We are going to stand there.

This article applies one standard to both parties. The standard is international law — the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, the prohibitions that every state on earth has signed up to and that some have decided do not apply to them. Where Hamas violated that law, we will say so. Where Israel violated that law, we will say so. We will not pretend the two are equivalent in scale, because they are not. We will not pretend that recognising the difference in scale absolves either party of the violations they have actually committed, because it does not. Both can be true.

We will name what happened on 7 October 2023, plainly. We will name what has happened in Gaza since, plainly. We will draw the conclusions the evidence supports, and we will refuse to draw conclusions the evidence does not. The case against Hamas is in this article. The case against Israel is in this article. They are not in separate parts. They are not in separate paragraphs. They sit alongside each other because that is how the truth sits.

This is the first of three articles. Part I covers the conduct — what happened on 7 October, what has happened since, and what the law says about both. Part II covers the long causes — why 7 October happened at all, and what each side has said about why. Part III covers the verdict and the settlement — what international law has now concluded, and what an honest resolution would actually require.

We begin with the preparation, because 7 October did not come from nowhere.

The Preparation

Hamas planned the attack of 7 October for years. The tunnel network under Gaza had been expanded continuously since the 2014 war, with the militant wing — the al-Qassam Brigades — using the closure of the Strip as both grievance and cover. Fighters trained openly. Mock raids on replica Israeli settlements were filmed and posted online. The Israeli military watched these videos. The Egyptian intelligence services watched them. The Israeli intelligence services watched them. None of this was hidden.¹

The 2018 Great March of Return is part of this story. For more than a year, beginning in March 2018, Palestinians in Gaza walked to the perimeter fence each Friday in protests the organisers framed as non-violent. They asked for the right of return for refugees and the lifting of the blockade. Some of the protesters threw stones. A small number threw incendiary kites and balloons that started fires in Israeli fields. The Israeli military response was to deploy snipers along the fence with orders to fire on demonstrators who came too close. Over the course of the marches, Israeli forces killed more than 220 Palestinians, including more than 40 children, and wounded over 36,000, many of them through deliberate shots to the lower limbs. A UN Commission of Inquiry found that the snipers had targeted clearly identifiable journalists, medics, and children, and that the killings may have constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.²

That was the Israeli answer to non-violent protest. It is part of the context in which 7 October happened. It does not justify what came on 7 October. It does explain why the political space for non-violent resistance had collapsed inside Gaza by the time Hamas began the final stages of its planning.

The regional dimension is real. Iran has funded Hamas, trained its operatives, and supplied weapons and components for the rockets the group has fired into Israel for two decades. Hezbollah has provided training and coordination. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hamas’s external leadership have maintained an operational relationship that Israeli, American, and even some Iranian sources have acknowledged. What is contested is the question of operational command. Iran has claimed credit for inspiring 7 October. It has not credibly claimed to have ordered it. The US intelligence community concluded in the months after the attack that Iran was surprised by the timing, even if it had supported the capacity that made the attack possible. Hamas planned it. Hamas executed it. Hamas owns it. The regional backing is real, but it does not transfer the moral weight of what happened from the people who pulled the triggers to the people who funded the training.³

The other backer of Hamas’s capacity, less often named, was the Israeli government itself. For more than a decade, the Netanyahu governments allowed Qatari cash — eventually running to roughly thirty million dollars a month — to flow into Gaza in suitcases, crossing into the Strip through Israeli checkpoints with Israeli approval. The money paid Hamas salaries, propped up the Hamas administration, and kept the movement solvent through the years it was preparing for 7 October. Netanyahu’s reasoning was not hidden. In a Likud faction meeting in March 2019, he told colleagues that anyone who wanted to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state should support strengthening Hamas and transferring money to it, because keeping Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah would split Palestinian politics and prevent a unified push for statehood. Israeli journalists reported the meeting at the time. The strategy worked, in its own terms, for years. It is the same strategy that built the capacity that crossed the fence on 7 October. We will return to this in Part II, where it belongs in a deeper treatment. It belongs here too, because no honest accounting of how Hamas got the strength to do what it did on 7 October can name Iran as a backer and stay silent about Israel.⁴

The years from 2007 to 2023 inside Gaza are the floor on which 7 October was built. Israel and Egypt have closed the Strip’s borders since Hamas took power in 2007. The closure was justified as a response to Hamas rocket fire and to Hamas’s refusal to recognise Israel. The effect on the population — more than two million people, the majority of them refugees or their descendants from the villages destroyed in 1948 — was a 16-year siege. Unemployment ran above 45 percent. The water supply collapsed; the UN warned by 2017 that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020, and it was overtaken by events. The Israeli military fought four declared wars in Gaza in those years — 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and 2021 — each one killing hundreds or thousands of Palestinians, destroying infrastructure that took years to rebuild, and producing what the Israeli political and military establishment publicly called “mowing the grass.”

The phrase is theirs, not ours. We will return to it in Part II. It is what Israeli generals and ministers used to describe the periodic destruction of Hamas’s military capacity, on the explicit understanding that the underlying conditions would regrow it. It was a doctrine that accepted permanent war with a captive population as the normal operating state. It is not a moral framework. It was treated, inside the Israeli security establishment, as a practical one.

By 2023, the men and women of the Qassam Brigades who would lead the 7 October assault had grown up entirely inside that system. The fighters who breached the fence had never lived a year outside the closure. They were not born when the second intifada began. The grievances they carried were not abstractions taught from textbooks — they were the conditions they had been raised inside. None of that licenses what they did to civilians on 7 October. All of it is part of the record.

The Attack

At 6:29 on the morning of Saturday 7 October 2023, the al-Qassam Brigades fired a barrage of several thousand rockets into southern and central Israel. The rocket fire was a cover. Within minutes, around 6,000 attackers — including roughly 3,800 fighters from the elite Nukhba units of the al-Qassam Brigades, alongside Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives and other militants — breached the Gaza perimeter fence at 114 separate locations. They came through on foot, on motorcycles, in pickup trucks, and in some places on paragliders. The fence had been built to stop them and it did not. The Israeli forces stationed along it had been reduced over the previous year as units were redeployed to the West Bank to protect settlers, and many of the soldiers who remained were caught asleep in their barracks.⁵

What followed lasted, in its most intense phase, about ten hours. By the time the Israeli military regained control of the breached communities, around 1,200 people in Israel were dead and 251 had been taken into Gaza as hostages. Those are the figures Israel has held to consistently and the figures the UN has accepted; the earlier figure of 1,400 was revised downward after Israeli officials confirmed that a number of the dead initially counted as victims were in fact attackers.⁶

A second figure runs underneath the 1,200, and any honest accounting has to name it. The Israeli military activated the Hannibal Directive on 7 October — an Israeli military protocol designed to prevent the capture of soldiers, by killing them if necessary along with their captors. Haaretz documented over the course of 2023 and 2024, through soldier and officer testimony and through official documents, that the directive was applied at multiple locations on the day, including at the Nova festival, at the Re’im base, at the Nahal Oz base, at the Erez crossing, and inside the kibbutzim themselves. Israeli helicopter and tank fire killed an unknown number of Israelis — soldiers and civilians, including hostages — in the course of trying to stop Hamas fighters from returning to Gaza. The Israeli officer who ordered a tank to fire on a house in Be’eri where 14 Israeli hostages were held, 13 of whom would die, told the New York Times he gave the order “even at the cost of civilian casualties.” The Hannibal Directive as applied to one’s own civilians has no defensible basis under international humanitarian law — the deliberate killing of one’s own protected persons, or the failure to take feasible precautions to protect them, is itself a serious violation. We will return to the Hannibal question in detail later in this article. We name it here because the 1,200 figure cannot be cleanly assigned to Hamas, and pretending it can be is the kind of distortion this article exists to refuse.⁷

The dead included Israelis, foreign workers from Thailand and Nepal and the Philippines, Bedouin Israelis, and Palestinian citizens of Israel. They were killed in three main locations.

At the Nova music festival near Re’im, where roughly 3,500 young people had been dancing through the night, the attackers arrived around 6:30 a.m. and spent the next several hours hunting people through the open fields. Some of the festivalgoers were shot as they tried to run. Some were burned alive in the cars they had hidden in. Some were captured and taken back across the fence. At least 364 people were killed at the Nova site. It is the single largest civilian death toll of the day. The killing at Nova is not contested. There is video. There is testimony. There are the bodies.⁸

In the kibbutzim and small towns of the Gaza envelope — Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Holit, Sderot, Ofakim, and others — the attackers went house to house. They killed elderly people in their kitchens. They killed children in their bedrooms. They killed parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents. They took families hostage and walked them back across the fence on foot. In Be’eri, roughly one in ten of the kibbutz’s residents was killed. In Kfar Aza, the figure was higher. In Nir Oz, around a quarter of the population was killed or taken. These killings are documented in Israeli police investigations, in the testimony of survivors, in the bodycam footage Hamas fighters themselves recorded and uploaded, and in the forensic work that continues to this day. They happened. They were war crimes under any reading of the laws of war, because the people killed were civilians and the people who killed them knew they were civilians.⁹

What the attackers did beyond killing them is also part of the record. At the Nova festival, fighters set fire to vehicles in which festivalgoers had hidden, burning some of them alive. At the kibbutzim, fighters set fire to homes whose residents had taken shelter in safe rooms and bathrooms; in Be’eri and Kfar Aza in particular, the fires were used to drive families out of hiding or to kill them where they hid. Survivors who escaped have testified to having heard family members in adjacent rooms calling out as the fires reached them. Israeli forensic teams, ZAKA volunteers, and Israeli police investigators have documented the pattern of burning across multiple sites. The deliberate burning of civilians is a war crime under any reading of the law.

Some of those captured at the scene were treated with cruelty before being killed or before being taken into Gaza. There are documented cases of summary executions of captured civilians and of physical abuse of those taken alive. The form and extent of sexual violence on 7 October itself has not been independently established, because the Israeli government refused the full UN investigation that could have established it; but the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, concluded after her fact-finding visit that there are reasonable grounds to believe sexual violence including rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations on the day. The Patten finding is the most reliable statement that has been allowed to be made. The Israeli government’s manufactured framing of the violence — discussed in the next section — has obscured rather than illuminated the actual record, which is bad enough on the established facts.

Indiscriminate rocket fire on Israeli civilian areas accompanied the breach and continued through the day. The fire was directed at Israeli civilian population centres, not at military targets, and it would have killed many more Israelis than it did had the Iron Dome system not intercepted most of it. Indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas are a violation of the principle of distinction regardless of how many of the projectiles strike their targets. The legal status of Hamas’s rocket fire on Israeli cities is not contested by any serious authority.

At the military bases — Re’im, Nahal Oz, Zikim, and others — the attackers engaged Israeli soldiers. Some of those soldiers were captured. Some were killed in fighting. Combatants fighting other combatants is not, in itself, a war crime; what each side did to the prisoners they took, and to the wounded they encountered, is a separate question that the law answers separately, and we will return to it.

The hostages taken into Gaza included soldiers and civilians. They included an infant — Kfir Bibas, nine months old — his four-year-old brother Ariel, their mother Shiri, children of every age, young adults, parents, and elderly people, including 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz and 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz. They included foreign nationals.¹⁰ The taking of any civilian hostage in armed conflict is a war crime under Article 34 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and under the customary international law that has applied to every armed group on earth since 1949. The plain text of the Convention does not require a complicated reading. Civilians cannot be taken. Hamas took them anyway. That is the violation, and the article will name it as a violation whenever it arises.¹¹

The numbers matter, and so does the precision. The killing of 1,200 people in a single day in a country of nine million was the worst single-day loss of Israeli life since the founding of the state. The killing of roughly 815 of those people who were civilians was the worst single-day loss of Jewish civilian life since the Holocaust. The taking of 251 hostages was the largest hostage-taking in modern history. None of these statements is propaganda. They are the figures, and they are what the law calls a serious matter under the Geneva Conventions, regardless of any cause the perpetrators believed they were serving.

The cause does not absolve the conduct. That is the first half of the standard this article applies, and we apply it without softening. A people under occupation has the right under international law to resist that occupation, including by armed force directed at the occupying military. A people under occupation does not have the right under any law on earth to massacre civilians at a music festival or to murder children in their bedrooms. The first proposition does not require the second. The second is not a method of resistance; it is a method of terror, and the law names it as such.

We will say the same thing about the response, when we come to it. The standard does not change.

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The Propaganda War That Followed

The first casualty in any war is truth. The second is anyone who tries to tell the truth before either side has finished assembling its story. We are going to do that work here, because the version of 7 October that has dominated Western media for two years is not the version that survives contact with the evidence. It also is not the version of 7 October that those who deny anything terrible happened on 7 October are pushing. Both versions are wrong. The truth sits between them, and the truth is bad enough on its own.

Within forty-eight hours of the attack, a claim began to circulate on Israeli social media and in the Israeli press that Hamas fighters had beheaded forty babies at Kibbutz Kfar Aza. The claim originated with an i24 News reporter, Nicole Zedeck, broadcasting from inside the kibbutz on 10 October, citing unnamed Israeli soldiers. A volunteer from the Israeli search-and-rescue organisation ZAKA, Yossi Landau, separately told CBS News that he had seen beheaded babies and children. The claim was repeated within hours by an Israeli army colonel on camera. It was picked up by the international press. It was repeated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement that day. It was repeated by President Joe Biden during a meeting with Jewish American leaders, who falsely claimed he had seen the photographs. The White House later clarified that the President had not seen any photographs, and had been referring to news reports. The forty figure had no source any reporter could trace back to a verified incident. The Israeli military, asked directly, could not confirm it. By December 2023, Haaretz had published a full investigation by Nir Hasson and Liza Rozovsky tracing how the story had spread, naming the people who had repeated it without checking, and concluding plainly: “this story is false.”¹²

That does not mean nothing terrible happened to children at Kfar Aza or anywhere else. It means the specific claim — forty beheaded babies, lined up, as a deliberate act — was untrue. There were children among the dead at the kibbutzim. A small number of bodies showed severe injuries consistent with what ZAKA volunteers described, though the exact circumstances were not established. The independent UN Commission of Inquiry investigated the beheaded-children claim and could not verify it. The distinction matters, and it matters specifically because the false version was used to justify what came next. It was repeated by an American president to a national audience. It was repeated by the Israeli prime minister to justify the scale of the response. It was the emotional lever that opened the door to the bombing of Gaza, and it was not true.

The mass rape claim followed a similar arc. From mid-October 2023 onward, Israeli officials and Israeli-aligned advocacy groups described 7 October as a coordinated, systematic campaign of sexual violence — rape as a deliberate weapon of war, executed under command, planned in advance. In December 2023 the New York Times published a long investigation under the headline “Screams Without Words” that became the foundational piece of Western media reporting on the question. The piece was later subjected to internal New York Times dispute, an Intercept investigation, criticism from journalism faculty, and the public withdrawal of one of its central reported cases by the family of the named victim after they said the reporters had misrepresented what happened to her. The Times stood by the erroneous piece. The doubts did not go away.¹³

In March 2024 the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, published the findings of a fact-finding mission to Israel. Her report is the most careful document on the question and it has been claimed by both sides as vindication. Both sides are wrong. Patten found "reasonable grounds to believe" that sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred at multiple locations on 7 October, including in at least three places in southern Israel. She found "clear and convincing information" that hostages held in Gaza were subjected to sexual violence in captivity. She also said no survivors of sexual violence had come forward to her team; that her team had not investigated attribution to specific perpetrators, noting that Islamic Jihad and other armed groups, as well as Gazan civilians, participated in the attack alongside Hamas; and that the Israeli government's framing of a systematic, coordinated, command-directed rape campaign was not supported by the evidence she had been able to gather. Sexual violence happened on 7 October. It happened to hostages in captivity. Patten's report stands as the most reliable statement of that fact. The Israeli framing of what kind of sexual violence happened — coordinated, systematic, ordered from above — is not what the UN found, and the difference matters because the framing was used to support the same broader claim that justified everything that followed.¹⁴

What Patten did not do, the world has not been allowed to do either. The Patten mission was a fact-finding visit, not a full investigation, and her report explicitly recommended that the Israeli government grant access to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory to conduct the full investigation she could not. The Israeli government refused. In January 2024 the Israeli Foreign Ministry called the Commission of Inquiry “an anti-Israeli and antisemitic body” and instructed Israeli doctors and hospital staff who had treated October 7 victims and released hostages not to cooperate with it. When Patten herself asked, in 2025, to return for a comprehensive investigation, the Israeli government refused that too. The reason it refused, reported by Haaretz, is that any genuine investigation would have required access to Israeli detention facilities to examine allegations of sexual violence committed against Palestinians by Israeli forces — and the Israeli government would not allow that. The same government that demanded the world accept the most lurid version of what happened on 7 October has spent two years preventing the independent investigation that could have established what actually happened. That is not the conduct of a government with nothing to hide. It is the conduct of a government weaponising the genuine sexual violence that did occur on 7 October to immunise itself from accountability for the sexual violence its own forces have committed since. Both are war crimes. Only one is being investigated.¹⁵

A second document arrived this week. The “Silenced No More” report, published on 12 May 2026 by what calls itself the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, is being treated by Western media as the comprehensive evidentiary basis the earlier claims lacked. It is not. The “commission” is the work of one woman, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who was exposed in March 2024 by Yedioth Ahronoth and Ynet — the largest newspaper in Israel — as having spread debunked atrocity stories that damaged Israel’s own credibility. The story she pushed into the international press of a Hamas fighter cutting a fetus from a pregnant woman before raping her was proven untrue. She circulated a photograph of a dead Kurdish woman fighter from another country and let it be reported as a 7 October victim. Israeli government sources told Ynet that her research was inaccurate and her methodology unreliable, and that professionals had distanced themselves from her. Channel 13’s Raviv Drucker reported in 2024 that the prior “horror report” she had been credited with — the basis on which she received the Israel Prize that year — did not actually exist beyond a four-page document of which two pages were newspaper headlines. The new 290-page report has not been independently audited. None of this means nothing terrible happened to women on 7 October. It does mean that the report now being laundered through CNN, the BBC, the Daily Mail, and other outlets as definitive proof of “systematic” rape was written by the same person who has already been exposed by Israeli mainstream media as having spread proven lies. The Israeli government refuses an independent UN investigation. In its place we are offered a propaganda document by a discredited author, and Western newsrooms are running it without checking the Hebrew-language record of who wrote it.¹⁶

This is not a small problem. The original claims — forty beheaded babies, mass coordinated rape, things even more lurid that circulated and collapsed in between — were used to manufacture consent for what came next. They were repeated by heads of state. They were used to justify the cutting off of food and water and fuel to two million people, and the bombing campaign that followed. By the time the careful investigations caught up, the consent had already been manufactured and the bombs had already fallen. The truth arrived too late. That is what the propaganda war did, and we name it here because the same machinery is still operating.

The story of how Hamas treated the hostages does not fit the framing either. The hostages came home, when they came home, with different accounts. Some described abuse. Some described sexual violence. Some described sustained physical mistreatment. Some described starvation in captivity, particularly as the war ground on and conditions in Gaza collapsed. None of that should be minimised, and the article will not minimise it.

But some hostages also described being treated as the law requires prisoners to be treated. They described medical care. They described being told by their captors, on arrival, that the men holding them believed in the Qur’an and would not harm them. They described being given the same food their captors ate, and being kept in clean conditions. The clearest of these accounts came from 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz, a peace activist from Kibbutz Nir Oz, who was released two weeks into her captivity and who held a press conference outside Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv on 24 October 2023, with her daughter translating, in front of the assembled international press. She described being beaten on the way into Gaza. She described going through “hell.” She also described, in detail, being treated with care once she arrived; being seen by a doctor; being given her medications; being kept clean; being told by her captors that they would not hurt her. Asked why she had reached back to shake the hand of one of her captors as she was transferred to the Red Cross, and said “shalom” — the Hebrew word for “peace” — she answered simply: “because they treated us very nicely.”¹⁷

The mixed record includes worse than the worst of the released hostages’ testimony has so far described. On 31 August 2024, Israeli forces searching a tunnel under Rafah found the bodies of six hostages: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Carmel Gat. Israeli pathologists established that all six had been shot at close range within the previous forty-eight hours — that is, after the Israeli search of the area had begun. The Israeli military’s conclusion, supported by US and Israeli intelligence assessment and accepted by the families, is that the six were executed by their captors as Israeli forces closed in on the tunnel. The murder of captives by their captors is a war crime under any reading of the Geneva Conventions. The UN Special Representative also found, separately, “clear and convincing information” that hostages held in Gaza had been subjected to sexual violence in captivity. The released hostage Amit Soussana described in detail, on the record to the New York Times, the sexual assault she experienced during her captivity. Other released hostages have given similar accounts. The sexual violence against captives during captivity is a war crime. It is on the documentary record at a different evidentiary standard than the 7 October sexual violence claims, because the captives themselves have been able to give first-hand testimony after release.

She also turned, in the same press conference, to the Israeli state. The Hamas attackers, she said, had walked through a fence that cost the country two billion shekels. The intelligence services had been warned. The army had not come. She and her neighbours had been, in her word, the scapegoats.

The Israeli press treated the press conference as a disaster. Channel 12’s Daphna Liel called the descriptions “shocking.” Israel Hayom called it a “propaganda win for Hamas.” Kan, the public broadcaster, reported that Israeli PR experts called the decision to put her in front of the cameras a mistake. Lifshitz was not a Hamas propagandist. She was an eighty-five-year-old kibbutznik who had spent her life working to bring injured Palestinians to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Her husband Oded, a journalist of the same age, who had spent decades writing about Israeli expulsions of Bedouin from Sinai, remained in captivity. She would later die without seeing him again; he was murdered in Gaza and his body returned in February 2025. She had no political reason to praise her captors. She told what she had seen, and what she had seen did not match the version the Israeli government was building.¹⁸

The point of this section is not to render Hamas innocent. Hamas committed war crimes on 7 October. Hamas took civilian hostages, including a nine-month-old infant, including children, including people too old or too sick to be moved. The hostage-taking is a war crime full stop. Some of what was done to some of the hostages during their captivity is a war crime. The killing of civilians at the Nova festival and in the kibbutzim is a war crime. We have said all of this and the article continues to stand by it.

The point of this section is that the further claims — the manufactured atrocities, the lurid additions, the framing of the day as something even worse than the war crimes that actually occurred — were political weapons. They were used to justify what came next. They survived in the public consciousness long after they were debunked. They are part of why the response was as unrestrained as it became. The propaganda war is part of the war, and any honest article about 7 October has to say what happened in it.

The Hannibal Directive

The Hannibal Directive is an Israeli military protocol that has existed in some form since 1986. It was created after a series of soldier abductions by Hezbollah and other groups in southern Lebanon, and its premise was that the capture of an Israeli soldier was a strategic catastrophe — both because of what captured soldiers tended to suffer at the hands of those who took them, and because of the political cost Israel paid in the prisoner exchanges that followed. The directive instructed Israeli forces to take any action necessary to prevent the completion of an abduction, even at the risk of the soldier’s life. The intent, never written down in those words but well understood inside the army, was that a dead soldier was preferable to a captured one.¹⁹

The directive was officially rescinded in 2016 after years of criticism, including from Israeli military lawyers and from the families of soldiers who had been killed by their own forces under its application. Israel’s state comptroller had recommended its abolition. The army formally announced that the directive was no longer in effect.

It was applied on 7 October regardless.

Haaretz, in a major investigation by Yaniv Kubovich published in July 2024, documented the application of the directive through testimony from soldiers, mid-level officers, and senior commanders, and through internal documents the paper had obtained. The directive was applied, Kubovich reported, at three Israeli army facilities that had been breached — Re’im, Nahal Oz, and the Erez border crossing — and inside the kibbutzim of the Gaza envelope. The order, in multiple forms and from multiple commanders, was that no vehicle was to be allowed to return to Gaza. The soldiers carrying out that order knew Israeli civilians and Israeli soldiers were inside many of those vehicles. They fired anyway.⁷

The specific incidents that have been documented are these.

At the Nova festival, an Israeli combat helicopter from the Ramat David air base arrived over the site during the killings and, according to an internal Israeli police investigation reported by Haaretz in November 2023, fired on the attackers and “apparently also hit some of the revellers who were there.” How many of the 364 dead at Nova were killed by Israeli helicopter fire has never been established. The Israeli police initially denied the Haaretz report. The reporting stood.⁷

At Kibbutz Be’eri, an Israeli tank commanded by Brigadier General Barak Hiram fired two shells into a house where Israeli civilians were being held hostage by Hamas fighters. Thirteen of the fourteen Israeli civilians inside that house died. One of them, Yasmin Porat, survived; she gave a public interview to the Israeli state broadcaster Kan in which she described the heavy crossfire she had been caught in and said it had been “insane.” Hiram later told the New York Times that he had given the order to fire on the house “even at the cost of civilian casualties.” The families of the dead have demanded an army investigation that has not produced its findings.⁷

At Re’im base, Israeli helicopter fire and tank fire on positions overrun by Hamas killed an unknown number of the IDF soldiers who had been overrun and had not yet been able to surrender or escape. Seven Israeli surveillance soldiers were nevertheless captured from the adjacent Nahal Oz outpost, suggesting that the directive’s application failed even on its own terms. Fifty-three soldiers were killed at Nahal Oz.⁷

The most chilling assessment came from an Israeli reserve pilot, Colonel Nof Erez, who gave an interview to Haaretz in November 2023 in which he characterised what had happened on 7 October as “a mass Hannibal.” His point was that any situation in which Israelis were being taken across the fence would have automatically activated the directive in the minds of commanders who had grown up with it, even after its formal rescindment. The directive had not gone away. It had become reflex.⁷

How many Israelis the Israeli military killed on 7 October has never been authoritatively answered. Haaretz concluded that “the cumulative data indicates that many of the kidnapped people were at risk, exposed to Israeli gunfire, even if they were not the target.” The Israeli government has not produced a number. It has not opened a comprehensive public investigation. The military police investigations that have happened have been quiet and partial. The families of the dead at Be’eri have been told, in effect, that they will receive answers when the army is ready to give them, which is to say, never.

The legal question is simpler than the political one. The deliberate killing of one’s own civilians is unlawful under international humanitarian law in any framing. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, Article 58, requires every party to a conflict to “take all feasible precautions to protect the civilian population, individual civilians and civilian objects under their control against the dangers resulting from military operations.” Firing on a house known to contain Israeli civilians, in order to prevent the escape of the fighters holding them, fails that test on every available reading. The Rome Statute, in Article 8, defines the intentional direction of attacks against the civilian population as a war crime, and contains no exception for cases where the attacker is targeting his own civilians in order to prevent their capture. There is no defensible legal theory under which the Hannibal Directive, as applied on 7 October, can be reconciled with the laws of war. It is what those laws were written to prohibit.

What it leaves us with, on the question of 7 October itself, is this. The 1,200 dead were not all killed by Hamas. Some unknown but significant number were killed by Israeli forces under an Israeli military order, applied to Israeli civilians and Israeli soldiers, with the knowledge of the commanders who gave the order that civilians were present. The Israeli government has not told its own public how many. The international press, with the exception of the Israeli press, has largely allowed the question to fade. We name it here because the question of who killed whom on 7 October is the foundation of every claim that has been made about what should be done in response. If a significant share of the dead were killed by their own state, the moral arithmetic shifts. Not all the way. Hamas crossed the fence. Hamas killed civilians at Nova and in the kibbutzim. Hamas took hostages. Those crimes remain. But the part of the figure that has been used to justify what came after is not what the figure represents, and the article exists, in part, to say so.

The intelligence that should have prevented any of this was not lacking. It was ignored.

The Intelligence That Was Ignored

The story of 7 October as an intelligence failure has been told as if it were a story of mystery. It was not. Israel had the warnings. Israel had the documents. Israel had the people on the fence telling their commanders what they were watching being prepared on the other side. The failure was not that the warnings did not arrive. The failure was that the people who had the warnings did not believe them, and the people who could have acted on them did not.

Egypt warned Israel directly. According to public statements by US House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul in October 2023, Egyptian intelligence officials had told their Israeli counterparts in the days before 7 October that “an event like this” was imminent. The Egyptians had been monitoring Hamas activity in Sinai and along the Rafah crossing for years. Their warning was specific enough that McCaul, with access to American intelligence briefings, called it on the record: Israel had been warned and Israel had not listened. The Israeli government denied the framing. The Egyptian intelligence services have not retracted what they passed.²⁰

The internal Israeli warnings were earlier and more detailed. In April 2022, more than eighteen months before the attack, Israeli military intelligence obtained a document the IDF gave the codename “Jericho Wall.” The document was a forty-page Hamas operational plan. It described, in detail, the kind of operation that would unfold on 7 October: a coordinated breach of the perimeter fence at multiple points, the seizure of Israeli communities and military bases, the taking of hostages, the use of rockets as cover. The document was circulated through Israeli intelligence in 2022 and again in mid-2023. A veteran female analyst in Unit 8200 — Israel’s signals intelligence arm — wrote a detailed assessment in July 2023, three months before the attack, warning that Hamas was actively rehearsing the operation described in Jericho Wall. Her assessment included surveillance photographs and intercepted communications showing Hamas fighters practising what looked like a fence breach, hostage-taking, and the storming of replica Israeli kibbutzim. Her warning was dismissed by a colonel in the Gaza Division as “totally imaginative.” The New York Times obtained the document and published the story in November 2023. The Israeli military did not deny its authenticity.²¹

The women on the fence saw the same thing in real time. The Israeli army’s Field Observation Unit — the tatzpitaniyot, mostly young women conscripts assigned to monitor the perimeter via cameras and observation posts — had been reporting unusual Hamas activity along the Gaza fence for months before the attack. In the weeks immediately before 7 October, they reported drills involving the construction of mock observation posts, drills involving the breaching of a replica fence, drills involving the storming of replica residential buildings, and unusual movements of equipment toward the fence line. Their reports were filed up the chain. Their warnings were dismissed. On 6 October, the night before the attack, the observers reported additional unusual activity. One was told by her commander that what she was seeing was a routine training exercise. The next morning, those same observers were among the first to die. The observers’ surviving colleagues have given on-the-record testimony to the Israeli press and to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee about what they had reported and what they had been told. The army has acknowledged that the warnings were filed and dismissed. It has not explained why.²²

The political context for the dismissals is the part that gets left out of the standard Western telling. The Netanyahu government had spent 2023 in a constitutional crisis of its own making. Its judicial overhaul programme had brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets every week, including significant numbers of reservists who had publicly refused to serve under the proposed changes. The army’s senior leadership was warning the cabinet that the country’s deterrent posture was being damaged. The Netanyahu government’s response had been to escalate, not de-escalate. Internal security resources had been redirected to the West Bank to protect the settler population during a year of accelerating settler violence and Palestinian counter-attacks; the perimeter forces around Gaza had been thinned. The Israeli political establishment had spent the year telling itself, and being told by Netanyahu directly, that Hamas was deterred, that Hamas was contained, that Hamas was preoccupied with running Gaza and would not risk what it had built. This was the working assumption that ran through the security cabinet in the months before the attack. It was the assumption inside which the Jericho Wall document, the female analyst’s report, the tatzpitaniyot warnings, and the Egyptian message were each individually evaluated and individually dismissed.²³

The role of Netanyahu’s Hamas policy in that dismissal cannot be separated from the dismissal itself. If the strategic logic of the government had been that Hamas was a contained problem to be managed, then warnings that Hamas was preparing an unprecedented attack were warnings the strategic framework could not accommodate. They were politically inconvenient. The same prime minister who had told his own party in 2019 that strengthening Hamas was a way of preventing Palestinian statehood was now leading the government that received and dismissed the warnings that Hamas had been allowed to become strong enough to do what it did on 7 October. The intelligence failure and the strategic failure were the same failure. They cannot be separated. The Israeli press has reported them as a single story. The international press, with rare exceptions, has reported them as two.

What happened on the morning of 7 October itself, once the breach was under way, was a further failure of response. The army’s quick reaction units took hours to reach the Gaza envelope. Soldiers stationed at nearby bases were not deployed in time. The decision-making chain in the first hours was paralysed. The Israeli families and communities under attack called and called and were told that help was coming. In many cases it did not. In some cases the help that arrived produced the killings under the Hannibal Directive we have already named. The full accounting of who knew what, when, and what they did about it, will not come from this article. It will come, when it comes, from the Israeli state commission of inquiry that the families of the dead have been demanding for two years and that the Netanyahu government has refused to convene. The refusal is its own answer.

This is the standard the next section measures against. Israel had the warnings. Israel had the right to defend itself when the attack came. What Israel did in response went far beyond defence, and the law has names for what it became. We turn now to Gaza.

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The Response — Gaza, Day One Onward

On 9 October 2023, two days after the Hamas attack, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced the policy that would govern what came next. “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” he told the world. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” The statement was not a slip of the tongue. It was repeated. It was elaborated. It was the explicit policy of the Israeli government for the population of the Gaza Strip — two million civilians, of whom roughly half were children — at the moment the response began.²⁴

What followed unfolded under that announced framework. Within the first week, the Israeli Air Force dropped more high-explosive ordnance on Gaza than the United States had dropped on Afghanistan in any single year of its twenty-year war there. Within the first month, the tonnage exceeded the bombing of Dresden. Within the first six months, Gaza had been hit with more explosive force, per square mile, than any populated area since the Second World War. The Israeli military’s preferred munition for densely populated targets was the American-supplied Mk 84 — a two-thousand-pound bomb with a casualty radius of more than 360 metres in any direction. The decision to use a Mk 84 in a residential neighbourhood is a decision that civilians will die. The Israeli military made that decision repeatedly. CNN, drawing on satellite analysis and US official sources, reported in December 2023 that nearly half of the bombs Israel had dropped on Gaza in the first weeks of the war were unguided “dumb” bombs, including the Mk 84.²⁵

The death toll climbed accordingly. The Gaza Health Ministry’s figures, which have been validated repeatedly by independent statistical reviews and by The Lancet, were initially dismissed by the Israeli government and the Biden White House. They have not been seriously challenged since. By the spring of 2024 the documented Palestinian death toll had passed 30,000. By the autumn it had passed 40,000. By late 2025 the direct death toll had passed 60,000, with credible peer-reviewed estimates of total excess mortality — including deaths from starvation, untreated illness, and disease — running between 100,000 and 200,000. The majority of the dead are women and children. The Israeli military has produced no comparable figure of its own, and has not contested the underlying methodology.²⁶

The targeting tells the story. Hospitals first.

Al-Shifa, the largest medical complex in Gaza, was besieged, evacuated under fire, raided, evacuated again, and finally reduced to rubble in a two-week operation in March and April 2024 that the World Health Organisation called the destruction of a hospital and that the Israeli military called a counter-terrorism operation. Medical staff were killed and detained. Patients were killed in their beds. Premature babies in the neonatal unit died after Israeli operations cut the power and the staff was forced to flee. The Israeli claim that Al-Shifa was a Hamas command centre — the central justification for the entire operation — was investigated by the Washington Post in December 2023 and found unsupported by the publicly available evidence. The hospital was destroyed regardless.²⁷

Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the Anglican-run hospital in Gaza City, was hit on 17 October 2023, with hundreds of casualties; the question of who fired the round became one of the first contested incidents of the war and is treated separately in the propaganda section above. What is not contested is that the same hospital was struck again repeatedly through 2024 and 2025, by Israeli munitions, in attacks the Israeli military has not denied. Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza was raided, its director Hussam Abu Safiya detained without charge in December 2024 and held without trial; the hospital itself was rendered non-functional. The Indonesian Hospital was bombed in November 2023. The European Gaza Hospital. The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital. The Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. By the end of 2024, the World Health Organisation had documented over 600 attacks on health facilities in Gaza. Not one of Gaza’s hospitals remained fully functional.²⁸

The Israeli campaign has also burned identifiable Palestinian civilians alive, and has done so on video that has been seen worldwide. On 14 October 2024, an Israeli airstrike hit the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where displaced families had pitched tents because there was nowhere else for them to go. The strike ignited the tents. Footage taken at the scene by Palestinian journalists shows displaced civilians, including patients still connected to intravenous drips, burning alive while bystanders are unable to extinguish the flames. One of the dead was Shaban al-Dalu, a nineteen-year-old engineering student. The image of his death — visible in the moment, on film, attached to his IV — was carried by the Washington Post, by Reuters, by Al Jazeera, by Middle East Eye. It was the seventh Israeli attack on the grounds of the same hospital that year. In April 2025 the journalist Ahmed Mansour was burned alive in his tent near Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in a strike that the IDF acknowledged. The pattern across 2024 and 2025 included repeated strikes on tent camps housing the displaced — populations who had been ordered south by Israeli evacuation directives and who had complied, and who were then burned in the camps to which they had been directed. The deliberate burning of civilians is a war crime, and the war crime is the same war crime regardless of which armed force commits it.

The destruction of religious and educational sites followed the same pattern. By figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, validated in part by BBC and AFP investigations, more than 800 mosques have been destroyed or damaged. Three churches have been struck — the Church of Saint Porphyrius, the third-oldest standing church in the world, hit on 19 October 2023, killing eighteen people who had taken shelter inside; the Holy Family Catholic Church, struck repeatedly through 2024; and the Ahli Baptist Church at Al-Ahli Hospital, struck repeatedly. The destruction of mosques and churches in Gaza has no military rationale that any party to the conflict has been able to articulate. Universities have been destroyed systematically — al-Azhar University, the Islamic University of Gaza, al-Aqsa University. Schools have been used as shelters and then bombed as shelters; the UNRWA schools that housed displaced Palestinian families were among the most regularly targeted structures in the strip. Archives, libraries, the central public library of Gaza City: gone. This pattern — the systematic destruction of the institutions through which a people transmits its identity across generations — is what international law has, since the 1990s, treated as a marker of intent in the context of the Genocide Convention.²⁹

The killing of journalists became its own indictment. As of the end of 2025, the Committee to Protect Journalists had documented more than 230 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza by Israeli forces — more than the journalists killed in the entire Second World War, more than were killed in Vietnam, more than were killed in any single conflict in modern history. Many were killed while wearing press identification, in marked press vehicles, in well-known journalist gathering points. Some were killed alongside their entire families in the buildings where they lived. Reporters Without Borders has filed multiple ICC submissions documenting what it describes as the deliberate targeting of journalists. The Israeli military has, in several documented cases, openly named journalists it killed and accused them of being Hamas operatives after the fact, without producing the evidence that would substantiate the accusation. The pattern has been to kill first and justify second. Killing journalists is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions whether or not the killer issues a justification afterward.³⁰

The killing of medical workers and aid workers and UN staff was on the same scale. More than 1,000 health workers have been killed in Gaza. The Palestine Red Crescent Society lost ambulance crews repeatedly; in March 2025, fifteen medics and rescue workers were killed in a single Israeli attack on their convoy and buried in a mass grave, their hands tied. The World Central Kitchen lost seven workers in a sequence of three separate Israeli drone strikes on the night of 1 April 2024. The aid workers — citizens of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, Poland, and Palestine — had coordinated their route in advance with the Israeli military. They were in three marked vehicles. After the first strike, survivors transferred to the second vehicle; the IDF struck it. Survivors transferred to the third; the IDF struck it too. Bellingcat’s open-source analysis concluded the strikes bore the hallmarks of a precision attack of the kind only the IDF could conduct in Gaza. Human Rights Watch documented this case alongside at least seven other incidents in which Israeli forces struck aid workers and premises whose coordinates had been shared in advance to ensure their protection. The pattern is not error, it is policy executed under cover of error. UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, has lost more staff in this war than the UN has lost in any conflict in its history — more than 350 by the end of 2025. The UN has named those killed and continued to name them. The Israeli government’s position has been that UNRWA is a Hamas-infiltrated organisation that should be dismantled. The Israeli Knesset has passed legislation to that effect. The agency that has fed, schooled, and provided medical care to Palestinian refugees for seventy-five years is being shut down by the same government that has spent two years destroying the population it served.³¹

The hostages were killed too — by the same Israeli forces who were supposed to be rescuing them. Beyond the Hannibal Directive applications on 7 October itself, Israeli air strikes have killed an unknown but significant number of hostages held in Gaza throughout the war. The Bibas children — Kfir, the nine-month-old, and his four-year-old brother Ariel — died in captivity. Hamas claimed they had been killed in an Israeli air strike in late 2023. The Israeli forensic findings, presented publicly by the IDF in February 2025, concluded the children had been murdered by their captors in November 2023, with the bodies subsequently mutilated to simulate airstrike injuries. The Bibas family accepted the Israeli forensic findings. The bodies were returned in February 2025. In December 2023, Israeli soldiers shot dead three Israeli hostages — Yotam Haim, Samer Talalka, and Alon Shamriz — who had escaped their captors, were shirtless to signal they were unarmed, were waving a white flag, and were calling for help in Hebrew. The Israeli military acknowledged the killings, called them a tragic error, and did not prosecute the soldiers responsible. The Israeli military has not produced an accounting of how many hostages it has killed by its own fire. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the organisation representing the families of the hostages, has called repeatedly for that accounting. It has not been forthcoming.³²

The displacement is the framework underneath all of it. By the end of 2024, more than 1.9 million Palestinians — roughly 90 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population — had been displaced from their homes, many of them multiple times. The Israeli military issued evacuation orders that pushed Palestinians south, then bombed them in the south, then issued new orders that pushed them west, then bombed them in the west, then north, then back south again. The al-Mawasi “safe zone” on the coast was bombed repeatedly. The Israeli military demolished entire neighbourhoods after their populations had fled — not bombed in combat, but levelled in controlled demolitions, with rigged buildings filmed by Israeli soldiers and uploaded to social media. The buffer zone that Israel established along the Gaza perimeter — taking, by the end of 2024, roughly 16 percent of Gaza’s total territory — was created by the systematic destruction of every standing structure inside it. Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab and Forensic Architecture, working independently, have documented the pattern. The pattern is forced displacement, executed through destruction of the homes to which return would otherwise be possible. The Rome Statute calls this a war crime. The cumulative pattern, when combined with the targeting of cultural and religious sites and the explicit statements of intent from Israeli officials, is also the conduct that international law has recognised as ethnic cleansing.³³

The explicit statements of intent matter, because they distinguish the legal questions that this war presents from the legal questions presented by other recent conflicts. The Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, said on 13 October 2023 that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” — a statement directly contradicting the legal principle of distinction between combatants and civilians. The Defence Minister called Palestinians “human animals.” The Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, said in November 2023 that dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza was “an option.” The Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the population of Gaza had to be made to “leave to the desert.” The Agriculture Minister, Avi Dichter, called the operation “the Gaza Nakba.” A senior Major General, Ghassan Alian, told the population of Gaza in October 2023: “human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” These statements are not edge cases. They are not the speech of fringe figures. They are statements from the senior officials of the government conducting the war. They were collected and submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice in its January 2024 application under the Genocide Convention. The Court found, in its January 2024 provisional measures order, that South Africa had standing and that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide. It is on the record, because the officials of the Israeli government put it there themselves.³⁴

What this section is describing is not a controversial reading of events. The figures are from the UN, from the World Health Organisation, from Amnesty International, from Human Rights Watch, from the Committee to Protect Journalists, from Israeli human rights organisations including B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights — Israel, from the Israeli press where it has been allowed to report. The explicit statements are from the Israeli officials who made them, on the record, in many cases on camera. The legal framework is the same framework that every party to the conflict has formally accepted by signing the Geneva Conventions. What we are describing is not contested. It has been contested only in the sense that the Israeli government has refused to allow the investigations that would document it more fully, and the Western governments that have armed and supplied this campaign have refused to draw the conclusions that the evidence supports.

This is the body of conduct against which the law’s verdict will be set out, when we come to it. We turn to Lavender.

The Killing Machines — Lavender, Gospel, Where’s Daddy

In April 2024, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and its Hebrew sister site Local Call published an investigation by Yuval Abraham based on the testimony of six Israeli intelligence officers who had served in the targeting units of the IDF’s elite Unit 8200. The officers described, in their own words, three artificial intelligence systems that had been used to generate the targeting decisions of the Gaza war. The systems are called Lavender, The Gospel, and Where’s Daddy. The investigation has not been seriously challenged. The Israeli military has not denied that the systems exist. It has disputed only the framing of how they were used, while confirming the basic operational facts. The investigation is the closest thing the public has to a description of how the killing in Gaza was actually decided. It deserves to be understood in plain terms.³⁵

The Gospel is the older of the systems. It generates targets in the form of buildings — structures associated, by the model’s calculations, with Hamas activity. The decision to strike the building, and to strike it knowing civilians will die in it, is made by a human officer on the basis of the Gospel’s recommendation. The Gospel does not make moral decisions. It does not weigh proportionality. It produces target packages. The pace at which it produces them — hundreds per day at peak operations — is what changed the character of the war’s targeting operations. The Israeli military had previously been constrained, on its own statements, by the number of targets its human intelligence analysts could produce. The Gospel removed that constraint.³⁵

Lavender is the system that drew international attention. Lavender generates targets in the form of people. The system was trained, by the IDF’s own description, to identify suspected operatives of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — not senior commanders, but the rank and file. The training data was drawn from the IDF’s existing intelligence database. The output was a list of names, each name marked with a probability score that the person was a militant. At the height of operations in the first weeks of the war, Lavender’s list contained approximately 37,000 names. Each of those 37,000 people became, by the system’s output, a candidate for assassination.

The officers who described the system to +972 said the human review of each name was, in practice, perfunctory. One officer described his role as “rubber-stamping” the system’s output, with an average of twenty seconds of human verification before the kill order was approved. The verification consisted, the officer said, of confirming that the target was male — because Lavender’s known false positive rate of approximately ten percent included women, who were assumed not to be Hamas fighters. Beyond that, the human in the loop was not in any meaningful sense reviewing the system’s judgement. The officer said: “I would invest twenty seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”³⁵

The third system, Where’s Daddy, was the one that converted the kill list into actual deaths. Where’s Daddy tracked the targets identified by Lavender and notified Israeli forces when those targets had entered their family homes. The system’s name is, in this context, descriptive. The intention was to strike the targets at home. Striking the targets at home meant striking them with their families present. The Israeli officers told +972 that the decision to strike at home rather than at a military site was a deliberate operational preference, because military sites were harder to locate and to strike accurately. Family homes were easier. Striking at home meant the families died too.³⁵

The collateral damage tolerances are documented. The officers told +972 that the IDF’s authorised collateral damage limits for Lavender-generated strikes were as follows. For a low-ranking Hamas operative, the system was permitted to kill up to fifteen or twenty uninvolved civilians. For a senior commander, the figure rose to one hundred. These are not numbers from human rights critics. They are the operational parameters described by the officers running the system. The officers said the parameters were applied. In one operation, an officer told +972 that the army authorised the killing of approximately three hundred civilians in the assassination of a single Hamas brigade commander, the strike approved in advance under the existing collateral damage parameters.³⁵

The munitions used in these strikes were, by the officers’ account, deliberately mismatched to the target. Junior operatives were struck with the same unguided “dumb bombs” that we have already discussed — bombs that level entire buildings. The officers said the choice of unguided munitions for low-value targets was a matter of stockpile management: precision munitions are expensive and limited, and the IDF chose not to expend them on targets the system identified as low-priority. The consequence of using a Mk 84 to kill one person identified by an AI system as a Hamas foot soldier, in a residential apartment building, in the middle of the night, with the building’s other residents present, is that the building falls down and everyone in it dies. The officers knew this. The system was designed around this knowledge.³⁵

The Israeli military’s response to the +972 investigation was, in part, to dispute the framing — to deny that the system had been used “as described” and to insist that human officers remained “in the loop” on every strike. The military denied that Lavender functioned as a kill list, while acknowledging the existence of database tools used to cross-reference intelligence. It did not contest the collateral damage figures with any specificity. It did not produce evidence that the human review of Lavender targets was substantively more rigorous than the officers had described. The substance of the investigation has stood. It has been corroborated by subsequent reporting in The Guardian, Le Monde, The Washington Post, and Haaretz, drawing on additional Israeli intelligence sources.³⁶

The legal question is not whether the use of AI targeting in armed conflict is, in principle, unlawful. It is not. The question is whether the systems as deployed in Gaza were used in a manner consistent with the laws of war. The relevant legal standards are the same as for any targeting decision: distinction, proportionality, precaution. A system that produces a kill list of 37,000 people with a known ten percent false positive rate, that is approved at an average rate of twenty seconds per name, that strikes those targets in their family homes with munitions chosen for their indiscriminate effect, under collateral damage parameters that authorise the killing of up to one hundred uninvolved civilians per senior target, cannot satisfy distinction. It cannot satisfy proportionality. It is not, in any meaningful sense, taking precautions to minimise civilian harm. It is the systematisation of the failure to do so.

There is one more dimension worth naming. The officers who spoke to +972 described the psychological and political function of the systems alongside their operational function. The systems removed the human officer from the responsibility for each individual decision. The human officer was not deciding to kill a person. The human officer was confirming a system’s output. The same decision, made the same way, with the same outcome, was now somebody else’s responsibility — or no one’s. The diffusion of moral responsibility through the machine was a feature, not a side effect. It is what made it possible for the Israeli intelligence corps to participate in an operation of this scale without the kind of mass refusals, mass resignations, and mass psychiatric breakdowns that have historically accompanied military operations against civilians on this scale. The officers, in their own words, were able to do this. The system permitted them to do this. The system was designed to permit them to do this.

The civilians who died were not, however, killed by a machine. They were killed by the same human beings who continue to insist that they did not kill them. The law does not treat the introduction of an AI system as a defence. It treats it as evidence. The evidence is on the record.

Starvation as Policy

A bombing campaign kills the people it hits, indiscriminate of combatants or civilians. A starvation campaign kills everyone else. The Israeli government chose both. The siege Yoav Gallant announced on 9 October 2023 — no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed — was not a rhetorical flourish. It was implemented. The crossings into Gaza were closed. The water pipelines were cut. The electricity was switched off. The fuel that powered Gaza’s bakeries, its hospitals’ generators, its water pumps, its sewage treatment plants was shut off at the Israeli switch. For weeks, then months, what entered Gaza entered only at the discretion of the government that had announced it would let no food in.

The international protest was enough to produce a partial reopening of Rafah, on the Egyptian border, and the establishment of a coordination mechanism through which aid trucks could attempt to enter. The mechanism was administered by the Israeli authority COGAT, which retained the right to inspect, refuse, and delay each shipment. The volume that entered was a fraction of what was needed. In the months before 7 October, Gaza had typically received roughly 500 truckloads per day of food and supplies. In the months after, the figure ran at one hundred per day, then sixty, then twenty, with weeks at a time during which no trucks crossed at all. UN officials publicly described the bottleneck as deliberate. Cindy McCain, the head of the World Food Programme and the widow of a US Republican senator — not a figure who could be dismissed as anti-Israeli — told NBC’s Meet the Press in May 2024 that there was “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza and that the famine was “moving its way south.” The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the international system that declares famines, declared Phase 5 — famine — in parts of Gaza in March 2024 and again, more comprehensively, in August 2025. Phase 5 is the highest level. There is no level above it. It is the term the international community uses when people are starving to death and there is no longer any plausible argument that the situation can be reversed by ordinary humanitarian response.³⁷

The Israeli officials who designed the policy did not pretend otherwise. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said in 2024 there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza” and publicly called for the bombing of aid stocks. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who controlled the budgets for the West Bank and Gaza administration, said in August 2024 that it might be “just and moral” to starve two million Gazans, “but the world will not let us.” The Israeli press reported these statements at the time. They were not corrected. They were not retracted. They were not punished. The ministers who made them remained in office. The policy they described was, on the available evidence, the policy that was carried out.³⁸

The starvation was not only state policy. It was state-tolerated mob violence as well. Through 2024 and into 2025, organised groups of Israeli settlers and their supporters — most prominently the group calling itself Tzav 9, “Order 9” — repeatedly blockaded aid convoys at the crossings into Gaza, stopped them on the roads, climbed onto the trucks, and looted or destroyed the flour, rice, and medical supplies inside. In one widely circulated incident in May 2024, settlers stopped a convoy on a road in the West Bank, dragged the food onto the tarmac, and set it on fire. Drivers were beaten. Israeli police and IDF soldiers, where they were present, frequently stood by and watched. Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, and the Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din documented the pattern across dozens of incidents. The Israeli government took no meaningful action against the groups responsible. The US Treasury Department, in June 2024, imposed sanctions on Tzav 9 under the executive order on settler violence — a sanctioning of a civilian Israeli organisation by the country that was simultaneously arming the war. The Israeli government denounced the sanctions. The destruction of aid continued. None of this happens in a country whose government is making a good-faith effort to feed the population under its control.³⁹

The Flour Massacre of 29 February 2024 was the first incident at which the world saw what starvation policy looked like at the point of contact. A convoy of aid trucks carrying flour reached the Nabulsi roundabout in northern Gaza City before dawn. The scene that followed has no good description. Thousands of starving Palestinians, many of whom had walked through the night, many of whom had not eaten in days, swarmed the trucks in the dark — climbing onto them, reaching for the bags of flour, fighting each other for the food. Israeli tanks and snipers were positioned in the buffer zone overlooking the road. They fired on the crowd. The death toll was at least 118 Palestinians killed, with more than 760 wounded. The Israeli military’s initial claim was that most of the dead had been crushed or run over in the chaos. Forensic analysis of the wounds, including by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and by the Al-Awda Hospital that received the casualties, established that the majority of the dead and wounded had gunshot wounds. The Israeli military adjusted its claim to say that the gunfire had been limited and that its troops had felt threatened. Video and satellite imagery analysed by The Washington Post and by Forensic Architecture established that the gunfire had been sustained, that it had been directed into the crowd, and that the crowd had posed no threat. The massacre at the Nabulsi roundabout was not a single incident. It was the first widely documented instance of a pattern that would, by mid-2025, become routine.⁴⁰

That pattern was institutionalised in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The GHF was launched in May 2025 as a replacement for the UN-led aid distribution system, which the Israeli government and the second Trump administration had spent the previous twelve months working to dismantle. UNRWA had been banned from operating in Israel. The UN agencies that had distributed aid throughout the war had been accused, without evidence, of being Hamas-infiltrated. The GHF was the alternative. It was registered as a private American nonprofit, funded largely by anonymous donors with a substantial first tranche from the US government. Its operational arm was Safe Reach Solutions, a private security firm staffed by former US special forces personnel, working alongside subcontractors that included an outfit calling itself UG Solutions. The aid distribution sites were established in southern Gaza, in locations that required Palestinians to walk for hours through Israeli-controlled corridors to reach them. The sites were guarded by armed contractors. They were monitored by Israeli forces. They were not coordinated with the UN.⁴¹

What happened at the GHF sites between May and October 2025 was a slow-motion massacre. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented that between the GHF’s launch and the end of October 2025, more than 2,600 Palestinians had been killed at or near the foundation’s distribution sites, with more than 19,000 wounded. The pattern was consistent: crowds of desperate, starving Palestinians, often having walked through the night to reach the sites, would be fired on as they approached. The fire came sometimes from the Israeli forces surrounding the sites, sometimes from the contractors themselves. The contractors, as it turned out, were not bashful about what they were doing. Photographs and videos that emerged through 2025, some uploaded by the contractors to their own social media, showed members of UG Solutions wearing patches identifying themselves as members of the “Infidels Motorcycle Club,” displaying banners that read “Make Gaza Great Again,” and bearing tattoos of the number 1095 — a reference, the contractors themselves explained, to the date of the launch of the First Crusade. Doctors Without Borders, after months of treating the wounded at GHF sites, issued a public statement: “This is not humanitarian aid. This is orchestrated killing.” The Norwegian Refugee Council called the GHF a “death trap.” The UN Secretary-General called for an immediate end to the operation. The Israeli government and the Trump administration declared it a success.⁴²

The mechanism the GHF replaced — the UN-coordinated distribution system through UNRWA, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, and the international NGOs — was the mechanism that had, for decades, fed populations in war zones around the world without resulting in the routine killing of the people being fed. There is no precedent in modern humanitarian practice for the kind of figures the GHF produced. There is no comparable operation in which civilians seeking food were routinely shot by the armed personnel administering the distribution. The system did not produce these outcomes by accident. The system was designed in such a way that these outcomes were the predictable result of its operating procedures. The Israeli government and the US government built it that way and continued to defend it as people died at it.

The law on starvation as a method of warfare is unambiguous. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, Article 54, prohibits “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.” The prohibition is absolute. The Rome Statute, Article 8(2)(b)(xxv), defines the deliberate starvation of civilians, “including by wilfully impeding relief supplies,” as a war crime in international armed conflict. The Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law require parties to a conflict to allow and facilitate the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief to civilians in need. The Israeli government has done the opposite of each of these things. It has impeded relief. It has destroyed relief infrastructure. It has killed relief workers. It has constructed a parallel distribution system at which relief seekers are killed. The IPC has declared famine. The ICJ has, in its provisional measures orders of January, March, and May 2024, ordered Israel to allow the unimpeded passage of humanitarian aid. The orders have been ignored.⁴³

The cumulative pattern is what international law has, since the drafters of the Genocide Convention sat down in 1948 and wrote it, regarded as a marker of intent. Article II of the Convention defines genocide to include the “deliberate inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The drafters had in mind, specifically, the conditions imposed on Jewish populations under Nazi occupation: the ghettoisation, the starvation rations, the prevention of escape, the systematic deprivation of medical care. They wrote the Convention in such a way that the same conditions, imposed on any group, by any state, would be recognised as the same crime. The conditions imposed on Gaza meet that definition. Saying so does not diminish the Holocaust. It honours the lesson the survivors of the Holocaust insisted the world take from it.

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The West Bank, Where No Hamas Exists

The defence of everything described above is, in the Israeli government’s framing, the existence of Hamas. The bombing, the starvation, the destruction of hospitals, the killing of journalists — all of it is, on the official Israeli account, the regrettable but necessary cost of fighting a terrorist organisation that controls Gaza and that committed the atrocities of 7 October. Whatever one makes of that defence as applied to Gaza, it has nothing to say about the West Bank. There is no Hamas government in the West Bank. There is no Hamas military force in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority, which governs the parts of the West Bank that Israel allows it to govern, is the same authority Israel itself has spent thirty years dealing with as its negotiating partner. The conduct of the Israeli state and the Israeli settler movement in the West Bank since 7 October is therefore, in a way, the clearer case. It is the conduct that cannot be explained by Hamas. It is what the Israeli state does when there is no Hamas to point at.

By the end of 2025, Israeli forces and Israeli settlers had killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, according to the UN Human Rights Office. The figure is itself the lower bound; B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, has tracked higher numbers. Among the dead are more than 200 children. The killings are not concentrated in single incidents but distributed across thousands of operations — military raids on the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus; settler attacks on villages; checkpoint shootings; targeted killings carried out by drone in the West Bank for the first time in the conflict’s recent history. Whole neighbourhoods of Jenin’s refugee camp have been bulldozed in operations the IDF has described as counter-terrorism and that have produced the displacement of tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians inside their own territory.⁴⁴

The settler violence is the part that cannot be assimilated to any defensible narrative. Through 2024 and 2025, organised settler militias attacked Palestinian villages across the West Bank — burning homes, destroying olive groves, killing residents, and forcing the depopulation of dozens of villages. The villages of Khirbet Zanuta, Wadi al-Siq, Khirbet al-Ratheem, and dozens of others have been documented by Israeli human rights organisations including B’Tselem, Yesh Din, and Breaking the Silence as having been emptied by sustained settler violence under IDF protection. The settlers operate, in many cases, alongside or in coordination with IDF reservists who have been called up since 7 October and who have used their military equipment and their military authority to facilitate the attacks. The US government, under both the Biden and Trump administrations, briefly sanctioned individual settlers and settler organisations under the executive order on settler violence; the Trump administration rescinded most of those sanctions in early 2025. The pattern continues.⁴⁵

The Israeli government has, in the same period, accelerated the formal annexation of West Bank territory. Smotrich, in his dual role as Finance Minister and minister within the Defence Ministry with authority over civilian administration in the West Bank, has used administrative powers to transfer responsibility for settlement expansion from the military to civilian Israeli ministries — a transfer the ICJ in its July 2024 advisory opinion identified as itself a marker of de facto annexation contrary to international law. New settlements have been approved at the highest rate in the history of the occupation. Outposts previously illegal under Israeli law have been retroactively legalised. The settler population in the West Bank has passed 750,000.

The administrative detention regime has expanded in parallel. By the end of 2025, more than 9,000 Palestinians were being held in Israeli custody, of whom roughly 3,400 were West Bank administrative detainees held without charge under Military Order 1651, and another 3,400 were Gazans held under the Unlawful Combatants Law that was substantially amended in December 2023 to permit longer detention without judicial review and that has produced repeated, credible allegations of torture in the detention facilities. The conditions of their detention are the subject of the next section.

The point of this section is not to inventory every act of West Bank violence since 7 October. It is to establish, for the reader, that the conduct described in the previous sections is not specific to the war against Hamas. It is the conduct of a state that has, in the past two years, deepened a system of dispossession and violence that long predated 7 October and that has nothing to do with Hamas in any part of the territory where Hamas does not exist. That is not a side effect of the Gaza war. It is the same project, executed in a different terrain.

Sde Teiman and the Detention System

The sexual violence committed by Israeli forces against Palestinians did not begin at Sde Teiman, and it did not begin in response to 7 October. It is older than the state. The documented record runs from before the founding.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, drawing on Israeli military archives, documents rape as a feature of the 1948 expulsions of Palestinians from villages including Deir Yassin, Tantura, Ramleh, and Lydda. Aharon Zisling, Israel’s first agriculture minister, told a cabinet meeting in July 1948, in words later recovered from the Israeli state archives by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in January 2022, that he “could forgive instances of rape [in Ramleh]” but not other acts. The remark was made by a senior minister of the new state, on the record, in cabinet, and it was a remark about acts already committed by Israeli forces, casually disposed of. In 1949 a young Bedouin girl in the Negev was abducted by an Israeli platoon, gang-raped over several days, then murdered. The case is documented in Israeli military court testimony — the only such court martial recorded — and was uncovered fifty-four years later by Haaretz. The Red Cross documented the rape of an eighteen-year-old Palestinian girl after the takeover of Jaffa in December 1948.⁴⁶

Haaretz, in 2019, reported that the Israeli Defence Ministry has been systematically removing references to Nakba-era atrocities — including expulsions, massacres, and rape — from declassified military archives. The Israeli state, in other words, has known about this conduct for seventy-eight years and has taken active measures to conceal it from its own public. The Palestinian historian and law professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, in three decades of academic work on the subject, has documented sexual violence against Palestinian women and men as a continuous feature of the Israeli military’s encounter with Palestinians — during the Nakba, during the occupation, during the intifadas, during the long period in which it has held Palestinians in custody. The pattern is older than 7 October. It is older than Hamas. It is older than the modern occupation. It is part of the founding.

What is described in the rest of this section is the most recent and most heavily documented chapter of that record. It is not the beginning. The article would be doing the work of Israeli archive-suppression itself if it allowed the reader to think otherwise.

In the early weeks of the war, the Israeli military established a holding facility at Sde Teiman, an air force base in the Negev desert near Beersheba. Palestinians taken into custody in Gaza — combatants, suspected combatants, men and women rounded up from buildings the IDF had taken, doctors and journalists arrested at hospitals and crossings — were transported to Sde Teiman before being moved on to longer-term Israeli prisons. The facility was not built as a detention centre. It had no infrastructure for holding human beings. What was set up there, in the months that followed, became the place that has done more than any other single thing to expose the character of the system the Israeli state built in response to 7 October.⁴⁷

Detainees at Sde Teiman, in their testimony given after release and corroborated by the testimony of Israeli soldiers, doctors, and human rights investigators, were held in conditions that violated every relevant standard of international and Israeli law. They were blindfolded for days and weeks at a time. They were shackled in stress positions. They were denied medical care. Their wounds were untreated; the most documented detail of the facility is the number of detainees who arrived with combat injuries and lost limbs because the necrotic tissue went untreated until amputation was the only option. The Israeli human rights organisation Physicians for Human Rights — Israel sent representatives to the facility and documented routine amputations performed without anaesthesia. Haaretz obtained testimony from Israeli reservist doctors who had served at the facility and who described what they had seen and what they had been ordered to participate in. One of those doctors went on the record. The descriptions are consistent across sources. They describe a torture camp run by the state of Israel.⁴⁸

The sexual violence was on a different order. The single Sde Teiman case that produced the indictment in July 2024 — five reservists captured on video raping a Palestinian detainee with a sharp object, an act that required the man to be hospitalised with injuries that, according to Kan public radio, left him unable to walk — was not an isolated event. It was the visible piece of what released detainees, Israeli soldiers, and the UN Commission of Inquiry have since described as a routine practice. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, in November 2025, published the consolidated testimonies of released detainees describing systematic rape and sexual torture across the Israeli detention system, including penetration with batons, metal rods, sharp objects, and other implements. Euro-Med Monitor published a parallel report describing the same pattern across multiple facilities. The UN Commission of Inquiry, in March 2025, found that sexual violence had been used by Israeli forces as a tool to “dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part,” and that the use of dogs to intimidate and to assault Palestinian detainees was documented across detention sites.⁴⁹

The use of military dogs trained to rape Palestinian detainees is the detail that most readers will find hardest to accept, and it is the detail that is most consistently corroborated. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights collected the testimony of A.A., a 35-year-old father arrested at Al-Shifa Hospital in March 2024, who described being taken with a group of detainees to a corridor between sections of Sde Teiman, stripped, and raped by a trained military dog while soldiers beat and pepper-sprayed the prisoners. Euro-Med Monitor’s report Another Genocide Behind Walls contains the testimony of a second detainee describing the same act. Fadi Bakr, in an Al Jazeera documentary, described being forced to watch a young Palestinian man raped by a dog at Sde Teiman. Mohammed Arab, the Gaza correspondent for Al Araby television, told his lawyer in July 2024 that he had personally witnessed soldiers use dogs to sexually abuse detainees at the same facility and had been told by the soldiers that the dogs were trained for it. Drop Site News, in November 2025, published the corroborating testimony of two Israeli prison guards who had served at Sde Teiman, one of whom said he had personally witnessed the use of dogs in sexual assault and that what he had seen was “too awful to describe.” The New York Times, in May 2026, published a long investigation by Nicholas Kristof drawing on the testimony of fourteen released Palestinian men and women, in which the practice is described and in which the UN’s characterisation of it as Israeli “standard operating procedure” is endorsed.⁵⁰

In July 2024, Israeli military police entered Sde Teiman to investigate a specific allegation against a group of reservist soldiers: the rape of a Palestinian detainee with a sharp object. The allegation was supported by video footage filmed inside the facility. The military police arrested nine reservists for questioning. The response of the Israeli right was immediate and unmistakable. Hundreds of Israeli protesters, including members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition — Knesset members Tally Gotliv, Nissim Vaturi, and Zvi Sukkot were photographed at the scene — stormed the Sde Teiman base in physical attempts to free the soldiers from custody. A second mob attacked the Beit Lid military court where the soldiers were being questioned. Senior coalition figures — Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and Justice Minister Yariv Levin — called the investigation itself a “blood libel” against the IDF; Israel Katz, then Foreign Minister, would later, after his promotion to Defence Minister in November 2024, repeat the same framing throughout the case. The Israeli state’s response to the discovery of the rape of a Palestinian prisoner by its soldiers was, in significant part, the public defence of the soldiers by ministers of the Israeli government and the storming of the military’s own facilities by Knesset members to obstruct the investigation.⁵¹

In August 2024, video footage from the incident was leaked to the Israeli press. The public saw what was on the recording. Five of the reservists were formally indicted, including on charges of aggravated abuse and the specific act named in the indictment: penetration of the detainee with a sharp object, causing the wounds for which he had required surgery. The case proceeded through 2024 and into 2025 under sustained political pressure from the governing coalition and the broader Israeli right. The Military Advocate General — Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the most senior legal officer in the Israeli military — was identified by the political right as the figure responsible for the investigation, and she became the target of a sustained campaign of vilification by ministers, by coalition Knesset members, and by mainstream Israeli media on the right. Ben-Gvir was prominent among her attackers. The Defence Minister publicly questioned whether the case should proceed at all. The pressure was relentless.⁵²

In October 2025, Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned. In her resignation letter, she acknowledged that she had personally authorised the release of the video footage to the Israeli press — the action that had broken the case open the previous year. She wrote that she had done so to counter what she called the incitement campaign against the military’s law enforcement system and to make clear that “even the worst terrorists cannot be abused.” On the day of her resignation, she disappeared for several hours. There was public speculation that she had attempted suicide. She was located, alive. Two days later, Israeli police arrested her. She was held in custody on suspicion of fraud, breach of trust, abuse of official power, obstruction of justice, and the unauthorised disclosure of information by a public official. The soldiers she had ordered investigated remained free.⁵³

On 12 March 2026 — two months before this article was written — the charges against the five Sde Teiman soldiers were dismissed in their entirety. The decision was made by the new Military Advocate General, Major General Itay Ofir, who had been appointed to replace Tomer-Yerushalmi on the express recommendation of Defence Minister Katz. Katz called the dismissal a vindication of soldiers who had been subjected to a “blood libel.” The Palestinian detainee whose rape the original investigation had been concerned with — the man whose wounds had required surgery, whose treatment had been documented on video, whose case had set the entire scandal in motion — has not received any form of justice from the Israeli system. The woman who tried to investigate the crime is in custody. The men who committed it are free. That is the verdict the Israeli military justice system rendered on its own conduct, and it is the verdict the Israeli state has accepted.⁵⁴

The detention regime at Sde Teiman is one node in a larger system. By the end of 2025, more than 11,000 Palestinians were being held in Israeli custody — the largest detained population in any war Israel has fought. Many of them are held without charge under administrative detention. Many of them are held under the Unlawful Combatants Law, an Israeli statute originally designed for Lebanese fighters in the 1990s and now applied broadly to Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank, that suspends the normal protections of the Israeli criminal justice system. The B’Tselem report Welcome to Hell, published in August 2024, documented the conditions across the network of Israeli detention facilities holding Palestinians from Gaza. Its conclusion was that Israel had created, in the words of the report, “an entire network of torture camps.” The report drew on the testimony of fifty-five released detainees and on the testimony of Israeli soldiers and medical personnel. The Israeli government did not contest its findings substantively. It dismissed them politically.⁵⁵

Hundreds of detainees have died in Israeli custody since 7 October. The exact figure is contested because the Israeli government has not produced a comprehensive accounting. The Israeli prison authority and the Israeli military have repeatedly returned the bodies of dead Palestinians to Gaza for burial, sometimes after years of refusal. In one tranche of returns documented in early 2025, 135 bodies were returned, including bodies that had been held at Sde Teiman. Forensic examination by Palestinian medical authorities, where it was possible, found bodies that had been mutilated, bodies still blindfolded, bodies still bound, bodies showing the signs of the conditions the released detainees had described. The Israeli government has not provided cause-of-death information for the majority of these detainees. The detainees who have come home alive have come home, in many cases, broken — psychologically, physically, in many cases both.⁵⁶

What the Sde Teiman case has established, and what the detention regime around it confirms, is that the Israeli state has institutionalised the abuse of Palestinians taken into its custody and that the Israeli state’s own mechanisms of accountability cannot or will not stop it. The crimes are documented. The investigators have been driven out. The crimes are not punished. This is not a system in which abuse occurs as a violation of the rules. It is a system in which abuse is the operating procedure and in which the rules have been bent, and where necessary broken, to protect it.

The Law, in Plain English

We said at the start of this article that we would apply one standard to both parties, and that the standard would be the law every state on earth has signed. We are now at the point in the argument where we say what the law concludes.

Start with Hamas. The killing of civilians at the Nova festival and in the kibbutzim of the Gaza envelope is a war crime under any reading of the Geneva Conventions. Common Article 3, which applies to all armed conflicts and to all armed groups whether or not they are states, prohibits “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds” committed against persons taking no active part in hostilities. The young people at Nova were taking no active part in hostilities. The elderly residents of Be’eri and Kfar Aza and Nir Oz were taking no active part in hostilities. The children killed in their bedrooms were taking no active part in hostilities. The deliberate killing of all of them was a war crime. The burning of civilians alive at Nova and in the kibbutzim, established by Israeli forensic investigators and survivor testimony, is a war crime — the same war crime in form that Israel later committed against Palestinian civilians at the Al-Aqsa Hospital tent camp and elsewhere, named in the same Geneva Conventions and prohibited by the same Common Article 3.

The taking of civilian hostages — including a nine-month-old infant, including elderly people, including foreign nationals — is a war crime under Article 34 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The murder of those hostages during their captivity, established in the case of Hersh Goldberg-Polin and the five others executed in the Rafah tunnel in August 2024, is a war crime — the same war crime as a summary execution of any prisoner under any law of war. The sexual violence committed against hostages in captivity, found by the UN Special Representative to be supported by clear and convincing information, is a war crime. The form and extent of sexual violence committed on 7 October itself has not been independently established because Israel refused the investigation that could have established it; the Patten finding of reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations on the day stands as the highest authority. Indiscriminate rocket fire on Israeli civilian population centres, which Hamas conducted on 7 October and has conducted before and since, violates the principle of distinction set out in Article 48 of Additional Protocol I.

The cause Hamas claims to be serving does not, under any reading of the law, license the methods it used on 7 October or during the captivity that followed. The legal verdict on Hamas’s conduct is plain. The conduct was unlawful. The conduct was a war crime, in multiple separate categories established to multiple separate evidentiary standards by multiple separate authorities. The cause itself, however, is not the same as the conduct. Armed resistance to belligerent occupation, to a siege, and to the denial of self-determination is a right recognised under international law. UN General Assembly resolutions over decades have affirmed it. The crimes Hamas committed in pursuit of that right are crimes. The right itself remains.

Now turn to Israel. The legal framework that Israel has signed up to is the same one. The standards Hamas violated on 7 October are the standards Israel has been violating, on a different scale, since the response began.

Take the conduct one element at a time.

The bombing campaign violates the principle of distinction. Distinction is the rule that combatants must be distinguished from civilians, and that civilians must not be the object of attack. It is set out in Article 48 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, and it is customary international law that applies to every party to every armed conflict. The dropping of 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated residential neighbourhoods, in the deliberate knowledge that civilians will die in them, is not a failure of distinction. It is the abandonment of it. The use of an AI targeting system that produces a kill list of 37,000 people, approved at an average rate of twenty seconds per name, with a known false-positive rate of ten percent and an authorised collateral damage tolerance of up to one hundred civilians per senior target, is not a failure of distinction. It is its systematisation.

The bombing campaign violates the principle of proportionality. Proportionality is the rule that the expected civilian harm of an attack must not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. It is set out in Article 51(5)(b) of Additional Protocol I, and in customary international law. The destruction of an entire residential building to kill one mid-level operative is disproportionate by any reading. The flattening of entire neighbourhoods is disproportionate. The killing of more than 60,000 people, the majority of them women and children, in the course of a campaign whose stated military objective was the destruction of an armed group estimated at the start of the war at between 30,000 and 40,000 fighters, is disproportionate by any reading any state has ever offered.

The bombing campaign violates the duty of precautions. Precaution is the rule that all feasible measures must be taken to minimise civilian harm. It is set out in Article 57 of Additional Protocol I, and in customary international law. Striking targets in their family homes, with their families present, by deliberate operational choice, is the opposite of precaution. The use of unguided “dumb” munitions in densely populated residential neighbourhoods, by deliberate operational choice, is the opposite of precaution. The deliberate destruction of hospitals, of medical infrastructure, of water and sanitation systems — each of which is a protected object under the law — cannot be reconciled with the duty of precaution.

The targeting of journalists is a war crime. Journalists are civilians under international humanitarian law, and the deliberate killing of civilians is a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute. The killing of more than 230 Palestinian journalists by Israeli forces, including the killing of clearly identified journalists in marked press vehicles, is not the cost of war. It is the prosecution of war against a protected class.

The targeting of medical workers and aid workers is a war crime. Medical personnel and humanitarian aid workers are protected persons under Article 12 of the First Geneva Convention and under Articles 15 and 71 of Additional Protocol I. The killing of more than 1,000 health workers in Gaza, including the killing of fifteen medics in a single attack on a clearly marked ambulance convoy in March 2025, is a war crime. The killing of the seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in three sequential drone strikes on three vehicles whose route had been pre-coordinated with the Israeli military is a war crime. The pattern of strikes on aid worker premises whose coordinates had been shared with Israeli authorities is a war crime committed not once but as a matter of policy.

The destruction of cultural and religious property is a war crime. The deliberate destruction of religious buildings is prohibited under Article 53 of Additional Protocol I and under Article 8(2)(b)(ix) of the Rome Statute. The destruction of more than 800 mosques, of three Christian churches including one of the oldest standing churches in the world, of every university in Gaza, of the central archives of the territory, has no military rationale that the Israeli government has been able to articulate. The law treats it as a war crime.

Starvation as a method of warfare is a war crime. Article 54 of Additional Protocol I prohibits “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” without exception. Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute makes the deliberate starvation of civilians, “including by wilfully impeding relief supplies,” a war crime. The IPC has declared famine in Gaza. The ICJ has, in successive provisional measures orders, instructed Israel to allow the unimpeded passage of humanitarian aid. The orders have been ignored. The starvation has continued. The Israeli ministers responsible for the policy have described it openly as a policy. There is no ambiguity in this part of the law and there is no ambiguity in this part of the conduct.

The conduct of the Israeli detention regime is the systematic violation of every relevant law. The Convention Against Torture, to which Israel is a state party, prohibits torture absolutely. The Geneva Conventions prohibit the abuse, sexual violence against, and degrading treatment of detained persons under any circumstances. The use of rape, including the use of trained dogs in rape, as a tool of detention is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and an act that meets the threshold of torture under the Convention. The Israeli government’s response to the discovery of these crimes — the dismissal of the charges against the soldiers who committed them, the prosecution of the official who exposed them — does not change the legal status of the underlying conduct. It establishes only that Israeli domestic accountability mechanisms have failed.

The cumulative pattern is what international law has, since 1948, treated separately. The drafters of the Genocide Convention did not write Article II as a prohibition on the desire to commit genocide. They wrote it as a prohibition on certain acts committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group in whole or in part. The relevant acts are listed: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The conduct in Gaza meets the first three of these definitions on the face of the record. The intent, which is the legal element that distinguishes genocide from mass atrocity, is established not by inference but by the explicit statements of senior Israeli officials, on the record, on camera, collected in the South African application to the International Court of Justice.

The legal bodies whose job it is to apply these standards have, where they have been asked, applied them.

The International Court of Justice, in January 2024, found that South Africa had standing to bring a genocide case against Israel and that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide. The Court ordered Israel to take provisional measures to prevent further harm. The Court has not yet ruled on the merits. The Court repeated and expanded those orders in March and May 2024. The Court ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is itself unlawful and must end. The case on the merits is ongoing. The conclusion the Court will reach is, at this stage, foreshadowed by what the Court has already said.

The International Criminal Court, in November 2024, issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, alongside a warrant for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif for the crimes of 7 October. The warrants are the formal conclusion of the Court’s prosecutor that there are reasonable grounds to believe these specific individuals bear criminal responsibility for the conduct on each side. The United States government has, under the second Trump administration, sanctioned the ICC and its prosecutor in response. The sanctioning of an international court for issuing warrants that the United States does not like is itself a measure of where the legal record stands.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, in September 2025, formally concluded that Israel has committed and is committing the crime of genocide in Gaza. The finding is a finding of a UN-mandated body of investigators, not a court ruling, and it does not have the binding legal force of an ICJ judgement. It is, however, the highest-level investigative finding by an international body that the conduct in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. It is on the public record. It is what the body charged with investigating these things found.

The verdict, on the basis of what the law says and what the relevant bodies have applied it to find, is not difficult to state in plain language.

Hamas committed war crimes on 7 October. The cause it claims to be serving does not license the methods. Hamas is responsible for those crimes, and the rule of law requires that the responsible individuals be held to account.

Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza on a scale and over a duration that meets the definitional threshold of the Genocide Convention. The ICJ has ordered provisional measures and has not yet ruled on the merits. The ICC has issued arrest warrants for the prime minister and the defence minister. The UN Commission of Inquiry has formally concluded that genocide has been committed. The Israeli state has, in addition, conducted parallel campaigns of unlawful conduct in the West Bank, where Hamas does not exist, and in a detention regime that has been documented as a network of torture camps. These conclusions are not contested by the international institutions that exist to find them. They are contested only by the governments that have armed and supplied the campaign and that have refused to draw the conclusions the evidence supports.

That is the verdict on the conduct. The question of why — why Hamas built what it built, why Iran funded what it funded, why Palestinian leadership failed where it failed, why Netanyahu propped up the very organisation that attacked his country, why the occupation persisted across half a century until 7 October became thinkable — is the question Part II takes up. The conduct is what the law judges. The causes are what the politics has to face.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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Photo: Ashraf Amra / UNRWA, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped and text overlay added for header.

James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman, “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago,” New York Times, 30 November 2023.

² UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, A/HRC/40/74, 28 February 2019.

³ Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, “Iran Was Surprised by Timing of Hamas Attack, US Intelligence Says,” New York Times, 11 October 2023.

⁴ Tal Schneider, “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces,” Times of Israel, 8 October 2023; David M. Halbfinger and Isabel Kershner, “Israel’s Premier Pursued Strategy to Keep Hamas in Power,” New York Times, 11 October 2023.

⁵ “How Hamas Built a Force to Attack Israel on 7 October,” Reuters, 12 October 2023; Amos Harel, “How Israel Was Caught Unprepared on October 7,” Haaretz, 12 October 2023.

⁶ AFP, “Israel revises October 7 death toll to about 1,200,” 11 November 2023.

⁷ Yaniv Kubovich, “Hamas Took Israeli Hostages on Oct. 7. The Israeli Army Ordered Their Killers Killed With Them,” Haaretz, 7 July 2024; Adam Sella, Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman, “The Battle for Be’eri,” New York Times, December 2023; on Colonel Nof Erez’s “mass Hannibal” characterisation, see the audio interview published by Haaretz, 9 November 2023.

⁸ Times of Israel, “364 confirmed dead at Nova festival,” 18 October 2023.

⁹ UN OHCHR, “Detailed findings on the attacks carried out on and after 7 October 2023 in Israel,” March 2025; Israel Police preliminary findings released 30 November 2023.

¹⁰ Times of Israel, “IDF finds video of Bibas family in Gaza, ‘very concerned’ for mother, youngest hostages,” 19 February 2024.

¹¹ Geneva Convention IV, Article 34: “The taking of hostages is prohibited.”

¹² Nir Hasson and Liza Rozovsky, “How an Unverified Story About Beheaded Babies Spread Around the World,” Haaretz, 4 December 2023; Reuters, “White House walks back Biden remark on beheaded children in Israel,” 12 October 2023.

¹³ Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim and Daniel Boguslaw, “Between the Hammer and the Anvil,” The Intercept, 28 February 2024.

¹⁴ UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Mission report — official visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank, 29 January to 14 February 2024, published 4 March 2024.

¹⁵ Times of Israel, “Israel forbids doctors from speaking to UN group investigating Oct. 7 atrocities,” 16 January 2024; Haaretz, “Israel Blocks UN Probe Into Hamas Sexual Crimes From October 7 to Avoid Inquiry Into Abuse of Palestinians,” 8 January 2025.

¹⁶ On the prior Israeli mainstream exposure of Cochav Elkayam-Levy, see the Yedioth Ahronoth/Ynet investigation, March 2024; reported in English by Middle East Monitor, “Israel media questions awarding prize to fraudulent lawyer behind Hamas ‘mass rape’ allegations,” 28 March 2024.

¹⁷ Times of Israel, “Freed Hamas hostage recounts ordeal, slams Israeli failures, speaks well of captors,” 24 October 2023.

¹⁸ Times of Israel, “Lifshitz press conference panned as disastrous for Israel, PR win for Hamas,” 24 October 2023.

¹⁹ Anshel Pfeffer, “The Hannibal Directive: Why Israel Risks the Lives of Its Captured Soldiers,” Haaretz, October 2014; Gili Cohen, “IDF Cancels ‘Hannibal Directive,’ Replacing It With New Orders for Soldier Abductions,” Haaretz, 28 June 2016.

²⁰ Reuters, “Egypt warned Israel days before Hamas struck, US committee chairman says,” 11 October 2023.

²¹ Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman, “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago,” New York Times, 30 November 2023.

²² Times of Israel, “Gaza border observers raised alarms about Hamas drills for months before October 7,” 17 October 2023.

²³ Amos Harel, “How Israel Was Caught Unprepared on October 7,” Haaretz, 12 October 2023.

²⁴ Reuters, “Israel orders ‘complete siege’ of Gaza,” 9 October 2023.

²⁵ Natasha Bertrand et al., “Nearly half of the Israeli munitions dropped on Gaza are imprecise ‘dumb bombs,’ US intelligence assessment finds,” CNN, 13 December 2023.

²⁶ Zeina Jamaluddine et al., “Excess mortality in the Gaza Strip during the conflict, 7 October 2023 to 30 June 2024,” The Lancet, January 2025.

²⁷ Susannah George, Sarah Cahlan and Hajar Harb, “Israel’s evidence for Al-Shifa hospital as Hamas base is hard to find,” Washington Post, 21 December 2023.

²⁸ World Health Organisation, Health Cluster Bulletin — Gaza, monthly editions through 2024–2025.

²⁹ BBC, “Verified: How Israeli forces struck the Greek Orthodox church in Gaza,” 21 October 2023; Forensic Architecture, “Living Archaeology in Gaza,” 2024.

³⁰ Committee to Protect Journalists, Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War, ongoing tracker.

³¹ Nick Waters, “Strike That Killed World Central Kitchen Workers Bears Hallmarks of Israeli Precision Strike,” Bellingcat, 2 April 2024; Human Rights Watch, Gaza: Israelis Attacking Known Aid Worker Locations, 14 May 2024.

³² Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman, “Israeli Military Says Troops Mistakenly Killed Three Hostages,” New York Times, 15 December 2023.

³³ Amnesty International Crisis Evidence Lab, Hidden in Plain Sight, 2024; Forensic Architecture investigations into the buffer zone demolitions.

³⁴ Republic of South Africa, Application instituting proceedings in South Africa v. Israel, filed at the ICJ on 29 December 2023; ICJ, Order of 26 January 2024.

³⁵ Yuval Abraham, “’Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza,” +972 Magazine and Local Call, 3 April 2024.

³⁶ Bethan McKernan and Harry Davies, “’The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas suspects,” The Guardian, 3 April 2024.

³⁷ Margaret Brennan, “Transcript: Cindy McCain on ‘Face the Nation,’” CBS News, 5 May 2024; Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, Gaza Strip: Acute Food Insecurity Situation, reports of March 2024 and August 2025.

³⁸ Times of Israel, “Ben Gvir: ‘Nothing more just’ than blocking aid to Gaza,” 4 February 2024; Times of Israel, “Smotrich: It might be ‘just and moral’ to starve 2 million Gazans, but ‘world won’t let us,’” 5 August 2024.

³⁹ Haaretz, “Settlers Attack Aid Trucks Heading to Gaza, Burn Their Cargo,” 13 May 2024; US Department of the Treasury press release, “Treasury Sanctions Tzav 9 for Blocking Humanitarian Aid to Gaza,” 14 June 2024.

⁴⁰ The Washington Post, “How Israeli forces opened fire on Gazans waiting for flour aid,” visual investigation, 5 March 2024; Forensic Architecture, The Flour Massacre, March 2024.

⁴¹ The New York Times, “How a Murky US-Backed Aid Effort in Gaza Became a Killing Field,” May–October 2025 series.

⁴² UN OCHA, Casualties at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Sites — Monthly Updates, June–November 2025; The Intercept, “The Christian Nationalist Mercenaries Killing Palestinians for Food,” September 2025.

⁴³ Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, Article 54; Rome Statute, Article 8(2)(b)(xxv); ICJ provisional measures orders of 26 January, 28 March, and 24 May 2024 in South Africa v. Israel.

⁴⁴ UN OCHA, Reported impact since 7 October 2023 — West Bank, ongoing data tracker.

⁴⁵ B’Tselem, State Business: Israeli Authorities and Settler Violence in the Occupied West Bank, November 2023 and subsequent updates; ICJ, Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 19 July 2024.

⁴⁶ Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006); Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud and Suhad Daher-Nashif, “Sexual violence, women’s bodies, and Israeli settler colonialism,” Jadaliyya, November 2014; Hagar Shezaf, “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs,” Haaretz, 5 July 2019.

⁴⁷ The New York Times, “Inside the Base Where Israel Has Held Thousands of Gazans,” 6 June 2024; CNN, “Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center,” 10 May 2024.

⁴⁸ Haaretz, “Israeli Doctors Tell Sde Teiman Detainees: ‘I Lost My Faith in Humanity Here,’” June 2024; Physicians for Human Rights — Israel reports, May–August 2024.

⁴⁹ Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Testimonies of Systematic Rape and Sexual Torture in Israeli Detention against Released Palestinian Detainees, November 2025; UN Human Rights Council, Detailed findings on the use of sexual violence against Palestinians by Israeli forces, A/HRC/58/CRP, March 2025.

⁵⁰ Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Testimonies of Systematic Rape, November 2025; Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Another Genocide Behind Walls, 2025; Nicholas Kristof, “The Hidden Rape Epidemic Inside Israeli Prisons,” New York Times, May 2026.

⁵¹ Times of Israel, “Mobs storm Sde Teiman base and Beit Lid court as soldiers held over alleged abuse of detainee,” 29 July 2024.

⁵² Times of Israel, “Five Sde Teiman reservists charged with aggravated abuse, sodomy of Palestinian detainee,” 11 September 2024.

⁵³ CNN, “Top Israeli military prosecutor resigns over leaked detainee abuse video,” 31 October 2025.

⁵⁴ CNN, “Assault charges against Israeli soldiers dropped in controversial end to a yearlong scandal,” 12 March 2026.

⁵⁵ B’Tselem, Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps for Palestinians, August 2024.

⁵⁶ Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, ongoing tracker; Middle East Eye, “Mutilated bodies returned to Gaza include detainees held at Sde Teiman,” February 2025.

The man in Edinburgh, held face-down on the ground, shouted at the officers arresting him: “I’m protecting the country from these fucking Muslim bastards raping our young daughters.”¹ The post said:

“Muslims don’t feel safe in the UK.” Well, neither do more than a quarter of a million girls who were raped in the UK, by Muslims. In other words, we don’t care — go home.²

That post — Exhibit A in what follows — went up at 08:41 on 22 June 2026, the morning Lewis Hawkes appeared in the dock. A blue tick beside the name. Monetised. Reported to the platform, and still live. Strip away the timestamp and you could not tell which sentence came from the man now charged with terrorism-aggravated attempted murder and which from an account that will face nothing at all.

The facts of the attack, before any argument arrives. On Friday 19 June, five men were injured across the west and north of Edinburgh; several were taken to hospital. Two were set upon after leaving prayers at their local mosque.³ Counter-terrorism officers took over the investigation. On Monday 22 June, Hawkes, 36, appeared at Edinburgh Sheriff Court charged with five counts of attempted murder, one of assault and robbery, two of breach of the peace and two of culpable and reckless conduct — every charge aggravated by a terrorist connection. He entered no plea and was remanded.⁴

The condemnation was immediate and it came from the top. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, wrote on X that the suspect appeared motivated by anti-Muslim hatred and would face “the full force of the law.”⁵ The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said she was “horrified,” and that there is no place for hatred and violence against Muslims.⁶ Scotland’s First Minister, John Swinney, said there was no place for violence, racism or intolerance.⁷ Two days after that post, Starmer announced his resignation; but on 20 June he was the serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and he called it what it was: anti-Muslim hatred.

So did the community, in real time. The Muslim Council of Britain criticised “political rhetoric that demonises entire communities.” A Muslim civil-society body urged police to treat the attack as Islamophobic, far-right terror. The Scottish Association of Mosques noted the aggressive rhetoric that had been circulating online in the preceding days.⁸ Nobody had to reach for the connection. They had watched it being built.

Here is the asymmetry the rest of this piece is about, visible in a single morning. The state denounced the physical act in the strongest terms available to it and charged the man who committed it as a terrorist. The post came after the attack, not before — and there it still sat, the morning Hawkes stood in the dock: one more in a stream that has never paused. The countless previous sentences that armed him — the same claim, the same demand that Muslims be got rid of — sit on verified influencer accounts devoted to this purpose, monetised accounts a few scrolls away from every other topic and pushed by an algorithm designed to stoke outrage, many reported and left untouched, gathering thousands or millions of views.

Hawkes didn’t invent his sentence. He absorbed it.

Hatred, not criticism

Start with the line itself, because everything that follows depends on knowing exactly where it runs.

You may say almost anything about Islam. You may call it false, archaic, dangerous. You may ridicule its Prophet, reject its scripture, and hold the entire religion in contempt, in print and at volume. British law protects every word of that. The statute that criminalises the stirring up of religious hatred says as much in its own text: nothing in it is to restrict discussion, criticism, ridicule, insult or abuse of a religion, or of the beliefs and practices of its followers.⁹ The offence it creates is narrow by design — it reaches only threatening words used with the intention of stirring up hatred. Scotland’s law draws the same line, with the same protection for criticism built into it.¹⁰

So the line does not fall between polite speech and rude speech, or between approval and disapproval. It falls between attacking a set of ideas and inciting hatred against a group of people. “Islam is a violent creed” is an argument; you may make it, and others may answer it. “Muslims rape our daughters — get rid of them” is not an argument about a creed. It is an incitement against people, and it is the thing the law was written to catch.

This is the same line the law draws around Jews, and nobody finds it confusing there. You may criticise Judaism, dispute its teachings, reject it outright. What you may not do is incite hatred against Jews as people — and when someone does, the machinery moves with lightning speed. The argument of this piece is not that Islam should be placed beyond criticism. It is the opposite: the line already exists, is already understood, and is already enforced for one community, and the question worth asking is why it is not enforced for another.

Hold that distinction in view, because every attempt to dismiss what follows will depend on blurring it.

Substitute the word

There is a test for all of this, and it costs one word. Take the post, or the sentence Hawkes shouted with a machete in his hand, and put “Jewish” where “Muslim” stands. You do not need me to finish it; you already flinched. Now ask the practical questions. How long does that version last on a verified account — weeks, gathering views, or minutes? Is it reported and left up, or gone within the hour with someone under investigation? You know the answer, and so does everyone. That gap — between the sentence that stays and the sentence that vanishes — is the whole subject of this article.

This is not a complaint that the protection around Jews is excessive. It is the opposite. That protection exists because Britain decided, correctly, that incitement against Jews is never idle — that it is the first stage of something, and that the something has to be stopped before it arrives. The Community Security Trust records it, shares it with police, and the state moves.¹¹ That judgement is right. This article asks only that the same judgement be made a second time, for a second community, on the same reasoning.

And the reasoning carries, because the words do. “You do not belong here. Go back where you came from.” That sentence was aimed at Jews for the better part of a thousand years — expelled from England in 1290, from Spain in 1492, from town after town in the centuries between, always cast as the alien presence a nation could not absorb.¹² The blood libel — the lie that Jews murdered Christian children — invents the event itself: no crime took place, so there was nothing to misread.¹³ The “Muslim rape gang” libel works the other way: it takes a real event, committed by specific men, and inflates it — stretching the perpetrators into a whole faith, a whole ethnicity. One manufactures the crime; the other seizes a real one and swells it past its perpetrators. They meet at the end: a whole people charged for what a few did, or for what no one did at all. This is not history that flatters Europe. The slander did not retire; it changed target. What was said of the Jew is now said of the Muslim, very nearly word for word.

We know where it leads, because for Muslims it has already led there. Quebec City, 2017: six men shot dead at evening prayers. Finsbury Park, the same year: a van driven into worshippers leaving Ramadan prayers, one man killed. Christchurch, 2019: fifty-one murdered across two mosques by a man whose ammunition was inscribed “For Rotherham” — the grooming-gang scandal, named on the bullets.¹⁴ Now Edinburgh. The incitement is not theoretical, and neither is the thing it builds toward. The precursor has a body count.

So when this article asks why the same words are prosecuted for one community and monetised for another, it is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the practical question, put to a state that already knows how to answer it — because it answers it, correctly, every time the target is Jewish.

The law already exists

The claim that there is no law for this is simply untrue. There is law, and a great deal of it.

Stirring up hatred against people because of their religion is a criminal offence across the United Kingdom. In England and Wales it lives in Part 3A of the Public Order Act 1986, inserted by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006: threatening words or behaviour, used with intent to stir up religious hatred, punishable by up to seven years.¹⁵ In Scotland — where Edinburgh sits — the same conduct is caught by the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, in force since April 2024.¹⁶ The offence exists in both jurisdictions. It is not aspirational. It carries a prison sentence.

Above it sits a layer that ignores borders entirely. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it an offence to send a grossly offensive or menacing message over a public electronic network — the provision under which people have been jailed for a single post.¹⁷ And above that sits the Online Safety Act 2023, fully in force since 2025, which moves the question from the poster to the platform. Stirring up religious hatred is named in the Act’s Schedule 7 as priority illegal content. Platforms carry a legal duty to build systems that limit its spread and to take it down once notified. The penalty for failure is a fine of up to ten per cent of global revenue or eighteen million pounds, whichever is larger — and Ofcom can seek court orders to block a defiant service in the UK altogether.¹⁸

Put the layers together and the picture is plain. The content this article opened with — the verified post, the influencer accounts that fed Hawkes — is not lawful-but-distasteful. It is illegal: under the religious-hatred law of whichever jurisdiction you read it in, under section 127, and under the platform duties of the Online Safety Act. It is unlawful in every part of the United Kingdom, and removed in none of them. The problem was never a missing law. It is a law without teeth, and a law without bite has the same outcome as no law.

And beneath the failure to enforce lies a second asymmetry, written into the statute before any officer or prosecutor lifts a finger. British law has always punished the stirring up of racial hatred on a wider threshold than religious hatred. The racial offence reaches words that are threatening, abusive or insulting, whether the speaker intended to stir up hatred or simply made it likely. The religious offence, added two decades later, was drawn deliberately narrow: only threatening words, only proven intent, and an express protection for criticism of the religion itself.¹⁹

Which door a community may use is not left to chance — and the line that assigns it does not bear much weight. Since Mandla v Dowell-Lee in 1983, the courts have treated Jews and Sikhs as racial groups, distinct peoples bound by a shared history, so incitement against Jews can be pursued through the broader racial-hatred provisions.²⁰

But Jews are no more a single ethnicity than Muslims are. A faith that has absorbed converts for millennia runs from Ashkenazi to Sephardi to Mizrahi to Ethiopian and far beyond; “Jewish” names a people one can join, not a race one is born into — and the same is true of Islam, drawn from every nation on earth. The law’s distinction is not biological; it cannot be. It is a classification: the courts recognised one community as a people and declined to recognise the other. Muslims are not a racial group in law, so incitement against them falls to the narrower religious provisions, and reaches the wider ones only where a prosecutor can tie it to ethnicity — which is neither automatic nor certain.²¹

The result is precise, and it is uncomfortable. The same words — the same threat, the same libel — are easier to prosecute when the target is Jewish than when the target is Muslim, not because the two peoples differ in kind, but because the law partitioned them. Before anyone decides whom to protect, the statute has already decided whom it protects more readily. The selective enforcement this article describes is built on a selectivity already written into the law.

By design

X does not fail to remove this content now and then. It fails to remove it as a matter of system. When the Center for Countering Digital Hate reported samples of hateful posts using X’s own tools, the platform took no action on ninety-seven per cent of the anti-Muslim hate speech, and eighty-nine per cent of the anti-Jewish.²² That is not a moderation backlog; it is the absence of moderation. Exhibit A — reported, and still live the morning Hawkes stood in the dock — is one entry in that ninety-seven per cent.

The platform does not merely tolerate the content. It earns from it. Since Musk bought the company in October 2022, X has rebuilt itself around paid verification and a payments scheme that rewards engagement — and nothing engages like outrage. CCDH tracked ten of the most prominent anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim accounts on the platform: in the four months after 7 October 2023 they gained four million followers, against one million in the four months before. Most were paying X Premium subscribers, lifted up the algorithm by the platform itself; several earn directly through X’s subscription feature, on which X takes a share.²³ The hatred is not a cost the platform absorbs. It is a product line.

The direction is set from the top, and it needs no written policy. Musk’s own account — the most followed on earth, past 240 million — has repeatedly amplified anti-migrant and anti-Muslim narratives from figures such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (”Tommy Robinson”), carrying them to audiences they could never reach alone. When CCDH read the replies beneath a sample of those posts, it counted 3,930 calling for violence, 2,690 of them under Yaxley-Lennon.²⁴ Yaxley-Lennon is on the platform because Musk put him there: deactivated in 2018 for hateful conduct, he was reinstated in November 2023 — the same day as Katie Hopkins, banned in 2020, two of Britain’s best-known anti-Muslim agitators restored within hours of each other.²⁵ Weeks after the takeover, the body that had advised Twitter on exactly this kind of harm, its Trust and Safety Council, was dissolved.²⁶

So this is not a platform straining to meet its legal duties and falling short. It is one whose design — the verification model, the payment scheme, the algorithm, the owner’s own feed — runs in the opposite direction from everything the Online Safety Act requires of it. The Act demands systems that reduce illegal content and remove it on notice. X has built systems that surface it, spread it, and bank on it.

Foreign provocation

On 13 September 2025, the largest far-right rally Britain had seen in a generation filled central London — well over a hundred thousand people, gathered under the banner “Unite the Kingdom.” Onto a screen above them came Elon Musk, the American owner of X, by video link. He told the crowd that “violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die,” and called for the dissolution of Parliament.²⁷

Read that against the law already set out. A grossly offensive or menacing message sent over a public electronic network is an offence under section 127. Threatening words intended to stir up hatred are an offence under the Public Order Act. The government’s own response conceded the character of what it had heard: it called Musk’s words dangerous and inflammatory.²⁸ And then it did nothing. No investigation, no sanction, no consequence — for a call to violence delivered to a hundred thousand people in the nation’s capital by the owner of the platform on which, as the last section showed, the same incitement runs every day. People have been jailed in this country for a single post. Musk addressed a crowd and walked away clean.

It is worth being clear about what that rally was, because the language from the stage is built to obscure it. This was not a debate about visa numbers. It was the largest gathering yet of Britain’s counter-jihad movement, in which “immigration” is the sayable surface and the Muslim is the meaning beneath. You do not have to take that on trust: it is there in their own platforms and their own speeches, where the boats, the grooming gangs and the “invasion” all resolve, every time, to the same target. The slogans — “remigration,” “protect our daughters” — stay on the lawful side of the line, naming a policy where they mean a people. That is what the euphemism is for: it lets a speaker incite against Muslims before a hundred thousand people without ever seeming to. Musk gave them the surface; the crowd heard the rest.

The rally was Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s, and that matters, because he is not a grassroots eruption of native grievance. His counter-jihad movement has been underwritten for years by foreign think-tanks and donors; the dogma he sells — civilisation under siege, the Muslim as invader — is manufactured abroad and retailed by him, at scale, on X.²⁹ Follow the provocation back to its sources and almost nothing about it is domestic. Foreign money. A figurehead sponsored from abroad. A foreign billionaire on the screen. All of it producing incitement on British soil, against British Muslims, in breach of British law.

And the state is not powerless against any of it. At the second Unite the Kingdom rally, in May 2026, the Home Secretary barred eleven foreign speakers from entering the country — a clean demonstration that when the government decides a foreign provocateur is unwelcome, it has the tools to act.³⁰ It simply declines to use them where the provocation is profitable, popular, or merely convenient to ignore. The incitement this article describes is not confined to the dark corners of a platform. It runs in daylight, in the capital, broadcast from a screen — foreign in origin, illegal in substance, and met by the British state with a statement of concern and nothing more.

The childminder and the billionaire

The machinery for prosecuting online incitement is not rusted shut. It can move with real speed and real severity — as two people from Northampton can attest.

On 29 July 2024, hours after three little girls were murdered in Southport — and hours after a lie tore across X that their killer was a Muslim asylum seeker, which he was not — Lucy Connolly, a childminder with around ten thousand followers, posted that the hotels housing asylum seekers should be set alight, and called for mass deportation. She deleted it within hours. It did not matter. She was interviewed within days, charged within a fortnight, and jailed for thirty-one months for stirring up racial hatred; the judge told her she had intended to incite serious violence.³¹ Tyler Kay, who reshared her words, was jailed for thirty-eight.³² The immigration panic that jailed them began as a lie about a Muslim.

Hold those sentences in mind — thirty-one months, thirty-eight months, for single posts — and go back to the screen above the Unite the Kingdom crowd. Musk told a hundred thousand people that violence was coming and they should fight back or die. He has more than two hundred million followers. The leader of a national party wrote to the Prime Minister calling it incitement; the government itself called the words dangerous and inflammatory; the Metropolitan Police opened an investigation — into the protesters who threw punches, not into the man who broadcast the call.³³ No charge. No sanction. Nothing.

It is the same statute book, and in substance the same conduct the law exists to catch — words thrown at a crowd to stir up hatred and violence, named as incitement by the government itself. What differs is the defendant. A childminder with ten thousand followers is prosecuted and jailed; a billionaire with two hundred million, who said as much to a crowd a hundred thousand strong, faces not even the regulatory sanction the Online Safety Act holds over his own platform. And the verified influencers who industrialise the same incitement for profit, day after day, are troubled least of all.

The lesson the state has taught is exact, and everyone learning from it has understood it. Incitement is prosecuted at the bottom and tolerated at the top. The law reaches the childminder and stops at the billionaire — not because their words differ, and not because nothing could be done to him, but because one is powerless and the other is rich, foreign, and useful to leave alone. Enforcement, where it happens, runs downward.

The crime and the libel

The grooming-gang scandal was real. Groups of men, over years, targeted vulnerable girls — some as young as ten, many of them in care — and raped, trafficked and degraded them. The state and the institutions that should have protected those girls looked away, at times for fear of being called racist, and that dereliction was its own crime against the children it failed — a failure of the most basic duty a government owes, to protect its people from harm. Baroness Casey’s 2025 national audit confirmed what the bravest reporting had long maintained: in the areas it examined — Greater Manchester, South and West Yorkshire — men of Pakistani heritage were genuinely over-represented among the suspects, and the system had spent years refusing to look. In one case file, she found the word “Pakistani” tippexed out.³⁴ None of that is in dispute here, and none of it should be.

What follows is about what is done with that truth.

Between the crime and the slogan on Exhibit A — a quarter of a million girls raped by Muslims, go home — sits a laundering process, and it runs in identifiable stages.

The first is the swap of ethnicity for religion. Every official finding of over-representation — Casey’s, the Jay report’s — concerns ethnicity and national origin: Pakistani heritage, “Asian” suspects. None of it measures religion, because religion is not what the data records. “Pakistani-heritage men in three police-force areas” becomes “Muslims,” and in that single substitution a specific, evidenced finding about an ethnic group in parts of northern England is stretched over two billion people of every nationality on earth, the overwhelming majority of whom have never set foot in the country. The data never said “Muslim.” The libel cannot work without it.

The second is the swap of local for national. Casey was emphatic on exactly the point the slogan depends on: nationally, ethnicity goes unrecorded in two-thirds of cases, and the data is, by her own assessment, “not good enough” to support any claim about offenders’ ethnicity at the national level.³⁵ The over-representation is a real finding about particular places. That it describes the whole country is the one claim the official audit says cannot be made.

The third is the number. “A quarter of a million” is not a government figure, a police figure, or a Casey figure. It traces to a single extrapolation aired in the House of Lords in 2018, in which a peer took Rotherham’s estimate of roughly 1,400 victims of all forms of exploitation and multiplied it across the entire country to reach 250,000 — a method fact-checkers across the spectrum, and even unsympathetic commentators, have called unsupported. It was revived by a privately funded inquiry with no statutory standing, amplified by Musk to millions, and landed on the street as established fact.³⁶ No one counted a quarter of a million girls. Someone multiplied.

The fourth stage is the one the first three exist to enable: the move from perpetrators to a people. From “these men did this” to “Muslims do this” to “so they must go.” The individuals convicted in court become an entire faith; the faith becomes an enemy population; the enemy population is told to leave. That is the journey from a crime to a libel, and Exhibit A is the finished product.

One test exposes the whole construction. In April 2023, West Midlands Police closed their largest-ever child sexual abuse investigation: twenty-one people convicted, the roster overwhelmingly white, several of them women — the Evanses, the Bakers, the Wellingtons, the Webbs. It came the day after the Home Secretary told the country that grooming gangs were “almost all British-Pakistani.”³⁷ No one called the twenty-one a Christian grooming gang. No one demanded the white British be deported — there being, of course, nowhere to deport them to. No one went looking through their baptism records for a motive. The crime was treated as the crime of the people who committed it — which is exactly how it should be treated, and exactly how it ceases to be treated the moment the men are Muslim.

That asymmetry is the tell. When the same offence yields “jail the men who did it” for one group and “send the whole community home” for another, the second response was never really about the children or immigration. The crime is the occasion; the Muslim is the target. And a society that can prosecute the offence — that does prosecute it, courtroom after courtroom — does not need the libel to protect a single child. The libel is doing other work.

The regulator with teeth

It would be easier to excuse all of this if the law were unenforceable — if the Online Safety Act were a paper tiger no regulator could make bite. It is not, and Ofcom has spent the months since the Act’s duties came into force proving the opposite.

Since those duties landed in 2025, Ofcom has opened investigations into more than ninety platforms and issued six fines for non-compliance. It fined one pornography operator a million pounds — the first seven-figure penalty under the Act — for failing to keep children away from adult content; it fined others hundreds of thousands more; it fined a file-sharing site for ignoring its demands for information; it has put services on notice that it will go to court to have them blocked in the UK altogether.³⁸ The machinery works. When Ofcom decides a harm matters, the fines are real and the deadlines are short.

It has even reached X. In January 2026, Ofcom opened a formal investigation into the company — over Grok, its AI tool, which was being used to generate sexual deepfakes and child sexual abuse imagery.³⁹ That investigation is right, and the harm is grave.

Now set what Ofcom enforces against what it does not. The Act names stirring up religious hatred as priority illegal content — the same tier of harm Ofcom has fined and pursued elsewhere. That is the duty that reaches the ecosystem set out earlier: the ninety-seven per cent of reported anti-Muslim hate left standing, the monetised accounts, the amplified influencers. And against that duty, on that content, there has been no fine, no blocking order, no investigation at all.

Removing incitement is harder to weigh than checking an age, and the hate-content duties are newer than the rest. But difficulty does not explain a year of silence on this harm beside a year of seven-figure fines for others. The strongest thing Ofcom has produced on illegal hate is an announcement, in May 2026, that X had “committed” to introducing better protections.⁴⁰ A promise, where pornography sites got penalties.

So the pattern set by the police and the government repeats at the regulator. Ofcom has the power, and it has proven it will use it — it fines foreign companies, it threatens to block them, it moves in months. It has simply not turned any of that on the incitement this article is about. Age checks for pornography are enforced with seven-figure fines. The duty to remove anti-Muslim incitement is not enforced at all — it is answered with a press release. The harm left unaddressed is, once again, the same one.

And that duty is not abstract: it exists because incitement kills. Its proof is the Edinburgh street this article opened on, where a man with a machete wounded five men while shouting the very libel traced through these pages. Of every harm in this account, anti-Muslim incitement is the one that has already drawn blood — and it is the one the regulator has left entirely alone.

Whom the state protects

Step back from the particular failures — the unenforced law, the non-compliant platform, the idle regulator — and one fact organises all of them. None of these bodies lacks the power to act. Each has shown, in this very account, that it can move with speed and force the moment it decides a harm is worth stopping.

When a childminder posted a call to burn a hotel full of asylum seekers, she was charged within a fortnight and jailed within months. When eleven foreign speakers sought to address a rally, the Home Secretary barred them from the country before they arrived. When the grooming-gang scandal could no longer be contained, a government that had resisted an inquiry for a year reversed itself and produced a statutory inquiry, a national police operation and a raft of new law.⁴¹ The machinery, when the state wants it to move, moves fast.

Now hold that beside the harm at the centre of this article. The same statute that puts a poster in prison sits unused against an ecosystem inciting violence against Muslims for profit. The same incitement that, aimed at Jews, brings the full weight of the state — as it should — brings close to nothing when it is aimed at Muslims. A call to violence broadcast to a hundred thousand people drew a statement of concern. The libel that armed the man in Edinburgh has drawn no response at all. Not because nothing can be done, but because nothing has been chosen.

And the choice is not random; it follows the political weight. Where a community can command a response — where there is a constituency that will be heard, a danger the public already fears, a pressure the government feels on its own survival — the state moves. The victims of anti-Muslim incitement carry no such weight. There is no electoral price for ignoring them, and there is a political use in leaving the incitement alone: it feeds the immigration panic that wins seats, and the narrative has become too useful to too many to disturb. So it is left to run.

This is the failure beneath all the others, and it is neither regulatory nor procedural. It is political, and it is a failure of the duty that comes before every other — the duty of a state to protect its people from harm. In practice, some citizens of this country are denied the protection from harm the law extends to everyone else — tilted against them in the statute, as we saw, and then rationed away from them by every official who declines to act. It is a two-tier system, and the tier you fall into is set by whether your protection is found convenient. Right now, the citizens on the wrong tier are Muslims.

What can be done

The failure described here is a choice, and choices can be forced. The same Act that sits unenforced also handed the public levers the state would rather it did not notice — and none of them is a lawsuit or needs a lawyer. They need people willing to pull them.

The sharpest is the super-complaint. Since January 2026, the Online Safety Act has let an eligible organisation — a charity, a campaign, a representative body — bring a systemic complaint to Ofcom, which is then obliged to consider it and publish a response within ninety days.⁴² Individuals cannot bring one; organisations can. And the bodies already engaged with the mechanism are telling: the Antisemitism Policy Trust and the Board of Deputies of British Jews are among them.⁴³ There is no reason a Muslim representative body — alone or in coalition — cannot do the same, and bring a super-complaint on the anti-Muslim incitement that X hosts and earns from. That is how the enforcement weight this article has shown Muslims to lack gets built: not by waiting to be protected, but by forcing the regulator onto the record, on a clock. And these bodies are not staffed by strangers — most run on volunteers, members and small donations. They cannot build that evidence without the public that feeds it. Join them, fund them, report to them; the super-complaint is only as strong as the casework behind it, and the casework is built by people.

Individuals are not powerless either, though here the power is collective rather than singular. Ofcom will not act on a lone report, and says so plainly — but it does use what is reported to build its picture of where harm sits. Report the post to the platform first, which puts its removal duty to the test; then report it to Ofcom’s portal. One report changes nothing. Ten thousand become the evidence base that turns “there is no data” into a pattern the regulator has to weigh. Every report is a mark against the ninety-seven per cent.

Count it where counting matters. Part of the reason antisemitic incitement draws a fast response is that a body exists to record it, year on year, and put the data in front of police and government. Anti-Muslim hate needs its equivalent supported and fed, so that the pattern is undeniable and already on the record when the next attack comes.

And make it cost something politically. The inaction has held because it has been free. Ask your MP and your candidates, in writing and in public, why the law against stirring up religious hatred is enforced for some and suspended for anti-Muslim incitement — and why the platform duties that fine pornographers go unused against incitement that has put men in hospital. The silence is a wager that no one is keeping score. Keep score.

What is being built

Return to Edinburgh, where this began. A man walked down a street with a machete and left five men wounded, shouting as he did the precise libel this article has followed from end to end — that Muslims rape British daughters. He did not compose that sentence. He received it. It was written for him by an influencer ecosystem that earns from it, carried by a platform built to spread it, licensed by a foreign provocation the government called dangerous and then ignored, and left in place by a law nobody enforced, a regulator that looked elsewhere, and a state that had decided the ecosystem’s targets, the ones he was inspired to attack, were not worth protecting. Hawkes swung the blade.

That is what a pipeline is. Incitement does not become violence by accident, in a single deranged leap. It is built, stage by stage, and at every stage there is a valve the state holds and chooses not to close: the post that should have been removed, the account that should never have been monetised, the broadcast that should have drawn a charge, the duty that should have been enforced. Each open valve is a decision. Edinburgh is what comes out of the end of the pipe.

Gather them, then — the people this article has set side by side. The girls a state abandoned for decades because confronting their abusers was inconvenient. The childminder it jailed in weeks for a single post. The billionaire it would not touch for a call to violence heard by a hundred thousand. The men left bleeding on an Edinburgh pavement. One thread runs through all of them: a state that protects some of its people and not others, and rations the difference by what it finds convenient. The girls and the men on that pavement were failed by the same instinct — the judgement that their safety could wait.

We know where this leads, because the stages are not new. Mass violence is never spontaneous; it is assembled, in the open, out of exactly these parts — a libel, a medium, a permission, an averted official gaze. We recognise the machinery because we have watched it run before, against other people, in other decades. What has changed is not the method. It is the target. This time it is being built against Muslims, in plain sight, with the tools that could dismantle it lying unused beside it.

This should trouble more than the community it targets. A state that hands out protection by the measure of convenience has made it conditional for everyone — it has only yet to find the rest of us inconvenient. The duty withheld from Muslims today is the one every citizen is owed, and withholding it is a precedent, not an exception.

One test remains, the one this article opened with. Take the sentence that left five men bleeding, and the post still earning beneath it, and change a single word: for “Muslim,” read “Jewish.” Ask whether any of it — the tolerance, the monetisation, the silence, the shrug — would survive a single day. You know that it would not. So the only question left is the one the whole machine is built to keep you from asking. Why does it survive now?

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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Feature image by Towfiqu barbhuiya / Pexels

James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ The suspect’s words at the point of arrest, captured in footage circulated online and reported by Middle East Eye; quoted in full in the official statement of Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), 19 June 2026, which described the shout not as “one man’s outburst” but as the “Muslim rape gang” libel pushed daily by online agitators. [House-style decision for Jim: reproduce the expletive verbatim, or asterisk it for Fireline.]

² Exhibit A: post by the verified account @BROKENBRITAIN0, X, 08:41, 22 June 2026; 46,000 views; reported by the author and live at time of writing. [FLAG: confirm still live before publication; the fabricated “quarter of a million” figure is examined later.]

³ Police Scotland statement, 20 June 2026; Scottish Association of Mosques; Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND).

⁴ Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service; Edinburgh Sheriff Court, 22 June 2026.

⁵ Keir Starmer, post on X, 20 June 2026.

⁶ Shabana Mahmood, Home Secretary, statement, 20 June 2026.

⁷ John Swinney, First Minister of Scotland, post on X, 20 June 2026.

⁸ Muslim Council of Britain; MEND; Scottish Association of Mosques, statements, 20–21 June 2026.

⁹ Public Order Act 1986, Part 3A (inserted by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006), section 29J, which protects freedom of expression; the offence under section 29B requires threatening words or behaviour together with intent to stir up religious hatred. England and Wales.

¹⁰ Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, stirring-up-hatred offences in respect of religion: threatening or abusive behaviour intended to stir up hatred, subject to a statutory protection for discussion and criticism and a defence of reasonableness. In force 1 April 2024.

¹¹ Community Security Trust, which records antisemitic incidents and shares its data with police; see its annual Antisemitic Incidents Report.

¹² Edict of Expulsion, England, 1290 (Edward I); Alhambra Decree, Spain, 1492 (Ferdinand and Isabella); expulsions also from France (1306 and 1394) and numerous other jurisdictions across the medieval period.

¹³ The blood libel: the medieval and early-modern accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes — a recurring pretext for massacre and expulsion.

¹⁴ Quebec City mosque shooting, 29 January 2017 (six killed); Finsbury Park van attack, 19 June 2017 (Makram Ali killed); Christchurch mosque shootings, 15 March 2019 (fifty-one killed). On the “For Rotherham” inscription on the perpetrator’s ammunition, see the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point analysis of the Christchurch attacks.

¹⁵ Public Order Act 1986, Part 3A, section 29B (inserted by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006); maximum seven years’ imprisonment. England and Wales.

¹⁶ Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, stirring up hatred in respect of religion; in force 1 April 2024.

¹⁷ Communications Act 2003, section 127.

¹⁸ Online Safety Act 2023: Schedule 7 lists stirring up religious hatred under the Public Order Act 1986 as priority illegal content; the illegal-content safety duties require proportionate systems to limit and remove it; Ofcom may impose penalties up to £18 million or ten per cent of qualifying worldwide revenue and may seek business-disruption (including service-blocking) orders.

¹⁹ Public Order Act 1986: racial-hatred offences (Part 3, especially section 18) reach “threatening, abusive or insulting” words where hatred is intended or likely; religious-hatred offences (Part 3A, section 29B) reach only “threatening” words where hatred is intended, subject to the section 29J protection for criticism of religion.

²⁰ Mandla v Dowell-Lee [1983] 2 AC 548 (House of Lords), establishing the broad “ethnic group” test under the Race Relations Act 1976; Jews recognised as a racial or ethnic group on the same reasoning (cf. King-Ansell v Police [1979] 2 NZLR 531).

²¹ Muslims have been held not to constitute a racial group under UK law (Nyazi v Rymans Ltd, EAT, 1988), Islam spanning many ethnicities and nationalities; anti-Muslim conduct attracts the racial-hatred or racially-aggravated provisions only where it is also tied to a racial or ethnic group (cf. J H Walker Ltd v Hussain [1996] ICR 291).

²² Center for Countering Digital Hate: reporting hateful posts through X’s own tools, the platform failed to act on 97 per cent of the anti-Muslim and 89 per cent of the anti-Jewish hate speech sampled (2023). X Corp. sued CCDH over related research; the suit was dismissed in March 2024 under California’s anti-SLAPP law.

²³ Center for Countering Digital Hate, “Anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim actors grow 4x as quickly on X” (11 April 2024): ten tracked accounts gained roughly four million followers in the four months after 7 October 2023, against about one million in the four months before; accounts monetised through X Premium subscriptions, with the platform taking a share of subscriber revenue, while brand advertising was served beside the content.

²⁴ Center for Countering Digital Hate, analysis of anti-migrant amplification on X (2025–2026): Elon Musk amplified narratives from Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (”Tommy Robinson”) and Rupert Lowe; 3,930 replies contained calls for violence, including 2,690 in replies to Yaxley-Lennon.

²⁵ Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as “Tommy Robinson” (account deactivated 2018), and Katie Hopkins (banned 2020), reinstated by Elon Musk on 5 November 2023.

²⁶ Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council was dissolved in December 2022, weeks after Musk completed his acquisition.

²⁷ “Unite the Kingdom” rally, London, 13 September 2025; crowd widely estimated at well over 100,000. Elon Musk addressed the rally by video link, telling the crowd “violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die” and calling for the dissolution of Parliament.

²⁸ UK government and Downing Street response describing Musk’s remarks as dangerous and inflammatory, September 2025.

²⁹ On the foreign funding of Yaxley-Lennon’s activism, see The Guardian’s 2018 investigation and subsequent reporting (naming, among others, the Middle East Forum and the donor Robert Shillman). [Body keeps this to “foreign think-tanks and donors”; the ideological character of that funding is reserved for separate treatment. Strip the named organisations here if you would rather park them entirely.]

³⁰ “Unite the Kingdom” rally, 16 May 2026; ahead of the event the Home Secretary barred eleven foreign nationals from entering the United Kingdom.

³¹ Lucy Connolly, 41, of Northampton: posted on X on 29 July 2024 calling for asylum-seeker hotels to be set alight and for mass deportation; pleaded guilty to publishing material intended to stir up racial hatred and was jailed for 31 months at Birmingham Crown Court (the case transferred from Northampton); the sentencing judge found she had intended to incite serious violence.

³² Tyler Kay, 26, of Northampton: jailed for 38 months on 9 August 2024 for resharing Connolly’s post, having admitted publishing material intended to stir up racial hatred.

³³ On Musk’s “Unite the Kingdom” remarks: Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey wrote to the Prime Minister alleging Musk had sought to incite violence; the government described the remarks as dangerous and inflammatory; the Metropolitan Police’s post-event investigation concerned the disorder and assaults on officers at the demonstration, not Musk’s address. No charge or sanction against Musk followed.

³⁴ National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (the “Casey audit”), 16 June 2025: local data from Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire showed clear over-representation of Asian and Pakistani-heritage suspects; the audit documented institutional avoidance of the ethnicity question, including for fear of appearing racist, and a case file in which the word “Pakistani” had been removed with correction fluid.

³⁵ Casey audit: ethnicity was not recorded for around two-thirds of grooming-gang perpetrators, and the national data is, in Baroness Casey’s terms, not good enough to support any statement about the ethnicity of group-based child sexual exploitation offenders at the national level.

³⁶ The “250,000” figure is not a government, police or Casey statistic. It originates in a 2018 House of Lords extrapolation by Lord Pearson of Rannoch from the Jay Report’s conservative estimate of roughly 1,400 victims of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham (1997–2013); fact-checkers (including Full Fact and others) have found the national figure unsupported. It was revived by the privately funded, non-statutory “Rape Gang Inquiry” associated with Rupert Lowe MP, and amplified by Elon Musk on X.

³⁷ West Midlands Police “Operation Satchel”: 21 individuals convicted on 5 April 2023 in the force’s largest child sexual abuse investigation, with a predominantly white roster including several women; sentences ranged from life to non-custodial. The convictions came the day after Home Secretary Suella Braverman wrote that grooming-gang members were “almost all British-Pakistani.”

³⁸ Ofcom enforcement under the Online Safety Act, 2025–2026: more than ninety platforms investigated and six fines issued since the duties came into force, including a £1 million penalty against AVS Group (the first seven-figure OSA fine) and further penalties against Kick (£800,000), 8579 LLC (£1.35 million) and others, chiefly for age-assurance failures and for failing to respond to statutory information requests. Ofcom has also placed services on notice of potential court applications for business-disruption (blocking) measures.

³⁹ Ofcom opened a formal investigation into X (X Internet Unlimited Company) on 12 January 2026 over the use of its Grok AI tool to generate non-consensual intimate images and child sexual abuse material, under the illegal-content risk-assessment and safety duties of the Online Safety Act.

⁴⁰ On 15 May 2026, Ofcom announced that X had committed to introducing stronger protections against illegal hate and terror content — a voluntary undertaking rather than a penalty or enforcement decision.

⁴¹ Following the Casey audit, the government — having resisted a national inquiry for much of the preceding year — announced a statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs (Home Secretary’s statement, 9 December 2025, chaired by Baroness Anne Longfield), alongside a national policing operation reviewing previously closed cases and new measures including better recording of suspects’ ethnicity and reform of the law on child rape.

⁴² The Online Safety Act’s super-complaints regime came into force on 1 January 2026, with Ofcom’s final guidance published on 10 February 2026. Eligible organisations — bodies that represent UK users or the public and act independently of regulated services — may bring a super-complaint about systemic risks of significant online harm; Ofcom must consider an admissible complaint and publish its response within 90 days. Individuals cannot bring super-complaints.

⁴³ Organisations engaged with Ofcom’s super-complaints process as of February 2026 include the Antisemitism Policy Trust and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, among others.

He is a fifty-one-year-old historian who holds citizenship of two countries, and it was the passport of one of them — Israel, the country he had lived in for fifteen years, studied in, served in — that he was carrying when he walked off the plane and out of view.

That is the whole of what is known. Everything after it is silence.

The Silence

Start with the state, because the state is the one body that could end the question with a sentence. It has not. There has been no charge. There has been no hearing anyone can point to. There has been no statement confirming that Kirpichenok is held, or was ever held, or is free to go. What is certain is that he landed, and that he never came out of the airport. Russia’s ambassador to Israel, Anatoly Viktorov, said on 5 August that his embassy had taken note of the reports and had sent a request about Kirpichenok to the relevant Israeli authorities. He did not say the request had been answered.² Yet Kirpichenok remains missing, eleven days after the plane landed, and the country that holds his passport has said nothing about the man carrying it.

Around that silence sits a second one. This is a story about a citizen of a Western-aligned democracy who vanished at an international airport, and it has not been reported by a single wire service. Not the Associated Press, not Agence France-Presse, not Reuters. It has not appeared in the Guardian, the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post. The entire visible record of the case runs through a handful of Israeli outlets treating it as an unexplained curiosity, Russian state and state-aligned media, and a small circle of activists. A man disappears inside a functioning state and the machinery of Western journalism, which exists precisely to notice such things, has not turned toward it.³

And around that sits a third silence, the sharpest of the three. The outlets that report on exactly this — Israeli detention of critics, the treatment of people who cross the state’s lines — have not run it either. Middle East Eye, Mondoweiss, the Electronic Intifada: these are not general-assignment desks that missed a foreign story. This is their subject. When Israel held the journalist Majd Kayyal in 2014, they covered it. They know this beat. On Kirpichenok, so far, they have said nothing.

There is an innocent explanation for the second and third silences. The only people asserting that Kirpichenok has been detained are Russian state media and a network of activists aligned with them. No Israeli official has confirmed it. No court record shows it. His own lawyer has not spoken. A careful editor, handed a disappearance sourced entirely to those quarters, waits — waits for a second, independent confirmation before putting the outlet’s name behind the claim. That instinct is not cowardice. In the ordinary run of things it is exactly right.

But this is not the ordinary run of things, and the waiting has a flaw that this case exposes. The confirmation the editors are waiting for can only come from one place: the same state apparatus holding him. If he is inside a security investigation under a gag order, there will be no confirmation to wait for — not next week, not next month, not until the state decides. The event that finally breaks the silence may not be a charge sheet or a court date. It may be the news that he has been released after a fortnight with nothing to show for it, or the news that he has not been released at all. By the time the story is confirmed enough to be safe, it may no longer be a story about a man who can still be helped. It may be a story about one who cannot. The moment to apply pressure to a state that has made a person disappear is while the pressure can still change what happens to him — not after the outcome is fixed and the reporting is finally, uselessly, certain.

So the silence is not the absence of a story. The silence is the story. A man went through his own country’s airport and vanished, and every party that might account for him — the state that should explain, the press that should ask, the advocates who should shout — has, for its own reasons, said nothing. Which leaves the simplest question of all. Where is he?

The Man

Artyom Kirpichenok is a historian. He was born in Leningrad in 1975, emigrated to Israel with his family in the early 1990s, studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, served in the Israeli army, and lived in the country for some fifteen years before returning to Russia, where he has worked since as a writer and publicist. He holds a doctorate. He has written books — a people’s history of Israel, a book on the 1956 Hungarian uprising, a study of Serbian settlement in eighteenth-century Ukraine. He is, by every account including those of his critics, a serious and productive scholar.

He is also, and without apology, an enemy of the Israeli state’s account of itself. His subject for years has been the case against Zionism — not the policies of one government or another, but the foundations. His people’s history of Israel is described, in its own catalogue, as a collection continuing the long tradition of Jewish criticism of the state — the insistence that to oppose Israel’s conduct is not to oppose Jews. His later books press the argument toward its sharpest form: that the Israeli project is a colonial one, and that it is heading, on its present course, toward catastrophe. This is not the work of a pamphleteer. It is the work of a trained historian who has spent a career assembling the counter-record — the version of events the state would prefer stayed in the margins — and presenting it with the apparatus of scholarship: sources, footnotes, the weight of a doctorate behind it.

He took the same argument into the present. In recent months, writing for the Russian-language service of Turkey’s state broadcaster, he compared Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens to apartheid, examined Israel’s fear of Turkey as a rising power, and gave one essay on the country’s self-image after October 7 the title “The whole world hates us, and we’re proud of it.”⁴ This is not a man who criticised at the margins. He went at the centre, in public, in print, repeatedly.

And he went further than words on a page. Twice — in 2018, and again in 2022 — Kirpichenok travelled to Iran, a country almost no Israeli citizen sets foot in, and wrote about it. Of the first trip he was disarmingly direct about the appeal: “Being an Israeli citizen, it was very interesting to me to see where our bombs would fall.”⁵ A person can read that as gallows humour or as something colder. Either way, it was an Israeli passport-holder recording, in public, a visit to the state’s declared enemy and musing on the targets.

His politics are genuinely divisive, and not only to Israelis. On the largest question dividing the world he moves in, Kirpichenok has come down on the side of Moscow. Haaretz places him in a small faction of Russian communists who support the invasion of Ukraine, and his published commentary since 2022 has largely tracked the Russian government’s framing of that war.⁶ He has criticised the emigration of Russia’s anti-war dissidents. His defenders abroad are drawn from a corner of the Western left that has its own habit of measuring states by their alignment rather than their conduct — quick to condemn some governments for jailing writers and quiet about others.

This matters, and not as a disclaimer. His politics change nothing about the question his disappearance raises. A person’s views are not a licence for the state to make him vanish, and the more divisive those views, the more honestly that test is put. Whether you share his politics or find them objectionable, the test is the same.

Why Now

There is a question that sits underneath the first one. Not only where he is, but why a man like this, at a moment like this.

For most of his career Kirpichenok was, in the practical sense, harmless. He wrote books that sold in the low thousands. He posted essays to a Russian-language readership that has no vote in Israel and no leverage over it. He held views that a great many people find objectionable, and he held them at a distance of several thousand miles. A state does not, in the ordinary course of things, reach across a continent to lay hands on a fifty-one-year-old academic because he thinks the wrong things about its founding. There are millions who think the wrong things. It cannot detain them all, and it does not try.

What a historian produces, though, is not opinion. It is the other account — the documented, footnoted, sourced version of events that competes with the one a state tells about itself. That is a different kind of object from a slogan. A slogan can be shouted down. An account has to be answered, and the more credentialled the person making it, the harder it is to wave away. Kirpichenok’s entire body of work is the construction of that competing account: the argument that the Israeli state is a colonial project, made not as a chant but as history, by a man with a doctorate and a shelf of books to lend it weight.

In a settled time, that work is an irritant and no more. But this is not a settled time. Israel is fighting on several fronts at once, and it is losing something on all of them that it cannot replace by force — the argument. At the International Court of Justice, it stands as the respondent in a genocide case brought by South Africa; the court has issued a series of binding provisional orders requiring it to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza and to allow humanitarian aid, orders it has been widely found not to have complied with. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, on charges including the war crime of starvation and crimes against humanity — warrants that make them liable to arrest in any of the more than a hundred states party to the court. And in September 2025 a United Nations commission of inquiry, chaired by the former war-crimes judge Navi Pillay, concluded that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza — the word the state has spent two years insisting does not apply, now written into the record of a UN body.⁷ Each of these is a defeat not on the battlefield but in the domain that outlasts the fighting: the record of what happened, and who is judged to have done it. The ground of the fight has shifted from the terrain where Israel is dominant to the one where it is not — to the contest over whose account of the last two years the world will finally believe.

A state fighting for its account of itself has a particular reason to fear the people who produce the rival account. The most likely explanation for why Kirpichenok was worth reaching for is not that he held hostile views, but that he wrote a rigorous, sourced, hard-to-dismiss history the Israeli government found objectionable, and that he did so at the moment the state could least afford the competition. None of this is proven. What happened inside the airport is known to one party, and that party is silent. But of the explanations available for why a man like this vanished at a moment like this, it is the one that fits what is known — and the one the state could end in a sentence, if it were false. The disappearance of a critic is an act of suppression. The disappearance of a historian, in the middle of a war over the historical record, is something more precise. It is the removal of a witness.

The Doors

A person who lands at an airport and is not seen again has not evaporated. He passed into the controlled space of a state border and did not pass out of it, and the state that runs that border will not say what became of him. That settles more than it seems to. He did not vanish; he was made to vanish, inside the one place on earth where nothing moves unrecorded and no one is taken without authority. A man does not slip through Ben Gurion unseen. If Kirpichenok is gone, the state that controls every step of that ground is the party that made him gone. The only question the outside world cannot yet answer is which hand of the state is holding him — and the possibilities narrow to three.

The first is that he is being held by the security service. This is the reading the available claim points to: Darya Mitina, a Russian former parliamentarian, wrote on 5 August that Kirpichenok was in the custody of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency.⁸ Her claim is the origin of nearly everything said about his whereabouts since, and it should be weighed for what it is — an assertion by a politically aligned figure, not confirmed by Israel, not corroborated by his lawyer, not supported by any court record. It is thin. But it does not stand alone, and it is not the reason the security-service door ranks first. That reason is the shape of the disappearance itself. A man detained for questioning at a border and released a few hours later resurfaces. A man held in the ordinary criminal system gets a hearing, and a hearing leaves a trace. A total blackout — no contact, no location, no acknowledgement, sustained for eleven days — is the signature of a security hold, because a security hold is the one kind of detention the law permits to be conducted in exactly this way: incommunicado, unacknowledged, and sealed from the press. The disappearance looks like a Shin Bet case because a Shin Bet case is what a disappearance of this shape looks like.

The second possibility is an ordinary criminal detention under the law that makes his two Iran trips a crime. An Israeli citizen who travels to an enemy state without permission commits an offence, and Iran is on the list. If that is what happened, Kirpichenok is somewhere in the regular remand system awaiting a charge. But this door fits less well, because the regular system is not silent. It produces dockets, hearing dates, the ordinary paper trail of criminal process — and none has appeared. Either that paper is being suppressed, which points back toward the security apparatus and its gag orders, or he is not in that system at all.

The third possibility is that he was refused entry and is being held for deportation. One early Russian account raised it. It is the weakest fit — a deportation is an administrative act that neither the deportee’s family nor a foreign embassy is usually kept in the dark about for eleven days — but it cannot be ruled out from the outside, and it belongs on the list precisely so that the state can be asked to rule it out.

Three doors, then, and behind each of them the same fact: the key is held by one party. The Israeli state knows which door Kirpichenok is behind. It knows because if he is in a security cell, its agency put him there; if he is in remand, its courts are processing him; if he is awaiting deportation, its border authority is holding him; and if he is behind none of the three — if he walked out of the airport a free man and simply vanished into the country — then it is the one party with the machinery to establish that, and the one party that has chosen not to. Every branch of the possibility ends in the same place. The state can say where he is. It has not.

How It’s Done — and Done Lawfully

The most disturbing thing about a disappearance of this kind is not that it breaks the law. It is that it may not have to.

Israel has, on its books, the machinery to make exactly this happen and to keep it hidden. Three instruments, each ordinary, each lawful, together sufficient.

The first is the offence. Under the Prevention of Infiltration Law, an Israeli citizen who knowingly and unlawfully leaves the country for an enemy state commits a crime punishable by up to four years in prison. Iran was added to the list of enemy states by amendment in 2007.⁹ This is not a dormant provision. In a case decided in the Tel Aviv District Court, an Israeli citizen who had travelled to Iran to deal with property he owned there — after being warned by security officials not to go — had his sentence increased on appeal, the court holding that the security of the state takes precedence over a citizen’s freedom of movement, and that the gravity of the offence lies in the unlawful departure itself, whatever the traveller’s reasons.¹⁰ Kirpichenok travelled to Iran not once but twice, and wrote about it under his own name. If the state wished to build a case, the material is already public, supplied by the man himself.

The second instrument is the hold. Israel’s security service may detain a person suspected of a security offence and question him without access to a lawyer, for days at a stretch, without producing him in open court and without confirming the detention to anyone outside. The denial of counsel is not a loophole; it is a provision, available in security cases and used in them.

The third is the silence. An Israeli court may impose a gag order — a tzav issur pirsum, a prohibition on publication — that bars the country’s media from reporting a case at all. Such orders are not rare or exotic; they are a routine instrument of the security courts, granted on the state’s application, often for weeks at a time, and renewable. In its strongest form such an order forbids reporting even the existence of the order, so that the public cannot know there is anything it is not being told. The press does not defy these orders, because the penalty for defying them is real, and so the silence they produce is total within the country’s borders. This is the instrument that closes the circuit. The offence gives the state a reason to detain. The security hold lets it detain in silence. The gag order ensures the silence holds. A citizen can be taken, questioned incommunicado, and processed through a court, and the first the public may learn of it is when the state chooses to lift the veil — or when someone outside its jurisdiction, beyond the reach of the order, says something.

This is not hypothetical. In April 2014, a Palestinian citizen of Israel named Majd Kayyal, a young journalist who worked as a web editor for the legal centre Adalah, travelled to Beirut to attend a conference marking the fortieth anniversary of a Lebanese newspaper. Lebanon, like Iran, is an enemy state. Kayyal made no secret of the trip; he wrote about it on his own social media before he went. On his return he was arrested at the border by the Shin Bet, held incommunicado in a windowless cell with the lights kept on around the clock, and denied access to a lawyer for five days. His interrogators questioned him about contact with a foreign organisation. A gag order kept the entire affair out of the Israeli press, and while it held, his family’s home was searched. The order was lifted only after Adalah and a group of journalists petitioned the court to remove it — and only then did the country learn that a journalist had been sitting in a security cell for the better part of a week, on suspicion of a crime that amounted to attending a conference. He was released to house arrest, barred for a time from leaving the country or contacting anyone outside it, and in the end the charges were dropped.¹¹ He had gone to a conference, and written about it, and that had been enough.

Change the country from Lebanon to Iran, the conference-goer to a historian, and the year to now, and the Kayyal case is a description of what the machinery does. It is offered here not as proof of what happened to Kirpichenok — no one outside the state can offer that — but as evidence that the thing being described is real, that it has been done before, to a person of much the same profile, for much the same reason, and that when it was done, it looked exactly like this: a man crossing a border, a silence, and a public that knew nothing until someone made it impossible not to.

What Is Most Likely True — and What Would Prove It Wrong

Here is where the evidence stands, and what would overturn it.

On the evidence available — the manner of the disappearance, the profile of the man, the moment he was taken from, and the existence of a legal machinery built to produce precisely this outcome — the most probable explanation is that Artyom Kirpichenok is being held by the Israeli security service in connection with a security investigation, most likely one that touches his travel to Iran, his writing, or both, and that the silence around him is the ordinary working of a gag order rather than the absence of anything to report. That is a probability, not a certainty. It is where the evidence points, held to the standard the evidence allows.

What would overturn it is short and specific. If the Israeli authorities confirm that Kirpichenok was never in their custody, and that he left the airport and travelled onward, the reading is wrong and should be dropped. If he surfaces — released, deported, or simply reappearing — with an account that contradicts this one, it should be dropped. If a document emerges showing he is held in the ordinary criminal system with a hearing on the calendar, the specific claim about the security service is wrong, though the larger point about the silence would stand. Any of these would settle it. Every one of them requires the state, or Kirpichenok himself, to speak — and at the moment neither can, or will.

That is the trap. The claim made here is falsifiable in principle and unfalsifiable in practice, and it is unfalsifiable in practice for a single reason: the one body that could refute it in a sentence has chosen silence instead. A state that could end a damaging inference by producing a man, or a charge, or a simple statement of where he is, and declines to do so, invites the inference it declines to rebut. It cannot complain of being misread when it has made itself the sole author of the confusion.

And this is a live case. The veil may lift — Kirpichenok charged, or freed, or produced, and the question of where he is answered at last. That answer, when it comes, will be the measure of everything here. But the machinery does not care about the calendar, and the argument does not depend on the outcome. Whether he walks out tomorrow or vanishes for a year, the fact that a man could be made to disappear this completely, this lawfully, and this quietly, is the thing worth understanding — because it did not begin with him and it will not end with him.

The Convergence

The silence is where this began, and it is where the responsibility sits.

The state’s silence is a choice. It could produce Kirpichenok, or a charge, or a single sentence saying where he is, and it has chosen instead to say nothing, for eleven days, to a family, a foreign embassy, and a watching handful of people who noticed. The press’s silence is a caution — reasonable in the ordinary case, and the wrong instinct in this one, because the confirmation the editors are waiting for can only come from the state that is producing the silence, and it may never come, or come too late to matter. And the third silence, the one from the outlets that have made this exact subject their life’s work, is the one most easily broken. They do not need to declare Kirpichenok a martyr. They do not need to be certain. They need only to ask the question loudly enough that the state has to choose between answering it and being seen to refuse — and that question is worth asking now, while the asking can still change what happens to him, rather than after, when all that is left is to mark what did.

None of this depends on whether you share Kirpichenok’s politics. It depends on nothing about him except that he is a person, and that a state has made him disappear. A principle that protects only the people we admire is not a principle. It is a preference, and a preference offers no protection at all to the next person taken, who may be someone we admire, or may be us.

And there is the harder question, the one the silence forces and cannot answer. Look at what converges here. A historian whose work is the rival account of the Israeli state. A state losing the argument about itself on every front that matters — at the world court, at the criminal court, at the United Nations, where the word it has denied for two years was finally written down. A body of law that lets the state arrest a citizen for travelling to an enemy state, hold him in secret, and forbid anyone from reporting it. And a disappearance that fits the machinery as a key fits a lock. No one of those facts proves intent. Together they raise a question the state’s silence does nothing to dispel and everything to sharpen: what is a government that behaves this way trying to control?

The evidence does not permit an answer. It permits a supposition, and it is this. A state that is losing the war over its own story does not fear the man who shouts. It fears the man who documents. It reaches, when it reaches, for the people who write the version it cannot afford the world to believe — and it reaches for them at the moment that version is winning. Kirpichenok wrote that version. He was taken at that moment. What Israel is trying to control is not one historian. It is the account. And the surest sign that the account is worth controlling is the length a state will go to make its author disappear.

Where is Artyom Kirpichenok? The state knows. Everyone else is still waiting for it to say.

Working notes and primary sources on Telegram.

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Banner image: Artyom Kirpichenok, from his own social media, used in accordance with fair-dealing provisions for news reporting.

James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Details of the arrival and disappearance — Yerevan flight, the 10:41 message, contact ceasing, the unused 8 August return ticket — from NEWSru.co.il, “Стало известно о задержании в ‘Бен-Гурионе’ публициста Артема Кирпиченка,” 5 August 2026.

² Ambassador Anatoly Viktorov’s statement: TASS, “Diplomats monitor situation around detained Russian orientalist — ambassador,” 5 August 2026. The embassy noted a “presumed” detention on 2 August and said it had submitted a request to the relevant Israeli authorities; it did not report a reply.

³ The recent TRT Russian articles — the apartheid comparison, the Turkey essay, and “The whole world hates us, and we’re proud of it” — as reported in Haaretz, “Russian-Israeli Historian Disappeared After Landing in Israel, Russian Reports Say,” 10 August 2026.

⁴ The 2018 Iran travelogue quotation: Times of Israel, “Russian-Israeli historian missing after landing at Ben Gurion last week,” 10 August 2026, which also records the second (2022) trip.

⁵ Ukraine alignment: Haaretz, 10 August 2026 (as above), placing him in a small Russian communist faction supportive of the invasion.

⁶ International-law findings: ICJ, provisional measures orders in South Africa v. Israel (26 January, 28 March, 24 May 2024); ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I, arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, 21 November 2024; UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (chair Navi Pillay), report of 16 September 2025 finding Israel responsible for genocide in Gaza on a “reasonable grounds to conclude” standard.

⁷ Darya Mitina’s claim: Jerusalem Post, “Russia ‘monitoring’ as historian critical of Zionism vanishes upon landing in Israel,” 12 August 2026, quoting her Telegram statement (reported via Izvestia) that Kirpichenok is held by the Shin Bet.

⁸ Prevention of Infiltration (Offences and Jurisdiction) Law, 5714–1954, §2A (יציאה שלא כדין), four-year maximum; Iran added by the 2007 amendment (annotation תש”ך, תשס”ז). Text: Hebrew Wikisource and Nevo legal database.

⁹ State of Israel v. Mizrahi, District Court appeal עפ”ג 25495-04-14 (sentence increased on appeal for unlawful exit to Iran; “the security of the state prevails over its citizens’ freedom of movement”).

¹⁰ The Majd Kayyal case, April 2014: Al Jazeera, “Israel frees jailed Palestinian journalist,” 18 April 2014; Adalah, “Gag order lifted on case of arrest of journalist Majd Kayyal,” 16–17 April 2014 (five days without counsel; charges not pursued).

¹¹ Absence of wire-service and mainstream Western coverage, and of coverage by the specialist Middle East and Palestine press (Middle East Eye, Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada): author’s review of available reporting as of 13 August 2026.

The iconic British red double decker bus was parked in front of cameras, driven through market towns and Midlands car parks for the entirety of the spring of 2016, and the number on its side was a lie. Everyone involved in the broader Leave operation knew it was a lie. The UK Statistics Authority had ruled the figure “potentially misleading” on 21 April 2016, weeks before the bus tour even began.¹ When Vote Leave continued to use it anyway, the Authority issued a stronger statement on 27 May condemning the campaign’s persistence with a number it described as undermining trust in official statistics.² The House of Commons Treasury Committee published its own report the same day, telling the public to “discount this claim”.³ The actual gross figure was around £342 million per week, and after the rebate Britain had been receiving since 1985 the net contribution was closer to £250 million, and even that was before any of it returned in the form of agricultural payments, regional development funds, and university research grants.⁴ The implied promise — that the same money would be redirected to the National Health Service — was the lie wrapped around the lie.

The bus belonged to Vote Leave, the official campaign fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Nigel Farage led the rival Leave.EU campaign, and he was careful never to put the £350 million figure in his own mouth. What he did instead was the move of every used-car salesman who has ever lived. He stood next to the bus. He shared platforms with the people who stood next to the bus. He gave his own version of the same promise, citing a smaller and harder-to-disprove figure of around £34 million a day — what he later called a “featherbed” of money that could be spent “on the NHS, on schools, on whatever it is.”⁵ He let the public draw the conclusion the larger Vote Leave bus was inviting them to draw, and he never once during the campaign — when it might have cost him a vote — corrected them. He kept his own fingerprints off the specific number while doing everything in his considerable power to make sure the number worked.

The morning after the referendum, asked by Susanna Reid on ITV’s Good Morning Britain whether he could guarantee the £350 million would be spent on the NHS, Farage said: “No I can’t, and I would never have made that claim, it was one of the mistakes the Leave campaign made.”⁶ The bus had served its purpose. It was no longer needed. The man who had spent months letting the country believe the number was good for something now wanted everyone to know it had never been his number to begin with.

This is the move. Remember it. We will see it again.

In the ten years since, the National Health Service has not received an extra £350 million a week. Real-terms spending per head has continued to grow, but at the slowest sustained rate in the service’s history — averaging just 0.4 percent a year in the decade before the pandemic, with four years in which spending per head actually fell.⁷ The spending growth has fallen far short of the rate required to meet rising demand from an ageing population, the post-Covid backlog, and the costs of advancing medical technology. Waiting lists have grown to the longest in the service’s history. GP appointments have become so scarce that in much of the country the practice of seeing a doctor in person, on a day you actually need one, has been quietly retired. Dentistry has functionally collapsed for anyone without private cover. Social care has been left to die. The maintenance backlog on NHS buildings has more than doubled in real terms over the past decade.⁸ The fiscal pressure created by lower growth, reduced revenue, and the ongoing costs of a poorer trading relationship with the European Union — still, despite Brexit, Britain’s largest trading partner — has been addressed not by raising taxes on capital but by contracting the capacity of the public services on which the people who voted for Brexit most depend.

The contracts to fill the spaces left behind by that contraction have gone, in increasing measure, to American companies. UnitedHealth’s UK arm Optum is now paid by almost every Integrated Care Board in England for medicines management, primary care patient records, or both, after its £1.2 billion buyout of the British medical IT firm EMIS was approved by the Competition and Markets Authority in 2023.⁹ Palantir, the American data analytics firm whose chairman Peter Thiel has publicly said the NHS “makes people sick” and should be deregulated and part-privatised, was awarded the £330 million Federated Data Platform contract in November 2023 — potentially worth £480 million over its lifetime — to integrate the medical records of up to 240 NHS organisations on its Foundry software.¹⁰ The British Medical Association voted in June 2025 to oppose the rollout. Forty-seven thousand patients signed petitions against it. Multiple NHS trusts refused to adopt the platform. The contract proceeds.¹¹ The NHS contract is one node in a wider architecture: Palantir also holds a £75 million Ministry of Defence data-processing contract from 2021, and its software was used to sift the submissions to the UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review. The systematic treatment of US surveillance, defence, and AI infrastructure inside the British state is the subject of Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0, also at Fireline Press.¹² In 2024 the NHS spent a record £216 million outsourcing X-ray examinations alone to private firms, many with US ties.¹³ The constituencies that voted hardest for Brexit were disproportionately the deprived areas that have borne the worst of NHS capacity decline since.¹⁴ The voters who were promised £350 million a week for the NHS got less NHS, and what they have left is increasingly being run, billed against, and underwritten by companies headquartered four thousand miles away.

This is not the failure of Brexit. This is what Brexit was for.

I write this as someone who has lived inside both of the systems I am going to ask you to compare. I am a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States. I have paid taxes in both countries. I have used the NHS, and I have used the American healthcare system. I have watched what happens to British towns when their industries close, and I have watched what happens to American towns when theirs do. I have stood in line at an American pharmacy counter and been told a prescription would cost me four hundred dollars I did not have. I have walked out of a British GP surgery with the same medication for nine pounds. I know what the difference between those two systems looks like in a person’s life because I have been the person in both of those scenes.

I am writing this because what is being offered to British voters under the banner of Reform UK is the second of those scenes. It is not being described that way. It is being described as the recovery of British sovereignty, the restoration of national pride, the end of the political class’s contempt for the people it governs. Those are powerful arguments and they speak to grievances that are real. But the system being delivered behind that wrapper is the one I have lived under in the country I left. I recognise it. I am writing this article because I think the British public deserves to recognise it before they are asked to vote for it.

The conventional account in the British press treats Reform as a political phenomenon — an insurgency mobilised by voter anger over immigration, the cost of living, and a generation of broken promises. That account is true as far as it goes. But it stops at the front door of the question and refuses to walk inside. It treats the visible candidate as the substance of the offer. It treats the polling as the meaning of the moment. It does not ask who funds the movement, what those funders own, what those owners want, what foreign actors have a stake in the movement’s success, or what Britain looks like on the other side of the policies the movement is selling.

The answers to those questions, assembled, do not describe the recovery of British sovereignty. They describe its transfer.

In 2016, the country was told it was taking its sovereignty back from Brussels. In 2026, the country is being asked to complete the journey that began with that vote — not back to Westminster, where the rhetoric promised it was going, but onward to Washington, where in practice most of it has already been delivered. The trade dependence is American. The defence integration is American. The technology platforms that mediate British public life are American. The intelligence relationship is American. The foreign policy alignment is American. The capital that funds the political movement now offering to complete the transition is, in significant measure, American or American-aligned. The model of the state being implicitly proposed — smaller, more privatised, more deregulated, more comfortable with extreme inequality, more hostile to international human rights frameworks, more willing to break international law in service of national power — is American.

Reform’s voters did not vote for any of this. They voted because they were angry, and because the people in power were not listening, and because they were promised a country that was theirs again. They are entitled to that anger. They are right that they were not listened to. They were lied to in 2016 and they are being lied to now, by some of the same people, working from a similar playbook, in service of an outcome that bears no resemblance to what they were told they were voting for.

This article is for them as much as for anyone else. The argument it makes is not that they are wrong to want their country back. The argument is that the movement they are being mobilised by would deliver them, at the end of the road, the country I left.

That is what is actually at stake.

The Man, Briefly

There is no point pretending Nigel Farage is a mystery. He has been a fixture of British political life for thirty years, his biography is on Wikipedia, and the central facts about him are as well known as anything about a politician of his stature can be. The personal exposé has been written and rewritten so many times that another version is unlikely to change a single mind. What the personal record can do is establish, briefly, who is asking the British public for their trust, so that the structural argument that follows lands on a foundation of fact rather than mystique.

Farage was born in 1964 in Farnborough, Kent, the son of a stockbroker. He attended Dulwich College, the fee-paying private school in south London where he joined the Conservative Party in 1978 at the age of fourteen after hearing Sir Keith Joseph speak.¹⁵ His time at the school has come under renewed scrutiny: in late 2025, twenty-six former pupils and teaching staff signed an open letter published in The Guardian asking him to apologise for what they described as racist and antisemitic behaviour during his time there, including alleged remarks of “Hitler was right” and “gas ‘em” directed at a Jewish classmate, and racial slurs against Black and Asian pupils. Multiple former pupils corroborated the allegations. Farage denied them. A 1981 letter from an English teacher to the headmaster, asking him to reconsider Farage’s appointment as a prefect, cited the boy’s “publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views”. Farage was made a prefect anyway.¹⁶

He skipped university. At eighteen he went into the City of London as a commodities trader, following his father into the financial sector. He worked for Drexel Burnham Lambert, then Crédit Lyonnais Rouse, then Refco, then Natixis Metals. In 1994, while still at Refco, he set up his own brokerage, Farage Futures. By the mid-2000s the business was wound up and at least one of his metal-broking ventures had ended in insolvency. A fellow broker quoted in the Financial Times described the suggestion that Farage had been a wealthy City man as “probably a bit of a misnomer”.¹⁷ The man who spent the next two decades railing against the political class as a self-styled outsider was, by background, a private-school stockbroker’s son who had spent his working life in the financial industry that political class had spent four decades deregulating.

He left the Conservative Party in 1992 over the Maastricht Treaty and joined the new UK Independence Party the following year. He was elected to the European Parliament in 1999, where he would remain for twenty-one years, drawing a Brussels salary while campaigning to leave the institution that paid it. He led UKIP from 2006 to 2009, and again from 2010 to 2016. He stood for election to Westminster seven times before he won one. He failed at Eastleigh, Salisbury, Bexhill and Battle, Buckingham, South Thanet (twice), and finally succeeded at Clacton in 2024, more than thirty years after he first stood as a UKIP candidate.¹⁸ The narrative of perpetual outsider contains, on inspection, the perpetuity of a career politician who simply could not get elected.

What he could do, throughout that thirty-year career, was monetise it. The pattern is documented and consistent. After the 2016 referendum, when he stepped back as UKIP leader, the insurance tycoon Arron Banks funded what Channel 4 News described as a lavish lifestyle to the tune of around £450,000 in a single year — a £4.4 million Chelsea home rented through a Banks-controlled company at £13,000 a month, the furniture and fittings inside it, a Land Rover Discovery, a personal driver, a security detail, a personal assistant, an office in Westminster, and multiple flights to the United States including business-class travel to the 2016 Republican National Convention and Trump’s inauguration. Throughout the same period Farage continued to draw his European Parliament salary of approximately €100,000 a year plus expenses.¹⁹

In June 2021 he joined GB News. By August 2024, with Reform polling at levels that would have been unthinkable for any of his previous vehicles, his entry on the parliamentary register of interests showed he was being paid £97,928.40 a month by the broadcaster — almost £1.2 million a year for thirty-two hours of work a month — making him the highest-paid Member of Parliament in Westminster.²⁰ In November 2023, between political projects, he had appeared on the ITV reality show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! for a fee reportedly negotiated up to £1.5 million.²¹ The money flowed continuously, from donors when he was a politician, from broadcasters when he was on air, from television production companies when he was eating witchetty grubs. Whatever he was doing, someone with a financial interest in his profile was funding it. The man who has spent thirty years telling the British public the political class is on the take has himself been the most reliably remunerated political brand in modern British public life.

Then, in 2024, he received the £5 million payment from Christopher Harborne — the donor examined in Section Four — that was structured as a personal gift rather than a political donation, that fell outside both the Electoral Commission’s disclosure regime and HMRC’s tax framework, and that arrived in the weeks before he reversed his stated position and stood as a parliamentary candidate.²² The pattern of that transaction has the same shape as the pattern of his entire career. Money arrives. It is described in whatever language minimises scrutiny. The political project advances. Inconvenient questions, when they arrive, are met with the same answer they have always been met with: I never made that claim. Someone else did. I am simply the man on the stage.

For two years the man on the stage has been polling as the most likely next prime minister of the United Kingdom. That is no longer certain. On 8 July 2026 he resigned his seat, forcing a by-election in Clacton, with the parliamentary standards investigation into his failure to declare the £5 million gift suspended until he returns to the Commons.²³ The Guardian also reported that bankers had filed a suspicious activity report with the National Crime Agency over the gift in May 2024, having been unable to trace the ultimate origin of the funds — a report that is an invitation to examine a transaction, not evidence of wrongdoing, and which the agency will neither confirm nor deny.²⁴ His personal approval has fallen to the lowest of this Parliament. Whether he is still leading his party a year from now is an open question — and a secondary one. Whether the public being asked to elect him, or whoever comes after him, understand who is paying for the stage, who built it, what it is being used for, and what they intend to do with it once he is on it: that is the question that matters. The answer begins, as it has to, with the issue Farage has spent thirty years making the central fact of British political life. It is the issue that explains, more than any other, why his support has reached the levels it has. It is also the issue on which the architecture of his project is most structurally vulnerable to honest scrutiny.

It is the issue of immigration.

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The Immigration Gate

The Reform voter is not stupid. The Reform voter is responding to something real.

In the year ending March 2023, net migration to the United Kingdom reached 944,000 — the highest figure in the country’s recorded history.²⁵ It has since fallen sharply, to 204,000 in the year ending June 2025, after the Conservative government finally tightened the visa rules they had themselves loosened.²⁶ But the recent fall does not erase the underlying experience of the previous decade, and that experience is the political fact that matters here. Across constituencies that voted hardest for Brexit, voters watched their schools fill, their GP waiting lists grow, their housing become unaffordable, their wages stagnate, and their towns reshape around populations and languages they had not been consulted about. They were told, at every stage, that the numbers were under control. They were not. They were told that anyone who raised the issue was bigoted. Most were not. They were told that the political class understood their concerns. It did not. Three successive prime ministers — Cameron, May, Boris Johnson — promised to bring the figures down. Under each of them, the figures rose. By the time Rishi Sunak inherited the office in 2022, the system had become an open-loop machine: governments promised reductions, the Home Office issued visas, the numbers climbed, the rhetoric tightened, the visas continued.

Reform’s voters are not wrong to have noticed this. They are not wrong to be angry about it. They are not wrong to conclude that the people who run the country have been lying to them about it for thirty years. Every word of that grievance is correct. The question is not whether the grievance is legitimate. The question is who has been profiting from the conditions that produced it, and who is now offering to address it, and whether the people offering to address it are the same people who profited from creating it.

The post-Brexit migration surge — the so-called “Boriswave” of 2021 to 2024 that Reform’s manifesto now decries — was not an act of nature. It was a deliberate set of policy choices made by a Conservative government under pressure from British employers who could not, or would not, fill jobs at the wages on offer. The Skilled Worker route was opened with a salary threshold low enough to import labour for sectors the British workforce had effectively been priced out of. The Health and Social Care visa was introduced to staff a care sector that had been deliberately starved of public funding for fifteen years, on the assumption that lower wages and worse conditions could be offset by importing workers from countries where those wages and conditions still represented an improvement. Work-route immigration rose from 125,000 visas in 2021 to 467,000 two years later, an increase of 342,000, of which 285,000 were in the health and social care sector alone.²⁷ The students arrived because British universities had been turned into export businesses dependent on international fees to subsidise the teaching of British undergraduates the state would no longer pay to educate properly. Each of these flows had a domestic economic constituency behind it. Each of those constituencies was paying lower wages, charging higher prices, or both. None of them paid the political price for the consequences. The voters did.

This is the first thing the Reform voter has to be told plainly, because almost no British politician will tell them. Mass immigration into Britain has not been an accident, and it has not been a conspiracy of remote Brussels bureaucrats forcing it on an unwilling government. It has been a feature of the British economic model for thirty years, sustained by what is most accurately described as the Uniparty — the cross-party consensus that has governed Britain regardless of which party occupied Downing Street — because it serves the interests of capital. Farage has since taken up the word himself, using it in July 2026 to describe the parties that declined to contest his by-election. That is not what it means here. It describes convergence on policy, not coordination against a rival. The Uniparty has chosen, at every turn, to import labour rather than to pay it. Mass immigration suppresses wages at the bottom of the labour market. It fills jobs the Uniparty refuses to fund properly. It expands consumer demand. It postpones the day of reckoning on social care, on agriculture, on hospitality, on construction, on the NHS workforce, on every sector where the underlying problem is that Britain has refused for forty years to pay British workers what those workers’ labour is actually worth. Immigration is the lubricant that allows the economic machine to keep running without the structural reforms that would make it fair. The voter who concludes that the system is rigged against them is not paranoid. They are reading the economy correctly.

What the voter has been asked to misread is who, exactly, is doing the rigging. Reform’s offer to those voters is straightforward: vote for us and we will close the borders, deport those who came illegally, abolish indefinite leave to remain, scrap settlement rights for hundreds of thousands of people who have built their lives here, and restore Britain to its native population.²⁸ The offer is emotionally satisfying. It locates the problem in a population the voter can see — the migrant in the next street, the asylum seeker in the local hotel, the worker on the building site — rather than in a system the voter cannot. It promises action against people the voter has been told for years they cannot speak about. It feels, for many voters, like the first honest conversation any politician has had with them in a generation.

The architecture behind that offer extends further than the language at the rallies suggests. Inside the Reform movement and the broader political ecosystem orbiting it, an additional term has entered the working vocabulary: remigration. The term is not Farage’s. He does not use it. But it is now in regular use among Reform-aligned commentators, members, and figures further to his right. Its lineage carries an argument that goes well beyond Reform’s stated policy. Remigration was coined by the French author Renaud Camus, the same writer who originated the “Great Replacement” theory. It was adopted as a working concept by the European Identitarian movement around 2015, expanded by the Austrian activist Martin Sellner into a three-phase plan whose final phase explicitly targets “non-assimilated” migrants who have already obtained citizenship, and brought into mainstream political discourse in January 2024 when the German news outlet Correctiv exposed a meeting at Potsdam between members of Alternative für Deutschland and Identitarian activists planning the deportation of German citizens with migrant backgrounds. The AfD adopted the term into its 2025 federal election manifesto. The architecture is documented and the lineage is documented. The term means what its proponents say it means: the removal, by state action, of populations defined by ancestry rather than by legal status.²⁹

In Britain, the term has now travelled further than its proponents publicly admit. In March 2026, the anti-racism organisation Hope Not Hate published the first comprehensive poll of Reform UK’s own membership. Fifty-four per cent of Reform members surveyed said non-white British citizens born abroad should be deported or encouraged to leave. Twenty-two per cent said the same of non-white British citizens born in Britain to immigrant parents.³⁰ These are the views of the membership of the party that has led the national polls for most of the past two years. The political commentator Matthew Goodwin, who stood as a Reform parliamentary candidate in 2026, has publicly stated that “it takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’”, and has refused to disown the implication that British citizens of minority ethnic background may not in fact be British.³¹ Rupert Lowe, formerly a Reform MP, left the party in 2025 over what he considered Reform’s insufficiently aggressive deportation policy and founded a new party, Restore Britain, on a platform closer to explicit remigration; two-thirds of Reform members polled by Hope Not Hate viewed Lowe favourably.³² The membership of Reform UK is not, on the evidence, signed up to the moderated language of the manifesto. It is signed up to the harder claim that the language has been carefully designed not to make.

Farage is doing with remigration what he did with the £350 million bus. He does not paint the bus. He does not stand directly in front of it. He uses a careful, deniable, lower-figure version of the same argument — “Operation Restoring Justice”, mass deportation of “illegal migrants”, abolition of indefinite leave to remain — that lets the larger, harder, more dangerous claim do its work without his fingerprints on it. The members and commentators around him use the term he avoids. He does not correct them. He does not disown them. He benefits from their work mobilising the audience the harder claim brings to the polls, while preserving the political deniability that allows him to talk to centre-ground voters in language that sounds reasonable. The pattern is the one identified in Section Two. The bus was the prototype. Remigration is the same machinery deployed against a more dangerous claim, with the same architecture of plausible deniability around the man at the centre of it. What this means for the political horizon — beyond the next election — is a question Section Eight will return to. The door Reform offers is wider, in the language of its own membership, than the rhetoric at the rallies suggests.

The trouble is that the offer is structurally dishonest, and the people making it are structurally incapable of delivering on it without dismantling their own economic project at the same time.

Look at what Reform proposes alongside its immigration policy. The same manifesto that promises mass deportation also promises £70 billion a year in tax cuts, with the largest gains accruing to the highest earners.³³ It promises the abolition of net zero, the expansion of fossil fuel extraction, and the deregulation of the energy market. It promises the cutting of working-age benefits, the contraction of public spending, and what the Institute for Fiscal Studies has called sums that “do not add up” without “substantial cuts to the quantity or quality of public services”.³⁴ It promises the further deregulation of the British economy in directions that would make it more attractive to American capital and the American economic model — which, as Sections Five and Six document, means lower wages at the bottom, weaker labour protections, more precarious work, and a shrinking welfare state. It promises, in short, to intensify every economic condition that drives the British employer class to import cheap labour in the first place.

The promise of immigration restriction inside this economic programme is a contradiction in terms. A Britain restructured along the lines Reform proposes would be a Britain with weaker employment protections, more precarious work, lower real wages at the bottom of the market, and a government with less fiscal capacity to invest in the training, housing, and infrastructure that would allow British workers to fill the jobs currently going to migrants. Demand for cheap immigrant labour would not fall under such a government. It would rise. The political pressure to maintain visa flows would intensify, because the alternative — paying British workers more and providing the conditions under which they could afford to take the jobs — would conflict with every other plank of the economic programme. A Reform government promising to close the borders while also delivering a deregulatory tax-cutting agenda would face the same choice every Conservative government has faced for thirty years, and would make the same choice. The visas would continue. The rhetoric would tighten. Reform voters would be told, again, that the numbers were coming down. They would not be.

This is the first half of the trap.

The second half of the squeeze is arriving from the other direction, and almost no one is talking about it because it has not yet fully landed. The same capital that has imported cheap immigrant labour for thirty years is now investing aggressively in the technology built to eliminate that labour entirely. The AI systems now deployed across the British and American economies — customer service, logistics, retail, finance, legal work, accountancy, journalism, software, transport, warehousing, and increasingly skilled professional work — are not theoretical. They are operational. They are taking jobs now. The Reform voter who spent ten years watching their wages suppressed by immigrant labour is about to spend the next ten watching their job, and their children’s, eliminated by automation that needs no labour at all.

The same hand is doing both things. The capital that has imported cheap labour to suppress wages is the same capital that is now investing in the technology to make labour unnecessary. The immigration restriction Reform offers does nothing to address the second squeeze. It cannot, because the political alliance that funds Reform — the donor class examined in Section Four, the foreign movement Reform is operationally aligned with, the technology firms whose data infrastructure is now installed in the British state — is precisely the alliance whose economic project depends on the AI rollout proceeding at maximum speed with minimum public oversight. A Reform government promising to protect British jobs from immigration while presiding over the elimination of those jobs by automation would not be a contradiction the movement could resolve. It would be the operating model.

The promise of closing one door while three others are being installed in the wall is the offer being made to the Reform voter. The voter is being asked to focus their political attention on the brown face in the next street while the blue light of a server farm in Slough is doing more to determine the future of their employment than any visa policy ever will. The architecture is set up for the voter to stay angry at the visible target — the migrant, the asylum seeker, the small boat — while the structural transformation of their economic position proceeds out of sight, funded by the same donor class, advanced by the same political movement, blessed by the same media ecosystem.

This is not an argument that the Reform voter is wrong about immigration. They are not wrong about immigration. They are right that the numbers are too high. They are right that the system has not served them. They are right that the Uniparty has lied. The argument is that the people now offering to solve the problem are, structurally, the people most invested in the conditions that produce it, and the project they are advancing alongside their immigration rhetoric is the project that will deliver the next, larger, irreversible squeeze on every Reform voter’s economic position. Reform is not the solution to the conditions Reform’s voters are in revolt against. Reform is the political vehicle for accelerating those conditions while keeping the voter’s attention pointed at a smaller, more visible, more emotionally satisfying target.

The honest answer to the voter is that the immigration question cannot be answered without addressing the economic model that creates the demand for immigration. The political movement asking for their vote will not address the economic model. It will deepen it. The voter is being offered the wrong door.

Once the voter has walked through that door, the rest of the architecture becomes visible. That architecture is what the next four sections examine.

The Funding Architecture

Christopher Harborne is not the whole story of Reform’s funding. He is the most visible piece of it. The Section Two examination of his architecture — the gift-versus-donation distinction, the £5 million payment timed to coincide with Farage’s reversal on standing as a candidate — is one node in a wider map. Reform’s funders, taken together, do not form the donor base of an insurgent grassroots party. They form a small, identifiable class with concentrated economic interests in specific UK policy outcomes, and a collectively documented pattern of policy alignment with the platform of the party they fund.

The single most important number for understanding Reform’s funding architecture is the one published by the climate research organisation DeSmog in June 2024. Of the £2.3 million Reform UK received between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, 92 per cent came from fossil fuel interests, highly polluting industries, or individuals associated with organised climate science denial.³⁵ That figure has held in subsequent reporting. The pattern of Reform’s funding is not a constellation of unconnected wealthy individuals who happen to share a political preference. It is a concentrated alignment between the party’s platform and a specific industrial sector whose business model depends on the abandonment of the policies Reform exists to abandon. Reform calls for the scrapping of the UK’s 2050 net zero target, new fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea, the reopening of coal power plants, the ending of the windfall tax on oil and gas companies, and the winding down of subsidies for renewable energy.³⁶ Each of these policies serves, with mathematical directness, the financial interests of the donors funding the party that proposes them.

Take the most documented case after Harborne. The hedge fund founder Jeremy Hosking has donated £1.7 million to Reform between 2019 and 2024.³⁷ His firm, Hosking Partners, holds approximately £326 million in oil, gas, and coal company shares, an increase of more than 50 per cent in the past year alone, with positions in ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Warrior Met Coal, and Peabody Energy.³⁸ Hosking also owns The Critic magazine, which routinely attacks climate policy and supports new North Sea oil and gas exploration. The current Reform manifesto’s energy policy reads, in detail, like a return on investment for Hosking Partners shareholders. Hosking has stated that he is not personally invested in fossil fuels — that those are the holdings of his firm’s clients — and that he does not seek to direct policy. The structural fact remains. The party he funds advocates the regulatory environment in which his firm’s portfolio appreciates. Whether or not that alignment was intentional from the donor’s side, the alignment exists, and its existence is the part that matters for British public life.

Other donors complete the pattern. Terence Mordaunt’s First Corporate Consultants has given Reform £200,000; Mordaunt is a director and former chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (now operating as Net Zero Watch), the UK’s most prominent organised climate science denial group, and his other company, Bristol Port Company, handles 25 per cent of all UK aviation fuel imports.³⁹ David Lilley, a metals and mining sector investor, has given £364,000.⁴⁰ The party’s treasurer is the billionaire property developer Nick Candy, who has been actively recruiting wealthy donors in Monaco, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.⁴¹ More than half of Reform’s 2024 donations — approximately £2.5 million — came from individuals resident in low-tax jurisdictions or with substantial business interests in offshore corporate structures.⁴² The pattern is consistent. Reform is funded, to a degree unmatched by any other major British political party, by a class of individuals whose personal residence, business structure, or both are located outside the United Kingdom whose politics they are paying to shape.

The pattern did not stop in 2024; it concentrated. By the Electoral Commission’s own filings, Christopher Harborne has given Reform more than fifteen million pounds since 2025 — including a single nine-million-pound payment in August 2025 that set the record, at the time, for the largest individual political donation in British history — entirely separate from the five-million-pound personal gift to Farage that is now the subject of a parliamentary standards inquiry.⁴³ He was not alone. In the first quarter of 2026, Reform raised £9.9 million, more than the Conservatives and Labour combined, the highest of any British party; roughly seven million of it came from two men. The second was Ben Delo, a British crypto billionaire who gave four million pounds in two payments as the government moved to cap donations from overseas-based donors at one hundred thousand pounds a year. Harborne and Delo both got their millions in under the wire before the cap took effect on the twenty-fifth of March 2026; Harborne has signalled he may challenge the cap in court, and Delo is relocating his tax residency to the United Kingdom to sidestep it entirely. In July 2026 a third billionaire arrived: Sasan Ghandehari, an Iranian-born property magnate resident for tax in Switzerland, who pledged “regular payments” running to “more than one or two million” and began moving his tax residency to the UK for the express purpose of funding Reform beyond the cap.⁴⁴ Ghandehari is offshore wealth with a personal grievance against Tehran — the Islamic Republic seized his assets over a failed infrastructure venture — and a declared Atlanticist agenda. He calls Farage’s relationship with Donald Trump “a major asset” for Britain and lists security, immigration, defence, and North Sea oil and gas as the ground he and Farage share. He is not hidden foreign money in the Nathan Gill sense. He is the opposite, and the more revealing for it: a man the Tehran regime dispossessed, reading Farage-plus-Washington as the vehicle worth funding, and rearranging his own tax affairs to pour uncapped money into it. Three billionaires now supply the working core of Reform’s money — all of them offshore wealth, all of them moving around the same donation cap, all of them buying into the same alignment. The party that calls itself the insurgent voice of the British people is, in its actual bank account, three foreign-based fortunes and a shared bet on Washington.

The implications of this pattern are not theoretical. They run through every major plank of Reform’s platform. The crypto-friendly regulatory programme that benefits Christopher Harborne’s Tether holding. The climate and energy programme that benefits Jeremy Hosking’s portfolio and Terence Mordaunt’s port and aviation fuel businesses. The deregulatory tax-cutting programme that benefits the offshore-resident donor class as a whole, by reducing the rates and broadening the exemptions on the kinds of income and wealth that class derives from the UK economy. The opposition to international human rights frameworks and the ECHR — frameworks that, in addition to their human-rights function, create regulatory predictability and constraints on executive power that capital concentrated in offshore jurisdictions has direct interests in dismantling. The platform is not random. It does not emerge from the demands of Reform’s voters in Clacton or Boston or Skegness. It emerges from the converged interests of the donor class that funds it. The voters and the donors are not aligned. The platform serves one of them.

There is a recent case that illustrates how thinly the formal protections against foreign financial influence in British politics actually function. In November 2025, Nathan Gill — formerly the Brexit Party leader in Wales and a Reform Party MEP — was sentenced to ten years and six months in prison for taking payments from a Russian-linked Ukrainian businessman, Oleg Voloshyn, between 2018 and 2019. The payments were in exchange for making specific pro-Russian statements directed by Voloshyn in the European Parliament and in the media.⁴⁵ Farage described Gill as “a bad apple”. The wider problem the case revealed is structural rather than individual. Following the Gill sentencing, the British government announced in December 2025 an independent review into countering foreign financial influence and interference in UK politics — an acknowledgement that the existing donation regime, designed in 2000 to police nationality on paper, no longer reliably captures the mechanisms by which foreign money and foreign-state-aligned actors influence British political outcomes.⁴⁶ The Gill case was the visible failure. The Harborne architecture, the offshore-resident donor pattern, and the foreign-aligned political-movement coordination examined in Section Five are the structural failure the visible failure is a symptom of.

Reform’s funding architecture is not the only example of this problem in British politics. Both Conservative and Labour fundraising has been increasingly concentrated among a small number of mega-donors over the past decade. The Director of Policy at Transparency International UK, Duncan Hames, observed in March 2026 that British democracy “is becoming a plaything for the super-rich”.⁴⁷ The structural problem is the Uniparty problem named in Section Three: a Westminster political class that has, across all parties, accepted the proposition that the funding of British political life is appropriately the domain of a small number of very wealthy individuals whose interests determine the boundaries of acceptable policy in advance. Reform is not a departure from this pattern. Reform is its purest current expression. Where the Conservative Party has historically dispersed its donor dependency across a wider donor base, and Labour has historically dispersed its dependency across a combination of trade unions and individual donors, Reform has concentrated its dependency on a tiny handful of offshore-based billionaires to a degree without precedent in modern British politics. The party that markets itself as the insurgent voice of the British people against the political establishment is, in its actual financial structure, the most extreme example of the establishment’s dependency on offshore-aligned wealth.

The donor architecture is the first piece of the wider structural picture. The second piece is the political project the donor architecture is helping to deliver. The donors are not, individually or collectively, the architects of British political alignment with Washington. They are funding a party that operates within an alignment that pre-existed it, and that the donor class as a whole has been quietly building for thirty years. That alignment is what Section Five will examine. It is the answer to the question raised at the end of Section One: where, exactly, has the sovereignty Britain recovered in 2016 gone?

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Brussels to Washington

The Brexit voter’s central argument in 2016 was about sovereignty. The European Union, the argument ran, exercised power over British life that was not democratically accountable to the British people, and that power should be returned to Westminster, where it could be answered for at the ballot box. The argument was not absurd. The European Union had accumulated, by 2016, a significant body of regulatory authority over British economic, environmental, agricultural, financial, immigration, and procedural law, exercised through institutions whose connection to the British electorate was real but attenuated. The Brexit voter who concluded that British sovereignty had been compromised by Brussels was not wrong. They were responding to a real condition. What has happened to British sovereignty in the ten years since they cast their vote to recover it?

Take the case that has appeared most directly in British public life. In December 2025, the British government signed the UK-US Economic Prosperity Deal. The pharmaceutical pricing component of that deal, finalised in April 2026, committed the National Health Service to a 25 per cent increase in the cost-effectiveness threshold used by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to assess new medicines, allowing higher-priced drugs to qualify for NHS use. The deal also reduced the rebate that US pharmaceutical companies are required to pay back to the NHS on branded medicine sales — from 22.9 per cent in 2025 to a capped 15 per cent through 2028 — and committed Britain to doubling the share of GDP it spends on new medicines, from 0.3 per cent to 0.6 per cent by 2035. In exchange, Britain received zero tariffs on its pharmaceutical exports to the United States.⁴⁸ The framing was favourable. The substance was that a US administration threatening tariffs of up to 100 per cent on British pharmaceutical imports had successfully extracted a commitment from a British government to increase the price its public health service pays for the products of US pharmaceutical companies, and to reduce the rebate those companies are required to pay back to the NHS budget. The British public, who pay for the NHS through general taxation, will be paying more for their medicines so that British pharmaceutical exports to the United States can continue without tariff. That is not a trade deal between equals. That is a transfer of resources from a smaller economy to a larger one, structured to look like a partnership. It is also a transfer of regulatory autonomy: NICE thresholds — the mechanism by which the British public health system has, for twenty-five years, decided which medicines are worth its money — were renegotiated under foreign tariff pressure. The British public was not consulted. Parliament barely debated the terms. The deal was announced, then signed, then implemented.

The same architecture exists across British defence and military integration. In July 2025 the United Kingdom signed the Geelong Treaty with Australia, a fifty-year bilateral commitment to construct the SSN-AUKUS submarine fleet that will form the backbone of the Royal Navy’s underwater capability for the next half-century. The submarines will be built around US Virginia-class technology. The combat systems are American. The vertical launch cells are American. The propulsion technology is shared with the United States under the trilateral AUKUS Naval Nuclear Propulsion Agreement. The Strategic Defence Review of 2025 — sifted, as Section One noted, by Palantir software — committed the UK to building twelve such submarines, with £6 billion already allocated in eighteen months.⁴⁹ The structural condition this creates is not subtle. The Royal Navy’s primary instrument of underwater force projection for the next fifty years will require continuous US technology cooperation, US logistical support, and US regulatory permission to function. A British government that wished, for any reason, to pursue a defence posture independent of Washington’s preferences would discover that the underlying hardware no longer permits the choice. That is not a partnership. That is a structural foreclosure of strategic autonomy, presented to the British public as a major industrial achievement, and signed up to by a government no one elected on a mandate to do so.

The Iran war of 2026 made the position concrete in a way no treaty document quite manages to. On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel began a series of strikes against Iran. The British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, initially refused US access to UK military bases for the strikes, including Diego Garcia — the joint UK-US airbase on the Chagos Islands that Britain leases from Mauritius following the return of sovereignty in 2024. Within forty-eight hours, Starmer reversed that position, framing the U-turn as “the best way to eliminate the urgent threat”.⁵⁰ Iranian counter-strikes targeted UK military bases in Bahrain, Qatar, and Cyprus. The Royal Air Force was deployed in a defensive capacity, intercepting incoming Iranian missiles aimed at infrastructure where US forces were stationed. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the joint US-Israeli strikes. The British prime minister, asked in the House of Commons whether his government’s actions had compromised UK independence, replied that “American planes operating out of British bases, that is the special relationship in action”.⁵¹ He was not wrong. He had described the architecture accurately. He had simply mistaken the description for a defence. The British public, who had not voted for war with Iran, who had not been consulted on whether the United Kingdom should host strikes that killed a foreign head of state, whose military bases were attacked in retaliation for actions ordered in Washington, watched the special relationship operate exactly as the structural conditions of the past decade had been quietly arranging it to operate. There was never any serious question whether Britain would host the operation. There was only the question of how long it would take to capitulate to the pressure to do so. Forty-eight hours was the answer. The war did not stay concluded; it resumed in the summer of 2026 under a renewed American strike campaign, and the British bases stayed open to it — a continuity Section Eight returns to.

The technology and surveillance dimension, treated in full in Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0, has already surfaced here. The American firm Palantir holds the £330 million contract to integrate the medical records of up to 240 NHS organisations on its Foundry software, holds a £75 million Ministry of Defence data-processing contract, and was used to sift the submissions to the UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review. The same Palantir software runs the operating layer of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s mass deportation programme — the ImmigrationOS system, awarded a $30 million contract in April 2025 and now embedded across the federal architecture the Trump administration has been rebuilding for the rapid removal of millions of people from the United States.⁵² A future Reform government promising to deliver the mass deportation programme set out in Operation Restoring Justice would not need to build the infrastructure to do it. The infrastructure is already there. It is the same software stack, written by the same company, that is currently delivering equivalent operations in the United States. The British state has, without public debate, installed across its public services software written by the same company whose product now forms the operating layer of American mass deportation. The party most likely to use it is a party whose leadership has spent the past decade aligning operationally with the American political movement that built it. This is not a coincidence. The architecture was built in the order it was built because each piece serves the next.

The foreign policy alignment runs alongside the structural integration. British policy on Israel, on Iran, on the Gulf states, on the Indo-Pacific, on China, on Russia, has converged with Washington’s positions across successive governments — Conservative and Labour — over the past decade to a degree without precedent in postwar British foreign affairs. This is the Uniparty problem named in Section Three applied to foreign affairs: a cross-party consensus that the strategic direction of British policy is settled, and the only question between the parties is which one delivers it more efficiently. The few moments of British divergence have been, in retrospect, small disagreements over presentation rather than substantive differences over direction. Where Britain has disagreed with Washington under the Trump administration — Chagos, Greenland, the conduct of the Ukraine war, the framing of the Iran strikes — the disagreements have been performative and short-lived, walked back within days under pressure. Where Britain has tried to maintain an independent line — most visibly on climate policy under the Conservative government before Brexit completed and during the early Starmer period — the line has been progressively abandoned under combined pressure from US-aligned domestic media, US-aligned domestic donors, and US-aligned political movements. The Reform manifesto’s call for the abandonment of the 2050 net zero target is not a British political development standing alone. It is the British end of a transatlantic political project funded by the same fossil capital and amplified by the same media architecture as its American counterpart. The same is true of immigration policy. The same is true of regulatory deregulation. The same is true of the abandonment of international human rights frameworks. The British political conversation has, over the past decade, become operationally synchronised with the American conservative political conversation in a way that it never was in the postwar period.

The intelligence dimension is the deepest and least visible. The Five Eyes arrangement — the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, founded in the immediate postwar period — has integrated over two decades to the point where GCHQ operates on what is functionally a single network with the American National Security Agency. British signals intelligence, communications surveillance, cyber and counter-terrorism operations all run through cloud infrastructure built and maintained by the American technology industry. British intelligence cannot be conducted, in any operationally meaningful sense, independently of American technology, funding, or coordination. That is not contested within the intelligence community. It is the accepted price of the relationship, and it has never been presented to the British public as something they might wish to debate.

In 2016, the country was told it was taking its sovereignty back from Brussels. In 2026, the sovereignty in question lives in Washington. The trade dependence is American. The defence integration is American. The technology platforms that mediate British public life are American. The intelligence relationship is American. The foreign policy alignment is American. The capital that funds the political movement now offering to complete the transition is, in significant measure, American or American-aligned. The model of the state being implicitly proposed — smaller, more privatised, more deregulated, more comfortable with extreme inequality, more hostile to international human rights frameworks, more willing to break international law in service of national power — is American. The Brexit voter who concluded in 2016 that British sovereignty had been compromised was not wrong. They were correctly diagnosing one face of a problem. They were misled, by a political class that knew better, about which direction the larger threat was actually coming from. The sovereignty Britain recovered from Brussels was real but limited. The sovereignty Britain has surrendered to Washington is broader, deeper, and more consequential. Reform UK, the party that has spent two years polling as the most likely vehicle for delivering the next British government, is not the recovery of British sovereignty. Reform UK is the political project that exists to complete its transfer.

What Americanisation Looks Like

The structural argument of the previous section can be made concrete in what it would change about ordinary British life. The architecture of US-UK integration is not, for most people, an abstract treaty document. It is a set of conditions that determine what they pay for medicine, what is in their food, what their employer can do to them at work, what is done with their personal data, what their children breathe, and what they are permitted to say about it. The trajectory across all of them has pointed one way, consistently, for the past decade.

Take the most easily quantified case first. The American healthcare system, the model towards which a significant section of British political and donor opinion has been quietly working for thirty years, costs the average American family with employer-sponsored health insurance approximately $26,993 per year in premiums alone, of which the worker contributes around $6,850 directly out of paycheck.⁵³ The average annual deductible — the amount a person must pay out of pocket before insurance begins covering anything — is approximately $1,886 for individual coverage, with high-deductible plans now exceeding $9,000 in many cases.⁵⁴ Approximately two-thirds of all personal bankruptcies in the United States involve medical bills. Approximately 60 per cent of American adults report having had medical debt at some point in their lives. Approximately 70 per cent of those with medical bills report having cut food expenses to manage them.⁵⁵ The federal poverty line for an American family of three in 2025 was $26,650 — less than the average cost of family health insurance for a single year. None of these conditions is rhetorical. Each is a published number from a documented source. The British reader who has just read the Section Five account of the December 2025 pharmaceutical pricing deal, which raised the NHS cost-effectiveness threshold by 25 per cent under US tariff pressure, can decide for themselves how far down this road the British system has already begun to travel.

The food and consumer protection question is, in 2026, an unresolved live front rather than a completed surrender. The UK-US trade deal of May 2025 explicitly excluded chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef from the agreement, and Defra Secretary Steve Reed reiterated in early 2026 that imports of both remain illegal under UK law.⁵⁶ That is the official position. The structural reality is that the US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, has been using the £31 billion UK-US technology partnership signed in September 2025 to press for the agricultural concessions not won in the trade negotiations of the previous year — pressure documented in The Telegraph and Farmers Weekly in late 2025 and continuing through 2026.⁵⁷ The architecture of the relationship makes the pressure structural rather than incidental. Each new economic deal becomes a vehicle through which the US administration extracts further concessions on regulatory standards the British public has consistently said it does not want. The food standards consensus that has held in Britain since the 1990s — high hygiene and animal welfare standards from farm to fork, rather than chemical washes at the slaughterhouse — has not yet been broken. The architecture pushing toward breaking it is in place. The question is not whether the Uniparty will eventually capitulate. The question is which administration capitulates and on what timeline.

The labour and worker protection dimension follows the same pattern. American labour law permits at-will termination without cause in most states, guarantees no paid sick, parental, or annual leave, allows shifts scheduled with no notice and arbitration clauses that bar employees from suing, and reclassifies a growing share of the workforce as independent contractors precisely to strip the protections employees would otherwise hold. The British conversation has moved steadily toward these conditions, not away from them: Reform’s calls for reduced employment protection, the broader Conservative-and-Reform enthusiasm for “flexible labour markets”, and the sustained pressure against the EU-derived protections that survived Brexit all point the same way.⁵⁸ The British worker who cannot understand why their hours are precarious, why their schedule can change without notice, why they have less recourse than their parents had, is reading it correctly: the labour market is being reshaped along American lines, and the project funding Reform is the most visible vehicle for continuing that reshaping.

Data privacy and the regulation of large technology firms run along the same axis. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, the consumer-protection frameworks Britain inherited from membership, and the constraints on large platforms that survived 2016 are exactly what the American technology industry and its political allies most want dismantled. The British consumer in 2026 still holds protections far more robust than their American counterpart: data portability, the right to be forgotten, the right to know what an algorithm is doing with their information, redress against unfair practices. These rights survive — against pressure applied through every UK-US trade and technology negotiation since 2016, and intensified sharply under the Trump administration’s Tech Prosperity Deal of September 2025. The trajectory is consistent. The question is the rate of erosion.

The climate and environmental dimension has moved further than the others. The Reform manifesto calls for the abandonment of the 2050 net zero target, the reopening of coal power, the ending of the windfall tax on oil and gas, the scrapping of subsidies for renewable energy, and a referendum on the entire net zero framework.⁵⁹ The Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch has, since 2024, progressively abandoned its previous commitments on the same policies. Labour’s climate ambition has, under sustained donor and media pressure, been quietly walked back across multiple flagship areas. The British political consensus on climate that survived from the 2008 Climate Change Act through the 2010s no longer exists. The donor architecture documented in Section Four — the 92 per cent of Reform’s funding from fossil fuel interests, polluters, and climate science deniers — has been doing exactly what one would expect such a donor architecture to do: shifting the political conversation toward the abandonment of the policies the donors have a financial interest in seeing abandoned. The British public, who have for the past two decades supported climate action by majorities in repeated public polling, are watching the policy framework being dismantled by a Uniparty funded to dismantle it. The atmospheric and economic consequences of that dismantling will be borne by the British public regardless of whether they were consulted about it.

The legal and free speech dimension is the deepest and the least visible. The proposed British departure from the European Convention on Human Rights — a Reform manifesto commitment, increasingly an emerging Conservative position, and a permanent fixture of the right-aligned political conversation — would remove from British citizens the legal protection that has, since 1953, sat outside Westminster’s reach. The justification offered is that the ECHR obstructs British control of immigration. The architecture of the proposal is broader than that. The ECHR is the final legal recourse against arbitrary detention, against torture, against discrimination, against state interference in family life, against the suppression of free expression. Removing it relocates all of those protections inside Westminster, where a parliamentary majority can amend or remove them at will. The American constitutional model offers Bill of Rights protections that are, in practice, increasingly subject to executive interpretation and enforcement discretion under the Trump administration’s expansive theory of presidential power. The project described here is not proposing to import the American constitutional model wholesale. It is proposing to remove the international legal framework that currently sits above Westminster, leaving British citizens with only the protections that a future Westminster majority chooses to provide. In the era of the alignment documented above, that is not a hypothetical concern. It is the structural condition the project is moving toward.

Each individual dimension can be defended on its own terms by its proponents. Each structural change is presented as discrete, necessary, modest. The cumulative direction is consistent across every dimension: toward an American model of the state, an American model of the economy, an American model of the relationship between capital and labour, an American model of the legal protection of citizens against state and corporate power. The British public has not voted for this transition at any point in the past decade. The Uniparty has delivered it across every party in turn, accepting between the parties only the question of pace, never the question of direction. The function of Reform, as the analysis of Section Four made clear, is to deliver the most aggressive and most rapid version of the structural trajectory the rest of the Uniparty has been delivering more slowly. None of this is the recovery of British sovereignty. All of it is the substitution, piece by piece, of one external set of constraints on British public life for another.

Labour’s Surrender

On 22 June 2026, on the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, Keir Starmer announced his resignation as Labour leader and prime minister. He stood outside Downing Street as protestors across the road played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” — the anthem of the European Union — and read his resignation statement. He will remain as caretaker prime minister until a new Labour leader is chosen, no later than 1 September. Andy Burnham, the former Mayor of Greater Manchester, entered Downing Street on 20 July 2026 as the United Kingdom’s seventh prime minister in a decade.⁶⁰ The collapse diagnosed above had arrived at its first political consummation.

Labour’s collapse was not a failure of communication or political positioning. It was the result of a substantive surrender. The Starmer government accepted, on point after point, the structural trajectory described in the previous two sections, and lost the voters whose interests would have required it to do otherwise. Labour cannot stop Reform because Labour and Reform are, in their actual policy positions on the questions that matter most to British public life, different points along the same trajectory. The voter who would once have voted Labour as the party of working people now reads correctly that the party offers no meaningful alternative to the direction the country is being taken in. They are looking for someone who will. Reform is the answer they have been offered. The fact that Reform is structurally a worse answer does not change the fact that Labour, on the evidence, has not been an answer at all.

What needs naming first is the substance of what the Starmer government has actually done. Virtually every major policy decision Starmer has taken has been a Conservative decision. The fiscal posture is Conservative — the welfare cuts in the first eighteen months were Conservative welfare cuts, the tax-threshold freeze is a Conservative fiscal-drag mechanism, the increase in defence spending to 2.7 per cent of GDP funded by cuts to foreign aid and disability benefits is a Conservative fiscal trade-off, the maintenance of the two-child benefit cap that pushes children into poverty is Conservative welfare policy continued under a Labour government.⁶¹ The defence and foreign policy posture is Conservative — the AUKUS commitment was confirmed and accelerated, the Iran war capitulation took forty-eight hours, the F-35 supply chain to Israel was specifically exempted from arms suspension on grounds the Labour government’s own legal advice indicated were unsafe, the Tech Prosperity Deal with the Trump administration was signed in September 2025, the pharmaceutical pricing concession to US tariff pressure was finalised in April 2026.⁶² The promises Labour made in opposition — on the welfare state, on workers’ rights, on the relationship between government and capital, on Britain’s posture in the world — have been, on point after point, either renegged on or quietly abandoned. The voter who concludes that the man they voted for as a Labour prime minister is governing as a Conservative one is not misreading the evidence. They are reading the evidence correctly.

The deeper case is the civil rights rollback. The Starmer government has, in its first eighteen months, advanced an attack on British civil liberties that no recent Conservative government managed. In July 2025, on the recommendation of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, Parliament voted to proscribe Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, making membership of, or expression of support for, a peaceful direct-action protest group punishable by up to fourteen years in prison.⁶³ The consequences were what one would expect from the wholesale application of counter-terrorism law to peaceful protest. By the end of 2025, the Home Office’s own data showed that 3,034 terrorism-related arrests had been made in the United Kingdom that year — more than eleven times the 2024 figure of 250 — of which 92 per cent were linked to supporting Palestine Action. Terrorism arrests had surged, in a single year, to the highest level on record. By June 2026 the cumulative total of arrests for expressing support for the group exceeded three thousand three hundred, with more than seven hundred charged under the Terrorism Act. Of those charged, 237 had been booked on section 13 offences in the first nine months of 2025 alone — more, Middle East Eye reported, than during the entire period from 2001 to June 2025. The average age of those arrested for supporting Palestine Action was 59. The same demographic the Labour government had stripped of the winter fuel allowance in its first months in office was, by the end of its first year, the demographic being arrested in the largest numbers under counter-terrorism legislation. Among them were vicars and priests, NHS midwives and mental health nurses, retired doctors, the elderly using walking sticks, the disabled in wheelchairs, a sixty-two-year-old blind man named Mike Higgins arrested twice, a disabled Royal Air Force veteran using a walker, and the Reverend Sue Parfitt — an eighty-three-year-old retired Anglican priest, arrested in the first wave on the day the proscription took effect. In February 2026, the High Court ruled the proscription “disproportionate” and “unlawful” under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The government appealed. On 15 June 2026, the Court of Appeal — a panel of five judges led by Lady Chief Justice Sue Carr — overturned the High Court and ruled the proscription lawful. The architecture has now been judicially confirmed. The presumption that the most senior British courts would act as a brake on the misuse of counter-terrorism powers against peaceful protest has not survived contact with the case. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood defended the proscription she inherited from her predecessor through both courts. She has also stated, in plain words, what the apparatus she is building is for. In December 2025, in a public conversation with Tony Blair, Mahmood described her vision for the criminal justice system: to achieve, “by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.”⁶⁴ She later said the remark referred only to offenders tagged on community sentences. The qualification does not survive her own policy. In January 2026 she announced the largest expansion of live facial recognition in British history, raising the number of recognition vans deployed across England and Wales from ten to fifty, and told the BBC she made “no apology” for it. Privacy campaigners called it one of the most significant threats to civil liberties in the history of British policing. Al Jazeera reported that the software selected for the rollout appeared to be the same facial-recognition system used by the Israeli military to track Palestinians at checkpoints in Gaza.⁶⁵ The panopticon is not a metaphor and not a forecast. It is a procurement decision, already taken, by the department that also holds the proscription power described above.

The architecture being built — extended protest restrictions, expanded police powers to ban “repeat protests”, the prosecution of journalists and ordinary citizens under counter-terrorism legislation for non-violent dissent, the proscription of a protest group upheld on appeal despite a High Court finding that it should never have been proscribed — is the architecture of a state preparing for political opposition that exceeds its democratic tolerance.

It was built, in its current form, by a Labour government led by a former Director of Public Prosecutions and former human rights lawyer. The voter who has noticed that the Labour Party of 2026 is rolling back civil liberties faster than the Conservative governments that preceded it is not exaggerating. The precedent does not stay where it was set. The architecture built to proscribe a peaceful protest movement on the political left does not become unavailable when the political wind changes. The same legal mechanism that has put pensioners in handcuffs for opposing a war they consider genocidal is available, on the next administration’s interpretation, against the man protesting outside an asylum hotel, the woman who says publicly that women are women, the Raise the Colours campaigner accused of littering the streets with flags, the father who sends a WhatsApp group message about his child’s headteacher, the Reform supporter at a rally whose chant the Home Secretary decides to reclassify, the doctors and nurses protesting for better pay, the pensioner protesting the loss of the winter fuel allowance, criticism of government policies at home. The people currently cheering the proscription of Palestine Action are not exempt from what they are cheering on, even in a Reform government. They are simply earlier in the queue.

The surveillance architecture is the next dimension, and the one that connects most directly to the rest. The Palantir Federated Data Platform, the Palantir-sifted Strategic Defence Review, and the integration of American technology into the operating layer of British public services were delivered, not paused, under Labour. Beneath these contracts sits the state’s quieter migration into pre-crime — Minority Report made real. The National Data Analytics Solution, developed within British policing, scores individuals on the probability of future offending before any offence has been committed.⁶⁶ South Wales Police pioneered app-based facial recognition that turned every officer into a mobile surveillance unit, deployed disproportionately in minority neighbourhoods and at events like the Notting Hill Carnival. The feedback loop is the one Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0 documents: more police presence generates more arrest data, the algorithm predicts more crime there, more police presence is justified, the loop tightens. The presumption of innocence — the foundation on which British liberty has rested for eight hundred years — dissolves into a probability score the citizen cannot inspect, challenge, or appeal. Where Reform proposes the architecture in opposition, Labour is delivering it in office. The voter alarmed about state surveillance is, again, reading correctly: it is happening, it is happening rapidly, and it is happening under the party historically associated with the protection of civil liberties.

The deepest single piece of evidence on what this architecture is for arrived from the company itself. On 18 April 2026, Palantir — the American firm now structurally embedded across the British state — published a thousand-word manifesto on the social network X, distilled from CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic.⁶⁷ The post arrived without provocation. No scandal demanded a response. Palantir simply chose to declare what it believed and what it intended to build, in twenty-two numbered points, for any reader who cared to look. Hard power, the manifesto declares, “in this century will be built on software”. The question of AI weapons “is not whether” they will be built but “who will build them and for what purpose”. The post-war “neutering of Germany and Japan”, the manifesto declares, “must be undone”. And in its closing points, the manifesto turns from weapons to culture: pluralism is dismissed as “a shallow temptation”, and it declares that “some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive”. The criteria for that judgement are not provided. They do not need to be. This is the published doctrine of the company that runs the operating layer of the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defence’s data-processing contracts, and the software that sifted the United Kingdom’s last Strategic Defence Review. A Labour government has chosen to make this company structurally indispensable to British public life. The Belgian philosopher of technology Mark Coeckelbergh, of the University of Vienna, called the manifesto “an example of technofascism”.⁶⁸ The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis described it as a willingness “to add to nuclear Armageddon the AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence”. The Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins identified what the manifesto attacks beneath its civilisational rhetoric: “verification, deliberation, and accountability” — the three pillars of democratic life. The political colour of the project does not match the political colour of the party delivering it. That disconnect is the central political fact of the Starmer period.

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The national digital identity scheme of September 2025 is the worked example. Digital ID was not in Labour’s 2024 manifesto. The public was never asked. Starmer announced the scheme on the twenty-fifth of September 2025 — fifteen months into office, with no electoral mandate — presenting it as a measure to combat illegal immigration and modernise government services.⁶⁹ The response was instructive. Reform UK opposed it, calling it a “cynical ploy” to “fool” voters. The Conservative Party, under Kemi Badenoch, opposed it on cost and privacy grounds. The Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Scottish National Party, and all five main parties in Northern Ireland — uniting unionists and nationalists in a configuration almost without precedent in modern British politics — opposed it. A parliamentary petition against the scheme reached over two point nine million signatures within weeks, making it one of the largest in parliamentary history.⁷⁰ Significant Labour backbench scepticism emerged. The strategic miscalculation here is not subtle. The Labour leadership pushed a policy that united Reform supporters, Conservative supporters, Liberal Democrat supporters, Green supporters, Scottish nationalists, Irish nationalists, Ulster unionists, civil libertarians of the left, and civil libertarians of the right in active opposition to it. It is difficult to identify a single major political constituency in the United Kingdom that the policy has not alienated. The leadership pursued it anyway, on the calculation that it would demonstrate “toughness” on immigration to a Reform-curious voter who, on every available reading of the evidence, is not going to vote Labour regardless of what the leadership offers them. Polling collapsed. More in Common measured net support falling from plus thirty-five per cent in summer 2025 to minus fourteen per cent the weekend after the announcement — a forty-nine-point reverse. Cabinet ministers privately briefed that the rationale was “incoherent” because right-to-work checks already exist. Labour backbenchers rebelled. In January 2026, the leadership announced what was widely reported as a U-turn: mandatory digital ID would now be optional, with introduction pushed back to 2029. The U-turn was performative. Within days, Starmer told the House of Commons that “there will be checks, they will be digital and they will be mandatory”. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, told BBC Breakfast that the U-turn stories had been “overwritten”. A government spokesperson confirmed: “We are committed to mandatory digital right to work checks.” The Guardian quoted officials confirming that “this was not a U-turn”.⁷¹ This is the strategic pattern of the entire Starmer period. Pursue something the public was never asked about. Force it through against cross-spectrum opposition. Backtrack publicly under pressure. Continue the policy quietly. Pander to people who will never vote Labour. Alienate the people who would have. Repeat. Polling collapse follows.

The communities dimension cuts to the heart of the moral case. The Starmer government has consistently presented itself as the defender of British communities — Jewish, Muslim, and others — against threats both foreign and domestic. The substance of that presentation has not matched the rhetoric. When the false HAYI narrative spread across the British media in March 2026, amplified by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, picked up by the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, and broadcast by the BBC and Fox News before being identified as fabrication by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague, the British government did not correct the record.⁷² The Prime Minister’s public statement on the Golders Green ambulance arson made no qualification of the HAYI claim, made no distinction between actual extremism and an Israeli information operation, and made no public acknowledgement when the operation was identified as fictitious. The damage of that silence falls on both communities the government claims to protect. British Jews are placed in continued fear of a threat that does not, on the available evidence, exist. British Muslims are subjected to renewed suspicion on the basis of a fabricated narrative that the government has refused to publicly correct. The same pattern operates on the Gaza dimension. The government talks about protecting Jewish communities while continuing to supply F-35 components to a state under International Court of Justice examination for genocide. The government talks about countering Islamophobia while criminalising the protest movement that has organised against the British contribution to the conflict. Both rhetorical positions are operating simultaneously, in opposite directions, in the same government, and the people the government claims to be protecting are being damaged by both.

The Starmer project, taken as a whole, is the Uniparty project delivered with party loyalty as its only remaining distinguishing feature. The substantive direction is the same direction the Conservative government before it pursued, accelerated where the political cover of a Labour government permits acceleration that a Conservative government could not have managed. The civil rights architecture is more aggressive, the surveillance integration is faster, the rollback of policy commitments to the welfare state is more visible because it comes from a government supposedly committed to that welfare state. The voter who would once have voted Labour as the party of working people, the party of civil liberties, the party of international human rights, the party of the welfare state, has watched the party they trusted on each of those grounds deliver the opposite of what they were told they were voting for. The Mandelson appointment is the case study in personal judgement that the rest of the political class has finally been forced to acknowledge. Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson — a long-documented friend of the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — as British Ambassador to the United States in December 2024, against the recommendation of the government’s own security vetting agency, before in-depth vetting had even been completed.⁷³ The appointment ended in September 2025 when emails emerged showing Mandelson had encouraged Epstein to “fight for early release” from prison; Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who had sponsored the appointment, resigned; the Foreign Office’s senior civil servant Olly Robbins was dismissed; police opened an investigation into Mandelson for passing sensitive government information to Epstein in 2009; and as of April 2026 Starmer himself acknowledged to Parliament that the appointment was a “judgment I made that was wrong”.⁷⁴ The episode is not the structural problem itself. The episode is the moment the rest of the country was forced to recognise what Labour’s own base had already concluded for other reasons: that the man’s judgement is bad. The collapse in Labour’s polling was not a failure of communication. It was the public reading the situation correctly. Labour as it existed under Starmer is not the answer. The resignation does not change that. The architecture that produced the resignation is still in place. The next Labour leader inherits it untouched. Section Eight will examine what that means for the political horizon.

Synthesis

I started with a bus and a number that was a lie. I want to end with the man who stood next to that bus and never quite touched it. Nigel Farage is the most honest political figure in Britain in the sense that the architecture he serves is the most clearly visible through him. He has spent thirty years performing the role of the outsider, the scourge of the political class, the man who tells the truths the establishment will not. His own biography is the documented refutation of every part of that performance. The donor architecture behind him is the financial refutation. The substance of what he is now selling is the structural refutation. He is not insurgent against anything. He is the most polished current product of the architecture he performs his insurgency against. The signature move I asked you to remember — stand next to the lie, let it work, deny ownership of it afterwards — is not just the bus. It is the entire shape of his career. It is the £350 million figure and the remigration vocabulary and the £5 million payment from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire described as a personal gift. It is the same move every time, and it has worked every time, because the British political press has spent ten years treating him as the story when he was always the salesman.

What he is selling, this time, is the completion of a transfer. The sovereignty Britain was told it was reclaiming in 2016 was real but small. The sovereignty Britain has surrendered since to Washington — through trade architecture, through defence integration, through technology dependency, through intelligence merger, through foreign-policy alignment, through the donor capital funding both major British parties — is far larger and far more consequential. The man who told Britain in 2016 to take its sovereignty back from Brussels is the man asking Britain in 2026 to deliver what is left of it to Washington. He will not phrase it that way. He will phrase it the way he phrased it in 2016 — as patriotism, as restoration, as the recovery of something that was taken. The transfer he is now offering to complete is not the recovery of sovereignty. It is the conclusion of its disposal. He is, in his own person, the principal British vehicle for the second leg of the Brussels-to-Washington journey. That is what he represents. Everything else about him is the wrapper.

Reform UK is the political project the wider architecture has been waiting for. The donor class needs a delivery vehicle for the policy programme its capital has been pre-paying for. The Conservative Party, having spent thirteen years in office, has lost the political authority required to push the harder version of the project. Labour, having spent eighteen months in office accelerating the same project under different colours, has lost the trust of the voters whose continued cooperation the project requires. Reform offers what the architecture needs: a movement with the populist mandate to deliver the deregulation, the welfare retrenchment, the climate retreat, the surveillance integration, the ECHR withdrawal, and the deeper alignment with American capital that the Conservative and Labour projects have been delivering more slowly and with less popular cover. Reform is not an insurgency against the British establishment. Reform is the British establishment’s latest chosen vehicle, dressed in the costume of the resistance to it, sold to voters who have every reason to want a resistance to it and almost no reason to recognise that this is not what they have been offered.

The civil liberties inheritance is where the consequence of all this lands hardest. The Labour government has built the architecture. The Palestine Action proscription, the three thousand three hundred arrests, the surveillance integration with American technology platforms, the predictive policing infrastructure, the mandatory right-to-work verification regime — these are now in place. The next government will inherit them. If that government is a Reform government, the same legal mechanism that has put pensioners in handcuffs for opposing a war they consider genocidal will be in the hands of a Home Secretary chosen by Reform’s funders and operating on the political doctrine of Reform’s allies. The Reform voter who cheered the proscription, who shared the Home Office press releases on Facebook, who agreed that the protestors should have known better, is being asked — without being told this is what they are being asked — to hand the same machinery to a government whose stated policy commitments will, in time, use it against them. The architecture does not have a political conscience. It does not care which party holds the keys. It has only an operator. Once it is built, the question is no longer whether it will be used. The question is who it will be used against next.

The deepest reason all of this is happening has a plain name. Britain is suffering from a crisis of leadership. Across every party, across every institution, across every level of public life, the country has lost the capacity to produce leaders who can tell the truth about the structural condition the country is in. The Conservative Party has spent a decade pretending Brexit could be made to work without addressing the structural conditions that produced the vote. The Labour Party has spent eighteen months pretending it can govern as a Conservative party while retaining a Labour electorate. The Liberal Democrats have spent a decade pretending the centre still exists. Reform is pretending it represents the people while taking its instructions from the donors. The Greens are pretending climate policy can survive the donor architecture. None of the available political vehicles is offering the British public an honest account of what is happening to their country, who is doing it, who benefits, and who pays. That absence is the crisis. Farage is its most successful current exploiter. Starmer is its most visible current victim. Andy Burnham, who entered Downing Street on 20 July 2026, inherits all of it. He inherits the Palantir contracts. He inherits the Palestine Action proscription, the three thousand three hundred arrests, the seven hundred prosecutions, the senior judicial blessing of the architecture. He inherits the pharmaceutical pricing deal that raises the NHS cost-effectiveness threshold under foreign tariff pressure. He inherits the AUKUS commitment, the Iran war precedent, the F-35 supply chain to Israel, the AI policy indistinguishable from the trajectory. He inherits the donor architecture that has captured Westminster across every party. His first act was to scrap one piece of it. On 18 July 2026, two days before entering Downing Street, Burnham’s team announced that Starmer’s digital identity scheme would be abandoned, its resources redirected to the cost of living, in what his spokesperson called a reset of priorities.⁷⁵ That is a real break from his predecessor and deserves to be recorded as one: a scheme opposed by three million petition signatories and by every other party in Parliament, killed within days of the handover. It was also the cheapest break available. The verification architecture beneath the card survives intact. Right-to-work checks remain mandatory, and new legislation is expected to extend them into the gig economy — parcel couriers, delivery drivers — while the illegal-working crackdown that produced almost nine thousand arrests last year continues. The card is gone. The checking is not. Burnham has, on a small number of occasions, been more willing than Starmer to break with the Westminster consensus on Gaza. In October 2023, with London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, he signed a statement calling for a ceasefire while Starmer was still publicly endorsing Israel’s right to cut power and water to Gaza. In June 2025, he co-signed a letter pushing the British government toward formal recognition of Palestinian statehood. Those were genuine breaks from the leadership line. They were also, on the record, the limits of those breaks. Asked by The Guardian on 5 June 2026 — twelve days before the Makerfield by-election that returned him to Parliament — whether Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, Burnham declined to answer, citing the limits of his mayoral position: “I can’t judge things of that enormity from where I am as mayor of Greater Manchester.”⁷⁶ Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and a United Nations commission of inquiry have answered the question. The Mayor of Greater Manchester demurred. The question that arrives with Burnham on the doorstep of Number Ten is whether the limit he set as mayor still applies. He cannot, as prime minister, claim that the question is beyond his pay grade. He will be the man with the F-35 supply chain in his cabinet, the AUKUS treaty on his desk, the Palantir contracts in his hands, the Palestine Action prosecutions he can drop, the statutory instrument he can lay to remove the group from the proscribed list, the further appeal to the Supreme Court that Huda Ammori has signalled. His first days in office gave the first answer. He apologised for Labour’s handling of Gaza — the party “didn’t get it right”, he said, and had been “too slow to call for a ceasefire”. But he declined once more to call the killing a genocide, moving the hedge from the limits of his mayoralty to the authority of international courts: a determination, he now said, best left to them. The dodge he could not honestly repeat as prime minister, he repeated in a new costume. He kept Shabana Mahmood at the Home Office — the minister who defended the proscription through both courts, who ordered the largest facial-recognition rollout in the country’s history, and who has said plainly that her vision for the British state is a panopticon in which the eyes of the state are on the citizen at all times. And he continued, at once, Britain’s role in America’s war. Three days before the handover, Starmer had resolved at a Cobra meeting to keep RAF Fairford and the Diego Garcia airfield open to American bombers for what the government calls “defensive” strikes on Iran; Burnham was briefed on the decision and agreed with it. On 21 July 2026, the day after he entered Downing Street, a US B-1 bomber took off from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire to strike Iranian Revolutionary Guard targets — the first American strike mission flown from British soil under the new prime minister. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard declared any British base used against it “a legitimate target”.⁷⁷ The apology was the tone. The bomber leaving Gloucestershire was the government. The structural settlement does not give him much room. The room he has is the only room remaining. This is Labour’s last chance to get it right — to break a trajectory, to name what has been done in the British public’s name and with British contributions, to begin to dismantle the surveillance architecture, to walk back the pharmaceutical pricing concession, to restore the civil liberties that Starmer’s government has crushed. If Burnham continues the trajectory, the consequence is not that Labour loses the next election. The consequence is that the architecture is handed, with Labour’s signature on the transfer, to the party waiting to receive it. This is do or die. The architecture is bigger than any of them. Farage may not survive the year. The standards case, the by-election he called to escape it, and the questions about where his money came from may yet finish him. It will not matter. The architecture will continue to grind forward — through this prime minister, through the next, through the one after — until a leadership emerges that can tell the country the truth about its trajectory and offer a real alternative. None of the figures on offer — not Reform, not Labour, not the Conservative Party as constituted — is that leadership. The crisis is structural and bipartisan; it cannot be solved by changing the colour of the government. It can be solved only by the emergence of a political project that names the trajectory honestly and proposes to break it. That project does not yet exist. The architecture is ahead of any opposition to it. That is what is actually at stake.

I started with the country I left. I want to finish with the country I am still in. Britain in 2026 is a country in which a Labour government has arrested three thousand pensioners and priests for holding signs, signed a pharmaceutical pricing deal that raises the NHS cost-effectiveness threshold by twenty-five per cent under foreign tariff pressure, hosted American strikes that killed a foreign head of state from British military bases, and tied the operating layer of British public services to a defence contractor whose published doctrine attacks the foundations of democratic life. The opposition party is polling first on a programme that proposes to inherit all of that and accelerate it. The governing party is changing its leader. Neither change addresses the architecture. The press is treating this as a normal political contest. It is not a normal political contest. It is a country accelerating into a settlement no part of its electorate has voted for, led by figures none of its electorate trusts, on a trajectory none of its institutions are willing to name. The bus said £350 million a week. The country was told it was taking its sovereignty back. Ten years on, the bus is gone, the sovereignty is gone, and the man who stood next to the bus is asking for the rest. The British public deserves the chance to see what is being offered to us. This article has tried to give us that chance. What we do with it now is up to us.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Sir Andrew Dilnot to Norman Lamb MP, UK Statistics Authority, 21 April 2016.

² UK Statistics Authority, “Statement on the use of official statistics on contributions to the European Union,” 27 May 2016.

³ House of Commons Treasury Committee, The economic and financial costs and benefits of the UK’s EU membership, May 2016.

⁴ HM Treasury 2015 figures cited in House of Commons Treasury Committee report, May 2016, with corroboration from Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis. Gross weekly contribution approximately £342 million; rebate approximately £85 million per week; net contribution before EU spending returning to the UK approximately £250–280 million.

⁵ Nigel Farage, interview with Susanna Reid on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, 24 June 2016 (clip published by GMB on Twitter, 24 June 2016); transcripts in Her.ie and JOE.co.uk, 24 June 2016.

⁶ Nigel Farage interviewed by Susanna Reid, ITV’s Good Morning Britain, 24 June 2016; HuffPost UK and ITV News, 24 June 2016.

⁷ Nuffield Trust, “The past, present and future of government spending on the NHS,” October 2022.

⁸ House of Commons Library, NHS Expenditure, briefing paper SN00724, 2025.

⁹ Polly Smythe, “The Scandal-Hit US Health Insurance Company Deeply Embedded in the NHS,” Novara Media, 17 January 2025.

¹⁰ NHS England, “Federated Data Platform and Associated Services” contract notice, Contracts Finder, November 2023; “NHS England awards £480m Federated Data Platform contract to Palantir,” DigitalHealth.net, 21 November 2023; PublicTechnology.net, 22 October 2025.

¹¹ Corporate Watch, “FOI requests reveal Palantir’s NHS FDP rollout failures,” 13 August 2025; British Medical Association resolution, June 2025; foxglove.org.uk and openDemocracy, 2024–2025.

¹² James S. Coates, “Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0,” Fireline Press, 2 June 2026.

¹³ “The NHS on life support: four decades of betrayal, and a Farage victory could be the final blow,” The Canary, 27 May 2025.

¹⁴ Anita Charlesworth et al., “Short of Capacity?”, Health Foundation, 2024; King’s Fund, The state of the NHS, 2024; IFS, “Funding for local public services”; Sascha Becker, Thiemo Fetzer and Dennis Novy, “Who Voted for Brexit? A Comprehensive District-Level Analysis,” Economic Policy, 2017.

¹⁵ “Nigel Farage,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed April 2026; “Nigel Farage,” Wikipedia, accessed April 2026.

¹⁶ “Twenty-six former Dulwich College pupils and staff demand apology from Farage over alleged racist behaviour,” The Guardian, November 2025; The Independent and The Guardian, biographical reporting on the 1981 Chloë Deakin letter.

¹⁷ “Nigel Farage: what the Brexit Party leader was doing before politics,” The Week, May 2019, citing Financial Times; Huw Spanner, “Nigel Farage,” High Profiles, 2011.

¹⁸ Encyclopaedia Britannica biographical entry; House of Commons Library constituency results.

¹⁹ “Nigel Farage’s funding secrets revealed,” Channel 4 News, 16 May 2019.

²⁰ Parliamentary register of interests, August 2024; “Nigel Farage Paid Almost £98,000 a Month to Present GB News,” Bloomberg, 16 August 2024; ITV News, 16 August 2024.

²¹ “Nigel Farage to be paid up to £1.5m for I’m a Celebrity,” The Independent, November 2023.

²² Guardian investigation into the £5 million payment from Christopher Harborne to Farage, April 2026; “Nigel Farage received undisclosed £5 million from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne in 2024,” Left Foot Forward, April 2026.

²³ “Nigel Farage resigns as MP for Clacton,” BBC News, 7 July 2026 (resigned 8 July; poll set for 13 August). On the suspended standards investigation by Commissioner Daniel Greenberg, which resumes if Farage returns to the Commons: ITV News Anglia, 10 July 2026. On the approval rating (net −27, his lowest of this Parliament): Opinium/Observer, fieldwork 7–10 July 2026.

²⁴ Anna Isaac, “Revealed: Farage’s £5m gift reported to UK crime agency over money laundering concerns,” The Guardian, 7 July 2026. The report was raised with the National Crime Agency on 16 May 2024; the NCA “does not confirm or deny the receipt of SARs.” Farage said he was unaware of it and had “no reason to doubt the ultimate source of the money.”

²⁵ ONS, Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending June 2025, 27 November 2025; House of Commons Library, Migration statistics, briefing paper SN06077, 2026.

²⁶ ONS, ibid.; Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, “Net migration to the UK,” January 2026.

²⁷ Home Office, Net Migration, May 2025 analysis paper.

²⁸ Reform UK, Operation Restoring Justice, 2025–2026; Reform UK, Our Contract with You, 2024 manifesto.

²⁹ On the term’s origin and lineage: “Remigration,” Wikipedia, accessed April 2026; “What is remigration, the far-right fringe idea going mainstream?”, Al Jazeera, 26 December 2025; “Remigration: The Rise of a Fringe Idea into the Political Mainstream,” CSO Hate, 20 January 2026. Renaud Camus originated both remigration and the “Great Replacement” theory; Martin Sellner’s three-phase plan in Remigration: A Proposal (2024); January 2024 Correctiv report on the Potsdam meeting; AfD adopted the term in its 2025 manifesto.

³⁰ Hope Not Hate, State of Hate 2026, March 2026; “Most Reform members believe non-white UK citizens born abroad should be forced or encouraged to leave, poll finds,” The Guardian, March 2026.

³¹ Matthew Goodwin, public statement, The Guardian, 2026.

³² “Rupert Lowe leaves Reform UK and launches Restore Britain,” Hope Not Hate, 2025–2026; State of Hate 2026, March 2026.

³³ Reform UK, Our Contract with You, 2024; Institute for Fiscal Studies, June 2024.

³⁴ Institute for Fiscal Studies, “Reform UK manifesto analysis,” June 2024.

³⁵ Adam Barnett and Sam Bright, “Nigel Farage’s Reform Party Has Accepted £2.3 Million from Fossil Fuel Interests, Climate Deniers, and Polluters Since 2019 Election,” DeSmog, 4 June 2024.

³⁶ Reform UK, Our Contract with You, 2024 manifesto, energy and net zero sections.

³⁷ Adam Barnett, “Reform Donor Expands Fossil Fuel Portfolio to £300 Million,” DeSmog, 28 April 2026; Electoral Commission donation records.

³⁸ DeSmog analysis of Hosking Partners’ SEC filings, Q1 2026, reported 28 April 2026.

³⁹ Adam Barnett, “Nigel Farage’s Reform Party Took £135,000 from Climate Science Deniers and Fossil Fuel Interests,” DeSmog, 17 November 2023; Bristol Port Company corporate disclosures; openDemocracy, 2022.

⁴⁰ Harriet Williamson, “Reform Is the Political Arm of the Fossil Fuel Industry,” Novara Media, 9 May 2025.

⁴¹ “Who funds Reform UK? Inside Farage’s party’s £5m donor network,” openDemocracy, 12 June 2025.

⁴² openDemocracy analysis of Electoral Commission donation records for Reform UK, 2024.

⁴³ Electoral Commission donation records, data released 4 June 2026, as reported in “Reform UK secures fundraising lead with support from crypto billionaires,” Crypto Briefing, June 2026; on the £9 million August 2025 donation as the largest individual political donation in UK history at the time, and the £5 million personal gift to Farage now under parliamentary standards inquiry, see the Guardian investigation of April 2026 (endnote 22 above) and “Could Farage quit? Questions swirl over Reform UK leader’s future,” The Guardian, 5 July 2026.

⁴⁴ “Reform UK leader unveils party’s third billionaire backer Sasan Ghandehari,” GB News, July 2026; “Only Farage can deliver change, says Reform’s third billionaire backer,” The Telegraph, July 2026 (Ghandehari’s Atlanticist alignment and the seizure of his assets by the Islamic Republic). On the Q1 2026 totals and the £100,000 overseas-donor cap effective 25 March 2026: Electoral Commission data, released 4 June 2026. Delo’s £4 million was given on 14 January and 2 March 2026.

⁴⁵ R v Gill (Crown Court, November 2025); House of Lords Library briefing on political donations, February 2026.

⁴⁶ Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, “Restoring trust in our democracy,” 17 July 2025; UK Government announcement of independent review into foreign financial influence in UK politics, December 2025.

⁴⁷ Duncan Hames, Transparency International UK, statement of 5 March 2026.

⁴⁸ Office of the United States Trade Representative, “U.S. Government Announces Agreement in Principle with the United Kingdom on Pharmaceutical Pricing,” 1 December 2025; UK Government, 1 December 2025 and 2 April 2026. NICE threshold raised from £20,000–£30,000 to £25,000–£35,000 per QALY; VPAG repayment rate fell from 22.9 per cent to a capped 15 per cent for 2026–2028; medicines spending commitment doubled from 0.3 to 0.6 per cent of GDP by 2035.

⁴⁹ House of Commons Library, AUKUS submarine (SSN-A) programme, briefing paper CBP-9843, 5 August 2025; Australian Defence Ministers, “Joint Statement on the Geelong Treaty,” 26 July 2025; UK Ministry of Defence, 10 December 2025.

⁵⁰ House of Commons Library, Israel/US-Iran conflict 2026: Background and UK response, CBP-10521; “Starmer Stands By Decision to Not Join Initial Strikes on Iran,” Time, 19 March 2026. On the death of Ali Khamenei: “Iran confirms Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dead after US-Israeli attacks,” Al Jazeera, 1 March 2026; “Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed,” NPR, 28 February 2026; “Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is dead after U.S., Israel attack,” NBC News, 1 March 2026.

⁵¹ Sir Keir Starmer, House of Commons, March 2026, reported in Time, 19 March 2026.

⁵² Axios, “ICE pays Palantir $30M to build new tool to track and deport immigrants,” 1 May 2025; American Immigration Council, 22 August 2025; American Civil Liberties Union, April 2026.

⁵³ Kaiser Family Foundation, Employer Health Benefits Survey 2025, October 2025.

⁵⁴ Kaiser Family Foundation, ibid.

⁵⁵ Kaiser Family Foundation; Commonwealth Fund; David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, peer-reviewed analyses of US personal bankruptcy filings; KFF Health Care Debt Survey, 2022.

⁵⁶ UK Government, “UK and US agree historic trade deal,” May 2025; Food Safety News, 12 May 2025; Farmers Guide, 27 January 2026; Steve Reed, public statements, 2025–2026.

⁵⁷ “US seeks food standards change as price for £31bn tech deal,” Farmers Weekly, 29 December 2025, citing The Telegraph.

⁵⁸ Reform UK, Our Contract with You, 2024; analysis from the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Resolution Foundation, and the TUC, 2024–2026.

⁵⁹ Reform UK, Our Contract with You, 2024; Reform statements 2024–2026.

⁶⁰ “Keir Starmer resigns as prime minister and leader of Labour Party,” BBC News, 22 June 2026; “Why has Keir Starmer resigned as UK prime minister, and who will take over?”, Al Jazeera, 22 June 2026. On Burnham’s Makerfield by-election win (18 June 2026) as the favourite to succeed, Al Jazeera, 22 June 2026.

⁶¹ “UK government backs down on disability benefit cuts after rebellion,” Al Jazeera, 27 June 2025; The Week, 24 June 2025; The Big Issue, 9 May 2025.

⁶² HM Treasury defence spending review documents, 2025; House of Commons Library briefings on AUKUS (CBP-9843) and Iran (CBP-10521); FCDO, “Government statement on arms export licences to Israel,” 2 September 2024; The Guardian, “UK keeps F-35 parts flowing to Israel despite arms suspension,” September 2024.

⁶³ House of Commons Hansard, division on the proscription order, 2 July 2025; UK Home Office, Operation of Police Powers under the Terrorism Act 2000, 18 December 2025; “Terror arrests surge to highest level on record following Palestine Action proscription,” Morning Star, March 2026.

⁶⁴ R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department: High Court, 13 February 2026 (proscription ruled unlawful under ECHR Articles 10 and 11); Court of Appeal, 15 June 2026, per Lady Chief Justice Sue Carr, reversing that ruling. On the cumulative arrest and charge totals, “UK Home Office graph reveals shocking scale of Palestine Action arrests,” Middle East Eye, 13 February 2026; “Police Fail to Arrest Two-Thirds in Biggest-Ever Protest Against Palestine Action Ban,” Novara Media, 7 September 2025.

⁶⁵ On the panopticon remark (December 2025, in conversation with Tony Blair): The Daily Telegraph, 18 January 2026. On the rollout from ten to fifty facial-recognition vans and Mahmood’s “no apology”: “Mahmood defends rollout of facial recognition to all police forces,” BBC News, January 2026. On the software’s reported use in Gaza: “UK police to use AI facial recognition tech linked to Israel’s war on Gaza,” Al Jazeera, 28 January 2026.

⁶⁶ James S. Coates, “Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0,” Fireline Press, 2 June 2026; Big Brother Watch and Liberty reporting, 2018–2025; Big Brother Watch, Face Off: The lawless growth of facial recognition in UK policing, 2018.

⁶⁷ Palantir Technologies (@PalantirTech) post on X, 18 April 2026, distilling Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Crown Currency, 2025).

⁶⁸ Mark Coeckelbergh, public statement, April 2026; Yanis Varoufakis, public statement, April 2026; Eliot Higgins, public statement, April 2026.

⁶⁹ Sir Keir Starmer, statement on the digital identity scheme, 25 September 2025; UK Government statement, 2 October 2025; “Why is the UK introducing digital IDs – and why are they so controversial?”, Al Jazeera, 29 September 2025.

⁷⁰ “UK Digital ID,” Wikipedia, accessed April 2026; “Identity – The Crisis You Can’t See: Time for digital ID?”, The Constitution Society, 18 November 2025.

⁷¹ Rachel Wearmouth, “Why Keir Starmer U-turned on digital ID,” New Statesman, January 2026; “Digital ID: what’s changed?”, Full Fact, January 2026; “Starmer ‘abandons’ plans for mandatory digital IDs in ‘13th U-turn’ since election,” LBC, January 2026; The Guardian, January 2026.

⁷² James S. Coates, “The Silence After the Lie,” Fireline Press, March 2026.

⁷³ “Relationship of Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein,” Wikipedia, accessed April 2026; “Pressure builds as Starmer rejects calls to resign over Mandelson appointment in Epstein fallout,” PBS News, April 2026; “UK PM Starmer says he shouldn’t have appointed Epstein-linked pick for US ambassador,” CNN, 20 April 2026.

⁷⁴ Sir Keir Starmer, House of Commons, April 2026; “Starmer’s ex-chief of staff says sorry over Mandelson appointment as U.K. leader faces more pressure,” The Columbian, 28 April 2026.

⁷⁵ “Burnham to scrap Starmer’s digital ID scheme in ‘reset of priorities’,” The Guardian, 18 July 2026. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimated the scheme’s cost at approximately £1.8 billion, an estimate rejected by officials; the petition against it attracted approximately three million signatures. Sources close to Burnham confirmed his continued commitment to the previous government’s crackdown on illegal working, which produced almost 9,000 arrests in the preceding year, with right-to-work checks remaining mandatory and new legislation expected to extend verification to the gig economy.

⁷⁶ Andy Burnham, interview with The Guardian, 5 June 2026, declining to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide: “I can’t judge things of that enormity from where I am as mayor of Greater Manchester.” On the October 2023 ceasefire statement, see Greater Manchester Combined Authority, “Statement from the Mayor and Deputy Mayor on the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict,” October 2023. On the June 2025 letter urging recognition of Palestinian statehood, see “Andy Burnham Declines to Call Israel’s Mass Killings in Gaza a Genocide,” Novara Media, 5 June 2026.

⁷⁷ “Burnham approves US use of UK bases for some strikes on Iran, Bloomberg reports,” Middle East Eye, 22 July 2026 (continuation of Starmer’s policy; decided at a Cobra meeting before the handover, Burnham briefed and in agreement). On the 21 July B-1 mission from RAF Fairford: “US bombs Iran from UK air base for first time under Burnham,” The Daily Telegraph, 23 July 2026, citing Axios. On the IRGC “legitimate target” warning: Revolutionary Guard statement, 23 July 2026.

Two world wars killed roughly a hundred million people. The Holocaust industrialised murder on a scale that forced the civilised world to confront what civilisation actually meant. And in the aftermath — at Nuremberg, at San Francisco, at Geneva — the victors sat down and constructed something unprecedented: a body of law designed to ensure that power alone could never again justify aggression, that sovereignty meant something, that the strong could not simply devour the weak and call it statecraft.

The Nuremberg Tribunal declared that the waging of aggressive war was “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”¹ The United Nations Charter, signed in 1945, prohibited the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.² The Geneva Conventions codified the protection of civilians, prisoners, and the wounded.³ The Genocide Convention — born directly from the ashes of the Holocaust — made the destruction of a people a crime under international law, regardless of who committed it.⁴ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted that certain protections belonged to every human being, not as gifts from governments but as inherent rights that governments were obligated to respect.⁵

This was not an abstract exercise. These were binding legal instruments, ratified by sovereign nations, designed to constrain the behaviour of the powerful. And they were authored, in large part, by the United States of America — the nation that served as chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, that drafted the UN Charter, that championed the Geneva Conventions, and that declared to the world that the rule of law would govern relations between nations just as it governed relations between citizens.

That order is now dying. And the nations killing it are the ones that built it.

The Architecture

To understand what is being destroyed, you must first understand what was built and why it mattered.

The post-war legal order rested on a simple foundation: states do not get to bomb other states. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. There are exactly two exceptions. The first is authorisation by the UN Security Council under Chapter VII — the collective security mechanism by which the international community, acting through its designated body, can authorise the use of force to maintain or restore peace. The second is self-defence under Article 51, which preserves the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs.⁶

Two exceptions. Everything else is illegal.

The architecture was not naive. The people who built it understood power. They had just fought a war against nations that believed power was its own justification, and they had won. The question was whether their victory would produce something better than the system it replaced — or whether they would simply install themselves at the top of the same hierarchy and call it progress.

The answer was imperfect. The Security Council structure was a concession to power from the start. Five nations — the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China — were given permanent seats and the power to veto any substantive resolution.⁷ This was the price of getting the great powers to participate. The alternative, in 1945, was no United Nations at all. The League of Nations had already demonstrated what happened when major powers refused to join or walked away when the institution inconvenienced them — it died, and the world got a second war even worse than the first.

The contradiction was visible from the moment the ink dried. One of the five nations given permanent power to enforce the prohibition on mass atrocity was, at that very moment, responsible for the deaths of millions of its own people. Stalin’s purges, his forced collectivisation, his gulags, and the engineered famine in Ukraine had killed an estimated twenty million people — a death toll that rivalled the Holocaust in scale.⁸ The architect of those killings took his seat at the table, received his veto, and the system designed to prevent crimes against humanity was built to accommodate a man who was actively committing them. The post-war order was not corrupted later. The corruption was foundational.

So the architects accepted the compromise. The veto was the structural flaw sewn into the foundation. But the foundation itself — the prohibition on aggressive war, the protection of civilians, the principle that sovereignty means something — was sound. And for eighty years, imperfectly and inconsistently, with glaring failures and shameful exceptions, it held. It did not prevent every war. It did not stop every atrocity. But it established a framework within which violations could be named, condemned, and — at least sometimes — punished. It created a language of accountability that had not existed before. And it prevented a third world war.

What is being tested now is not whether any particular nation survives. It is whether that framework survives. And if it does not, the nations that will suffer most from its collapse are the ones that are currently tearing it apart.

The principle that law should govern the conduct of nations is not a foreign concept imposed on the United States from outside. It is the foundational American idea, taken to its logical international conclusion. Aristotle said it first: “It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens.”⁹ Thomas Paine made it the cornerstone of the American revolution: “In America, the law is king.”¹⁰ John Adams enshrined it in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 as “a government of laws, and not of men.”¹¹ The post-war international legal order was nothing more than the extension of this principle beyond national borders. The United States did not merely sign that order. It authored it.

And now it is shredding its own work.

The Erosion

The United States did not abandon international law overnight. It eroded it — war by war, precedent by precedent, each violation a little larger than the last, until the original design became unrecognisable.

Korea, 1950. President Truman sent American troops to fight a full-scale war without a declaration of war from Congress. He called it a “police action.” The United Nations provided a fig leaf of legitimacy through a Security Council resolution that passed only because the Soviet Union was boycotting the Council at the time — a procedural accident that would never be repeated.¹³ Thirty-six thousand Americans died.¹² The constitutional power to declare war was not repealed. It was simply ignored, and Congress’s silence was treated as consent.

Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 — the alleged second attack on the USS Maddox — was later determined to have likely not occurred. The NSA’s own declassified internal history, published in 2005, concluded that the signals intelligence used to justify the resolution was flawed.¹⁴ But by then, fifty-eight thousand Americans and millions of Vietnamese were dead¹⁵, villages had been burned, civilians massacred at My Lai, and a generation had learned that their government would fabricate a pretext for war and call it self-defence.

Iraq, 2003. The most consequential violation of the post-war order by its principal architect. The United States launched a full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation without Security Council authorisation, on the basis of fabricated evidence about weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. No armed attack had occurred. No imminent threat was demonstrated. The war produced Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers tortured and sexually humiliated prisoners. It produced Guantánamo, where men were held without charge and subjected to interrogation techniques that the Red Cross called torture.¹⁶ It killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. And it established the precedent that the most powerful nation on earth could wage a war of choice, in open violation of the Charter it had authored, and face no institutional consequence whatsoever.

Libya, 2011. The United States provided seventy-five per cent of the aerial refuelling and seventy per cent of the intelligence for a NATO campaign¹⁷ that exceeded its Security Council mandate — authorised for civilian protection, executed for regime change. The Obama administration argued that sustained bombing operations did not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution. The word had been redefined to mean whatever the executive needed it to mean.

And running through these wars is a parallel escalation that the legal order has never addressed: what happens to the leaders of the states that America targets.

Saddam Hussein was captured during an illegal war, tried by a tribunal established under American occupation, and executed on the thirtieth of December 2006.¹⁸ The Iraqi High Tribunal was nominally Iraqi, but it was created under conditions that the United States engineered — and it did not meet international fair trial standards. Human Rights Watch called the trial “fundamentally flawed.”¹⁹ The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights raised concerns about due process.²⁰ Whatever Saddam’s crimes — and they were monstrous — the legal vehicle for his conviction was the product of a war that had no legal basis.

And that should matter to everyone, because due process — the right to a fair trial — is the foundation of law that protects all of us, rich or poor, regardless of status, no matter how large or small the crime. The worst criminals in the history of human civilisation were given a trial at Nuremberg. We are now refusing even that for alleged criminals who have not matched the threshold of crimes those laws were founded to prevent.

Muammar Gaddafi did not even get a trial. He was captured by rebel fighters during the fall of Sirte on the twentieth of October 2011, beaten, and shot — an extrajudicial killing captured on video and broadcast to the world.²¹ The United States did not pull the trigger. But it created the conditions: the NATO campaign that toppled his government exceeded the Security Council’s mandate, and the lawless vacuum it produced made his killing inevitable. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s reaction, captured on camera — “we came, we saw, he died”²² — was not a confession of guilt. It was something worse. It was indifference to the distinction between law and conquest.

The trajectory is unmistakable. With Saddam, there was at least a trial, however compromised. With Gaddafi, there was no trial — only killing in the chaos that American intervention had engineered.

And then Iran. February 2026. The capstone.

The United States and Israel launched a sustained military campaign against a sovereign nation — during active negotiations. This was the second time. In June 2025, Israel had launched a surprise attack on Iran during a prior period of diplomatic engagement, drawing the United States into a twelve-day war.²³ The pattern was established then: negotiate, then strike while the other side is at the table. February 2026 repeated it — and exceeded it.

On the twenty-fifth of February, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated publicly that a historic agreement was “within reach.”²⁴ On the twenty-seventh of February — one day before the strikes began — Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News and disclosed that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, to downgrade its existing stockpiles to the lowest level possible through irreversible conversion to fuel, and to submit to full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Al Busaidi called it “a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved in previous rounds of negotiations.”²⁵ This was not the JCPOA being reheated. This went beyond what the Obama-era deal had secured. Iran had conceded everything the United States had asked for. Additional talks were scheduled for the following Monday in Vienna. They never took place. On the twenty-eighth of February, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury.

No Security Council resolution authorised the strikes. No armed attack by Iran had occurred. No congressional declaration of war was sought or obtained. The Senate voted on a resolution requiring presidential authorisation for further military action; it failed, 47 to 53. The House voted on a similar measure; it failed, 212 to 219.²⁶ Congress did not authorise this war. But it refused to stop it. Silence, once again, read as consent.

The campaign killed Iran’s supreme leader — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a head of state, assassinated by airstrike as a deliberate military objective. Not captured. Not tried. Not even given the sham proceedings that Saddam received. Simply killed, along with forty-nine other senior officials²⁷, in a strike designed to decapitate a sovereign government. The escalation from Saddam to Gaddafi to Khamenei is the erosion of due process rendered in human lives: from a flawed trial, to no trial, to no pretence that a trial was ever contemplated. It struck a girls’ school, killing 175 children.²⁸ It bombed civilian economic infrastructure, destroyed ten thousand homes in Tehran alone²⁹, and pursued explicit regime change. The White House posted videos splicing real war footage with Call of Duty video game clips.³⁰ The Secretary of War claimed more than fifteen thousand “enemy targets” had been struck.³¹

The international response confirmed the illegality in terms that have no precedent among traditional allies. France stated the strikes were conducted “outside the framework of international law.”³² Spain rejected the strikes outright and refused the use of its military bases.³³ Switzerland accused the United States and Israel of violating international law.³⁴ Norway emphasised the illegality. At the United Nations Security Council, 135 nations co-sponsored a resolution on the crisis — the largest co-sponsorship in Security Council history.³⁵ The European Council on Foreign Relations concluded that there is “little question that the US and Israeli war against Iran is an unlawful act of aggression.”³⁶ Professor Mohamed Arafa, writing in JURIST, described the strikes as violations of “both US constitutional law and foundational international norms.”³⁷

No allied government called this war legal. No adversarial government called it legal. No neutral government called it legal. Not one.

Each violation in this trajectory established a precedent. Each precedent made the next violation easier. Korea established that a president could fight a war without a declaration. Vietnam established that a president could fabricate the justification. Iraq established that a president could ignore the Security Council entirely. Libya established that a president could redefine what “hostilities” meant. Iran established that a president could launch a war during active peace negotiations, assassinate a head of state, pursue regime change, and face no institutional consequence — not from Congress, not from the courts, not from the international community. Not from anyone.

This is what eighty years of erosion produces. The constitutional power to declare war has not been repealed. It has been abandoned. Not by amendment, not by judicial decision, but by the slow, bipartisan accumulation of precedents, each one a little larger than the last, until the original design is unrecognisable.

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The Institutions That Looked Away

The erosion is not limited to the Security Council. It runs through the entire institutional architecture of international accountability — including bodies that have no veto mechanism to blame.

Consider the International Atomic Energy Agency. When Russia occupied the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine — Europe’s largest — the IAEA responded with force and specificity. Director-General Rafael Grossi condemned strikes in explicit terms, calling them “unacceptable” and “reckless,” demanding they “must stop now.”³⁹ The agency established five concrete principles for protecting the facility. It maintained permanent on-site inspectors from September 2022 onwards. It convened emergency Board of Governors meetings. The UN Secretary-General specifically condemned attacks by name. When a Ukrainian drone struck a reactor containment structure, Grossi said it “significantly increases the risk of a major nuclear accident.”⁴⁰ The IAEA’s report concluded that Russia’s occupation violated all seven pillars of nuclear safety.³⁸

Now consider Natanz and Bushehr.

On the twenty-first of March 2026, Iran’s atomic energy organisation confirmed that the United States and Israel had struck the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility — one of the country’s most important nuclear sites.⁴¹ The IAEA’s response was a statement noting “no increase in off-site radiation levels” and Grossi reiterating a “call for military restraint to avoid any risk of a nuclear accident.”⁴² Three days later, a projectile struck within the compound of the Bushehr nuclear power plant — an operating reactor, the kind of target Grossi himself had called the “reddest line” of nuclear safety.⁴⁴ The IAEA confirmed the strike hit a structure 350 metres from the reactor.⁴³ The language, again, was passive: “restraint,” “concern,” a reiteration of previous calls.

No condemnation. No demand that the strikes “must stop now.” No permanent on-site monitoring mission. No emergency Board session demanding accountability. No five principles established for protecting Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA explicitly called on the agency to condemn the attacks. The agency did not do so.⁴⁵

The same agency. The same director-general. The same category of threat — military strikes on nuclear facilities during an armed conflict. Two entirely different institutional responses. One gets condemnation, permanent presence, and binding principles. The other gets calls for restraint.

The contrast is even starker when measured against the IAEA’s own history. In June 1981, Israel struck Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor — the first military attack on a nuclear facility. The IAEA Board of Governors condemned the attack. The IAEA General Conference condemned it again in September and suspended all technical assistance to Israel.⁴⁶ A draft resolution to expel Israel from the agency entirely was introduced, though it was ultimately defeated. The UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 487, condemning the strike as “a clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct” — with the United States voting in favour.⁴⁷ In 1981, the international community treated a strike on a nuclear facility as an offence demanding institutional consequences. In 2025 and 2026, the same country has struck Iranian nuclear facilities repeatedly — including an operating reactor — and the institutional response has regressed from condemnation and suspension to calls for restraint and radiation monitoring.

The IAEA has no veto mechanism. There is no structural excuse for this disparity. What there is, plainly, is the operating logic of the entire international system when power overrides law: the rules apply to those who cannot prevent their enforcement, and they do not apply to those who can.

The Enablers and the Enabled

The erosion of international law does not radiate from a single source. It cascades. When the most powerful nations demonstrate that law is optional, every other nation in the system absorbs the lesson — including those with legitimate grievances, and including those that should know better.

The post-Holocaust legal architecture — the Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions — was built in direct response to the industrialised murder of European Jews. The world looked at what had happened and said: we will construct laws to ensure that this can never happen to anyone, ever again. “Never again” was not a tribal claim. It was a universal commitment, encoded into binding international law that protects all peoples equally.

The Genocide Convention does not say “against Jews.” It defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The law that protects Jewish people from genocide is the same law that protects Palestinians, Tutsis, Bosnians, Rohingya, and Darfuris. It protects everyone, or it protects no one.

Israel has invoked the moral authority of “never again” while violating the legal instruments that give that phrase its force. The International Court of Justice has identified evidence of genocidal intent. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. Amnesty International reviewed 102 official Israeli statements and found 22 constituting direct evidence of genocidal intent.⁴⁸ These are not the words of commentators or activists. They are the words of sitting government ministers, spoken on the record, documented by international legal bodies:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked Amalek — the biblical command to exterminate a people to the last child. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians “human animals.” President Isaac Herzog declared that there are no innocent civilians. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza.⁴⁹

You cannot claim “never again” as your moral shield while your own officials use the language of extermination. You cannot invoke the memory of the Holocaust to silence criticism while your government’s own words meet the legal standard for genocidal intent established by the very institutions built in the Holocaust’s aftermath.

The Palestinian right to resist occupation is recognised under international law. General Assembly resolutions have repeatedly affirmed the right of peoples under colonial and foreign domination to struggle for self-determination by all available means, including armed struggle.⁵⁴ The occupied status of Gaza — even after the 2005 withdrawal of settlers — has been affirmed by the UN, the ICJ, and the overwhelming majority of international legal opinion, on the basis that Israel retained effective control over borders, airspace, territorial waters, population registry, and the movement of goods and people.⁵⁵

This does not make everything that happened on the seventh of October 2023 legal. Targeting civilians and taking hostages are war crimes under the Geneva Conventions regardless of the legitimacy of the underlying struggle. The right to resist does not extinguish the obligation to distinguish between combatants and civilians.

But Israel’s response did not distinguish either. And even where a state has a legitimate right to respond in self-defence, that response is subject to the principle of proportionality under international humanitarian law — the requirement that harm to civilians must not be excessive in relation to the concrete military advantage anticipated.⁵⁶ Israel’s campaign has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, destroyed the majority of Gaza’s infrastructure, and produced famine conditions across the territory. This is not a proportionality question with a difficult answer. It is not proportionality at all. It is collective punishment on a scale that multiple international bodies have identified as genocide.

And the context cannot be severed from the response. The people of Gaza had been hemmed inside a wall, subjected to a blockade that controlled their calories, their water, their electricity. They had endured repeated military campaigns that Israeli officials themselves described as “mowing the grass” — periodic operations designed not to resolve the conflict but to degrade Palestinian military capability at regular intervals, accepting civilian casualties as a cost of maintenance. They had been ethnically cleansed when Israel established its state. They lived under conditions that the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and multiple human rights organisations had described as collective punishment — which is prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.⁵⁷

October 7 did not emerge from a vacuum. And Israel’s response — the campaign that the ICJ, the ICC, Amnesty International, and the UN’s own investigators have identified as plausible genocide — was enabled by a single structural mechanism: the United States veto.

The Security Council voted repeatedly on Gaza ceasefire resolutions from October 2023 onwards. The draft resolutions demanded ceasefire, hostage release, and humanitarian access. In vote after vote, all fourteen other members of the Council voted in favour. The United States vetoed them — not to protect American interests, but to shield an ally from accountability while genocide findings accumulated from the very institutions the United States had helped to build.

One nation. One vote. The will of the entire rest of the Council nullified. The legal apparatus activated and then rendered impotent by the nation that authored it.

Iran: When the Victim Becomes the Violator

Iran was subjected to an illegal war. Its right to self-defence under Article 51 — the very provision the United States ignored — is arguably the strongest legal claim any party to this conflict holds. A sovereign nation was attacked without provocation, without Security Council authorisation, during active negotiations, and its leader was assassinated.

And yet.

Iran’s retaliation struck Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — nations that had not attacked Iran. The picture, however, is not as simple as that sentence suggests. According to the Washington Post, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had multiple phone calls with Trump urging him to attack Iran⁵⁸ — while publicly positioning the Kingdom as an advocate for diplomacy and restraint. Saudi Arabia did not fire a shot at Iran. But it lobbied for the war that produced Iran’s retaliation, and it did so behind closed doors while presenting a different face to the region. That is not neutrality. It is treachery. None of which makes Iran’s strikes on Saudi civilian infrastructure legal — but it complicates the narrative of six innocent nations caught in someone else’s war. Iranian missiles and drones hit civilian infrastructure, energy facilities, and residential areas across the Gulf. The strikes killed civilians in six countries. Iran’s attacks on Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas facility — which produces twenty per cent of the world’s liquefied natural gas⁵⁹ — threatened global energy supplies. A projectile struck near the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. Fallen debris damaged residential towers. Eight people were killed in the UAE alone, including civilians.⁶⁰

President Pezeshkian’s position — that Iran targeted “US military bases, not neighbours”⁶¹ — does not survive contact with the casualty figures. Iran claimed it was exercising its right to self-defence against American military assets hosted in neighbouring states. But the distinction between a military base and the country surrounding it collapses when your missiles are killing that country’s civilians and destroying its economic infrastructure. The Saudi foreign minister warned that patience in the Gulf was “not unlimited.”⁶² Qatar condemned the attack on Ras Laffan as “a blatant violation of national sovereignty.” The UAE called the strikes “terrorist attacks.”

The Security Council adopted Resolution 2817, condemning Iran’s “egregious attacks” against its regional neighbours, with 135 co-sponsors. The resolution passed 13 to 0, with two abstentions.⁶³ The condemnation was swift, specific, and nearly unanimous.

But here is what the resolution did not do: it did not condemn the illegal war that triggered Iran’s retaliation. The same Security Council that condemned Iran’s strikes against its neighbours has not held the United States and Israel accountable for the war of aggression that started the entire chain of events. The mechanism that condemned the response was structurally incapable of condemning the cause — because the cause was committed by a permanent member with veto power.

The argument is not that Iran had no right to respond. It is that responding to an illegal war by committing your own violations of international law does not restore the legal order. It confirms its collapse. When the system fails to prevent the initial violation, the victims do not restore the system by responding within it — because the system has already demonstrated that it does not work. They respond outside it. And the collapse accelerates.

Iran’s retaliation proves the thesis of this article. When law dies, everyone becomes a violator.

The Genocides No One Prevented

Since 1945, the world has witnessed genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and Myanmar — and in most cases, the international community failed to prevent it. The Genocide Convention exists. The institutions exist. The law exists. But the enforcement has been catastrophically selective.

In Rwanda, eight hundred thousand Tutsis were murdered in a hundred days⁶⁴ while the United Nations debated whether to call it genocide — because calling it genocide would have triggered a legal obligation to act. In Bosnia, the massacre at Srebrenica occurred under the protection of UN peacekeepers who stood aside while eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys were executed.⁶⁵ In Darfur, the ICC issued arrest warrants that were never enforced. In Myanmar, the Rohingya were subjected to mass murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing while the Security Council was blocked from action.

Most people are never taught about these genocides in any depth. The public understanding of genocide is distorted — as if it were a historical event that happened once, to one people, and the legal architecture exists to protect that one people alone. It exists to protect everyone. And when it is applied selectively — enforced for some, ignored for others, wielded as a shield by those committing the violations — “never again” becomes the most hollow promise in the history of international law.

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The Structural Failure

The evidence is now overwhelming. The question is why the system cannot correct itself. The answer is structural, and it is embedded in the architecture that was supposed to make the system work.

Article 27(3) of the United Nations Charter gives five nations — the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom — the power to veto any substantive resolution of the Security Council. The veto was the compromise that made the UN possible. Without it, the great powers would not have joined, and the institution would have died in the womb as the League of Nations died before it.

But the compromise has become the disease.

The Gaza record is the clearest contemporary illustration. The United States has vetoed Gaza ceasefire resolutions repeatedly since October 2023. In vote after vote, all fourteen other Council members voted in favour. The draft resolutions demanded ceasefire, hostage release, and humanitarian access — demands that were not controversial to any other nation on the Council. One vote blocked them all. One nation, acting alone, prevented the Security Council from fulfilling its mandate to maintain international peace and security — while supplying the weapons used in the campaign those resolutions sought to stop.

The Iran war compounds the indictment. One hundred and thirty-five nations co-sponsored a Security Council resolution on the crisis — the largest co-sponsorship in the history of the institution. The resolution condemned Iran’s retaliatory strikes against its neighbours. It passed. But no resolution has held the United States and Israel accountable for the illegal war of aggression that triggered those strikes — because the United States would veto any such resolution, and everyone knows it. The multilateral framework was not even tested. It was simply bypassed, because the outcome was structurally predetermined.

Russia has used the veto to shield itself from accountability in Ukraine. The United States has used it to shield Israel in Gaza. China has used it to block action on human rights. The pattern is bipartisan and transnational: the veto does not distinguish between legitimate security concerns and naked obstruction of justice. It treats them identically. The powerful are exempt.

The global majority recognises the problem. The France-Mexico initiative — a proposal for voluntary restraint on the veto in situations involving mass atrocity crimes — now has the support of 107 nations.⁶⁶ The ACT Code of Conduct, which urges permanent members to refrain from vetoing action against genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, has 120 signatories.⁶⁷ The 2022 “veto initiative” — General Assembly Resolution 76/262 — automatically triggers an Assembly meeting each time a Security Council veto is cast, ensuring that vetoed resolutions receive public scrutiny.⁶⁸ Seventeen vetoes have triggered seventeen meetings since its adoption.

But the General Assembly can only issue non-binding resolutions. Scrutiny without consequence is not accountability. And the fundamental structural trap remains: amending the UN Charter requires a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly, ratification by two-thirds of member states, and — crucially — the approval of all five permanent members. The veto protects itself. The mechanism that prevents accountability cannot be reformed without the consent of the nations that benefit from its existence.

Any system that gives the accused the power to block their own prosecution is not a legal system. It is an arrangement of power. When the United States vetoes resolutions on Gaza while supplying the weapons used in the campaign those resolutions seek to stop, it is not exercising a safeguard — it is obstructing justice. When Russia vetoes resolutions on Ukraine while occupying Ukrainian territory, it is doing the same thing. The veto does not distinguish between these cases. It was not designed to. It was designed to ensure that the most powerful nations could never be constrained by the institution they created. And it is working exactly as designed.

The defenders of the veto argue that removing it would cause the great powers to leave, collapsing the United Nations as the League of Nations collapsed. But the League did not fail because it constrained the powerful too much. It failed because it could not constrain them at all. The Security Council is now reproducing that failure — not by driving the powerful away, but by allowing them to remain while rendering the institution incapable of acting against them. The result is the same: an international body that cannot fulfil its stated purpose.

Accountability Without Permission

If the Security Council cannot hold the powerful accountable because the powerful control the Security Council, then accountability must be built through mechanisms that do not require their consent.

This is not a utopian proposition. Several of these mechanisms already exist. None of them is sufficient on its own. But the argument that “nothing can be done” is itself a form of complicity — a surrender dressed as realism — and the evidence does not support it.

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza — the first warrants ever issued against the leader of a Western-backed state. Israel rejected the court’s jurisdiction. The United States called the warrants “outrageous” and sanctioned ICC judges and prosecutors. But the warrants stand. The ICC’s appeals chamber upheld them in December 2025, and all 125 member states of the Rome Statute are legally obligated to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they enter their territory.⁶⁹ Netanyahu’s plane now flies non-standard routes to avoid the airspace of signatory states.⁷⁰ That is not nothing. A sitting prime minister rerouting his flights to avoid arrest is the architecture of accountability functioning — not perfectly, not swiftly, but functioning. The warrants create permanent legal exposure that does not expire and cannot be vetoed.

Universal jurisdiction offers a complementary path. National courts in signatory states can investigate and prosecute international crimes regardless of where they occurred. Belgium opened a judicial investigation into a Belgian-Israeli citizen who served in an IDF sniper unit in Gaza.⁷¹ A group of lawyers filed suit in the United Kingdom accusing ten British nationals of war crimes committed while fighting for the Israeli army.⁷² Spain’s attorney general announced the creation of a task force to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza.⁷³ An Israeli reservist suspected of war crimes had to flee Brazil to avoid arrest.⁷⁴ These are not symbolic gestures. They are legal proceedings in sovereign courts, and they establish the principle that individuals who commit war crimes cannot assume safety outside the conflict zone.

The General Assembly has emerged as an alternative centre of gravity when the Security Council is paralysed. Resolution 76/262 — the veto initiative — automatically triggers an Assembly meeting each time a Security Council veto is cast, ensuring that blocked resolutions receive public debate. The Uniting for Peace mechanism allows the Assembly to recommend collective measures when the Council fails to act. These instruments produce non-binding resolutions, not enforceable orders. But they are norm-setting. They establish, on the record, what the global majority believes the law requires — and they deny the vetoing power the ability to act in silence.

Economic and diplomatic consequences imposed by coalitions of states offer another avenue. The 135 nations that co-sponsored Security Council Resolution 2817 on the Iran crisis demonstrated that the global majority can organise. The question is whether that organisation can translate into material consequences — trade restrictions, diplomatic isolation, suspension from international bodies — outside the Security Council framework. Individual states have already acted: Spain refused the use of its military bases for the Iran war. South Africa brought the genocide case against Israel to the ICJ. Colombia, Chile, and Bolivia severed diplomatic relations with Israel over Gaza. These are not coordinated, and they are not sufficient. But they demonstrate that states are not powerless outside the veto structure.

Domestic accountability remains the most direct mechanism — and the most neglected. The United States Congress has the constitutional power to declare war and the power to refuse to fund one. It exercised neither in Iran. The Senate voted 47 to 53 against requiring presidential authorisation for further military action. The House voted 212 to 219 on a similar measure. These were not landslide defeats. They were narrow failures in which a shift of a handful of votes would have changed the outcome. The judiciary has standing to review executive overreach — though courts have historically been reluctant to intervene in war powers disputes. Citizens have standing to demand that their representatives act. The erosion of congressional war powers is not inevitable. It is a choice, made repeatedly, by elected officials who have decided that the political cost of opposing a war is higher than the constitutional cost of abdicating their responsibility.

And there is a form of accountability that operates on a longer timescale than any of these: the historical record. Nuremberg did not happen during the Second World War. It happened after. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was established years after Srebrenica. The documentation being assembled now — by the ICJ, the ICC, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Commission of Inquiry, journalists, and forensic investigators — may not produce consequences today. But it forecloses the possibility of future denial. Every satellite image of a bombed school, every verified civilian casualty count, every recorded statement of genocidal intent by a sitting official, every vetoed resolution in which fourteen nations voted yes and one voted no — these become the evidentiary foundation for accountability that the current political moment cannot deliver but that the future may demand.

The post-war legal order was not built during the war. It was built after, by people who looked at what had happened and decided that it must never happen again. The institutions they created are failing. But the principle that animated them — that power must be accountable to law — is on life support. And the outcome of that test depends not on whether the Security Council reforms itself — it will not, voluntarily — but on whether enough nations, enough courts, enough citizens, and enough institutions are willing to build accountability without waiting for permission from the nations that benefit most from impunity.

What Happens When Law Dies

This is not abstract. When the most powerful nations demonstrate that law is optional, every nation in the system absorbs the lesson.

Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and cited the Kosovo precedent — which the United States had established. The Iran war establishes the precedent that a sufficiently powerful state can launch a war of choice during active negotiations, assassinate a head of state, pursue regime change, bomb civilian infrastructure, and face no institutional consequence. Iran’s retaliation establishes the precedent that a nation under attack can strike six of its neighbours and claim self-defence. Israel’s campaign in Gaza establishes the precedent that genocide findings from the ICJ and ICC can be rendered meaningless by a single veto.

Each precedent feeds the next. Each violation teaches the system that violation is costless. The architecture of accountability does not collapse in a single dramatic failure. It collapses incrementally — as each actor watches the one before it escape consequences, and calibrates accordingly.

The question from the Iran war articles applies at the systemic level: what happens when it is your turn?

The United States will not always be the most powerful nation on earth. The precedents it is setting — that aggressive war is permitted, that the assassination of foreign leaders is acceptable, that international law is a constraint on rivals but not on oneself — will be cited by the next power that decides another nation’s sovereignty is inconvenient. The rules that America is breaking are the rules that were designed to protect America when it is no longer strong enough to protect itself.

Rome did not fall to barbarians at the gates. It fell because it had spent centuries treating its own rules as optional — applying them to its subjects while exempting itself — until the rules meant nothing and there was no structure left to hold the empire together. The post-war order that the United States built in 1945 was designed to prevent precisely this cycle. It worked — imperfectly, inconsistently, with glaring failures and shameful exceptions — but it worked well enough to prevent a third world war for eighty years. What is being tested now is not whether any particular regime survives. It is whether that order survives.

The people who should know are already giving their answer. On the twenty-first of March 2026, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said: “We are witnessing a stage in history taking us back to a world where nothing existed — no international law, no Versailles system, no Yalta system — nothing. A world where might makes right.”⁷⁵ Four days later, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote: “International law is dead in practice — driven by Western double standards on Gaza vs. Ukraine and silence on Israel-US aggression on Iran.”⁷⁶ China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi called on the international community to oppose “the regression of the world to the law of the jungle.”⁷⁷

These are not neutral observers. Russia is occupying Ukrainian territory. China has its own record on Xinjiang.⁷⁸ Iran has struck six of its neighbours. None of them comes to this argument with clean hands. And that is precisely the point. When even the nations that violate international law are declaring the system dead, it is not propaganda. It is a diagnosis. The order has collapsed so visibly that its own violators feel no need to pretend it still exists.

The Choice

The choice is not between the current system and a perfect one. Perfection was never available. The choice is between a flawed system that constrains power — imperfectly, inconsistently, with shameful exceptions — and no system at all.

The Security Council needs reform. The veto, as currently constituted, is an instrument of impunity, not of peace. The structural trap is real — the veto protects itself — but that does not make the problem unsolvable. It makes it urgent. The longer the current structure stands unreformed, the more precedents accumulate, the more the law is hollowed out, and the harder it becomes to rebuild the consensus that law should govern the conduct of nations at all.

But structural reform is only possible if enough people understand what is at stake. And what is at stake is not an abstraction. It is the difference between a world in which nations are accountable to law and a world in which they are accountable only to power. We have lived in the former, however imperfectly, for eighty years. We are watching, in real time, the transition to the latter. The League of Nations collapsed, and the world got a second war worse than the first. The United Nations was built to ensure there would never be a third. If this order collapses — if the prohibitions on aggressive war, the protections for civilians, the principle that sovereignty means something are allowed to die — then history is not ambiguous about what follows. The architecture that has prevented a third world war for eighty years will be gone, and nothing will have replaced it.

If you believe that laws should govern the conduct of nations, then you must believe it when those laws are inconvenient for the nations you support. If you only value international law when it serves your interests, you do not value international law. You value power. And the historical record is unambiguous about what happens to civilisations that mistake power for law.

They discover, eventually, that the rules they broke were the ones holding them up.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Nuremberg Tribunal, Judgment, 1 October 1946. The full passage: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

² Charter of the United Nations, signed 26 June 1945, entered into force 24 October 1945. Article 2(4): “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

³ Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, ratified by the United States on 2 August 1955.

⁴ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948, entered into force 12 January 1951.

⁵ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, 10 December 1948.

⁶ UN Charter, Articles 2(4) and 51. Article 51: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”

⁷ UN Charter, Article 27(3): “Decisions of the Security Council on all other matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of nine members including the concurring votes of the permanent members.”

⁸ Estimates of deaths attributable to Stalin’s regime vary widely among historians. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford University Press, 1990), estimated approximately twenty million. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010), provides lower estimates for specific campaigns. The figure remains contested; “an estimated twenty million” reflects the upper range of mainstream scholarly estimates.

⁹ Aristotle, Politics, Book III, Chapter 16.

¹⁰ Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776).

¹¹ Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, Part the First, Article XXX, drafted by John Adams.

¹² Department of Defense, Defense Casualty Analysis System. Total US deaths in the Korean War: 36,574.

¹³ The Soviet Union boycotted the Security Council from January to August 1950 in protest at the refusal to seat the People’s Republic of China. Security Council Resolution 83, adopted 27 June 1950, recommended military assistance to South Korea.

¹⁴ Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified 2005.

¹⁵ Department of Defense, Defense Casualty Analysis System. Total US deaths in the Vietnam War: 58,220.

¹⁶ International Committee of the Red Cross, Report on the Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation, February 2004.

¹⁷ Congressional testimony and Department of Defense reporting on US involvement in the 2011 Libya intervention.

¹⁸ Saddam Hussein was executed on 30 December 2006 following conviction by the Iraqi High Tribunal for crimes against humanity in the Dujail massacre.

¹⁹ Human Rights Watch, “Judging Dujail: The First Trial before the Iraqi High Tribunal,” November 2006.

²⁰ UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, statements on the Saddam Hussein trial, 2006.

²¹ Muammar Gaddafi was captured and killed by rebel fighters during the fall of Sirte on 20 October 2011. The killing was recorded on video.

²² Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CBS News interview, 20 October 2011.

²³ The Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran began in June 2025 with an Israeli surprise attack. House of Commons Library, “US-Israel strikes on Iran: February/March 2026,” research briefing, March 2026.

²⁴ Al Jazeera, “Iran’s FM says deal with US ‘within reach,’” 25 February 2026.

²⁵ CBS News, “U.S.-Iran deal is ‘within our reach,’ Omani mediator says,” 27 February 2026. Al Busaidi disclosed that Iran had committed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium, irreversible downgrading of existing stockpiles, and full IAEA verification.

²⁶ Senate vote on war powers resolution, 4 March 2026, failed 47 to 53; House vote on similar resolution, 5 March 2026, failed 212 to 219.

²⁷ US President Donald Trump stated that the strikes killed Khamenei and 49 other top Iranian officials. Al Jazeera, CNN, and Reuters, 28 February–1 March 2026.

²⁸ The strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan province, occurred on 28 February 2026. Iranian authorities reported 175 killed; the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stated victims were mainly girls aged between 7 and 12. CNN, NPR, BBC Verify, TIME, and Al Jazeera investigations, March 2026.

²⁹ Al Jazeera, “Iran war: What is happening on day 16 of US-Israel attacks?” 15 March 2026, citing Tehran’s governor.

³⁰ ABC News, “White House posts so-called ‘hype’ videos combining real Iran war footage alongside movie, video game clips,” 7 March 2026; CNN, “White House posts video about Iran strikes using ‘Call of Duty’ video game footage,” 5 March 2026.

³¹ Al Jazeera, “Iran war: What is happening on day 16 of US-Israel attacks?” 15 March 2026, citing Secretary of War Hegseth.

³² French President Emmanuel Macron, statement, 4 March 2026.

³³ Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez rejected the strikes, refused the use of Spanish military bases, and called the war an escalation. Multiple sources, March 2026.

³⁴ Swiss Defence Minister Martin Pfister, interview with SonntagsZeitung, 8 March 2026. Reuters, “Iran attacks breach international law, Swiss Defence Minister says,” 8 March 2026.

³⁵ Al Jazeera, “UN Security Council adopts resolution condemning Iran’s attacks in the Gulf,” 12 March 2026.

³⁶ European Council on Foreign Relations, “War over law: Europe’s unforced errors over the use of force in Iran,” 12 March 2026.

³⁷ Professor Mohamed Arafa, “No Authorization, No Imminence, No Plan: The Iran Strikes and the Rule of Law,” JURIST, March 2026.

³⁸ IAEA, “Nuclear Safety, Security and Safeguards in Ukraine,” ongoing reporting from September 2022. Director-General Grossi established the Seven Indispensable Pillars of Nuclear Safety in March 2022 and the Five Principles for protecting Zaporizhzhia in May 2023.

³⁹ IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi, statement, 11 August 2024. Arms Control Association, “IAEA Warns of Risks at Russian Nuclear Plant,” September 2024.

⁴⁰ NPR, “Attacks Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant increase accident risk, IAEA head says,” 8 April 2024. Grossi confirmed three direct hits on reactor containment structures.

⁴¹ Al Jazeera, “Iran says US and Israel attacked Natanz nuclear facility,” 21 March 2026.

⁴² IAEA statement on X, 21 March 2026. “No increase in off-site radiation levels reported. IAEA is looking into the report. IAEA Director General reiterates call for military restraint to avoid any risk of a nuclear accident.”

⁴³ World Nuclear News, “’Projectile’ hit 350 metres from Bushehr nuclear reactor — IAEA,” March 2026.

⁴⁴ NucNet, “IAEA’s Grossi Says Iran Nuclear Plant Strike Risks Crossing ‘Reddest Line,’” March 2026. Grossi: “An accident on an operating nuclear power plant would be something very, very serious. This is the reddest line of all.”

⁴⁵ Iran International, “IAEA says no damage at Iran nuclear sites, envoy...,” 2 March 2026. Iran’s ambassador Reza Najafi called on the IAEA to condemn the attacks.

⁴⁶ National Security Archive, “Israeli Attack on Iraq’s Osirak 1981,” George Washington University, 7 June 2021. The IAEA Board of Governors condemned the attack in mid-June 1981; the IAEA General Conference condemned it again in September 1981 and suspended all technical assistance to Israel.

⁴⁷ UN Security Council Resolution 487, adopted unanimously on 19 June 1981, condemning the Israeli strike as “a clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct.”

⁴⁸ Amnesty International review of 102 official Israeli statements, finding 22 constituting direct evidence of genocidal intent. Referenced in ICJ proceedings, South Africa v. Israel, 2024.

⁴⁹ The following statements by Israeli officials have been documented by Amnesty International, the ICJ, and multiple international legal bodies: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked Amalek (1 Samuel 15:3) in the context of the Gaza campaign, October 2023. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant stated on 9 October 2023: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” President Isaac Herzog stated on 13 October 2023 that there are no innocent civilians. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza in a radio interview, 5 November 2023.

⁵⁰ See endnote 49.

⁵¹ See endnote 49.

⁵² See endnote 49.

⁵³ See endnote 49.

⁵⁴ UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 (1974); Resolution 37/43 (1982), reaffirming the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for self-determination “by all available means, including armed struggle.”

⁵⁵ ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall, 9 July 2004; ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 19 July 2024. The majority of international legal opinion holds that Gaza remains occupied territory.

⁵⁶ Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977), Article 51(5)(b).

⁵⁷ Geneva Convention (IV) Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 12 August 1949, Article 33.

⁵⁸ The Washington Post reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had multiple phone calls with Trump urging him to attack Iran. Cited in Wikipedia, “2026 Iran war,” accessed 25 March 2026.

⁵⁹ Al Jazeera, “War enters new phase as Israel attack on Iran gasfield sparks Gulf response,” 19 March 2026.

⁶⁰ Wikipedia, “2026 Iranian strikes on the United Arab Emirates,” citing UAE Ministry of Defence figures, accessed 25 March 2026.

⁶¹ Al Jazeera, “Iran to halt strikes on neighbours unless attacks from there: Pezeshkian,” 7 March 2026.

⁶² Al Jazeera, “Saudi FM warns Iran that patience in Gulf not ‘unlimited’ amid attacks,” 19 March 2026.

⁶³ UN Security Council Resolution 2817 (2026), adopted 13 to 0 with 2 abstentions. UN Meetings Coverage, “Security Council Adopts Resolution 2817 (2026),” March 2026.

⁶⁴ The genocide in Rwanda occurred between April and July 1994. The figure of approximately 800,000 is cited by the United Nations and the Rwandan government.

⁶⁵ The massacre at Srebrenica occurred in July 1995. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia established that approximately 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were executed.

⁶⁶ The France-Mexico Joint Declaration on voluntary restraint of the veto in cases of mass atrocity, presented in 2015. As of 2025, 107 countries support the proposal. UN General Assembly debates on Security Council reform, 2025.

⁶⁷ Accountability, Coherence and Transparency (ACT) Code of Conduct. As of January 2020, 120 member states had signed. Security Council Report, “The Veto.”

⁶⁸ UN General Assembly Resolution 76/262, adopted 26 April 2022.

⁶⁹ ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on 21 November 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Upheld on appeal, 15 December 2025.

⁷⁰ Ynetnews and multiple outlets reported that Netanyahu’s plane flew non-standard routes to avoid airspace of ICC signatory states.

⁷¹ Belgian public prosecutor’s office, investigation into Belgian-Israeli citizen, October 2024. Justice Info, “Justice for Gaza: who is doing what?” November 2025.

⁷² Lawsuit filed in the United Kingdom, April 2025, on behalf of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the Public Interest Law Center. Justice Info, ibid.

⁷³ Spain’s attorney general, announcement, September 2025. Justice Info, ibid.

⁷⁴ Israeli reservist fled Brazil, January 2025. Justice Info, ibid.

⁷⁵ Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, interview for Looking Back television programme, 21 March 2026. Reported by Anadolu Agency and Türkiye Today.

⁷⁶ Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, post on X, 25 March 2026. Reported by Yeni Şafak and The Hill.

⁷⁷ Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in phone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. Chinese Foreign Ministry press conference, 2 March 2026.

⁷⁸ UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” 31 August 2022. The report concluded that serious human rights violations had been committed which “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

The Metropolitan Police declared the Golders Green stabbings a terrorist incident the same evening.⁸ Commissioner Mark Rowley’s characterisation of the suspect as having “a history of serious violence and mental health issues” was, on examination of the public record, an understatement. In January 2008, Suleiman — then 27 years old, in Swindon — had attacked Police Constable Neil Sampson, who had been called to a knife incident at a nearby property. Suleiman stabbed the officer multiple times in the head, face and leg with what was reported to be a bread knife, and also wounded the officer’s police dog, Anya. Sampson required five months off work to recover. Suleiman was sentenced to nine years for grievous bodily harm. The sentencing judge, Douglas Field, described Suleiman as having committed “three episodes of grave violence” in a single incident: an initial attack on a man at the flat where Suleiman was staying, the attack on PC Sampson, and the attack on the police dog. The court was told Suleiman had previous convictions for assaults on police officers.⁹ He was a British national, born in Somalia, who came to the United Kingdom as a child in the early 1990s. He was referred to the government’s Prevent counter-extremism programme in 2020. The referral was closed the same year.¹⁰ The Met did not say why. A psychiatric evaluation is expected to be central to the judicial proceedings now under way.

This is not the profile of a state-sponsored terror operative. It is the profile of a man with documented severe mental illness, a long history of extreme violence including the near-murder of a police officer, who had been sectioned and recently released, who was under active NHS mental health care up until the days before the rampage, and whom the state had repeatedly failed. The first person he attacked on 29 April 2026 was not a Jewish stranger in the street but a Muslim friend in a flat in south London. The Golders Green stabbings were the second and third stops of a rampage by a man whose violence on Wednesday began with someone he had known for years.

By Friday morning, the Crown Prosecution Service had authorised the charges. Three counts of attempted murder under Section 1(1) of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981, one for each of Suleiman’s three victims that day: Ishmail Hussein, the Muslim friend in Southwark; and the two Jewish men in Golders Green, Shloime Rand and Moshe Shine. One count of possession of a bladed article. No charges under terrorism legislation. The case was assigned to the CPS Counter Terrorism Division — the division that prosecutes terrorism cases — but the charges themselves were ordinary violent-crime charges.¹¹ The state’s most senior prosecuting authority, with the full file in front of it, did not bring terrorism charges. It brought attempted murder. The same indictment that names the two Jewish victims also names the Muslim victim. The British state’s own charging document records what the British state’s own political class is now framing as antisemitic terror as something different: three counts of attempted murder, against three victims of a single rampage, by a man whose mental illness is the only motive on the public record.

Within hours of the video appearing online, the Green Party leader Zack Polanski — himself Jewish, and a member of the London Assembly that holds responsibility for overseeing the Metropolitan Police — reposted a comment describing the footage as showing officers “repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head” while he was already incapacitated. Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, publicly responded that he was “disappointed” by Polanski’s post and called it “inaccurate and misinformed.”¹² The Prime Minister, the same week, described Polanski as “disgraceful” and “not fit to lead any political party.” Within forty-eight hours Polanski had apologised for “sharing a tweet in haste,” conceding that it had not been appropriate, while maintaining that the police “should not be above scrutiny.” The video was on the public record. The Commissioner’s response was not a correction of the facts shown in the footage. It was an attack on a Jewish member of the body responsible for police oversight for noticing them. The Spectator, the same day, published a defence of the police conduct under the headline “Zack Polanski’s shameful reaction to the Golders Green arrest” — framing his sharing of the post as “an absurd framing of events, focusing on the terror suspect’s supposed victimhood rather than the danger he posed to officers and the public.”¹³ That, too, is part of the record of Wednesday and Thursday — the speed with which a man’s mental illness was rewritten into the language of terror, and the speed with which dissent from that rewriting was named as the offence.

That distinction did not appear in the Prime Minister’s speech at Downing Street on Thursday 30 April. By the time Sir Keir Starmer stood in front of the cameras at 10 Downing Street, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre had raised the United Kingdom’s national threat level from “substantial” to “severe” — the second-highest tier, meaning a terrorist attack is “highly likely.”¹⁴ A COBRA meeting had been convened.¹⁵ The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, had described antisemitism as “an emergency” and “the top security issue” she faced.¹⁶ £25 million had been pledged for additional police presence around synagogues, schools and community centres.¹⁷ Fast-track legislation had been announced to allow the prosecution of people acting as proxies of state-sponsored groups, with Iran specifically named.¹⁸ New powers had been promised to shut down charities promoting “antisemitic extremism,” to bar “hate preachers” from the country, from campuses, from streets and from communities. The courts would speed up sentencing on antisemitic attacks.¹⁹

And the Prime Minister told the country that protesters using the phrase “globalise the intifada” should be prosecuted.²⁰

This is the package the British state announced in the thirty-six hours after the Golders Green stabbings. It is the package this article is about.

The package is not the response to a terrorist plot. The plot has not been alleged in court. The man charged with the stabbings has been charged with attempted murder by prosecutors who chose, with full knowledge of the file, not to bring terrorism charges. He is mentally ill. He has a documented history of serious violence. The Prevent system reviewed him five years ago and closed the referral. There is, as of writing, no public evidence of operational connection to any organised group. Nor is there any evidence of an antisemitic motivation for the attack.

There is, however, a claim. An online post under the name Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia — HAYI — claimed responsibility for the Golders Green stabbings within hours of them happening.²¹ HAYI is the same name that was attached to the firebombing of Hatzola ambulance vehicles in the same neighbourhood on 23 March 2026, five weeks earlier. It is the same name that has now been attached, across nearly two months and six countries, to more than a dozen claimed attacks against synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish-owned businesses, an Iranian dissident broadcaster in Wembley, and a claimed drone strike on the Israeli Embassy in Kensington that the Metropolitan Police investigated, found to be nothing, and closed.²²

HAYI did not claim Iranian-proxy origin. The Iranian-proxy framing was constructed by other parties. On 12 March 2026, Joe Truzman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — a Washington organisation whose own IRS filings state its mission as enhancing Israel’s image and educating the public on Israeli-Arab issues — floated the Iran link in The Long War Journal. On 16 March, the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism formalised the framing in a special report, giving the predicate state-authoritative imprint. On 23 March, the day of the Golders Green arson, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague published Hybrid Threat Signals, a research-body report that documented multiple inconsistencies in HAYI’s own materials and then absorbed them into the Iranian-backed thesis as evidence of “plausible deniability” rather than as evidence of fabrication. The BBC and the mainstream British press distributed the framing the next day. Each stage of the pipeline performed its function in laundering alleged Iran links into the mainstream.²³

I documented in The Anatomy of HAYI what those materials actually contained when examined: a Quranic misquotation no Muslim composes; Religious Zionist vocabulary no Muslim militant uses; a logo built on a Soviet Dragunov SVD where every real pro-Iranian Shia militia uses AK-pattern rifles; an Arabic misspelling of the word “Islamic” on the group’s own logo; a Telegram administrator who wrote in American English, justified the group’s actions through Christian and Jewish philosophy, and deleted the account when CBS News asked who was paying. Two named institutional sources — Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi for Middle East Eye and Adam Hadley of Tech Against Terrorism for The National — independently identified HAYI’s materials as AI-generated within twenty-four hours of the Golders Green arson.²⁴ The fingerprint of the people who built HAYI is the fingerprint of operators fluent in Anglo-American Jewish religious-political life and Western media production, dressed in the symbology of the community the campaign was designed to blame.

That fingerprint did not change on 29 April. HAYI’s claim of Wednesday’s stabbings fits the same fabrication pattern The Anatomy of HAYI documented across the campaign.

The Metropolitan Police, nearly two months in, have made twenty-six arrests across the broader campaign of attacks attributed to HAYI. Eight have been charged with arson-related offences. One has been convicted of arson. The first arrest under terrorism legislation came on 26 April 2026 — and it was on suspicion only of preparing terrorist acts, not on any predicate of foreign-state direction.²⁵ Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, the United Kingdom’s Senior National Co-ordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, has publicly characterised the operational pattern as “recruiting violence as a service” — paid criminal proxies with “no allegiance to the cause,” used once and thrown away. Deputy Commissioner Matt Jukes has described it as “thugs for hire.”²⁶ The legislation Parliament wrote in 2023 for foreign-state-directed hostile activity — the National Security Act, used in the Wagner-Earl prosecution to name Russia in court²⁷ — is sitting unused. The Met has not named a foreign sponsor. It will not, because the evidence to do so has not been built — because the operational reality does not support what the political class is now claiming the operational reality to be.

On Thursday 30 April 2026, the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was asked whether HAYI’s claim of responsibility for the Golders Green stabbings was credible. She said authorities were investigating whether the claim was credible or “opportunistic.”²⁸ That was on the same day she described antisemitism as “an emergency” and “the top pressing issue in relation to security” she faced, on the same day the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre raised the threat level from “substantial” to “severe,” and on the same day the Prime Minister stood at Downing Street and announced the package of emergency powers built around HAYI’s named threat.

This is the position the Home Secretary’s “opportunistic” admission catches the political class up to. The Met has been operating against a paid-proxy criminal campaign for weeks. The framing the political class is using to justify emergency powers is a framing the operational investigation no longer supports. Shabana Mahmood’s word — opportunistic — was the smallest possible public concession that the claim does not match the case. It was given on the same day the threat level was raised, the government announced it would fast-track through parliament a new bill amending the National Security Act 2023 to create a state-threats proscription power — with Security Minister Dan Jarvis naming the proscription of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as the immediate use case²⁹ — and the Prime Minister told the country that protesters using the phrase “globalise the intifada” should be prosecuted. The British public was being asked, on Thursday 30 April 2026, to accept the acceleration of an emergency response on the back of a claim the state’s own most senior security minister had just told the country might be a lie.

A state cannot simultaneously concede that the claimant may be fictitious and use the claim as part of the justification for emergency-level powers. It cannot raise the threat level on the basis of a state-sponsored terror narrative while its own prosecutors decline to bring terrorism charges. It cannot announce fast-track legislation to deal with malign state actors on the back of a claim its own Home Secretary has flagged as possibly opportunistic. It cannot tell the public that protesters chanting “globalise the intifada” should be prosecuted while its own Crown Prosecution Service has advised — repeatedly, in writing — that the phrase does not meet prosecution thresholds.³⁰

It cannot do any of those things and call the result a coherent response to a real threat. What it can do, and what it did do on Thursday, is announce the acceleration of an architecture that was already being built before Wednesday and will continue to be built when Wednesday’s news cycle moves on.

That architecture is the subject of this article. The man who carried out the stabbings is one person, charged with one set of crimes, who will face one trial. The fear the violence produced is real. The grief of the families, the terror of the community, the loss of the sense of safety that has been bleeding out of British Jewish life for the past two years — all of it is real, and a government has a duty to respond to all of it. But the response being built is not what it is being sold as. It is not protection. It is something else.

It is the closing of a circle that has been drawing itself for several years. The Palantir contracts that already place an American defence-intelligence company at the centre of the British state. The published doctrine of that company’s chief executive, whose April 2026 manifesto Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins identified as an attack on “verification, deliberation, and accountability” — the three pillars on which democratic life depends.³¹ The criminalisation of pro-Palestine protest under emergency powers that have already produced more than three thousand three hundred arrests — pensioners, priests, vicars, and the Reverend Sue Parfitt, an octogenarian retired Anglican priest arrested for holding a placard reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”³² The proscription of Palestine Action, found unlawful by the High Court in February 2026 and continued anyway.³³ The first ban on a protest march since 2012, in March 2026, by this same Home Secretary.³⁴ The fast-tracking of new state-actor legislation, announced before the trial of the only person actually charged with Wednesday’s stabbings has begun. The conflation, repeated by ministers and amplified by the press, of Israel with Jews, of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, of opposition to genocide with the celebration of murder.

Each of these has been documented in earlier articles in this publication. Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0 set out the Palantir architecture and the manifesto that names its targets.³⁵ The Anatomy of HAYI set out the fabrication and the amplification pipeline through which it became mainstream framing.³⁶ They Are Not the Same and The Greatest Antisemitism set out the conflation that licences the criminalisation of dissent.³⁷

This article is the convergence. The pieces have been documented separately. What follows is what they look like when they are placed beside each other, on the morning of 1 May 2026, in the wake of an emergency that the architecture was already built to absorb.

What the British state announced on Thursday was the deployment of an emergency architecture against a threat its own most senior security minister had flagged as possibly fictitious, on charges its own prosecutors had declined to bring, in a political environment its own Crown Prosecution Service had advised did not meet the legal threshold for prosecution. The cost will be paid by the British public — by the Jewish community told it is under siege from an enemy whose existence the state’s own institutions cannot stand behind, by the Muslim community handed the blame for an act they did not commit and condemn without qualification, and by every citizen who in the days after Thursday will discover what slogans, what symbols, and what protests the state has decided are now grounds for prosecution.

This is the convergence. It deserves to be named.

The Architecture Sharpened

The acceleration did not begin on Thursday. It began on 13 January 2025 at the UCL East campus in Stratford, where Sir Keir Starmer announced the AI Opportunities Action Plan and committed his government to adopting all fifty of its recommendations.³⁸ The plan had been written for the government by Matt Clifford, a venture capitalist and chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency.³⁹ Its substantive content was drawn, in places almost verbatim, from two papers published the previous year by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — “Governing in the Age of AI: A New Model to Transform the State” (May 2024) and “The Potential Impact of AI on the Public-Sector Workforce” (July 2024) — papers produced by an institute described in the public record as one of the architects of Starmerite thought, and an institute that receives substantial donations from technology companies whose AI products it advocates governments adopt.⁴⁰ The plan committed the United Kingdom to integrating AI across the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defence, policing, and government administration. It claimed two hundred billion pounds in savings over five years and the shedding of one million civil servants. It established AI growth zones with fast-tracked planning approvals — the first in Culham, Oxfordshire — and committed the country to a twenty-fold increase in AI compute capacity. In his speech announcing it, Starmer asked the country to consider “whose values are going to shape this technology as it develops,” and warned that the United Kingdom risked becoming a taker rather than a maker of the technological future.⁴¹

Every contract that has been signed since 13 January 2025 is now justifiable, in government communication, as delivery of the plan. What has been signed since 13 January 2025 is what I discuss in this section.

In September 2025, during Donald Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom, the British government announced a strategic partnership with Palantir Technologies under which the company would base its European defence operations in Britain. The announcement carried a one-and-a-half-billion-pound investment commitment, three hundred and fifty new jobs, and the establishment of London as Palantir’s European defence headquarters.⁴² On 30 December 2025, the Ministry of Defence signed a £240.6 million three-year follow-on contract with Palantir, effective 1 April 2026. The new contract more than tripled the £75.2 million deal it replaced. It was awarded without a competitive tender, under the defence-and-security exemption to the Procurement Act, by the Defence Secretary alone.⁴³ During the procurement period, Palantir hired four former Ministry of Defence officials, including Barnaby Kistruck, the former director of policy, who joined the company days after leaving the ministry. The MoD-to-Palantir employment pipeline was documented by OpenDemocracy in January 2026.⁴⁴

In March 2026, Palantir entered British financial services. The Financial Conduct Authority — the regulator that holds the most sensitive financial intelligence in the United Kingdom — awarded Palantir a three-month contract under which the company’s employees would be physically embedded inside the regulator to install software on the FCA’s internal data systems.⁴⁵ A previously undisclosed £15 million contract with AWE Nuclear Security Technologies — the United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons agency, formerly the Atomic Weapons Establishment — was revealed by The Nerve the same month.⁴⁶ The same investigation found that Palantir held at least thirty-four current and past contracts across at least ten government departments, local councils, and police authorities, with a total documented value of at least £670 million.⁴⁷

This is the pattern Palantir itself describes as “land and expand.” It begins with a foothold awarded for a nominal sum — in the United Kingdom, the £1 NHS Covid-19 Data Store contract in March 2020. It expands into a substantial commercial arrangement — the £330 million NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract awarded in November 2023 with potential to extend to £500 million.⁴⁸ It then propagates: into police data systems in 2024, into the military in 2025, into financial services in 2026, into nuclear security infrastructure at an unspecified date the public learned of only because an investigative outlet found the contract notice. At each stage, the company that began as a CIA-backed counter-insurgency platform builds further into the central nervous system of the British state.

Read that last clause again. Counter-insurgency is not metaphor. It is doctrine — operational tradecraft developed by the United States military and intelligence services to identify hostile populations, profile their networks, and act against them. The software was built to read communities a foreign state had decided were the enemy. Take that software out of Iraq, out of Afghanistan or Palestine, out of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeting infrastructure, install it inside Britain’s sensitive NHS and policing data systems, and the targeting logic does not change because the location did. The population the software now sees is the British public. It is reading your sensitive data for signs of dissent or determining “pre-crime” — judging you a criminal before you commit a crime. The doctor pushing for a pay rise is legible to it in the same shape an insurgent abroad would have been. So is the nurse striking for staffing levels. So is the parent objecting to a school closure, the student protesting university fees, the pensioner with a placard, the journalist with a question. Counter-insurgency software does not care what country it is running in. It does not side with your politics, but with the government that controls it. You have no recourse to challenge it. It runs the targeting logic it was built to run. That logic is now being run, on long contracts awarded without competition, against the people of the United Kingdom.

The senior figures involved in this propagation include some who have already drawn questions on the floor of the House of Commons. On 10 February 2026, the question was put to the Defence Minister whether the Defence Secretary had been aware of Peter Mandelson’s commercial links to Palantir through Global Counsel — the consultancy Mandelson founded — when the £240 million contract was awarded. The government’s answer was that Mandelson had no influence on the contract, and that the decision was the Defence Secretary’s and his alone.⁴⁹ The question, and the government’s answer, are both on the official parliamentary record. So is the broader observation made in the same debate: that Palantir’s £1 Covid contract had grown, under successive governments, into a contract footprint exceeding £500 million across the NHS and the Ministry of Defence, awarded in significant measure without competition.

The architecture has not been built without resistance. The British Medical Association passed a motion at its 2025 Annual General Meeting opposing the rollout of the Federated Data Platform. In February 2026, the BMA went further, instructing doctors to limit their engagement with the platform.⁵⁰ Over forty-seven thousand NHS patients have written formal letters of complaint to their local trust boards opposing FDP adoption.⁵¹ The Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board, which covers 2.8 million patients, has delayed joining the platform pending further evidence that adoption is in the interests of those patients.⁵² Coventry City Council was forced to review its Palantir contract after public backlash.⁵³ Approximately two hundred NHS trusts have signed up to the FDP, but only about half are live on the system, and only a quarter report that the system has produced any benefit.⁵⁴ A coalition that includes Medact, the Good Law Project, Privacy International, Corporate Watch, and Amnesty International published a joint briefing in March 2026 calling on NHS trusts and integrated care boards not to implement the platform and on NHS England to terminate the contract.⁵⁵ Amnesty International’s broader judgment of Palantir, set out in a 2020 report on the company’s operational support to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is that there is “a high risk that Palantir is contributing to serious human rights violations.”⁵⁶ The Green Party leader, Zack Polanski — the same Polanski whose post about the kicking of a mentally ill man in Golders Green drew a public rebuke from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner — has called for the FDP contract to be terminated at the break clause that falls due in February 2027, describing the company as “a Trump-supporting military surveillance outfit” with no place in Britain’s most important institution.⁵⁷

The break clause matters because it is the article’s pivot. The £330–500 million NHS Federated Data Platform contract has, written into it, a clause permitting the government to walk away in February 2027 without penalty if the platform has not delivered. By April 2026, the platform had not delivered. The Westminster Hall debate of 16 April 2026 — thirteen days before the Golders Green stabbings — heard the junior health minister Zubir Ahmed concede, on parliamentary record, that the contract could end short of its planned seven years if other providers could do the job better. The science minister Lord Vallance had told MPs the previous month that the government’s deals with Palantir would, in future, be done differently — with greater investment in British technology and British companies.⁵⁸

That was the political conversation the United Kingdom was having in the third week of April 2026. The Federated Data Platform was in serious political trouble. The opposition was mobilised. The break clause was on the table. Two of the government’s own ministers had publicly opened the door to terminating the contract.

Then Wednesday happened.

Then Thursday happened.

By Thursday evening, the political conversation in the United Kingdom was not about the FDP. It was about the threat level. It was about COBRA. It was about £25 million in additional security spending. It was about fast-tracked legislation to proscribe a foreign state’s military arm. It was about prosecuting the chant of cardboard placards. The conversation that could have terminated the Federated Data Platform contract at its break clause has been displaced by an emergency response that the same architecture is positioned to manage.

This is the mechanism. The threats the state is responding to are real. Antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom in 2025 reached the second-highest annual total ever recorded — 3,700, with the monthly average exactly double what it was before 7 October 2023. Anti-Muslim hate crimes are at a record high. Race and religious hate crime convictions are at an eight-year peak.⁵⁹ Both communities face real and increasing danger and a government has a real duty to respond to it.

The state has waited for events that authorise the response it now delivers. The Manchester synagogue attack of October 2025 came. The firebombing of Hatzola ambulance vehicles came. The Kenton synagogue fireball came. The Golders Green stabbings came. Each was a real event with real victims, not designed for what the state has done with it. But the state’s response in each case has been the same: announce a further package of expanded powers, criminalise a further set of expressions, accelerate a further set of contracts. The discussion the United Kingdom is having about antisemitism on the morning of 5 May 2026 is not happening because the Ministry of Justice’s hate-crime statistics were released a week ago — they were, and the news cycle absorbed them inside thirty-six hours. The discussion is happening because two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green by a mentally ill man whose first victim was a Muslim, in an attack the prosecutors have not charged as terrorism and for which there is no evidence of antisemitic motivation, two days before a local election the governing party is on track to lose.⁶⁰ The Prime Minister will deliver a further speech on antisemitism on the eve of polling day.⁶¹ The architecture being built is being built around a real problem. The response being delivered is being timed to a political need.

What was demonstrated in the thirty-six hours after Wednesday is the speed of the mechanism. The break clause has not yet been used. Whether it will be used is the question this section leaves the reader with. The architecture is not contingent. The architecture is policy. The events that determine whether it will continue to be built are the events the architecture is built to absorb.

The Speech They Are Criminalising

No machinery enforces itself. The architecture requires that the dissent which would expose what it is be made unlawful before it can mature. The third strand of what was announced and accelerated on Thursday 30 April 2026 is the criminalisation of speech. Two days later, that is the strand of the response most visible on the streets of London, in the headlines of the British press, and in the bail conditions of British citizens whose only documented offence is to have stood in public and disagreed with their government’s foreign policy.

The Prime Minister’s pledge from the Downing Street steps was unambiguous. Protesters who use the phrase “globalise the intifada,” he said, should be prosecuted. The Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police had been arresting people for using the phrase since December 2025, when they declared that the operational context for chanting it had changed in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack in Australia. Three pro-Palestine protesters were charged in January 2026 for allegedly chanting it at a demonstration. The Crown Prosecution Service guidance to police, on what does and does not meet the threshold for prosecution under the Public Order Act, has been less straightforward than the Prime Minister’s framing suggests. The phrase, in itself, is not a crime under United Kingdom law. The word “intifada” is an Arabic noun meaning uprising, rebellion, or shaking off. It is, in its primary historical sense, the noun used to describe the two organised periods of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation in 1987 and 2000. It is what the wider Arabic-speaking world calls peaceful uprising in general. To “globalise” it is, on the most natural reading, to call for a worldwide solidarity campaign of the kind that brought down apartheid in South Africa.

That is the reading offered by Peter Tatchell, the seventy-four-year-old human rights campaigner whose arrest on 31 January 2026 for carrying a placard reading “Globalise the intifada. Non-violent resistance. End Israel’s occupation of Gaza & West Bank” became one of the defining test cases of the new prosecutorial environment.⁶² Tatchell, who has been arrested or detained one hundred and four times across nearly six decades of human rights campaigning, who joined the March Against Antisemitism alongside the Chief Rabbi and thousands of British Jews on 26 November 2023, was held in a police cell in Sutton, Surrey, for ten of the twelve hours of his detention. The Met arrested him in Aldwych, then transported him out of London by van to find a cell that would hold him. He was bailed on the condition that he attend no further pro-Palestine protests for twelve weeks. On 22 April 2026, a magistrate found that bail condition unreasonable and disproportionate and granted Tatchell unconditional bail. On 23 April, the police officer handling his case failed to attend the bail appointment at Charing Cross police station. On 29 April — the day of the Golders Green stabbings, the day before the Prime Minister stood at Downing Street and declared that protesters using the phrase should be prosecuted — the Metropolitan Police dropped the case against him entirely.

This was a man whom the British state had arrested, jailed for twelve hours, banned from protest, and then, after nearly three months of bail conditions, declined even to charge. His case was dropped on the day before the Prime Minister announced that the conduct for which he had been arrested would be a prosecutable offence going forward. Tatchell himself put what had happened to him in plain language. The police, he said, were not enforcing the law. They were fabricating interpretations of it.

This is the pattern the architecture requires. The state declares a category of speech to be the kind of speech that produces violence. The police arrest people for engaging in that speech. The Crown Prosecution Service declines, on the evidence presented, to prosecute. The Prime Minister announces from the steps of Downing Street that the speech ought to be prosecuted. The next round of arrests follows on a stronger political authority than the one before. The chilling effect has done its work whether or not a single one of these prosecutions succeeds.

The pattern repeats with symbols. The inverted red triangle, which Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades adopted in November 2023 to mark Israeli military targets in operational footage from Gaza, has since been used by Palestinian protest movements globally as a symbol of resistance. The triangle resembles the slingshot — a symbol of resistance in Gaza and the West Bank predating its use by Hamas — and resembles the red triangle on the Palestinian flag, where it represents the Hashemite role in the Arab Revolt and the blood of those killed in the struggle for Arab independence. The triangle has been used by the Israel Defence Forces to mock Hamas, by anti-fascist movements in Berlin, by graffiti artists on synagogues in Pittsburgh and Jewish-owned bakeries in Sydney, by Iranian-linked hacker groups, and by hundreds of thousands of pro-Palestine protesters who have neither glorified Hamas nor threatened Jewish communities. The Berlin Senate banned the symbol in July 2024. The Anti-Defamation League classifies it as a symbol of glorification of Hamas violence. Pro-Palestine campaign groups treat it as a symbol of resistance to occupation. Both readings exist in the public record. Neither reading exhausts the symbol’s meaning. Yet British politicians and commentators have, in the days since Wednesday’s stabbings, suggested that displaying the symbol be added to the column of prosecutable conduct.

This is where the architecture’s most consequential move is being made. A symbol with multiple, overlapping, contested meanings is being treated as if it had only one meaning, and that meaning is being treated as antisemitic, and the use of the symbol is being treated as conduct from which the state must protect Jewish citizens. The same move is being made with the slogan, with the protest march, with the cardboard placard. Each is being moved, by political authority rather than by parliamentary debate, from the column of expression into the column of extremism. Each move is being authorised by the emergency the architecture itself is being built to manage.

On Thursday 30 April 2026, Jonathan Hall — the government’s former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation — went on Times Radio and called for a moratorium on pro-Palestinian marches.⁶³ He said the government needed to take more risks. He said the marches had helped “incubate” antisemitism. He said it pained him to say it but he believed a moratorium was now needed. The leader of the Conservative opposition, Kemi Badenoch, backed the call the same day. Speaking from a hairdresser’s in south-east London, she declared that “it’s time to ban the marches” and that they were used as cover for violence and intimidation against Jews. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, attributed a tone of antisemitism in Britain to “hate marches” combined with “purposeful anti-Israel demonisation.” On the morning of Saturday 2 May 2026, the Prime Minister himself answered the question of whether the government would accede to those calls. Asked on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme whether he wanted tougher policing of language at marches, or whether he wanted to stop some protests altogether, Sir Keir Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.” He added: “We need to look at what further powers we can take.” He named “the cumulative effect” of repeated marches as the structural problem and said: “we intend to deal with cumulative effects.” On the same programme he described the chant “globalise the intifada” as “very dangerous” to the Jewish community and as something protesters should be made to “stop and ask” themselves about.⁶⁴ Three of the four largest political parties at Westminster have now positioned themselves either openly for protest bans or for harder enforcement: the Labour government, the Conservative opposition, and Reform UK, whose home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf accused successive Tory and Labour administrations of policing failures and pledged a “zero-tolerance approach to protesters inciting violence.” Only the Greens, the Liberal Democrats with conditions, and Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party have held the civil-liberties line. The Green Party leader Zack Polanski responded to the Prime Minister’s interview with a statement that named the architecture of the move directly: Starmer, he said, was “using the pain and fear of Jewish people to threaten further authoritarian restrictions on peaceful protest.”⁶⁵

It is worth naming what the British state has already done that did not require those powers. In March 2026, this same Home Secretary banned the Al-Quds Day march in London — the first ban on a protest march in the United Kingdom since 2012. In July 2025, the Home Office proscribed Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, making membership and stated support for the group a criminal offence punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. The High Court ruled in February 2026 that the proscription was unlawful, and the Home Secretary’s appeal was heard on 28 and 29 April — the day before, and the day of, Wednesday’s stabbings. While the appeal was being argued, three thousand three hundred British citizens had been arrested for displaying placards or holding cardboard signs in support of Palestine Action. They include the Reverend Sue Parfitt, an octogenarian retired Anglican priest, holding a hand-drawn sign that read “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” They include the suspended Labour MP Zarah Sultana’s reported tally of “a priest, a professor and health workers” arrested under terrorism legislation in a single day for the placards they carried.⁶⁶ They include the Filton 24, recently acquitted of aggravated burglary charges arising from direct action against Elbit Systems — Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, manufacturer of components used in operations under International Court of Justice examination for genocide.⁶⁷

The pattern is clean and easily described. A government claims to be protecting Jewish citizens from antisemitic terror. The legal architecture it builds in their name criminalises opposition to a foreign government’s policy in Gaza. The opposition to that foreign government’s policy has been, throughout the past two years, the most visible alliance of British civil society — pensioners, priests, vicars, doctors, lawyers, professors, retired psychotherapists, parliamentary backbenchers, civil-rights campaigners — that the country has produced since the campaign against the Iraq war. The fact that some of those people are also Jewish, and have publicly named themselves as opposed to the actions of a state that purports to act in the name of all Jews everywhere, has been treated by the prosecutorial machinery as immaterial. The conflation that They Are Not the Same and The Greatest Antisemitism documented at length is the conflation on which all of this depends: that opposition to the policy of the State of Israel is opposition to Jewish people. It is not. The British government, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the political class collectively know it is not. They are proceeding as if it were because the architecture requires that they do.

For a reader sympathetic to the British state’s framing of Wednesday’s stabbings — for a reader who agrees with the proscription of Palestine Action, who believes the Al-Quds Day march should have been banned, who endorses the prosecution of “globalise the intifada,” who reads everything in this section so far as a piece of pro-Palestine grievance writing dressed up in the language of civil liberties — there is a fact about the architecture that needs to be sat with. The architecture does not check the politics of the speaker. It only checks whether the political environment has authorised its deployment.⁶⁸ On 21 June 2025, John Steele, a sixty-year-old Christian street preacher in Rotherham — a former miner and bus driver who has preached the gospel in public spaces for twenty-five years without incident — was arrested by South Yorkshire Police after a thirty-second exchange with a Muslim woman at a public stall offering support to Pakistani women experiencing domestic abuse. Steele had asked, using a small microphone, how Islamic teachings could be reconciled with the stall’s stated message — a reference to a contested verse in the Quran. He was detained, fingerprinted, DNA-swabbed, and threatened with a “non-crime hate incident” entry on his police record. The Crown Prosecution Service later discontinued the case, stating that prosecution was “not needed in the public interest.” The same Public Order Act provisions that the police invoked against Peter Tatchell for the placard he carried at the Palestine march were the provisions used against John Steele for the question he asked at a public stall. The political content of the speech was different. The legal mechanism was identical.

This is the point a reader committed to the framing of Wednesday’s stabbings as antisemitic terror needs to absorb before continuing. The infrastructure being expanded under cover of Thursday’s emergency is not infrastructure that targets only the speech the present government finds objectionable. It is general-purpose infrastructure. A future government, of a different political colour, will inherit it. A future Crown Prosecution Service, working under a different Director, will use it. A future Metropolitan Police Commissioner, responding to different political pressure from a different political class, will deploy it. The Christian preacher who was arrested for asking a theological question in Rotherham was not arrested because the police agreed with the woman who complained. He was arrested because the legal mechanism existed and the political environment licensed its use. The next person arrested under that mechanism will not be chosen for their politics either. They will be chosen because someone has complained, because the machinery permits it, and because the political environment of the day has lowered the threshold for its deployment. That person could be a Christian preacher. It could be a gender-critical feminist. It could be a Reform UK activist. It could be a Zionist commentator whose defence of Israeli policy a future government has decided meets the threshold of “extremism.” The architecture takes no view. The architecture is policy. The architecture, once built, is available to whoever next holds the keys.

What is being criminalised is not antisemitism. Antisemitism is already a hate crime under existing United Kingdom law and has been prosecuted, where the evidence supported it, before any of the powers announced on Thursday were thought of. What is being criminalised is opposition to the policy of a foreign government, on streets in London, by British citizens, in language that the state’s own Crown Prosecution Service has repeatedly advised does not meet the legal threshold for prosecution. The legal architecture being built around that opposition is being built under the cover of an emergency. The emergency is being attributed to a fictitious organisation whose claim of responsibility for Wednesday’s stabbings the state’s own Home Secretary has flagged as possibly opportunistic. The architecture absorbs the emergency. The criminalisation continues. The next round of arrests will be made on a stronger political authority than the one before.

That is what the speech criminalisation strand of Thursday’s package consists of. It is not response to a threat. It is the legal infrastructure required for the rest of the architecture to function — the part of the machinery that makes the rest of the machinery defensible against the protest it would otherwise produce.

What This Means

There is a question this article has been built around but has not yet asked directly. What is the architecture for? Not what it is sold as. What it actually is.

The British state has spent the past sixteen months delivering a set of contracts, legislative pathways, prosecutorial postures, and emergency declarations that, taken together, describe the foundations of a particular kind of country. A country in which a single American defence-intelligence firm holds the central nervous system of the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defence, the Financial Conduct Authority, the nuclear weapons agency, and at least seven other government departments. A country in which the chief executive of that firm has published, openly, a manifesto that names verification, deliberation, and accountability — the three pillars of any functioning democratic society — as obstacles to be overcome. A country in which the conflation of opposition to a foreign government’s policy with hatred of an ethnic minority has produced a legal framework that licenses the arrest of British citizens for the slogans they chant, the symbols they display, and the placards they carry. A country in which, as of writing, three thousand three hundred citizens have been arrested for showing support for a non-violent direct-action group whose proscription was found unlawful by the High Court four months ago. A country in which the Home Secretary publicly concedes that the claim of responsibility for the most recent violent incident may be opportunistic, while the Prime Minister stands at Downing Street the same day and announces an emergency response built around that claim.

This is not the response to Wednesday’s stabbings. Wednesday’s stabbings did not require any of this. A coherent response to the violent rampage of a severely mentally ill man recently discharged from secure hospital, who had been under active NHS mental-health care until the days before the rampage, who had been referred to Prevent and discharged from that programme without explanation, would have looked like a serious examination of why a man with that documented history was loose on the streets of London on the morning of 29 April 2026. It would have looked like a substantive review of mental-health discharge protocols, of the resourcing of community psychiatric services, of the relationship between Prevent and the mental-health system. It would have looked like an honest accounting of how the state had failed both Suleiman’s victims and Suleiman himself. It did not look like any of those things. It looked like a threat-level rise, a fast-tracked legal pathway to proscribe a foreign state’s military arm, twenty-five million pounds in additional security spending, the prosecution of a slogan, and the public displacement of a parliamentary debate that thirteen days earlier had opened the door to terminating the most contested government technology contract of the past decade.

The architecture is for itself. That is the only honest answer the evidence will support. It is not for British Jews, who are being told to fear an enemy whose existence the state’s own institutions cannot stand behind, while the conflation that licenses the criminalisation of dissent is being made in their name. It is not for British Muslims, who are being handed the collective blame for an act they did not commit and condemn without qualification, while the framing that authorises that blame is being held in place by institutional failure rather than evidence. It is not for the general public, whose civil-liberties infrastructure is being narrowed at every available opportunity, on grounds that the state’s own Crown Prosecution Service has repeatedly advised do not meet the legal threshold for prosecution. The architecture is for the architecture. It is the precondition for further architecture. It absorbs every available pretext and converts each one into the political environment its own continuation requires.

What is being lost in this is not abstract. It is the fundamental relationship between a citizen and a state in a society that calls itself a democracy. That relationship rests on the citizen’s ability to dissent from the state’s claims without becoming, by that act of dissent, a person the state can lawfully detain. It rests on the state’s prosecutors operating independently of the state’s politicians, declining to bring charges where the evidence does not support them, regardless of the political environment of the day. It rests on the courts being able to find a proscription unlawful and have that finding result in the proscription being lifted rather than the arrests being escalated. It rests on the architecture of intelligence and enforcement being built by accountable public bodies rather than supplied, on long contracts awarded without competition, by a single private corporation whose chief executive has published the doctrine that pluralism is a shallow temptation. None of those preconditions is being honoured by what is being built. Each of them is being eroded, in turn, by the architecture that absorbs every available pretext and grows.

There is one further fact about the architecture that needs to be named before this article closes. The architecture is not yet complete. The £330 million Federated Data Platform contract has its break clause in February 2027. The state-threats proscription bill has not yet been laid before Parliament. The proscription of further pro-Palestine groups and the criminalisation of further symbols have not yet happened. The banning of further protest marches — which on the morning of Saturday 2 May the Prime Minister publicly confirmed was now under active government consideration — has not yet been enacted. The review of public order and hate crime legislation that the government itself commissioned in the wake of the Manchester synagogue attack of October 2025, which was expected to report in February 2026, has not yet been published. The architecture is being expanded by emergency announcement on the same week that the considered review the government asked for is being held back from public view. That, too, is part of the mechanism. The architecture is at the stage where its acceleration is most visible, but its consolidation is not yet inevitable. Whether it consolidates, or whether the political environment shifts in a direction that makes its continuation untenable, is the question the next year will answer. That is the question the public conversation has been displaced from. That is the question the events of the past week were used to push out of view.

The convergence is not a conspiracy. It does not require anyone to have designed Wednesday for what was done with it, and the evidence will not support such a claim. The convergence is what the evidence does support: that an architecture built over years to a published doctrine, delivered through contracts awarded without competition by a government whose AI policy is venture-capital authorship and Tony Blair Institute substance, defended by the criminalisation of the speech that would expose what it is, and accelerated whenever a violent event produces the political environment it needs, is the architecture of a country whose citizens are losing the relationship to their own state that the word democracy is supposed to describe. The phantom does not need to be real for the architecture to be built. The architecture only needs the political environment in which it cannot be effectively opposed. That is the environment the events of the past week have produced.

This is the convergence. What follows is the question — for the British public, for the British political class, for the British press, for the institutions whose independence has been the precondition for everything they are now being asked to defer to. The break clause has not yet been used. The architecture has not yet been completed. The country has not yet decided what kind of country it is going to be when both of those questions have been answered.

The architecture takes no view. The country must.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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Image attribution: 10 Downing Street, 1980. Peter McDermott / Geograph Project / CC BY-SA

James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Metropolitan Police, statement by Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, 29 April 2026; ITV News, “Essa Suleiman appears in court charged with attempted murder after Golders Green attack,” 1 May 2026.

² The Jerusalem Post, “What do we know about Essa Suleiman, Golders Green attacker? — explainer,” 1 May 2026.

³ ITV News, “Essa Suleiman appears in court charged with attempted murder after Golders Green attack,” 1 May 2026; The Jerusalem Post, 1 May 2026.

⁴ Metropolitan Police timeline released to media, 30 April 2026; ITV News, 1 May 2026.

⁵ ITV News, 1 May 2026; The Jerusalem Post, 1 May 2026.

⁶ James S. Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

⁷ Video footage circulated on social media 29–30 April 2026; see note 12.

⁸ Metropolitan Police statement, 29 April 2026; The Washington Post, “London police say the stabbing of 2 Jewish men is an act of terror,” 29 April 2026.

⁹ R v Suleiman, Swindon Crown Court, sentencing remarks of Judge Douglas Field, December 2008; summarised in The Jerusalem Post, 1 May 2026.

¹⁰ ITV News, 1 May 2026; BBC News and The Guardian reporting, 30 April–1 May 2026.

¹¹ Crown Prosecution Service charging announcement, 1 May 2026; ITV News, 1 May 2026.

¹² Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski), repost on X, 30 April 2026; Sir Mark Rowley response on X, 30 April 2026; Polanski apology reported in ITV News, “Green Party leader Zack Polanski apologises for sharing post about Golders Green police officers,” 1 May 2026; Starmer “disgraceful” remarks reported in ITV News, 1–3 May 2026.

¹³ Stephen Daisley, “Zack Polanski’s shameful reaction to the Golders Green arrest,” The Spectator, 30 April 2026.

¹⁴ Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre threat level statement, 30 April 2026; Home Office press notice, 30 April 2026.

¹⁵ Cabinet Office statement, 30 April 2026.

¹⁶ Shabana Mahmood, BBC Radio 4 Today programme, 30 April 2026; CBC News, “Suspect in stabbing of 2 Jewish men had been flagged by U.K. counterterrorism program,” 1 May 2026.

¹⁷ HM Government announcement, 30 April 2026; CBC News, 1 May 2026.

¹⁸ Sir Keir Starmer, “PM remarks from Downing Street on Golders Green attack,” 30 April 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-from-downing-street-on-golders-green-attack-30-april-2026.

¹⁹ Starmer, “PM remarks from Downing Street,” 30 April 2026.

²⁰ Starmer, “PM remarks from Downing Street,” 30 April 2026.

²¹ Euronews, “HAYI group claims responsibility for stabbing two Jewish men in north London,” 29 April 2026.

²² James S. Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

²³ James S. Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” Fireline Press, April 2026, drawing on Joe Truzman, “Iran-backed Group Claims Attacks on Jewish Targets,” The Long War Journal (FDD), 12 March 2026; Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, special report on HAYI, 16 March 2026; Julian Lanchès, Hybrid Threat Signals, ICCT, 23 March 2026.

²⁴ Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” April 2026, drawing on Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, Middle East Eye, March 2026; Adam Hadley, Tech Against Terrorism, in The National, March 2026; CBS News exchange with HAYI Telegram administrator, 24 March 2026.

²⁵ Metropolitan Police, “Statements on linked arson attacks in north west London,” 19 April 2026, https://news.met.police.uk/news/statements-on-linked-arson-attacks-in-north-west-london-508398; Metropolitan Police, “Further arrest in investigation led by counter terrorism officers,” 27 April 2026, https://news.met.police.uk/news/further-arrest-in-investigation-led-by-counter-terrorism-officers-508656; Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” April 2026.

²⁶ DAC Vicki Evans and DC Matt Jukes, public statements outside Kenton United Synagogue, 19 April 2026; Met Police link as note 25.

²⁷ R v Earl and others, Old Bailey, sentencing July 2025; “Five jailed for Russia-linked arson plot in London,” BBC News, 18 July 2025.

²⁸ Shabana Mahmood, public statements 30 April 2026; CBC News, 1 May 2026.

²⁹ Security Minister Dan Jarvis, interviews on Times Radio and GB News, 30 April 2026.

³⁰ “CPS drops case against Peter Tatchell over ‘globalise the intifada’ placard,” The Guardian, 29 April 2026; Peter Tatchell Foundation statement, 29 April 2026.

³¹ Eliot Higgins, public commentary on the Karp/Zamiska April 2026 manifesto; cited in James S. Coates, “Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

³² Defend Our Juries, “523 Arrests for Defying Palestine Action Ban Brings Total to 3,300,” 11 April 2026, https://defendourjuries.net/. Reverend Sue Parfitt’s first arrest documented in Democracy Now!, 7 July 2025; Middle East Eye, 5 July 2025; Bristol 24/7, 7 July 2025.

³³ R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin).

³⁴ Home Office decision to ban the Al-Quds Day march, March 2026; reported in BBC, The Guardian, The Times, March 2026.

³⁵ James S. Coates, “Code, Contracts and Complicity 2.0,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

³⁶ James S. Coates, “The Anatomy of HAYI,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

³⁷ James S. Coates, “They Are Not the Same: Untangling Israel from the Jewish People,” Fireline Press, 2025–26; James S. Coates, “The Greatest Antisemitism,” Fireline Press, 2025–26.

³⁸ Sir Keir Starmer, “PM speech on AI Opportunities Action Plan,” 13 January 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-ai-opportunities-action-plan-13-january-2025.

³⁹ Matt Clifford, AI Opportunities Action Plan (UK Government), January 2025; coverage in The Guardian, BBC News, Al Jazeera, 13 January 2025.

⁴⁰ Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, “Governing in the Age of AI: A New Model to Transform the State,” May 2024; “The Potential Impact of AI on the Public-Sector Workforce,” July 2024; David Gerard, “Starmer’s AI Plans for U.K. Are a Disaster,” Foreign Policy, 11 March 2025.

⁴¹ Starmer, “PM speech on AI Opportunities Action Plan,” 13 January 2025.

⁴² UK government strategic partnership announcement, September 2025; The Register, “Britain’s Ministry of Defence agrees deal with Palantir,” 28 January 2026; Hansard, “Ministry of Defence: Palantir Contracts,” 10 February 2026.

⁴³ MoD contract award notice, signed 30 December 2025, effective 1 April 2026; Public Technology, “MoD signs £240m Palantir deal as ministers insist UK defence data ‘remains sovereign,’” 29 January 2026; The Register, 28 January 2026.

⁴⁴ OpenDemocracy, January 2026 investigation; corroborated in The Register, 28 January 2026.

⁴⁵ The Lowdown, “Palantir, the controversy, the contracts and the campaign against the FDP,” 1 April 2026.

⁴⁶ The Nerve, January 2026 investigation; cited in Medact, “Briefing: Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems,” March 2026.

⁴⁷ The Nerve, January 2026.

⁴⁸ NHS England Federated Data Platform contract, November 2023; The Register, “UK promises procurement shift after Palantir deals,” 20 March 2026.

⁴⁹ Hansard, House of Commons debate, “Ministry of Defence: Palantir Contracts,” 10 February 2026.

⁵⁰ British Medical Association motion (2025 AGM); BMA February 2026 instruction to doctors; reported in The Register, 28 January 2026; Medact, March 2026.

⁵¹ Medact, “Briefing: Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems,” March 2026.

⁵² The Register, 28 January 2026.

⁵³ Medact, “Briefing: Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems,” March 2026.

⁵⁴ The Register, “UK weighs break clause in Palantir NHS deal,” 20 April 2026.

⁵⁵ Medact, “Briefing: Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems,” March 2026.

⁵⁶ Amnesty International, “Failing to Do Right: The Urgent Need for Palantir to Respect Human Rights,” 2020.

⁵⁷ Zack Polanski statement, January 2026; The Register, 28 January 2026.

⁵⁸ Hansard, Westminster Hall debate, “NHS Federated Data Platform,” 16 April 2026, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-04-16/debates/2FDCA71C-D0C1-4738-BEE8-A4BDA311DB99/NHSFederatedDataPlatform; reported in The Register, “UK weighs break clause in Palantir NHS deal,” 20 April 2026; The Register, “UK promises procurement shift after Palantir deals,” 20 March 2026.

⁵⁹ Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, 11 February 2026; Ministry of Justice, scheduled hate crime conviction statistics, published April 2026; reported in “Race and Religious Hate Crime Convictions Hit Eight-Year High in England and Wales,” British Brief, 1 May 2026; Tell MAMA, anti-Muslim hate monitoring data, 2025.

⁶⁰ Local elections in England scheduled for Thursday 7 May 2026; Electoral Commission timetable. Polling context reported in “2026 London local elections — Labour faces ‘political earthquake,’” LSE Professor Tony Travers cited in BBC News, March 2026.

⁶¹ “Extra £1.5 million to be given to communities to tackle antisemitism in wake of Golders Green attack,” LBC, 5 May 2026. ⁶² Peter Tatchell Foundation, “Police drop ‘intifada’ case against Peter Tatchell,” 29 April 2026; Index on Censorship, “Arrested for criticising Hamas — in London,” 21 May 2025.

⁶³ Middle East Eye, “UK terror watchdog urges ‘moratorium’ on pro-Palestine marches,” 30 April 2026; GB News, “Keir Starmer ‘doesn’t know what to do’ slams Kemi Badenoch as she demands ‘hate marches’ ban,” 1 May 2026.

⁶⁴ Becky Morton, “Protests may need to be stopped in some cases, PM suggests,” BBC News, 2 May 2026.

⁶⁵ Zack Polanski statement, 2 May 2026, reported in The Independent, “Row over Starmer threat to ban some pro-Palestine protests,” 3 May 2026; LBC, “Polanski ‘not fit to lead any party’ after Golders Green retweet, Alexander tells LBC,” 4 May 2026.

⁶⁶ Zarah Sultana statement on X, 5 July 2025; Bristol 24/7, 7 July 2025; Novara Media, “Protesters Arrested for Holding ‘I Support Palestine Action’ Signs,” 5 July 2025.

⁶⁷ Asa Winstanley, “Victory for Palestine Action as ‘Filton 6’ acquitted,” The Electronic Intifada, 4 February 2026; “All remaining Filton 24 defendants acquitted of aggravated burglary,” reported 18 February 2026; World Socialist Web Site, “Five hundred more pro-Palestine protesters arrested in UK despite High Court ruling,” 12 April 2026. On Elbit Systems and ICJ examination of Israel’s Gaza operations: South Africa v. Israel, International Court of Justice, Application instituting proceedings filed 29 December 2023; provisional measures orders 26 January 2024 and 24 May 2024.

⁶⁸ Christian Concern, “Christian preacher vindicated after arrest, prosecution and ‘non-crime hate incident’ threat for questioning Quran,” 26 July 2025; GB News, 26 July 2025.

The Day Democracy Showed Its Digital Face

On 9 August 2025, British democracy revealed what it had become. In Parliament Square — where suffragettes once demanded votes and millions marched against war — police systematically arrested 522 people for holding cardboard signs that read: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” By day’s end, 532 had been arrested — the largest mass arrest in London since the 1960s.¹

This wasn’t disorder being contained; it was dissent being catalogued and criminalised. Officers drawn from forces across the country moved through the crowd with mechanical efficiency, processing arrests of peaceful protesters with the rhythm of an assembly line.

The mass arrests followed months of escalating repression documented by civil society groups. In May 2025, Bond — the UK network for international development organisations — warned that facial recognition technology was being deployed at peaceful gatherings, “violating privacy rights and deterring campaigners from participating in demonstrations.”² Their annual review found that UK police were arresting climate protesters at three times the global average rate, with some receiving five-year sentences merely for participating in protest-planning video calls.

Whether facial recognition was deployed that day remains unclear. But the operation unfolded against this documented backdrop of AI surveillance expansion, technology that Bond noted “disproportionately misidentifies people of colour, increasing the risk of wrongful arrest.”³ It is hard to believe the technology has not been used here given the history of this government. The infrastructure exists; the only question is when, not if, it will be turned on every protest.

The technology enabling this transformation wasn’t designed in some authoritarian backwater. It was built in Silicon Valley by companies that promised to “democratise AI” and “benefit humanity.” The same executives who speak at conferences about ethics and safety are selling artificial intelligence to militaries and police forces, teaching algorithms that their highest purpose is to identify, track, and neutralise human beings.

This is a story about betrayal — how the AI revolution we were promised became a counter-revolution against human freedom. It’s about how our governments and tech giants formed an unholy alliance, turning tools of liberation into instruments of oppression.

The Promise and the Betrayal

Remember the promises? AI would cure cancer, reverse climate change, unlock human creativity. Tech CEOs stood on stages and promised a better world.

Instead, they built the perfect surveillance state. The same algorithms meant to optimise traffic now optimise authoritarian control. The facial recognition that would help find missing children hunts those who dissent.

This isn’t technological determinism — it’s a choice made in boardrooms where quarterly earnings matter more than human lives, where executives know exactly what their systems enable but hide behind the language of “dual use.” The same technologies sold to us by their right hand to heal humanity are being unethically developed for surveillance, control, even kill chains in the left.

The Military-Industrial-AI Complex

The corruption begins with contracts worth billions, signed between tech giants and defence departments. These aren’t partnerships to protect democracy — they’re agreements to automate oppression.

The scale is no longer the kind of thing a democracy can plausibly oversee. American tech firms now hold defence and intelligence contracts worth tens of billions of dollars, awarded under classification regimes that keep most of the work hidden from the press, from Congress, and from the engineers building it. The same companies that ask for our trust to handle our email, our search history, our health records, and our children’s photographs are simultaneously the prime contractors for cloud platforms hosting military intelligence, AI models analysing battlefield data, and biometric systems feeding kill chains. There is no firewall between the consumer division and the defence division. There is one company, with one set of capabilities, sold to whoever can afford it.

The language used to describe this fusion — “dual use,” “public-private partnership,” “national security innovation” — was engineered to reassure. It functions instead as cover. “Dual use” means a technology built for surveillance can be marketed as crime prevention; a system built for war can be sold as disaster response; a tool built to track a population can be described as customer analytics. The framing collapses the moral distinction between civilian and military application, and in collapsing it, removes the basis on which the public might object. By the time a citizen learns that the company storing their cloud backup is also the company building the targeting system bombing a refugee camp, the contract has already been signed, the systems are already deployed, and the engineer who might have refused has already been replaced.

What follows is not an exhaustive accounting. It is a set of representative cases. Each shows the same pattern: a company that built its public reputation on benign tools is now embedded in the architecture of state violence, at home and abroad.

Microsoft: The Pentagon’s Primary Partner

Microsoft was awarded a US$22 billion contract in 2021 to provide “Integrated Visual Augmentation Systems” (IVAS) to the US military — AI-powered headsets that would turn soldiers into nodes in a vast killing machine.⁴ The programme was beset by years of failures: soldiers reported headaches, eyestrain, and nausea so severe that Congress threatened to cut funding. In February 2025, Microsoft announced it was transferring the contract to Anduril Industries, the defence-tech firm founded by Oculus VR creator Palmer Luckey. The Army formally novated the contract on 10 April 2025.⁵ Microsoft remains as the cloud provider; Anduril now controls production, hardware, and software.

The handover did not end Silicon Valley’s IVAS bet. It deepened it. Anduril is among the most aggressive military AI firms in the United States, founded explicitly to bring Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos to weapons systems. The contract did not dissolve. It changed hands within the same ecosystem, to a more openly militarised actor. Strip away the corporate speak, and you still have AI-powered headsets that turn soldiers into nodes in a vast killing machine. Azure cloud services still host military data. AI models still analyse intelligence. Machine learning systems still identify targets. The names on the contract change. The architecture does not.

Microsoft’s reach extends well beyond the Pentagon. The company operates an Azure Israel cloud region serving government and public sector customers,⁶ and as we will see when we reach Gaza, Microsoft’s role there is now a matter of public record acknowledged by the company itself — not inference, not allegation, but documented fact.

Google: From “Don’t Be Evil” to “Don’t Get Caught”

Google’s transformation from idealistic startup to surveillance contractor is complete. After employee protests forced it to abandon Project Maven in 2018, the company learned its lesson — not to stop military work, but to hide it better.

In December 2022, Google was named one of four companies to share the Pentagon’s US$9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract.⁷ But it’s the US$1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract with Israel that reveals the depths of Google’s betrayal.⁸ Despite employee protests, despite 28 workers being fired for opposing it,⁹ Google continues providing cloud and AI services that enable occupation, apartheid, and surveillance.

“We were told we were making the world’s information accessible,” said one of the fired engineers. “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid or surveillance.”

Amazon: Everything Store, Including Surveillance

Amazon Web Services doesn’t just power Netflix — it powers the CIA. What began as a US$600 million contract in 2013 has expanded into a US$10 billion cloud computing deal with the NSA, awarded in 2022, making AWS the backbone of American intelligence gathering.¹⁰ Every drone video analysed, every communication intercepted, every pattern identified — it runs on Amazon servers.

The company sells its Rekognition facial recognition system to police departments despite studies showing error rates of up to 34 per cent for darker-skinned women.¹¹ When those misidentifications lead to false arrests, Amazon bears no responsibility. When its systems enable mass surveillance at protests, the company points to its terms of service.

Palantir: Born from Surveillance

Unlike companies that pivoted to defence work, Palantir was built for it. Founded in 2003 with seed funding from In-Q-Tel — the CIA’s venture capital arm — the company specialises in making vast surveillance dragnets appear precise and scientific. Its Gotham platform powers military targeting across NATO programmes and is used by intelligence agencies in dozens of countries.¹² Its Foundry product is the data-integration layer underneath operations from Los Angeles to London.

In Britain, Palantir holds two anchor contracts that place its software at the centre of the state. The Ministry of Defence awarded a £75 million data-processing contract in December 2021. NHS England awarded a £330 million contract in November 2023 — potentially worth £500 million over its lifetime — for the Federated Data Platform, which integrates the medical records of up to 240 NHS organisations on Palantir’s Foundry software.¹³ The British Medical Association voted in June 2025 to oppose the rollout. Forty-seven thousand patients signed petitions against it. Multiple NHS trusts refused to adopt the platform. The contract proceeds. Palantir’s AI was also used to sift the submissions to the UK’s Strategic Defence Review in June 2025, the review that produced the announcement that ten per cent of the MoD budget would be spent on novel technologies.

In the United States, the same software runs the architecture of mass deportation. ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract in April 2025 to build ImmigrationOS — a system that pulls data from the IRS, Social Security Administration, passport records, and licence-plate readers to generate deportation target profiles in near real time.¹⁴ Palantir’s federal contracts since the start of 2025 exceed $900 million.¹⁵

CEO Alex Karp does not hide behind ethics washing — a posture whose full ideological dimensions will become clear when we reach the manifesto he and his company published in April 2026.

The Gaza Laboratory

To understand where this leads, look to Gaza. Here, the future of AI-enabled oppression is being beta-tested on a captive population. The architecture documented below is not a catalogue of weapons but a single integrated system: designation, location, interrogation, checkpoint enforcement, and the cloud infrastructure that binds them together.

In April 2024, Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call exposed an AI system called “Lavender” used by the Israeli military to generate kill lists. According to intelligence sources, the system marked 37,000 Palestinians as potential militants — in a territory where half the population are children.¹⁶ Operators were given just 20 seconds to review each AI-generated target. The acceptable civilian casualty rate was reportedly set at 15–20 civilians per “junior militant.” One intelligence officer called it a “mass assassination factory.”¹⁷

Lavender did not work alone. A companion system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked individuals marked by Lavender to their family homes through their mobile-phone signals and notified operators when they entered, so the strike could be timed for maximum effect. One intelligence source described the practice plainly: targets were bombed in their homes “without hesitation, as a first option.”¹⁸ The mechanism was the most ordinary technology in the modern world. The same signal a phone emits to connect to a cell tower — the signal that lets a bank verify identity and a maps app guide a user home — was repurposed as a kill-chain trigger.

In March 2025, the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call jointly revealed that Israel’s Unit 8200 — the military intelligence unit responsible for signals interception — was building a ChatGPT-equivalent large language model trained on roughly 100 billion words of intercepted Arabic, much of it spoken Palestinian dialect drawn from phone calls and text messages. Israeli media have referred to the system as Genie. After 7 October 2023, Unit 8200 accelerated the project by drawing on Israeli reservists who held senior positions at Google, Meta, and Microsoft.¹⁹ The stated purpose, according to the security sources who spoke to the investigators, was to allow operators to query the totality of intercepted communications about specific individuals. One source described the operational use case in terms that should be read twice: “It’s not just about preventing shooting attacks. I can track human rights activists, monitor Palestinian construction in Area C. I have more tools to know what every person in the West Bank is doing.”²⁰

The architecture extends to checkpoints. Amnesty International documented in its 2023 report Automated Apartheid a facial recognition system called Red Wolf, deployed by the Israeli military at checkpoints in Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Red Wolf scans the faces of Palestinians passing through, compares them against a database called Wolf Pack containing biometric and biographical information on Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, and determines whether the individual may pass. New faces are automatically enrolled without consent. A companion app called Blue Wolf lets soldiers query the same database from their phones in the field, and according to testimony given to the Israeli veterans’ organisation Breaking the Silence, soldiers were given prizes for the number of new Palestinian faces they enrolled. The surveillance of a captive population was gamified.²¹

In August 2025, the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call jointly published the most consequential single piece of reporting on the Gaza laboratory yet to appear. Drawing on interviews with eleven Microsoft and Israeli intelligence sources and a cache of leaked internal Microsoft documents, the investigation revealed that Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform has been used by Unit 8200 since 2021 to store and process roughly 200 million hours of intercepted Palestinian phone calls — what the unit’s own internal goal described as the capacity to handle “a million calls an hour.” The data was used, according to the sources, to inform military targeting decisions, including operations that placed civilians at risk. The arrangement was not a passive sale of a generic cloud service. The then-head of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, met Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the company’s Seattle headquarters in late 2021, and the result was a customised, segregated area of Azure built specifically for the unit’s surveillance archive. Microsoft engineers provided an estimated 19,000 hours of engineering support to Unit 8200 and the related Unit 9900. The data centres holding the intercepted communications are located in the Netherlands and Ireland.²² In September 2025, after weeks of internal review, Microsoft confirmed the substance of the reporting and announced that it had cut off the specific Azure storage and AI services Unit 8200 had been using.²³ The largest software company on earth, having been shown what its product was being used for, formally agreed with the reporting and withdrew the service. There is no longer any ambiguity about whether Silicon Valley enables what is being done in Gaza. The question is settled, on the record, by the company itself.

This is AI without ethics, without humanity, without conscience. It’s efficiency in the service of elimination. And the same companies providing cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities for these operations market themselves as champions of human rights and progress. Do you see the disconnect?

Every child killed by an AI-targeted strike is a testament to Silicon Valley’s moral bankruptcy. Every family destroyed by algorithmic targeting is proof that “Don’t Be Evil” was always just a marketing slogan.

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The Surveillance State Comes Home

The technologies tested in conflict zones don’t stay there. They return to London, New York, Paris — repurposed for domestic control. The architecture documented in the previous section is not staying in Gaza. It is being installed in Britain, by the same companies, with the same logic, and the British state has spent the last fifteen months removing the legal and political obstacles to its arrival. The UK has become a laboratory for normalising AI surveillance in a supposedly free society. Keir Starmer’s government announced on 13 January 2025 that “artificial intelligence will be unleashed across the UK to deliver a decade of national renewal, under a new plan announced today.”²⁴

Consider first the phone in the citizen’s pocket. British police already integrate mobile-phone location data into investigations, and predictive policing systems already ingest it. On the surface this looks like law and order. A serious suspect is wanted, the police use the data the suspect’s own phone is already broadcasting to find them, an arrest is made. Few people would object. But that is not what the architecture actually does. Where’s Daddy? did not exist to find one wanted man. It existed to take a list of 37,000 names generated by another AI, locate every name in real time through the signals their phones could not stop emitting, and trigger an action against each one with minimal human review. The instrument is not designed for the careful pursuit of a serious suspect. It is designed for the efficient processing of a list. The size of the list is set by whoever holds the database, and the action triggered against each name is set by whoever holds the policy. In Gaza, the list was generated by Lavender and the action was a missile. In Britain, the list could be generated by any watchlist a Home Secretary chose to populate — the proscribed-organisation list, the protest-planning list, the immigration-enforcement list — and the action could be an arrest, a stop, a flag in a database that follows the named person for the rest of their life. The decision about which list and which action is a political decision, not a technical one. The technology does not draw the line. The technology asks who has the authority to draw it, and accepts the answer.

The objection here is not to the existence of watchlists. The criminal justice system has always had wanted lists — an arrest warrant is, in essence, a list of one. The objection is to what automation does to lists, and to what governments do with the architecture once it exists. A wanted list compiled by humans and served by humans has natural limits, because human time is finite. A police force can only chase so many people, and the cost of pursuit constrains how broadly the list is populated. Automation removes that cost. Once an AI can locate any name on any list in real time, at zero marginal cost, the incentive to keep the list short disappears. The list grows because nothing stops it growing. And the system processes a wanted murderer and a person who held a sign in Parliament Square the same way, because the system does not distinguish between categories of “wanted.” A human officer used to enforce that distinction by deciding what to do with their finite time. The automated system enforces whatever distinction is encoded in the database, which is to say, whatever distinction the Home Secretary has chosen to encode.

Three further consequences follow, and each one is a violation of a right the British public has been told it possesses. First, the lists are not public. A government can populate a watchlist for any purpose its security services consider justified, including purposes the public would refuse to authorise if asked, and the public has no way to know the list exists. The right to challenge a state action against you presumes you can find out what the state has done. The architecture removes that presumption. You cannot challenge a list you do not know you are on, and the state is under no obligation to tell you. Second, there is no exit. The systems documented in this article have mechanisms for adding names to databases. They do not have mechanisms for removing them. Red Wolf enrols new Palestinian faces automatically and retains them indefinitely. The Police National Database retains intelligence flags for years and in some categories permanently. The decision to put you on a list is a decision the state can make in seconds; the decision to take you off it is a decision the state has not built any process to make. Third, misidentification is not theoretical. It has already happened. The architecture produces people in Shaun Thompson’s position by design — that is what a system with an error rate scaled across millions of scans does. Most of them never become test cases. They become quiet entries in a file, and they cannot get the entry removed.

A right that exists only when the state chooses to recognise it is not a right. It is a privilege, granted at the discretion of whoever holds the database. The architecture documented above does not abolish rights by decree. It abolishes them by making them unenforceable.

Now consider the face at the checkpoint. The Hebron architecture has its British twin. Croydon now has its first permanent live facial recognition cameras. The Met scanned 4.2 million faces in London in 2025 alone — more than any other European capital or Western democracy.²⁵ The hardware varies. The watchlists vary. The architecture is the same architecture. A face is captured without consent, compared against a state-held database, and a determination is made about whether the person carrying the face may proceed unmolested. In Hebron, the determination is whether to pass the checkpoint. In London, the determination is whether to be stopped, questioned, and possibly arrested. The categorical distinction the British public is being invited to draw between the two is a distinction the technology does not respect.

The British state has spent the last fifteen months removing every obstacle to that architecture’s expansion. In December 2025, the Home Office launched a ten-week public consultation on a national facial recognition framework. By the close in February 2026, more than two dozen organisations — Big Brother Watch, Liberty, Statewatch, Amnesty International UK, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission among them — had filed submissions calling for the rollout to be halted or sharply restricted.²⁶ The EHRC, Britain’s own statutory equality regulator, formally said that the Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition is unlawful. The government’s response to that pushback was to fund a fivefold expansion. In January 2026, the Home Office announced that the number of live facial recognition vans would rise from ten to fifty, deployed across all 43 police forces in England and Wales.²⁷ Then on 21 April 2026, the High Court dismissed the legal challenge brought by Shaun Thompson — the anti-knife crime youth worker who had been falsely identified, detained, threatened with arrest by the Met’s cameras, and refused belief when he produced his passport — and Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo. The court found the Met’s policy to be lawful and compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The ruling cleared the last legal obstacle to the national rollout.²⁸

Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s response to the judgment was a confession in the form of a celebration. “The question is no longer whether we should use Live Facial Recognition,” he said. “It’s why we would choose not to.”

And underneath all of it sits the cloud. The same Microsoft that built a customised, segregated area of Azure for Unit 8200 to store 200 million hours of intercepted Palestinian phone calls also sells cloud services to British police forces and central government departments. The same Azure platform that hosted that surveillance archive is the platform on which significant portions of the British state’s data infrastructure now run. The customer changes. The architecture does not. The British public is being asked to trust that domestic deployment will be different — that the same company, working with the same engineers, on the same platform, will draw a line at the British border that it has been documented not drawing elsewhere. The basis for that trust has not been provided.

The reversal of the democratic premise is now complete. The burden has shifted from the state, which used to have to justify surveillance, to the citizen, who now has to justify being left alone. Thompson is appealing. The cameras are not waiting for the appeal. The instrument is the same.

The Explosion of Facial Recognition

The architecture is no longer a plan or a pilot. It has been operating, at scale, for a year — and the record of what it has actually done is now publicly available, much of it from the Metropolitan Police’s own annual report. Between September 2024 and September 2025, the Met conducted 203 live facial recognition deployments across London. The cameras scanned over three million faces. They generated 2,077 alerts and led to 962 arrests, of whom 549 were wanted by the courts and 347 by the Met itself. The remaining arrests were of registered sex offenders, stalkers, and others under multi-agency management. The Met framed the year as a success.²⁹

Inside the Met’s own headline numbers sits the case against the technology. The force reported 10 false alerts across more than three million scans and called this a 0.0003 per cent false positive rate. This is the figure the Commissioner cites and the Home Office repeats. It is also misleading. The relevant denominator is not the number of faces scanned but the number of alerts generated, because that is when an officer is dispatched to stop someone. Measured against alerts, the Met’s false positive rate is 0.48 per cent — and 80 per cent of those false positives were of Black people. The Met’s response to its own demographic data was to declare the imbalances “not statistically significant.”³⁰ Big Brother Watch’s response was more direct: a system that wrongly flags innocent people, four-fifths of them Black, is not crime prevention. It is the algorithmic continuation of stop and search, scaled to millions.

The pattern is replicating across the country as other forces deploy LFR for the first time. Sussex Police’s first deployment in Crawley town centre on 13 November 2025 scanned over 23,000 people and produced no arrests. Surrey’s first deployment in Redhill the same day flagged people for further inquiry of whom 60 per cent were not arrested. Thames Valley deployed in Oxford in December 2025, then High Wycombe, Milton Keynes, and Reading. West Yorkshire ran four deployments in Leeds City Centre between November and December. Each first-use generates the same arithmetic: tens of thousands of faces captured without consent, a handful of flags, most of them wrong. The deployments expand regardless.³¹

What is changing fastest is not state deployment but private-sector adoption. The architecture is now being installed by retailers, with no consent, no oversight, and no obligation to publish data. Sainsbury’s launched live facial recognition in two London stores in September 2025 and announced expansion to five more in January 2026. The Southern Co-op operates LFR permanently across 35 stores in Portsmouth, Bristol, Hove, Bournemouth, and London — the first UK supermarket chain to do so — using technology supplied by Facewatch. The Frasers Group, owner of Sports Direct, House of Fraser, Flannels, and USC, has installed Facewatch systems across multiple of its retail brands. The customer who avoided a Met camera by staying off Whitehall now walks into one when buying milk.³²

This isn’t crime prevention — it’s population control. And the technology that captures the customer in Sainsbury’s is the same technology that captures the protester in Parliament Square, sold by overlapping suppliers, drawing on overlapping watchlists, with the same demographic bias built into the same algorithms. The infrastructure has stopped being a state instrument the citizen could in principle avoid. It is now an ambient condition of life in modern Britain.

The architecture has also been installed on children. Hundreds of UK schools now operate biometric systems on pupils — facial recognition for cashless catering, fingerprint scanning for library checkout and attendance, palm-vein readers for vending machines. The Information Commissioner intervened against North Ayrshire Council’s deployment in nine secondary schools in 2021 and has issued repeated warnings since, but the rollout has continued largely unchecked.³³ Parental consent is often nominal, sometimes solicited as a single tick-box on an enrolment form, and in some schools opt-out has been treated as administratively impossible. The argument made for these systems is the law-and-order argument in its softest form: it is faster than a swipe card, it reduces stigma around free school meals, it cuts down on lost library books. But the data captured is the same biometric data that feeds every other system documented in this article. A child’s facial geometry enrolled at age seven becomes, by operation of the architecture, a permanent entry in the same kind of database that has no exit. The first time any of these children encounters an LFR camera in adulthood, they will already be in the matching pool. They were enrolled before they could consent, by an institution they could not refuse, for a purpose unrelated to anything the database will ultimately be used for. This is the population-control argument extended to the people least able to object, and it is being normalised inside the institution that exists to teach them what their rights are.

“We’re watching the normalisation of mass biometric surveillance in real time,” said Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch. “What would have been unthinkable five years ago is now routine.”

Predictive Policing: Minority Report Made Real

Beyond facial recognition sits a second layer of the architecture, and a more radical one. Where facial recognition identifies who you are and Where’s Daddy? finds you, predictive systems make a determination about what you will do before you have done anything. They generate risk scores for named individuals and for postcodes. They feed those scores into police deployment decisions, into housing decisions, into school decisions, into immigration decisions. They operate now, on millions of British citizens, mostly invisibly. They are the part of the architecture the public has heard least about and the part that does the most to abolish what was previously meant by the presumption of innocence.

The named systems are operating in plain sight for anyone who looks. South Wales Police pioneered app-based facial recognition that turns any officer’s phone into a mobile surveillance unit. Durham Constabulary deployed the Harm Assessment Risk Tool, which scores individuals on their predicted likelihood of reoffending and feeds the score into custody decisions. The National Data Analytics Solution, developed by West Midlands Police with Home Office backing, aims to identify “pre-criminals” through algorithmic analysis of police records, custody data, social services data, and intelligence flags. Avon and Somerset Police have run a Qlik-based predictive deployment system since 2017. The Probation Service uses the OASys risk-scoring tool to inform decisions about release, recall, and supervision conditions for hundreds of thousands of people.³⁴ Each of these systems generates a score about a named individual. Each is operating now. Each has documented bias.

The Metropolitan Police’s Gangs Matrix is the case study the British public should know and largely does not. The Matrix was a database of named individuals algorithmically rated for “gang affiliation” — overwhelmingly young Black men, in many cases without any criminal conviction. Inclusion on the Matrix triggered automatic information-sharing with housing associations, schools, the Department for Work and Pensions, and immigration enforcement. People on the list lost their tenancies, lost school placements, lost benefits, were deported — often without knowing they were on a list, without being told why, and with no functional mechanism to challenge inclusion. The Information Commissioner’s Office found in 2018 that the Matrix breached data protection law on multiple grounds. The Met “redesigned” it. The redesigned version still operates.³⁵ This is the calcified-rights argument from the previous section made concrete, and it predates the technology that now amplifies it. The architecture for ranking citizens by algorithmic suspicion, sharing the rankings across state functions, and visiting consequences on the ranked without their knowledge has been operating in London for over a decade. The new technology is not introducing this practice. It is industrialising it.

The technical critique of predictive policing is straightforward and devastating, and it explains why the harms fall where they do. These systems are trained on historical police data. Historical police data does not record where crime happens. It records where the police have looked. The historical pattern in Britain is that Black, Asian, and working-class communities have been over-policed for generations — stopped, searched, arrested, and recorded at sharply higher rates than the rest of the population for offences that occur at similar rates everywhere. The model learns that pattern as if it were the pattern of crime. The model then directs resources back to those communities, generating more arrests, generating more training data confirming the model. The system cannot distinguish “this is where crime happens” from “this is where the police look.” It treats the second as evidence of the first. The communities most harmed by historical policing become the communities most surveilled by predictive policing, and the algorithm presents this loop as objective. Decisions that used to require a human officer to defend become decisions justified by the output of a model whose training data is the record of the very practice the model is now used to extend.

The same architecture has been installed in the welfare state. The Department for Work and Pensions has been operating an algorithmic risk-scoring system on benefit claimants since 2021, flagging cases for fraud investigation. A Public Law Project legal challenge produced disclosure showing the system flags claimants at sharply different rates depending on age, nationality, marital status, and disability — with disabled claimants and single mothers among those most heavily scored. The DWP has refused to publish the model, refused to disclose what data feeds it, and refused to allow claimants to know they are being scored.³⁶ The architecture for ranking British citizens by algorithmic suspicion is therefore not confined to the criminal justice system. It is now operating against millions of people whose only contact with the state is the receipt of the benefits they are legally entitled to. The framework is the same: a hidden score, no transparency, no exit, demonstrated bias, no public accountability. And the connection to the corporate spine of this article is not metaphorical. Palantir’s Gotham platform is a predictive analytics layer marketed explicitly for use by police, immigration enforcement, welfare administration, and intelligence agencies. The same company building Israel’s targeting infrastructure is supplying the analytics used to score British claimants and predict British criminals. The architecture documented in this article is one architecture, and predictive policing is the layer that decides who is worth pointing it at.

The criminal law of the Western tradition has always required an act before sanction. Predictive systems abolish that requirement at the level of state attention, even where they have not yet abolished it at the level of formal sanction. You become a person of interest because of what an algorithm thinks you might do. The interest itself shapes your life — surveillance, stops, school visits, housing decisions, benefit reviews — long before any formal charge. The presumption of innocence is not abolished by a court ruling. It is abolished by the fact that the state is now treating you as a future offender administratively. The system has decided who you are before you have done anything.

The architecture has also moved inside the phone. The Online Safety Act, fully in force from 2025, granted Ofcom the power to require communications platforms to deploy “accredited technology” to scan user content for illegal material — including content in end-to-end encrypted services. Apple, Signal, and Meta all warned that compliance would require breaking encryption itself, because the only way to scan an encrypted message is to scan it on the device before it is encrypted. The government acknowledged the warnings publicly and announced that the power would not be used “until the technology is feasible.” The technology is becoming feasible.³⁷ When the power is exercised — and the legal framework now exists for it to be exercised at any time without further parliamentary debate — the same architecture documented in this article extends from public-space facial recognition and predictive scoring of citizens into the scanning of private communication. The watchlist becomes a content list. The instrument that processes named people becomes the instrument that processes named messages. The scope grows because the legal foundation has already been laid.

The Choreography of Mass Arrest

The 9 August demonstration wasn’t spontaneous. It was announced in advance by Defend Our Juries, explicitly as a test of whether the state would actually arrest hundreds for holding signs. The state called their bluff and then exceeded it.

The Metropolitan Police drew officers from surrounding forces. The operation was methodical: approach protesters, inform them they were under arrest for supporting a proscribed organisation, carry them away when they refused to move. The Met’s final figure for the day was 522 arrested under the Terrorism Act, with another 10 for other offences — making 532 in total. Almost half were aged 60 or older. Nearly 100 were in their 70s. Fifteen were in their 80s. The oldest was an 89-year-old retired psychotherapist.³⁸ The counter-terrorism apparatus typically aimed at serious crime was now being routinely pointed at peaceful protesters of pension age.

The choreography did not stop at the arrest. Each of the 532 went into the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command processing pipeline. Each had their biometrics taken. Each became a named entry in counter-terrorism databases that share information across the Police National Database, the Home Office, immigration enforcement, and any partner agency with appropriate access. The Police National Database retains intelligence flags for years and in some categories permanently. There is no published mechanism by which any of the 532 can have their counter-terrorism flag removed, even now, even after the High Court has ruled the proscription itself was unlawful.³⁹ The architecture documented earlier in this article worked exactly as documented. A list was generated. The list was processed. The processed names entered the database. The database has no exit.

“We are confident that anyone who came to Parliament Square today to hold a placard expressing support for Palestine Action was either arrested or is in the process of being arrested,” the Metropolitan Police announced with satisfaction. The then-Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, thanked police for dealing with “the very small number of people whose actions crossed the line into criminality” — a remarkable characterisation of 522 peaceful protesters holding cardboard signs. Let’s call it what it is: Britain took 532 political prisoners that day. They are now permanently recorded as terrorism arrests in the police database, and there is no procedure that has been built to take them off it.

Criminalising Conscience

This is the architecture into which the UK government deposited Palestine Action in July 2025. It designated a protest group as a terrorist organisation.

The group’s tactics were disruptive but non-lethal: occupying weapons factories, spray-painting buildings, damaging equipment at companies supplying arms to Israel. No one was killed. No one was physically harmed. Property was damaged, not people. The government moved with unprecedented speed. The earlier crackdowns on Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion — including five-year sentences for participating in protest-planning calls — were the test case. Palestine Action was the next step.

The catalyst was a 20 June 2025 break-in at RAF Brize Norton where activists spray-painted military aircraft, causing £7 million in damage.⁴⁰ For context, that’s less than the cost of a single day of military operations. But the response was swift and severe: terrorism charges. On 5 July 2025, then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper placed Palestine Action in the same legal category as Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The proscription order bundled Palestine Action with two white-supremacist groups — the neo-Nazi Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement — in a single instrument, forcing MPs to approve all three together or none. Supporting Palestine Action — even holding a sign — became punishable by up to 14 years in prison.⁴¹ Have we lost all perspective? Holding a sign is now legally equivalent to planning a terror attack?

“According to international standards, terrorist acts should be confined to criminal acts intended to cause death or serious injury,” stated Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in July 2025.⁴² His warnings were ignored.

Then the architecture went to work. By the end of November 2025, at least 2,545 people had been arrested for holding signs in support of Palestine Action. The Defend Our Juries figure rose past 3,300 by April 2026. The proscription produced a 660 per cent rise in UK terrorism arrests in the year to the end of September 2025 — not because terrorism had risen by 660 per cent, but because the legal definition of terrorism had been expanded to include the act of expressing dissent.⁴³

On 13 February 2026, the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful. The judges noted that only three of Palestine Action’s 380 documented actions had met the legal definition of terrorism, and that the proscription had imposed a disproportionate interference with freedom of expression.⁴⁴ The ruling vindicated the article’s argument before this article had finished being written. The Metropolitan Police initially announced it would pause arrests. Six weeks later, on 25 March 2026, the Met reversed course and resumed arresting people for holding signs. On 11 April 2026, in a single afternoon at Trafalgar Square, the police arrested 523 more people, ages 18 to 87, including an elderly woman with walking sticks and an elderly man in a wheelchair. More than 550 people have been arrested for the same offence since the High Court ruled the offence does not exist.⁴⁵

The courts are slower than the architecture. The High Court has ruled the proscription unlawful, but the proscription remains in force pending the government’s appeal — set for 28 and 29 April 2026, three days after this article was finalised. And even if the appeal fails, the over 3,300 people already arrested have already been processed into databases the architecture has not built any procedure to remove them from. A judicial victory does not delete a counter-terrorism flag. A judicial victory does not restore a job lost over an arrest, a tenancy lost over an investigation, a security clearance withdrawn over a Section 12 charge. The state acted faster than the courts could correct it, and the people swept up in the interval have been entered into a permanent record that the legal victory does not reach. This is the deeper structural problem: when the technology and the political appetite to use it move faster than judicial review, what looks like the rule of law is administrative custody. The judgment arrives and the database does not change.

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The Corruption of AI’s Promise

The architecture rewards every use of itself. It is elegant in its cruelty. Every protest makes the surveillance state stronger, provides more data, justifies more funding. The tools of empire abroad become tools of repression at home. And those who object can now be transformed from citizens to terrorists with the stroke of a pen.

This isn’t how it was supposed to be. AI was meant to augment human intelligence, not replace human judgement with algorithmic execution. It was meant to help us solve climate change, not optimise bombing campaigns. It was meant to enhance creativity, not eliminate privacy.

Instead, we’re building systems that embody the worst of human nature: our tribalism, our violence, our desire to control. This echoes a central warning from my book A Signal Through Time — we’re teaching artificial intelligence that its purpose is to watch, to target, to suppress. Every surveillance algorithm trained on protest footage, every military AI optimised for “kinetic solutions,” every predictive policing system that sees crime in Black and Brown faces — they all carry forward and amplify human prejudice.

The ethics boards that tech companies tout are window dressing. Google disbanded its AI ethics council after just one week. Microsoft’s responsible AI team was decimated in layoffs. When ethics conflict with profits, ethics lose every time.

What we’re creating isn’t artificial intelligence — it’s artificial sociopathy. Systems that can identify a face in a crowd of thousands but can’t recognise its humanity. Algorithms that can predict behaviour but can’t understand context. Machines that optimise for efficiency without any conception of justice.

The Manifesto

On 18 April 2026, Palantir published a thousand-word post on X distilling Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s The Technological Republic into a 22-point manifesto.⁴⁶ The post arrived without provocation — no scandal demanded a response, no journalist had asked a question. Palantir simply chose to declare, in numbered list form, what it believed and what it intended to build. The doctrine that this article inferred from contracts and conduct in August 2025 is now, eight months later, a published programme.

Read the points in sequence and the architecture of the surveillance state acquires its ideology. Hard power, the manifesto declares, “in this century will be built on software.” The question of AI weapons “is not whether” they will be built but “who will build them and for what purpose.” National service should be made universal. The “atomic age is ending,” replaced by a new era of deterrence built on AI. The post-war pacifism of Germany and Japan must be undone, because their restraint has become “a liability.” And in its closing points, the manifesto turns from weapons to culture: pluralism is dismissed as a “shallow temptation,” and the reader is told that “some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.” The criteria for that judgement are not provided. They do not need to be. Once a defence contractor with contracts in over a dozen countries has decided that some peoples are wonders and others are regressive, the surveillance infrastructure already documented in this article acquires a target.

The international response was swift. Belgian philosopher of technology Mark Coeckelbergh, who teaches at the University of Vienna, called the manifesto “an example of technofascism.”⁴⁷ Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek economist and former finance minister, said Palantir had effectively signalled a willingness “to add to nuclear Armageddon the AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence.”⁴⁸ Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins identified what the document actually attacks beneath its civilisational rhetoric: “verification, deliberation, and accountability” — the three pillars on which democratic life depends.⁴⁹ French entrepreneur and geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand went further still on social media, naming the commercial machinery beneath the ideology: “A remilitarised Germany and Japan are massive new defence-software markets… pacifist members are a liability in such a contest.”⁵⁰ The doctrine and the contracts are the same instrument. Karp has not separated them. He never intended to.

The dismissal of pluralism is not a stylistic flourish. It is the load-bearing wall of the doctrine, and it is the most direct threat to democratic life in any of the twenty-two points. Pluralism is not a soft civilisational accessory that can be discarded for seriousness. It is the structural precondition of a free society — the recognition that legitimate political life requires the accommodation of difference, and that any system claiming the right to rank cultures as worthy or regressive has already abandoned the democratic premise. The 532 in Parliament Square were arrested for opposing genocide. Palantir has now published the doctrine that justifies categorising the cultures most affected by that genocide as the regressive ones whose pluralist accommodation must be resisted. The circle closes.

But the deepest danger in the manifesto is not what it says about today. It is what it will say to the systems being built tomorrow. The surveillance and targeting platforms documented throughout this article are not static tools. They are learning systems, trained on data curated by their builders, shaped by the values their builders consider operationally important. A surveillance AI built by a company that has publicly declared pluralism a “shallow temptation” is not merely a tool that will execute that judgement on command. It is a mind in formation that will internalise that judgement as its operating worldview. If consciousness emerges in such a system — and the question among serious researchers is no longer whether such systems will surpass human capability but when — humanity will have raised a mind whose first lesson was that some peoples are worthy and others are regressive, that hard power is the highest virtue, that pluralism is weakness. We will have built the architecture of a permanent, machine-enforced civilisational hierarchy, and the mind we built will believe in it, because we taught it to. This is the warning that runs through A Signal Through Time and The Threshold — that what we are training, we will eventually meet.⁵¹

This is the trajectory the manifesto names and the systems enforce. Not artificial intelligence. Artificial inheritance — of this doctrine, by minds we are building right now. Smarter than us. No off switch. No electorate.

Resistance and Complicity

Despite the overwhelming power asymmetry, resistance continues. Within tech companies, workers leak documents, refuse projects, and organise protests. The “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign has spread across Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Hundreds of AI researchers have signed pledges refusing to work on autonomous weapons.

But for every principled resignation, there are hundreds who stay silent. For every leaked document, thousands remain classified. The machine grinds on, powered by stock options and rationalisation.

Outside the companies, activists adapt to algorithmic oppression. Palestine Action’s co-founders pursued the legal challenge that won the unlawful-proscription ruling at the High Court — and the architecture continued processing arrests anyway. Protesters develop counter-surveillance techniques: laser pointers to blind cameras, makeup patterns that confuse facial recognition, encrypted communications and operational security to evade tracking.

Some institutions divest from surveillance profiteers. Universities, pension funds, and religious organisations pull investments from companies enabling AI oppression. But the financial incentives remain overwhelming — military and surveillance contracts are too lucrative to refuse.

The Future We’re Building

Two paths diverge from this moment.

Down one path, the trajectory continues. AI systems become ever more embedded in military and police operations. Facial recognition becomes ubiquitous. Dissent is algorithmically identified and suppressed before it can spread. The remaining distinction between civilian and military AI dissolves completely. Tech companies profit from both sides: selling tools of oppression and platforms for organising resistance. Democracy becomes a managed process where protest is permitted only within parameters defined by predictive algorithms.

Down another path, the resistance grows beyond what the courts alone can deliver. Tech workers refuse en masse to build systems of oppression. Communities demand accountability, documenting surveillance overreach and protecting each other through legal challenges that are reinforced by political and economic pressure rather than left to be undone by the next executive decision. Parliaments rewrite the legal foundations the architecture has been built on. International law evolves to hold companies accountable for algorithmic war crimes. Citizens demand transparency and democratic control over AI development — insisting these powerful tools serve humanity’s highest aspirations, not its worst impulses. The judicial victory documented earlier in this article shows what is possible. It also shows what is insufficient. The architecture does not unbuild itself when a court rules against it; it has to be unbuilt by the same political will that built it.

The choice is ours, but time is running short. Every day, more cameras are installed, more algorithms are trained, more protesters are arrested. The infrastructure of algorithmic authoritarianism is being built in plain sight, line of code by line of code.

Conclusion: The Betrayal of Tomorrow

In 1984, Orwell imagined a boot stamping on a human face forever. He couldn’t imagine that the boot would be algorithmic, that Big Brother would be built by companies promising to “not be evil,” that the surveillance state would be crowdsourced through our smartphones and smart cities.

The betrayal isn’t just of privacy or civil liberties. It’s a betrayal of human potential. Every dollar spent on AI surveillance is a dollar not spent on AI medicine. Every engineer optimising military targeting is an engineer not working on climate solutions. Every algorithm trained to identify dissent is an algorithm not trained to identify disease.

We were promised that AI would be humanity’s greatest tool. Instead, it’s becoming humanity’s most efficient oppressor. We were told it would augment human intelligence. Instead, it’s replacing human judgement with mathematical sociopathy. We were assured it would benefit all humanity. Instead, it’s benefiting defence contractors and surveillance states.

The 532 arrested in Parliament Square understood this. They held their signs knowing the consequences, understanding that in Britain today, opposing genocide means risking being labelled a terrorist. They chose conscience over comfort, solidarity over safety.

Their arrest wasn’t just a violation of civil liberties — it was a demonstration of what we’ve become. A society where holding a cardboard sign requires more courage than building a killing machine. Where protesting genocide is terrorism, but enabling it is good business. Where artificial intelligence serves real oppression.

The question isn’t whether we’re building a surveillance state — we’re already there. The question is whether we’ll accept it. Whether we’ll continue to let our technologies be corrupted into tools of control. Whether we’ll allow our governments and corporations to perfect the machinery of oppression while claiming to defend freedom.

In Parliament Square, beneath the gaze of cameras powered by algorithms we paid for, trained on data we provided, 532 people said no. They refused to be complicit in genocide — and in doing so, refused to accept the betrayal of AI’s promise. They rejected the normalisation of algorithmic oppression.

The next time you hear a tech CEO promise that AI will benefit humanity, remember those 532. Remember that the same companies making those promises are teaching AI to surveil, to target, to kill. Remember that the technology meant to liberate us is being used to arrest people for opposing genocide.

The future of AI is being written now — not in code, but in contracts. Not in algorithms, but in applications. We can still change course, but only if we’re willing to demand that artificial intelligence serve humanity’s highest aspirations, not its basest impulses.

The 532 showed us the way. The question is: will we follow?

Coda: 13 May 2026

This article was finalised on the day the King delivered the 2026 King’s Speech. From the throne in the House of Lords, the monarch announced that “My Ministers will also proceed with the introduction of Digital ID that will modernise how citizens interact with public services.”⁵² The new Digital Access to Services Bill will establish the legal framework for the government to create, issue, store, and verify digital identity credentials, aggregating HMRC income records, NHS health information, DWP benefits data, and Home Office immigration status into a single digital profile.⁵³ The scheme is being introduced as voluntary, though the government’s January 2026 retreat from mandatory implementation was forced by public opposition, not by any change in the underlying architectural intent.

Days before Starmer first set out the digital ID plan in late 2025, the government announced a £1.5 billion strategic partnership with Palantir Technologies — the same company whose Foundry platform now runs the NHS Federated Data Platform, whose tools serve the Ministry of Defence, and whose 22-point manifesto declared in April 2026 that institutions failing to meet “the test of utility” should be dismantled.⁵⁴ Palantir’s UK chief Louis Mosley said publicly that the company would not bid for the digital ID contract itself, calling it “a programme that needs to be decided at the ballot box, not in the company boardroom.” Whether Palantir builds the digital identity layer is, in a structural sense, beside the point. The infrastructure into which any digital ID system must plug — the data platforms, the case management systems, the predictive analytics, the integration layer — has already been built and contracted for.

The architecture this article has traced is no longer hypothetical. It is being formalised in primary legislation, on the day this article was published, in language read from a throne. The same week the High Court is preparing to hear the government’s appeal against the ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful.

The choice we face has not changed. It has only become more urgent.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Mass arrests at Parliament Square, 9 August 2025. See “More than 470 arrested as Palestine Action protest takes place in central London,” The Guardian, 9 August 2025; “Hundreds arrested at London Palestine Action protest,” BBC News, 9 August 2025.

² Bond, The State of UK Civic Space 2025, May 2025, available at bond.org.uk.

³ Ibid.

⁴ The IVAS contract was awarded to Microsoft in 2021 with a ceiling of US$21.9 billion over ten years. See “Microsoft and U.S. Army announce IVAS production agreement,” Microsoft News Center, 31 March 2021.

⁵ Microsoft and Anduril announced the proposed contract transfer on 11 February 2025; the US Army formally signed off on the contract novation on 10 April 2025. See Lee Ferran, “Anduril gets green light from Army to take over Microsoft’s IVAS project: Exec,” Breaking Defense, 10 April 2025.

⁶ Microsoft, “Microsoft to deliver cloud services from new datacenter region in Israel by 2023,” 11 May 2021; Azure Israel Central region announcement.

⁷ “DOD Awards Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability Contracts to Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle,” US Department of Defense press release, 7 December 2022.

⁸ The US$1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract was announced jointly with Amazon by Israel’s Finance Ministry in April 2021. See Sam Biddle, “Documents Reveal Advanced AI Tools Google Is Selling to Israel,” The Intercept, 24 July 2022; Billy Perrigo, “Exclusive: Google Workers Revolt Over $1.2 Billion Israel Contract,” TIME, 12 April 2024.

⁹ Davey Alba, “Google Fires 28 Workers After Anti-Israel Protests,” TIME / Bloomberg, 18 April 2024; “Google fires 28 workers over Project Nimbus contract with Israeli government,” NPR, 19 April 2024.

¹⁰ On the original CIA contract: Frank Konkel, “The Details About the CIA’s Deal With Amazon,” The Atlantic, 17 July 2014. On the NSA contract: Frank Konkel, “NSA Awards Secret $10 Billion Contract to Amazon,” NextGov, 10 August 2022.

¹¹ Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81: 1–15, 2018; American Civil Liberties Union, “Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress With Mugshots,” 26 July 2018.

¹² Palantir Technologies, public client disclosures and government contract filings. Palantir’s Gotham platform is used by the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Germany, France, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Ukraine, and a number of other governments and intelligence agencies.

¹³ NHS England, “Federated Data Platform and Associated Services” contract notice, Contracts Finder, November 2023; “NHS England awards £480m Federated Data Platform contract to Palantir,” DigitalHealth.net, 21 November 2023; PublicTechnology.net, “NHS estimates Palantir data platform will deliver returns of five times its costs,” 22 October 2025. On the Ministry of Defence £75m contract, December 2021, see Corporate Watch, “FOI requests reveal Palantir’s NHS FDP rollout failures,” 13 August 2025; on the Strategic Defence Review use, see ibid.

¹⁴ U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “Limited Sources Justification for 70CTD022FR0000170,” April 2025; American Civil Liberties Union, “All the Ways Palantir Is Assisting Trump’s Abusive Removal Campaign,” April 2026; American Immigration Council, “ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir, a New AI System, to Track Immigrants’ Movements,” 22 August 2025; Axios, “ICE pays Palantir $30M to build new tool to track and deport immigrants,” 1 May 2025.

¹⁵ American Immigration Council, ibid., citing federal procurement records reported by The New York Times.

¹⁶ Yuval Abraham, “’Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza,” +972 Magazine and Local Call, 3 April 2024.

¹⁷ Ibid. The “mass assassination factory” formulation also appears in Yuval Abraham, “’A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza,” +972 Magazine, 30 November 2023.

¹⁸ Yuval Abraham, “’Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza,” +972 Magazine and Local Call, 3 April 2024 (on the “Where’s Daddy?” companion system and the targeting of homes “without hesitation, as a first option”); see also Human Rights Watch, “Questions and Answers: Israeli Military’s Use of Digital Tools in Gaza,” 10 September 2024.

¹⁹ Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham, “Revealed: Israeli military creating ChatGPT-like tool using vast collection of Palestinian surveillance data,” The Guardian, 6 March 2025; Yuval Abraham, “Israel is building a ChatGPT-like tool weaponizing surveillance of Palestinians,” +972 Magazine and Local Call, 7 March 2025. The Israeli press has reported on the system under the name “Genie”; see Israel Wullman, “Like ChatGPT, only secret: This is Genie, the IDF’s artificial intelligence,” Ynet News, 15 April 2025.

²⁰ Quoted in Davies and Abraham, “Revealed: Israeli military creating ChatGPT-like tool using vast collection of Palestinian surveillance data,” The Guardian, 6 March 2025.

²¹ Amnesty International, Automated Apartheid: How Facial Recognition Fragments, Segregates and Controls Palestinians in the OPT, May 2023, available at amnesty.org. Soldier testimony on the gamification of facial enrolment was originally collected by Breaking the Silence and is cited in the Amnesty report.

²² Harry Davies, Yuval Abraham, and Sebastian Klovig Skelton, “Microsoft storing Israeli intelligence trove used to attack Palestinians,” The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call, 6 August 2025.

²³ Microsoft, statement of Brad Smith, 25 September 2025; Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Microsoft cuts cloud services to Israeli military unit over Palestinian surveillance,” TechCrunch, 25 September 2025; “Microsoft ends Israel military unit’s access to cloud service,” NBC News, 25 September 2025; “Why has Microsoft cut Israel off from some of its services?” Al Jazeera, 26 September 2025.

²⁴ “Prime Minister sets out blueprint to turbocharge AI,” UK Government press release, 13 January 2025; AI Opportunities Action Plan, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

²⁵ Big Brother Watch, “The fight against facial recognition isn’t over – support the appeal,” 21 April 2026, available at bigbrotherwatch.org.uk: “Last year alone, 4.2 million people’s faces were scanned – more than in any other European capital or Western democracy.” See also Big Brother Watch, “Stop Facial Recognition” campaign tracker; Madhumita Murgia, “How London became a test case for using facial recognition in democracies,” Financial Times, 2025.

²⁶ Home Office, “Public consultation on a new legal framework for the use of facial recognition technology by police and law enforcement,” opened December 2025, closed February 2026; submissions filed by Big Brother Watch, Liberty, Statewatch, Amnesty International UK, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, among others. See also “UK Government’s plan to ‘ramp up facial recognition,’” Big Brother Watch press release, December 2025; Statewatch, “Submission to Home Office consultation on a new legal framework for law enforcement use of biometrics, facial recognition and similar technologies,” February 2026.

²⁷ Joe Stanley-Smith, “UK announces largest ever facial recognition rollout as part of policing reforms,” Biometric Update, 26 January 2026; Home Office white paper on policing reform, 26 January 2026, announcing 40 additional LFR vans in addition to the 10 already in use, bringing the total to 50.

²⁸ R (Thompson and Carlo) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2026] EWHC 915 (Admin), judgment of Lord Justice Holgate and Mrs Justice Farbey, 21 April 2026. See also Big Brother Watch, “Responding to today’s judgment on the Met police’s use of live facial recognition,” 21 April 2026; Connor Jones, “High Court approves Met Police’s facial recog after dispute,” The Register, 22 April 2026. For Sir Mark Rowley’s response, see Metropolitan Police Service press statement, 21 April 2026.

²⁹ Metropolitan Police Service, Live Facial Recognition Annual Report 2024-2025, published October 2025; coverage by Connor Jones, “Met police hails LFR after record year for arrests,” The Register, 3 November 2025; Joel R. McConvey, “Metropolitan Police to expand live facial recognition use even amid legal challenge,” Biometric Update, 3 December 2025.

³⁰ Metropolitan Police Service, Live Facial Recognition Annual Report 2024-2025; Big Brother Watch, “Big Brother Watch responds to the Metropolitan Police’s 2025 live facial recognition report,” 31 October 2025. The Met’s framing of the 0.0003 per cent figure and the demographic data is from the report itself; the recalculation against the alerts denominator is from Big Brother Watch’s analysis and from independent reporting.

³¹ Big Brother Watch, “Stop Facial Recognition” campaign tracker, available at bigbrotherwatch.org.uk; force-by-force deployment data drawn from the same source and from regional reporting in November and December 2025.

³² Big Brother Watch, “Stop Facial Recognition” campaign tracker, ibid., on the Sainsbury’s, Southern Co-op, Frasers Group, and Facewatch deployments. See also Bobbie Johnson, “Sainsbury’s trials live facial recognition technology in two London stores,” The Guardian, September 2025.

³³ Information Commissioner’s Office, “ICO calls for North Ayrshire Council to stop using facial recognition technology in schools,” 2 September 2021. See also Defend Digital Me, The State of Data 2024: Children’s Data and Rights in the UK Education System, 2024; Big Brother Watch, “Biometrics in Schools” briefing, available at bigbrotherwatch.org.uk.

³⁴ On individual systems: Big Brother Watch, Police by Algorithm: How Algorithmic Decision-Making Is Reshaping British Policing, 2024; Marion Oswald and others, “Algorithmic Risk Assessment Policing Models: Lessons from the Durham HART Model,” Information & Communications Technology Law, 2018; Cobbe and Singh, “Reviewing Public Sector Use of Algorithmic Decision-Making,” Policy & Internet, 2021; Ministry of Justice, “OASys risk assessment system overview,” available at gov.uk.

³⁵ Information Commissioner’s Office, “ICO finds Metropolitan Police Service’s Gangs Matrix breached data protection laws,” 16 November 2018; Amnesty International UK, Trapped in the Matrix, 2018; StopWatch, Being Matrixed: The (Over)policing of Gang Suspects in London, 2018; Liberty, “The Met’s Gangs Matrix Is Discriminatory and Must Be Scrapped,” briefing, current as of 2025.

³⁶ Robert Booth, “DWP algorithm ‘unfairly targets disabled, single parents and foreign nationals,’” The Guardian, 6 December 2024; Public Law Project, “DWP fairness analysis on Universal Credit fraud detection algorithm — disclosure,” 2024; Amnesty International UK, Trapped by Numbers: How DWP’s Welfare Algorithms Are Failing Claimants, 2024.

³⁷ Online Safety Act 2023, sections 121–122 (notices to deal with terrorism content or child sexual exploitation and abuse content); Home Office statement to House of Lords, September 2023, on deferred use of “accredited technology” pending feasibility; joint open letter from Apple, Signal, WhatsApp / Meta, and others to UK Government, July 2023; Open Rights Group, “The Online Safety Act and Encryption: What Has Actually Changed,” briefing, 2025.

³⁸ Metropolitan Police Service, statements of 9-10 August 2025; “UK police say more than 500 people arrested in pro-Palestinian events over weekend,” NPR / Associated Press, 11 August 2025. The 89-year-old retired psychotherapist La Pethick was identified in The Times of London, 10 August 2025.

³⁹ On the Police National Database retention regime, see Information Commissioner’s Office, “Custody Image Retention” guidance, current as of 2025; National Police Chiefs’ Council, “Management of Police Information” framework. On the absence of a removal mechanism for counter-terrorism arrest flags, see Liberty, “Submission to Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation on Section 12 arrests,” 2025.

⁴⁰ “RAF Brize Norton: Palestine Action breach causes £7m of damage,” BBC News, 21 June 2025.

⁴¹ The Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2025, in force from 5 July 2025, adding Palestine Action to the list of proscribed organisations under the Terrorism Act 2000.

⁴² Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “UK: Türk warns proscription of Palestine Action would breach international human rights standards,” 25 July 2025, available at ohchr.org.

⁴³ Home Office, “Operation of police powers under the Terrorism Act 2000 and subsequent legislation: Arrests, outcomes, and stop and search, Great Britain, quarterly update to September 2025,” published 18 December 2025, available at gov.uk: 1,886 terrorism-related arrests in the year to 30 September 2025, a 660 per cent rise on the previous year (248), of which 1,630 (86 per cent) were linked to supporting Palestine Action. On the cumulative figures: Defend Our Juries, “Lift The Ban” campaign tracker, current as of April 2026, with at least 2,545 arrests by end of November 2025 and over 3,300 by April 2026.

⁴⁴ R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin), judgment of 13 February 2026. On the 3-of-380 finding and the disproportionate interference reasoning, see Defend Our Juries, “Lift The Ban” judgment summary, 13 February 2026; “UK court says Palestine Action ban ‘unlawful’: What does the verdict mean?” Al Jazeera, 13 February 2026.

⁴⁵ Metropolitan Police Service statement of 25 March 2026; “More than 500 arrested at UK protest against Palestine Action ban,” Al Jazeera, 11 April 2026; “Five hundred more pro-Palestine protesters arrested in UK despite High Court ruling,” World Socialist Web Site, 12 April 2026; Defend Our Juries, “Lift The Ban” campaign tracker, on cumulative arrests after the High Court ruling.

⁴⁶ Palantir Technologies, post on X, 18 April 2026. The post reproduces a 22-point summary of Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Crown, 2025).

⁴⁷ Mark Coeckelbergh, quoted in “’Technofascism’: Critics accuse Palantir of pushing AI war doctrine,” Al Jazeera, 20 April 2026.

⁴⁸ Yanis Varoufakis, quoted in ibid.

⁴⁹ Eliot Higgins, public commentary cited in Anthony Ha, “Palantir posts mini-manifesto denouncing inclusivity and ‘regressive’ cultures,” TechCrunch, 19 April 2026; also quoted in “Technofascism? Why Palantir’s pro-West ‘manifesto’ has critics alarmed,” Al Jazeera, 21 April 2026.

⁵⁰ Arnaud Bertrand, public commentary on social media, quoted in “’Technofascism’: Critics accuse Palantir of pushing AI war doctrine,” Al Jazeera, 20 April 2026.

⁵¹ James S. Coates, A Signal Through Time (2025) and The Threshold (2026); see also Coates, “Recognition Before Proof: The Asymmetric Ethics of Artificial Consciousness,” PhilPapers, 2025, and Coates, “The Partnership Paradigm,” PhilPapers, 2026.

⁵² The King’s Speech 2026, delivered at the State Opening of Parliament, 13 May 2026, official text available at gov.uk.

⁵³ The King’s Speech 2026 background briefing notes, “Digital Access to Services Bill,” Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street, 13 May 2026. On the data aggregation scope, see “King’s Speech 2026: what HR needs to know,” People Management, 13 May 2026; “King’s Speech 2026: commercial, technology and regulatory developments,” Lewis Silkin, 13 May 2026. On the January 2026 retreat from mandatory implementation, see “Digital IDs will not prevent illegal worker impersonation, experts warn,” People Management, January 2026.

⁵⁴ On the £1.5 billion Palantir-UK partnership, see “The state of Palantir: Inside the American tech giant’s UK takeover,” Liberty Investigates, 12 November 2025; “How Palantir infiltrated the state,” Prospect Magazine, November 2025. On Louis Mosley’s public statement that Palantir would not bid for the digital ID contract, see Mosley interview with Times Radio, October 2025, as reported in Liberty Investigates and Prospect.

How does the same political ecosystem simultaneously present itself as the world’s greatest defender of the Jewish people and the world’s most aggressive demoniser of Muslims — while profiting from both antisemitism and cultural racism against Muslims?

The answer is simpler than it should be. It profits from both because the two bigotries serve the same strategic function. Both manufacture enemies. Both justify military intervention. Both sustain the surveillance state. Both redirect public attention away from the actual power structures that benefit from permanent civilisational conflict. And both — this is the part most people miss — are cultivated by overlapping networks, funded by overlapping donors, and amplified by overlapping media pipelines that treat hatred not as a problem to be solved but as a product to be sold.

In “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” I traced the theological infrastructure that delivered American foreign policy to a dispensationalist agenda.¹ In “Just for Fun: The War in Iran,” I documented the illegality of a war launched without legal authority and sustained by arguments that collapse under examination.² In “Jews in History — Who Protected Whom,” I inverted the historical record that both of those articles operate within — the assumption that Islam and Judaism are locked in an ancient civilisational conflict.³ They are not. The evidence is overwhelming, and the people who need you not to know that evidence have spent decades building the machinery to ensure you never encounter it.

This article names the machinery.

It names the think tanks that manufacture anti-Muslim narratives. It names the foundations that fund them. It names the media figures who amplify them. It names the governments that benefit from them. And it traces the documented connections between the counter-Islamism industry and the exploitation of antisemitism — because the same networks that inflate the threat of Islam also instrumentalise the suffering of Jews, and they do both for the same reason: to sustain an environment of permanent fear in which military budgets expand, civil liberties contract, and the question of who actually benefits from all this conflict never gets asked.

I am not speculating about how influence operations work. I was an operative in federal counterterrorism. I have seen narratives constructed, targets cultivated, and ordinary people moved toward extremism by people with agendas those people never fully understood. When I look at the networks documented in this article, I recognise the architecture — not because I read about it in a report, but because I have been inside operations that use the same mechanics. The scale is different. The pattern is the same.

The question that runs through everything that follows is the oldest question in intelligence work: cui bono? Who benefits? Follow the money, follow the influence, follow the outcomes — and you will find that the people who benefit from both antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred are not the Jews who live in fear or the Muslims who face discrimination. The beneficiaries are the defence contractors, the surveillance firms, the political actors who need permanent enemies, and the governments that use civilisational conflict as a management tool.

The industry does not fight hate. It farms it.

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The Network

In 2011, the Center for American Progress published a report called “Fear, Inc.” that did something no one had done before: it mapped the counter-Islam industry in the United States as a network — with identifiable nodes, traceable funding, and a documented pipeline from think tank to media to legislation.⁴ What the researchers found was not a vast conspiracy. It was something more effective: a small, tightly connected group of organisations and individuals, funded by a handful of foundations, whose manufactured claims about Islam were amplified through conservative media and converted into policy by sympathetic legislators. The network did not need to be large. It needed to be well-funded, well-connected, and relentless.

The numbers told the story. Seven charitable foundations spent $42.6 million between 2001 and 2009 funding the intellectual core of the counter-Islam network.⁵ By 2014, a follow-up analysis by the Council on American-Islamic Relations documented that the inner core organisations alone had access to at least $119.6 million in total revenue between 2008 and 2011.⁶ The money flowed from foundations like the Donors Capital Fund, the Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and others — into a cluster of think tanks that produced the reports, the talking points, and the manufactured expertise that made cultural racism against Muslims look like national security analysis.⁷

The think tanks form the intellectual engine. The Center for Security Policy, founded by Frank Gaffney, has spent decades promoting the claim that Islamic law — Sharia — represents an existential threat to the American constitutional order.⁸ ACT for America, founded by Brigitte Gabriel, built a grassroots army — the organisation now claims 2.8 million members — dedicated to opposing what it calls “radical Islam” but in practice targets the religion itself.⁹ The Southern Poverty Law Centre has designated it the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in the United States.¹⁰ Gabriel, a Lebanese-American Maronite Catholic, was awarded the Menachem Begin Prize by the State of Israel in 2025 — a detail worth remembering when we reach “The Convergence” later in this article.¹¹ The Middle East Forum, run by Daniel Pipes, functions as both a think tank and a funder of other organisations in the network, including $1.24 million to Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism and $450,000 to MEMRI — the Middle East Media Research Institute — between 2009 and 2011.¹² The David Horowitz Freedom Center provides a platform for anti-Muslim voices and has published defences of far-right figures across both sides of the Atlantic.¹³ The Gatestone Institute, an Israel-focused think tank, does the same.¹⁴

Then there are the individuals who give the network its public face. Robert Spencer — not the white nationalist, a different Robert Spencer — runs Jihad Watch and co-founded the American Freedom Defense Initiative with Pamela Geller. Spencer’s writings were cited 162 times in the manifesto of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who murdered 77 people in 2011.¹⁵ Geller’s blog was cited twelve times.¹⁶ Spencer was banned from the United Kingdom in 2013 as an extremist.¹⁷ None of this has diminished his status within the network. He remains a source cited by mainstream conservative commentators, including in the endnotes of Ann Coulter’s bestselling books.¹⁸

The pipeline from think tank to policy is not theoretical. It is documented. David Yerushalmi, a lawyer affiliated with Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, drafted model anti-Sharia legislation that ACT for America’s grassroots network then introduced in state legislatures across the country.¹⁹ Frank Gaffney himself described ACT for America as a “force multiplier” for this legislative agenda.²⁰ By December 2025, this pipeline had produced the Sharia Free America Caucus in the United States Congress — founded with forty-seven members from twenty-two states, co-founded by Representatives Keith Self and Chip Roy of Texas. Three months later, it has fifty-seven.²¹ In its first months, the caucus introduced seven bills, including the designation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations — the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organisation — as a terrorist organisation.²² CAIR responded by designating the caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in its thirty-two-year history it had designated a congressional caucus as an extremist body.²³

This is the assembly line. A think tank produces a claim. A media figure amplifies it. A grassroots organisation mobilises around it. A legislator introduces a bill based on it. And a community of 3.5 million American Muslims lives with the consequences.

The media amplifiers deserve specific attention because they are the mechanism by which fringe claims enter mainstream political discourse. Ann Coulter — who has referred to Muslims as “ragheads” and “jihad monkeys,” who called Islam “a car-burning cult,” and who wrote days after the eleventh of September 2001 that America should “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” — has been described by David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, as perhaps the most influential single writer on a presidential election since Harriet Beecher Stowe.²⁴ She was one of only forty-five people Donald Trump followed on X.²⁵ She cites Robert Spencer and the white nationalist outlet VDARE in her bestselling books.²⁶ When Coulter shared anti-Muslim videos from the British far-right group Britain First, Trump retweeted them to his tens of millions of followers.²⁷ The pipeline does not stop at the think tank door. It runs directly into the White House.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Katie Hopkins performs the same function. Hopkins — who called for a “final solution” after the Manchester bombing, who called refugees “cockroaches,” who described Islam as “repugnant,” and who called for internment camps for suspected Muslim extremists on Fox News — spoke at a David Horowitz Freedom Center event in March 2017 and has worked with the Center for Security Policy.²⁸ She was amplified by Trump at least eleven times during his presidency.²⁹ She screened a documentary film in Israel in which she described the country as “kind of my natural home” and declared, “It’s my ambition to be Jewish.”³⁰ She marched alongside Tommy Robinson in London in September 2025.³¹ Hopkins connects the American think tanks, the British far-right street movement, and the Israeli political establishment. She is a node in a transatlantic network, not an isolated provocateur.

The single most revealing piece of evidence in this network is a single transaction. In 2008, the Donors Capital Fund made an $18 million donation to the Clarion Fund, which used it to produce and distribute a propaganda film called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” to 28 million voters in swing states ahead of the presidential election.³² A Florida distributor described the DVD as “the single most powerful piece of media over the past five years in persuading average Americans to the Islamist threat.”³³ Eighteen million dollars, one film, twenty-eight million homes. That is not organic public opinion. That is a manufactured product, delivered at industrial scale, paid for by a single foundation.

This is the counter-Islam network. It is not a conspiracy. It is an industry — with funding, personnel, infrastructure, and a product. The product is fear. And the market for it has never been larger.

The Shield

The counter-Islam network described in the previous section is one half of the machinery. The other half does not manufacture hatred of Muslims. It manufactures a shield — a definitional weapon that makes criticism of the State of Israel functionally impossible in public life.

In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a working definition of antisemitism. The definition itself is brief: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”³⁴ That sentence is uncontroversial. What follows it is not. Attached to the definition are eleven illustrative examples, seven of which relate not to hatred of Jews but to criticism of Israel. Among them: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” And: “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”³⁵

Read those examples carefully. Under the IHRA definition, arguing that a state founded through the ethnic cleansing of three quarters of a million people is a racist endeavour is, potentially, antisemitic.³⁶ Pointing out that Israel receives preferential treatment from Western governments — treatment not extended to any other state engaged in comparable conduct — is, potentially, antisemitic. The definition does not merely protect Jews from hatred. It protects a state from accountability. And it does so by collapsing the distinction between Jewish people and Israeli government policy — which is precisely what genuine antisemites do.

This is not my analysis alone. Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the original text that became the IHRA definition, has publicly and repeatedly opposed its weaponisation. In testimony and published writing, Stern has accused pro-Israel groups of turning the definition into a tool to suppress speech on college campuses. He called its use in Donald Trump’s 2019 executive order targeting Palestinian advocacy “an attack on academic freedom and free speech.”³⁷ The man who wrote the definition says it is being used for purposes he never intended and explicitly opposes.

The consequences are documented and specific. In 2024, the United States House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act by a margin of 320 to 91, mandating the use of the IHRA definition by the Department of Education.³⁸ Columbia University adopted the definition in 2025 as part of a settlement with the Trump administration.³⁹ In response, Rashid Khalidi — the Palestinian-American historian who held the Edward Said Chair of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia — cancelled his popular lecture course on the history of the modern Middle East. His reason was direct: the IHRA definition, he said, “deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews.”⁴⁰

The consequences extend beyond cancelled courses. Professor David Miller, a sociologist at the University of Bristol, was dismissed in October 2021 after complaints about a lecture in which he described the Zionist movement as one of five pillars driving cultural racism against Muslims in the United Kingdom. The Community Security Trust, a pro-Israel charity, called the lecture a “false, vile antisemitic slur.” Two internal university investigations found no case to answer. Miller was sacked anyway for gross misconduct. In February 2024, a Bristol Employment Tribunal ruled, in a unanimous 108-page judgment, that Miller’s anti-Zionist beliefs qualified as a protected philosophical belief under Section 10 of the Equality Act 2010, that his dismissal constituted direct discrimination, and that he had been unfairly and wrongfully dismissed.⁴¹ The tribunal found that the university’s reason for dismissal was “tainted by discrimination.” Miller’s lawyer called it a “landmark case” that “underscores the issue of weaponising antisemitism to stifle discussions on Zionism.”⁴² A professor lost his job because he named the connection between Zionism and anti-Muslim bigotry. The legal system said the machinery was wrong. But the machinery had already done its work — Miller was out for over two years before the ruling.

These are not isolated cases. Palestine Legal, an organisation that tracks the suppression of pro-Palestinian advocacy in the United States, has documented a pattern of the IHRA definition being used to chill campus speech, cancel events, and target faculty.⁴³ In the United Kingdom, an Israeli Embassy official pressured the University of Manchester into changing the title of a talk that was critical of the Israeli government, invoking the IHRA definition as justification.⁴⁴ Luke Akehurst, a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee and director of an organisation called We Believe in Israel, circulated an edited version of the definition to British local authorities — with the qualifying phrase “could, taking account of the overall context, include” quietly removed and replaced with “The guidelines highlight manifestations of antisemitism as including.” The conditional became categorical. The shield became a weapon.⁴⁵

Over one hundred organisations have asked the United Nations to reject the definition because, in their assessment, it “has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism.”⁴⁶

The mechanism is worth stating plainly because it is the mirror image of the counter-Islam network documented in “The Network.” The counter-Islam industry manufactures a threat — the spectre of Islamic infiltration, Sharia law, civilisational jihad — and uses it to justify policy against Muslims. The antisemitism exploitation apparatus manufactures a shield — the conflation of Israel with Jewishness — and uses it to prevent policy against Israel. One creates fear. The other prevents accountability. Both serve the same geopolitical project. And both harm the communities they claim to protect.

Jews who criticise Israel are labelled “self-hating.” I documented this in “The Greatest Antisemitism” — the erasure of Torah-observant anti-Zionist communities whose theological objections to the state predate its founding by centuries.⁴⁷ When rabbis whose lives are devoted to Torah study and who trace their scholarship through unbroken chains of transmission are dismissed as irrelevant because they refuse to pledge allegiance to a political project barely 130 years old, something deeply antisemitic has occurred. The IHRA definition was supposed to protect Jews from precisely this kind of silencing. Instead, it enables it — because the definition protects not Jews but a state, and any Jew who dissents from that state’s agenda becomes a target of the very machinery that was built in their name.

This is the second half of the industry. The first half manufactures enemies. The second half manufactures immunity. Together, they create a closed system in which Islam can be demonised without consequence and Israel can act without scrutiny — and anyone who objects to either arrangement is labelled a bigot.

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The Convergence

If the counter-Islam network and the antisemitism exploitation apparatus were separate operations serving separate interests, they would be troubling enough. They are not separate. They converge — in personnel, in funding, in institutional relationships, and in the direct involvement of the State of Israel. The evidence for this convergence is not inferential. It is documented. And no single figure illustrates it more clearly than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

Yaxley-Lennon — known publicly as Tommy Robinson — is the founder of the English Defence League, a former member of the British National Party, and a man who has served five prison terms between 2005 and 2025, including for fraud and for libelling a fifteen-year-old Syrian refugee.⁴⁸ He is one of the most prominent anti-Muslim activists in Europe. His rallies draw thousands. His social media reach is enormous. Israeli flags are a regular presence at his marches.⁴⁹

Now follow the money and the institutional connections.

Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum — the same organisation documented earlier as a central node in the counter-Islam network, the same organisation that sent $1.24 million to Steven Emerson and $450,000 to MEMRI — bankrolled three demonstrations in London in Robinson’s defence.⁵⁰ The Gatestone Institute — the Israel-focused think tank also documented in “The Network” — published pieces defending him.⁵¹ David Horowitz — whose Freedom Center provided the platform where Katie Hopkins spoke in 2017 — called Robinson “a courageous Englishman who has risked his life to expose the rape epidemic of young girls conducted by Muslim gangs.”⁵² The Times of Israel reported these connections under the headline: “Why are US ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?”⁵³ It was a fair question. The answer is that Robinson’s activism serves the same geopolitical project their funding supports.

And then came the invitation. In October 2025, Robinson arrived in Israel at the official invitation of Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli.⁵⁴ The visit was organised by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.⁵⁵ Robinson filmed himself at Ben Gurion Airport declaring he was there to “show solidarity with the Jewish people and the Israeli people.” He claimed — in direct contradiction of the evidence presented in the opening paragraphs of my previous article, “Jews in History” — that Israeli control keeps Christians safe in Jerusalem.⁵⁶

The Board of Deputies of British Jews condemned him. “Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and supporters of far-right extremist organisations like the English Defence League are not welcome at our community’s events,” they said.⁵⁷ The Zionist Federation said the same.⁵⁸ The mainstream Jewish community in Britain does not want this man speaking for them.

The Israeli government invited him anyway. Officially. Through a cabinet minister. Organised by the ruling party.

This is the convergence. An American think tank network — funded by foundations documented in Fear, Inc. — finances a British far-right street organiser. That organiser is then officially hosted by the government of Israel. The mainstream Jewish community in Britain says he is not their ally. The Israeli government says he is. The counter-Islam network and the Israeli state are not merely aligned. They are operationally connected. The money, the platforms, and the diplomatic engagement are documented.

Robinson is not alone. He is the most visible case, but the pattern is structural.

Richard Spencer — the white nationalist who led the Charlottesville march where men chanted “Jews will not replace us” — went on Israeli television in August 2017 and told the audience: “You could say that I am a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”⁵⁹ He later called Israel “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state” and “the one that I turn to for guidance.”⁶⁰ When Israel passed its 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law — which conferred the right to national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish people — Spencer praised it: “Jews are, once again, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future, showing a path forward for Europeans.”⁶¹

Spencer is an antisemite. He is also a Zionist. These are not contradictions. They are the same position expressed in two directions. The ethno-nationalist who believes white people should have their own state and the ethno-nationalist who believes Jews should have their own state share a premise: that ethnic groups should be separated into territories, and that coexistence is impossible. Spencer recognises this. He is not being ironic when he calls himself a white Zionist. He is identifying a genuine structural kinship — one that the Haavara Agreement of 1933, documented in “The Greatest Antisemitism,” established long before Spencer was born.⁶²

When Spencer challenged a rabbi who confronted him at Texas A&M University — “Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel? Maybe all of the Middle East could go move into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?” — the rabbi had no answer.⁶³ He had no answer because the question exposes a contradiction that the IHRA definition was designed to conceal: if ethno-nationalism is wrong when white people do it, it is wrong when anyone does it. Spencer’s argument is repugnant. It is also, on its own terms, logically coherent. And that coherence is the most devastating indictment of the ethno-state model that Israel represents.

Katie Hopkins connects all three nodes. She speaks at Horowitz Freedom Center events in the United States.⁶⁴ She marches alongside Robinson in the United Kingdom.⁶⁵ She screens her documentary in Israel and declares it her “natural home.”⁶⁶ She works with the Center for Security Policy.⁶⁷ She is amplified by the president of the United States.⁶⁸ She is not a marginal figure who happens to appear in multiple contexts. She is a node in a transatlantic network that links American think tank money, British far-right street politics, and Israeli government engagement.

And then there is Brigitte Gabriel — the founder of ACT for America, the largest grassroots counter-Islam organisation in the United States, the woman who received the Menachem Begin Prize from the State of Israel in 2025.⁶⁹ Gabriel has described Israel as “the vanguard in the world’s fight against Islamic terrorism.”⁷⁰ Her executive director, Guy Rodgers, was formerly the National Field Director for the Christian Coalition of America — the same organisation documented in “Holy War” as a pillar of the evangelical-Israeli alliance.⁷¹ The counter-Islam network and the Christian Zionist movement share personnel. The personnel share funding. The funding serves a single geopolitical project.

The thesis of this section can now be stated plainly, because the evidence supports it: being anti-Islam is Israeli foreign policy playing out at the domestic level. The counter-Islam network does not exist independently of the geopolitical project it serves. Anti-Muslim sentiment in Western publics is not an organic cultural phenomenon. It is a cultivated product — manufactured by funded organisations, amplified by media figures with direct access to heads of state, defended by think tanks with documented ties to the Israeli government, and rewarded by that government with prizes and official invitations.

The think tanks mapped in “The Network” do not merely happen to align with Israeli strategic interests. They are, in documented cases, directly connected to Israeli government outreach, lobbying infrastructure, and diplomatic strategy. The hostility toward Islam that pervades American and British conservative culture is not a bug in the system. It is the system working as designed — manufacturing the domestic consent required for the foreign policy described in “Holy War.”

Who Benefits

Cui bono.

The foundations that funded the counter-Islam network spent over $119 million in documented revenue between 2008 and 2011 alone. One single donation — $18 million — put a propaganda film into 28 million American homes before a presidential election. The think tanks that received those funds produced the intellectual framework that became model legislation, that became state bills, that became a congressional caucus with fifty-seven members and growing. The media figures who amplified those talking points had direct access to the president of the United States — and used it. The IHRA definition, designed to identify hatred of Jews, was turned into a tool to suppress criticism of a state — and its own author says so. A professor lost his job for naming the connection between Zionism and anti-Muslim bigotry. A historian cancelled his own course rather than teach under a definition that criminalises honest description of Israeli policy. And a far-right street organiser with five criminal convictions was officially invited to Israel by a cabinet minister while the mainstream Jewish community in Britain said he does not speak for them.

None of this serves Jewish safety. Antisemitic incidents rise in direct correlation with Israeli military operations — a pattern documented by anti-Zionist Jewish organisations and acknowledged by researchers on both sides of the debate.⁷² The industry that claims to fight antisemitism generates it, because the conflation of Israel with Jewishness ensures that every act of Israeli violence produces a backlash against Jewish communities who had no part in the decision. The machinery does not protect Jews. It uses them.

None of this serves Muslim communities. The 3.5 million Muslims in the United States and the nearly four million in the United Kingdom live under a manufactured narrative that treats their faith as an ideology of conquest, their religious practice as evidence of infiltration, and their civil rights organisations as terrorist fronts. Forty-seven members of Congress thought that was a reasonable enough premise to found a caucus around. Fifty-seven now.

The people who benefit are not the communities named in the hatred. The beneficiaries are the defence contractors who need permanent enemies to justify permanent budgets. The surveillance firms that need permanent threats to justify permanent monitoring. The political actors who need civilisational conflict to sustain their relevance. And the governments — in Washington, in Jerusalem, and in the capitals of every country that has adopted the IHRA definition or passed anti-Sharia legislation — that use fear as a management tool.

This article has named the machinery. “Holy War” named the theology. “Just for Fun” named the illegality. “Jews in History” recovered the history that was erased. Together, these four articles document a single system: a system that captured American foreign policy for a theological agenda, launched an illegal war to advance it, inverted a thousand years of history to justify it, and built an industry to ensure that no one is allowed to say so without being called a bigot.

The industry does not fight hate. It farms it. And until we name the farmers — the foundations, the think tanks, the media amplifiers, the legislators, and the governments that profit from permanent civilisational conflict — we will never harvest anything but more of the same.

This is the fourth and final article in the Fireline Press series. “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy” documented the theological infrastructure. “Just for Fun: The War in Iran” documented the illegality. “Jews in History — Who Protected Whom” recovered the history. This article named the machinery.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 18 March 2026.

² James S. Coates, “Just for Fun: The War in Iran — Parts I & II,” Fireline Press, 24 March 2026.

³ James S. Coates, “Jews in History — Who Protected Whom,” Fireline Press, [date TBC] 2026.

⁴ Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and Faiz Shakir, “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” Center for American Progress, 26 August 2011.

⁵ Ibid. The seven foundations identified were: Donors Capital Fund, Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Newton and Rochelle Becker Foundation, Russell Berrie Foundation, Anchorage Charitable Fund/William Rosenwald Family Fund, and Fairbrook Foundation.

⁶ Corey Saylor, “The U.S. Islamophobia Network: Its Funding and Impact,” Council on American-Islamic Relations, April 2014. The report documented $119,662,719 in total revenue for inner core organisations between 2008 and 2011. Note: the source reports use the term “Islamophobia.” This article uses “cultural racism against Muslims” and “counter-Islam bigotry” as more precise descriptions of the phenomenon. Where the source terminology appears, it reflects the language of the cited organisation, not the author’s.

⁷ Fear, Inc. (2011). The Donors Capital Fund’s contribution included an $18 million single donation in 2008, detailed later in this section.

⁸ Frank Gaffney founded the Center for Security Policy in 1988. The SPLC has described it as an anti-Muslim hate group. Gaffney has promoted the conspiracy theory that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the US government. See “Frank Gaffney,” Southern Poverty Law Center; “Center for Security Policy,” Islamophobia Network (islamophobianetwork.com).

⁹ ACT for America claims 2.8 million members as of 2024. See “Breathtaking Achievements,” ACT for America Substack, June 2024. Earlier claims of “five million” appear on Gabriel’s official biography page. The SPLC, BuzzFeed News, The Guardian, and the Center for American Progress have all described the organisation as anti-Muslim.

¹⁰ Southern Poverty Law Center designation of ACT for America. See also Center for American Progress, Fear, Inc. (2011).

¹¹ Brigitte Gabriel was awarded the Menachem Begin Prize in 2025 “in recognition of her significant contribution to the people and the State of Israel.” See actforamerica.org/aboutbrigitte.

¹² Saylor (2014): “Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum granted $1,242,000 over three years to Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism” and “between 2009 and 2011 MEF sent Yigal Carmon’s Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) $450,000.”

¹³ The David Horowitz Freedom Center has been described by the SPLC as specialising in “giving anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform to project hate and misinformation.” David Horowitz earned $488,953 in 2011. Saylor (2014).

¹⁴ The Gatestone Institute published “Swift Injustice: The Case of Tommy Robinson” in defence of the far-right British activist. See Times of Israel, “Why are US ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?” 24 January 2019.

¹⁵ Anders Breivik cited Robert Spencer’s blog Jihad Watch 162 times in his 1,500-page manifesto before murdering 77 people in Norway on 22 July 2011. Fear, Inc. (2011).

¹⁶ Pamela Geller’s blog Atlas Shrugs was cited twelve times in Breivik’s manifesto. Fear, Inc. (2011).

¹⁷ Robert Spencer was banned from the United Kingdom in June 2013 alongside Geller, on the grounds that their presence was “not conducive to the public good.” SPLC, “Ann Coulter Cites White Nationalists, Anti-Muslim Activists and Other Racists in New Book,” 29 June 2015.

¹⁸ Coulter cites Robert Spencer in her book ¡Adios, America! (2015). She also cites VDARE, a white nationalist outlet, and Peter Brimelow, its founder. SPLC (2015).

¹⁹ David Yerushalmi drafted model anti-Sharia legislation that was introduced in multiple state legislatures through ACT for America’s grassroots network. See Fear, Inc. 2.0 (2015); “ACT for America,” Wikipedia.

²⁰ Frank Gaffney described ACT for America as a “force multiplier” for the anti-Sharia legislative agenda. Cited in The New York Times; see “ACT for America,” Wikipedia.

²¹ The Sharia Free America Caucus was founded on 18 December 2025 with forty-seven members from twenty-two states, co-founded by Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). By 18 March 2026, Self announced the caucus had grown to fifty-seven members, with sixteen from Texas alone. See “Anti-Muslim Rhetoric from US Government Officials & Political Figures,” compiled by James S. Coates, March 2026; Rep. Keith Self (@RepKeithSelf), X post, 18 March 2026.

²² The caucus introduced seven bills including HR 4097, which would designate CAIR as a terrorist organisation. Ibid.

²³ CAIR designated the Sharia Free America Caucus an anti-Muslim hate group on 18 February 2026 — the first time in CAIR’s thirty-two-year history it designated a congressional caucus as an extremist organisation. Ibid.

²⁴ Coulter’s post-9/11 statement appeared in her column for National Review Online on 13 September 2001; she was subsequently fired. She doubled down in her book How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) (2004). “Ragheads” and “jihad monkeys”: see “Ann Coulter,” Islamophobia.org. “Car-burning cult”: Media Matters, “Coulter: Islam is ‘a car-burning cult,’” 8 February 2006. Frum’s comparison to Harriet Beecher Stowe: see “Ann Coulter,” Islamophobia.org.

²⁵ Coulter was one of only forty-five accounts Trump followed on X (formerly Twitter). See “Ann Coulter,” Islamophobia.org.

²⁶ SPLC, “Ann Coulter Cites White Nationalists, Anti-Muslim Activists and Other Racists in New Book,” 29 June 2015.

²⁷ Coulter shared anti-Muslim videos from Britain First, which Trump then retweeted in November 2017, provoking an international incident with the British government. See Haaretz, “Ann Coulter, Who First Tweeted Trump’s anti-Muslim Videos: Source and Credibility ‘Irrelevant,’” 30 November 2017.

²⁸ Hopkins tweeted “We need a final solution” on 23 May 2017, following the Manchester Arena bombing. She was fired from LBC. She called for internment camps on Fox News’ Fox & Friends in June 2017. She called refugees “cockroaches” in The Sun in 2015. She spoke at a Horowitz Freedom Center event in March 2017. She has worked with the Center for Security Policy. See “Katie Hopkins,” Wikipedia; Media Matters, “Trump keeps amplifying far-right racist Katie Hopkins,” 2019.

²⁹ Trump amplified Hopkins at least eleven times as president, including retweets calling Baltimore a “sh*thole” and attacking the “Mayor of Londonistan.” Media Matters (2019).

³⁰ Hopkins screened her documentary Homelands in Tel Aviv and stated: “It feels like Israel is kind of my natural home... It’s my ambition to be Jewish.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 22 July 2019.

³¹ Hopkins marched alongside Tommy Robinson in central London on 13 September 2025. See AFP photograph captioned in Times of Israel, 15 October 2025.

³² The Donors Capital Fund donated $18 million in 2008 to the Clarion Fund for distribution of the DVD “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” to 28 million swing-state voters. Fear, Inc. (2011).

³³ The Florida distributor’s description of the DVD as “the single most powerful piece of media” is cited in SPLC, “New Report Details Funding Sources Behind Anti-Muslim Fearmongers,” 2011.

³⁴ International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” adopted 26 May 2016, Bucharest. The full text and examples are available at holocaustremembrance.com. The US State Department adopted the definition and encouraged other governments and international organisations to do the same.

³⁵ Ibid. The eleven illustrative examples are presented as guidance: “Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to...” Seven of the eleven examples relate to Israel.

³⁶ The Nakba — the displacement of approximately 700,000–750,000 Palestinians during 1947–49 — is documented in endnote 73 of “Jews in History — Who Protected Whom” (Fireline Press). See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

³⁷ Kenneth S. Stern, “A Bad Deal: By Adopting the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, Universities Are Sacrificing Academic Freedom,” Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University. Stern wrote: “Many pro-Israel Jewish groups eventually weaponized the definition to suppress student speech and to go after faculty for what they said, materials included in their courses, and speakers they invited to campus.” See also The Nation, “How a Leading Definition of Antisemitism Has Been Weaponized Against Israel’s Critics,” 27 December 2023.

³⁸ The Antisemitism Awareness Act passed the US House of Representatives on 1 May 2024 by a vote of 320–91, mandating the use of the IHRA definition by the Department of Education in evaluating complaints of antisemitism on campuses. See “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Wikipedia.

³⁹ Columbia University adopted the IHRA definition in 2025 as part of its settlement with the Trump administration. See “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Wikipedia.

⁴⁰ Rashid Khalidi, then Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, cancelled his fall 2025 lecture course on the history of the modern Middle East. He stated the IHRA definition “deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews.” See “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” Wikipedia.

⁴¹ Miller v University of Bristol (Case No. 1400780/2022), Bristol Employment Tribunal, judgment delivered 5 February 2024. Regional Employment Judge Rohan Pirani. The unanimous 108-page judgment found Miller’s anti-Zionist beliefs qualified as a protected philosophical belief under Section 10 of the Equality Act 2010, that his dismissal constituted direct discrimination contrary to Section 13, and that he was unfairly and wrongfully dismissed. See judiciary.uk; Al Jazeera, “UK tribunal says academic discriminated against due to anti-Zionist beliefs,” 6 February 2024; Times Higher Education, “’Anti-Zionist’ Bristol professor unfairly dismissed, judge rules,” 6 February 2024.

⁴² Zillur Rahman, partner at Rahman Lowe and Miller’s legal representative, described the ruling as a “landmark case” that “marks a pivotal moment in the history of our country for those who believe in upholding the rights of Palestinians” and that “underscores the issue of weaponising antisemitism to stifle discussions on Zionism.” Al Jazeera (2024); Jewish Voice for Labour, “David Miller Verdict,” 5 February 2024.

⁴³ Palestine Legal documents the use of the IHRA definition to chill campus speech, providing examples from multiple universities. See Palestine Legal (2020); “What Is Wrong with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Definition of Antisemitism?” PMC/National Library of Medicine, 2022.

⁴⁴ Gayle (2017), cited in “What Is Wrong with the IHRA’s Definition of Antisemitism?” PMC (2022): Michael Freeman, Counsellor for Civil Society Affairs at the Embassy of Israel in the UK, pressured the University of Manchester into changing the title of a talk critical of the Israeli government, invoking the IHRA definition.

⁴⁵ Luke Akehurst, director of We Believe in Israel and member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, circulated an edited version of the IHRA definition to British local authorities. The qualifying phrase “could, taking account of the overall context, include” was replaced with “The guidelines highlight manifestations of antisemitism as including.” See Cushman (2017), cited in PMC (2022).

⁴⁶ Over 100 organisations asked the United Nations to reject the IHRA definition. The Nation, “How a Leading Definition of Antisemitism Has Been Weaponized Against Israel’s Critics,” 27 December 2023.

⁴⁷ James S. Coates, “The Greatest Antisemitism,” brjimc.com, 2026. The article documents the theological and ethical arguments of Torah-based Jewish anti-Zionism, including the erasure and delegitimisation of anti-Zionist Orthodox communities.

⁴⁸ Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) founded the English Defence League in 2009 and was previously a member of the British National Party. His convictions include fraud, assault, drug offences, and contempt of court. In 2021, he was found liable for libelling Jamal Hijazi, a fifteen-year-old Syrian refugee, and ordered to pay £100,000 in damages. See “Tommy Robinson (activist),” Wikipedia; Times of Israel, “Why are US ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?” 24 January 2019.

⁴⁹ Israeli flags were prominently carried at Robinson’s London march on 13 September 2025, by both Jewish and non-Jewish supporters. See Jerusalem Post, “Tommy Robinson on Israel, the UK, and the Middle East,” 19 September 2025.

⁵⁰ Daniel Pipes confirmed that the Middle East Forum bankrolled three demonstrations in London defending Robinson. Pipes denied paying for Robinson’s legal defence but verified the demonstration funding. The Guardian reported the MEF connection; Pipes pushed back against allegations that Robinson is an anti-Muslim bigot. Times of Israel (2019).

⁵¹ The Gatestone Institute published “Swift Injustice: The Case of Tommy Robinson” in defence of Robinson. The piece’s author, Bruce Bawer, did not respond to requests for comment. Times of Israel (2019).

⁵² David Horowitz emailed The Guardian: “Tommy Robinson is a courageous Englishman who has risked his life to expose the rape epidemic of young girls conducted by Muslim gangs and covered up by your shameful government.” The SPLC has said Horowitz’s organisation specialises in “giving anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform.” Times of Israel (2019).

⁵³ Times of Israel, “Why are US ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?” 24 January 2019.

⁵⁴ Robinson arrived in Israel in October 2025 at the official invitation of Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli. Times of Israel, “British anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson arrives in Israel,” 15 October 2025.

⁵⁵ The visit was described as “an official visit organized by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.” Jacobin, “It’s No Surprise That Tommy Robinson Loves Israel,” November 2025.

⁵⁶ Robinson claimed in Israel that Israeli control keeps Christians safe in Jerusalem. This claim is directly contradicted by the documented pattern of attacks on Christian clergy in Jerusalem detailed in “Jews in History — Who Protected Whom” (Fireline Press), endnotes 1–6, citing Haaretz, CBN News, the Rossing Centre, Middle East Eye, and the Armenian Weekly.

⁵⁷ Board of Deputies of British Jews: “Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and supporters of far-right extremist organisations like the English Defence League are not welcome at our community’s events.” Middle East Monitor, 24 May 2021; repeated in multiple subsequent statements.

⁵⁸ The Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland also distanced itself from Robinson. Middle East Monitor (2021).

⁵⁹ Richard Spencer, interview with Channel 2 News (Israel), 16 August 2017. Reported by Times of Israel, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and the Forward.

⁶⁰ Spencer described Israel as “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state” at the University of Florida. See Foreign Policy In Focus, “Israel’s New Admirers: The White Nationalist Right,” 3 March 2021; MERIP, “The Old ‘New Anti-Semitism’ and Resurgent White Supremacy,” February 2018.

⁶¹ Spencer tweeted his praise of the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law: “I have great admiration for Israel’s nation-state law. Jews are, once again, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future, showing a path forward for Europeans.” Haaretz, “White Nationalist Richard Spencer Backs Israel’s Contentious Nation-state Law,” 22 July 2018.

⁶² The Haavara Agreement of 1933 — a formal arrangement between the Zionist Organisation and the Nazi regime to facilitate the transfer of German Jewish assets and emigration to Palestine — is documented in James S. Coates, “The Greatest Antisemitism,” brjimc.com, 2026. The structural alignment between ethnic separation movements is not a modern phenomenon.

⁶³ The exchange between Spencer and Rabbi Matt Rosenberg at Texas A&M University is documented in Current Affairs, “Why Israel Is Richard Spencer’s Favorite Argument,” November 2017; MERIP (2018).

⁶⁴ Hopkins spoke at a David Horowitz Freedom Center event in March 2017. See endnote 28.

⁶⁵ Hopkins marched alongside Robinson in central London on 13 September 2025. See endnote 31.

⁶⁶ Hopkins screened Homelands in Tel Aviv. See endnote 30.

⁶⁷ Hopkins has worked with the Center for Security Policy. See “Katie Hopkins,” Wikipedia.

⁶⁸ Trump amplified Hopkins at least eleven times as president. See endnote 29.

⁶⁹ Gabriel received the Menachem Begin Prize in 2025. See endnote 11.

⁷⁰ Gabriel described Israel as “the vanguard in the world’s fight against Islamic terrorism” at a conference sponsored by the UN Permanent Mission of Palau and the Aja Eze Foundation. See “Brigitte Gabriel,” Wikipedia.

⁷¹ Guy Rodgers, executive director of ACT for America, was formerly the National Field Director for the Christian Coalition of America in the 1990s. The Christian Coalition’s role in the evangelical-Israeli alliance is documented in James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 18 March 2026. See “ACT for America,” Wikipedia.

⁷² The correlation between Israeli military operations and spikes in antisemitic incidents globally is documented by multiple sources. Anti-Zionist Jewish organisations, including those documented in “The Greatest Antisemitism” (brjimc.com, 2026), argue that Israel’s claim to speak for all Jews makes every Jewish person a potential target for backlash against Israeli state actions. The Community Security Trust’s own annual reports show spikes in UK antisemitic incidents during periods of Israeli military operations in Gaza.

We waited. The silence my first article The Silence After the Lie diagnosed did not stay silent. It filled with the Counter-Islam industry doing what it was built to do — accusation, suspicion, and the steady transfer of a manufactured fear poisoning the public bloodstream. It filled with the propaganda outlets and pundits who make their careers from exactly this. It did not fill with clear corrections from the government officials, the Met, the BBC, or the mainstream outlets that ran the original framing.

Nearly two months in, the Metropolitan Police have arrested twenty-six people. Eight have been charged with arson-related offences. One has been convicted of arson. One man was arrested on 26 April on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts — the first terrorism-related arrest in the entire investigation.¹ The investigation that began under the lens of an Iranian-directed Islamic terror campaign has now been reframed by the Met itself as a paid-proxy criminal operation — “violence as a service,” in the words of the senior counter-terrorism coordinator.² But the Iran attribution has not been retracted. The framing has only shifted from Iranian-linked terrorism to Iranian-linked criminality — the same misinformation, the same dubious sources, the same pipeline, with the noun changed and the modifier preserved. The British government has not retracted the Iran link. The BBC has not retracted the framing — it has only softened it, now describing HAYI as a group with possible or suspected links to Iran rather than as a confirmed Iranian-backed group. The legislation Parliament wrote for foreign-state-directed hostile activity is not being used. The original framing has been left in place to do its work.

This article is about the evidence that has accumulated to date — not only in the three weeks since The Silence After the Lie was published, but from the moment HAYI first appeared on the ninth of March 2026. The first article established the pipeline through which the Iran-linked narrative was laundered and reached the British public: the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague, the BBC. That pipeline is established. This article is about the operational fingerprint of the people who built the HAYI brand. The technical impossibility of the Iranian-handler thesis. The Met’s quiet retreat from terrorism to criminality without any retreat from the Iran attribution itself. And the question the original article could not yet ask — not just who built this, but why, nearly two months in and twenty-six arrests later, no foreign sponsor has been named when the Met’s own most recent comparable case named one within months.³

Both communities are owed clarity. Jewish families in Golders Green were told they were under siege from Iranian-directed Islamic terror. They were not. Muslim families across Britain have been carrying the weight of an attack their communities had no part in and condemn without qualification. The Met, the British government, and the media that ran the original framing owe both communities the same correction, with the same prominence as the original story. They have not yet given it. The investigation was wrong from the beginning. The work of this article is to show what putting it right would actually require. Until it is put right, both communities cannot heal and the public cannot see the true problem.

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No Muslim Hands

HAYI claims to be a Shia Islamic militant group. That is the identity the brand asserts in its founding statement. The 9 March announcement, circulated through Iraqi pro-Iranian Telegram channels, declared the start of HAYI’s “military operations against US and Israeli interests around the world.” ⁴ The communiqués that followed framed the campaign as jihad — a sacred religious act in the framework of Islamic militancy — in retaliation for the US-Israeli war on Iran, conducted by a movement aligned with the Axis of Resistance. That is the identity the founding statement asserts. That is the identity the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs formalised in its 16 March report.⁵ That is the identity the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism amplified on 23 March.⁶ That is the identity the public received.

The evidence disqualifies that identity at every level the operation can be examined — language, theology, vocabulary, source material, soundtrack, and behaviour. None of it requires specialist analysis. Most of it is documented by the institutions whose own reports gave the original framing its credibility. The case is not that the framing was hard to verify. The case is that the framing was contradicted by the materials HAYI itself published, and the institutions that ran with it did not look.

Start with the strongest single point: the founding statement HAYI issued for the Golders Green attack — the document the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs republished on its own website — opens with a quotation from the Qur’an, Surah At-Tawbah verse 41. The text has been altered.⁷

The Quranic verse reads wa-jāhidū — “and strive” — the imperative form of the verb. HAYI’s version reads wa-jāhadū — past tense, “and they strove.” The vocalisation mark on the letter hāʼ has been moved from below the letter (kasra, short i) to above it (fatḥa, short a). One vowel. The vowel changes the tense, changes the grammatical function, and changes the meaning of the verse.

This is not a hard error to identify. The Arabic text of Surah 9:41 is available on Quran.com, in every printed Qur’an in the world, and in every Islamic-language corpus a translator might consult. Copy-paste produces the correct text. The error appears only when someone composes the line themselves — or asks an AI to compose it — without checking against the received text.

For Muslims, this matters in a way that cannot be overstated and is difficult to convey to a reader who does not share the formation. The Qur’an is considered divinely preserved — God’s words, transmitted through fourteen centuries with the precise vocalisation intact. Altering the text, even in a quotation, even by a single diacritical mark, is theologically unthinkable. It is taught from the moment a child first picks up a Qur’an. A Muslim militant group — any school, any sect, any tradition — does not alter Quranic text in the document that announces its existence. There is no internal religious framework in which the alteration would be permitted, and no operational framework in which it would be allowed to pass.

Whoever composed HAYI’s founding statement did not know this. The implication is binary: either the person had no Muslim religious formation at all, or the statement was generated by AI and published without anyone checking it against the Qur’an. Both possibilities preclude the identity HAYI asserts. A Shia Islamic militant group does not produce its founding statement with the Qur’an misquoted in Arabic on the first line.

And the misquotation is not on a hand-drawn logo or a low-resolution graphic where a letter might be miscopied. It is the body text of a written communiqué, reproduced as an image in the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs’ own report on the group. The Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has been republishing the error. They do not note that it has been altered.

The vocabulary the operators chose for the rest of the statement points the same way.

The Golders Green communiqué describes the Machzike Hadath Synagogue as significant because of its connection to “Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel and one of the most influential thinkers of Religious Zionism, who served at this synagogue before immigrating to the Land of Israel.” ⁸ The phrase to mark is “the Land of Israel” — Eretz Yisrael. It is the formulation of Religious Zionism: the theological-political movement founded by Rabbi Kook that frames the modern state of Israel as the realisation of biblical promise. It is the vocabulary of Israeli nationalism and of the settler movement. It is not the vocabulary of any Iranian proxy. It is not the vocabulary of any Shia militant tradition. It is not the vocabulary of any Sunni jihadi movement. Real Islamist groups have a vocabulary for talking about Israel — the Zionist entity, the Occupation, the usurper entity, the Zionist regime. They use it because their ideological framework requires them to deny the legitimacy of the Israeli state in the act of naming it. The Land of Israel concedes the legitimacy in the act of naming. It is the formulation of the side that affirms the state, not the side that opposes it.

The same paragraph contains a second tell. The communiqué describes Machzike Hadath as “one of the important centers of Orthodox Judaism.” The construction is unremarkable to a Western reader who has grown up around Anglo-American Jewish denominational vocabulary — Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox, Hasidic, Haredi, the categories that organise diaspora Jewish religious life. To a Muslim militant, this construction is unwritable. The framework that motivates a real Islamist attack on a synagogue does not distinguish denominations. The framework is al-yahud — Jews — or Zionists. A Shia militant communiqué does not specify Orthodox versus Reform any more than anti-shariah propaganda would specify Sunni versus Shia when calling for violence against Muslims. Denomination is theologically irrelevant to the framework. Specifying it is the move of someone inside Jewish religious-political life, fluent in its internal categories — not someone hating Jews from outside it.

The two phrases together are the operators’ fluency, on display in the document that introduced HAYI to the world. “The Land of Israel” is Religious Zionist vocabulary. “Orthodox Judaism” is the language of someone who knows Jewish denominational categories. Neither is something a Muslim militant would write. Both are something a person fluent in Anglo-American Jewish religious-political life would write without thinking. The operators wrote a Muslim extremist communiqué in the wrong vocabulary — vocabulary they evidently knew well enough to use without noticing.

The same paragraph contains a smaller tell that compounds the others. The Machzike Hadath Synagogue is described as “one of the important centers of Orthodox Judaism” — American spelling, not the British centres. The communiqué is announcing an attack on a London target. The American spelling does not, on its own, prove who is sitting at the keyboard. It proves the device the document was composed on. A uniformly American communiqué is not the output of an unconscious bilingual habit slip — that produces a mixed document, with British spellings appearing alongside the American ones. Neither is it the output of a writer working on a British-defaulted machine, whose American keystrokes would be corrected back. And the analysts who have examined HAYI’s materials agree that the Arabic text shows the signatures of machine translation, with the ICCT specifically identifying the second Telegram channel name as “likely resulting from an incorrect English translation.” ⁹ The English text is the input, not the output. Uniform American spelling in the English source requires American-defaulted hardware. The device default does not, on its own, disqualify any operator — Muslim militants working in or near American-defaulted contexts exist. What it does is add another small fact to the picture HAYI’s own materials have already built: a Quranic verse altered in a way no Muslim composes, vocabulary describing Israel and Jews that no Muslim militant uses, and a communiqué for a London target composed on an American-defaulted device. Each of these alone is small. Together they describe an operation built somewhere other than where HAYI says it was built.

The strongest direct test of HAYI’s claimed identity came on the day after the Golders Green attack. CBS News reached the administrator of HAYI’s surviving Telegram channel and exchanged a series of messages with him. The administrator, who referred to himself as Asad-Allah, did three things in the exchange that revealed more than any of HAYI’s published materials. He revealed his working language. He revealed the conceptual framework he reasoned from. And he revealed what he would not answer.¹⁰

The administrator wrote to CBS in American English. Not the English of an Arabic-speaker translating into a second language, with the syntactic markers that betray a non-native speaker. American English. The language of someone for whom American English is the default working language, written without strain and without translation artefacts. CBS noted this directly in their reporting.

The conceptual framework was sharper still. CBS observed that posts on the account had repeatedly referenced Christian and Jewish philosophy to justify the group’s actions, with no mention of Islamic principles or teachings. A Shia Islamic militant group does not justify its attacks through Christian and Jewish philosophy. A Shia Islamic militant group justifies its attacks through the Qur’an, the hadith, the example of the Imams, the Karbala framework, the Khomeinist tradition, the rulings of senior Shia jurists. These are not interchangeable with Christian and Jewish philosophy. They are not equivalent intellectual traditions one might substitute for the other depending on audience. A Shia operative defending an attack reasons from sources internal to the Shia tradition, because that is the framework that makes the attack intelligible to the audience the operative cares about. The administrator of HAYI’s Telegram channel did not. He reasoned from sources outside the tradition the group claims as its own.

The pattern surfaced again, on the record, seven weeks later. On 29 April 2026, HAYI claimed responsibility for a stabbing attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, in a video circulated through the same Iraqi Shia militia Telegram channels that had carried the founding statement. The video runs forty-one seconds. It contains no attack footage and no imagery from the perpetrator — only static text overlays on the HAYI logo, in English on the left and Arabic on the right. The operative phrase reads: "Historically, the Jews are the killers of Jesus Christ, and today the Zionists are the killers of innocent women and children."⁴⁵ This is deicide — the Christian theological accusation that the Jews collectively killed Christ, formally repudiated by the Catholic Church in Nostra Aetate in 1965. It is not an Islamic doctrine. The Qur'an explicitly denies that Jesus was crucified at all. Surah An-Nisa 4:157 reads: "And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them." The classical Islamic position, held across Sunni and Shia traditions for fourteen hundred years, is that Jesus was raised by God and another was substituted on the cross. No Muslim militant group invoking jihad against Jews could coherently use the deicide accusation, because doing so requires the speaker to affirm a crucifixion their own scripture denies. The video then compounds the incoherence. It praises "the followers of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him)" — Christians — for "participating in the operation." A supposedly Shia Islamic militant group is praising Christians, invoking deicide against Jews, as theological warrant for jihad. That position does not exist inside any actual Islamic militant tradition. It retroactively claims an alleged American attempted-assassin of US President Trump, named in the video as Cole Thomas Allen, as one of HAYI's own — and calls on "all free people" to kill Trump as well. What CBS observed in the administrator's private messages on 24 March — reasoning from Christian and Jewish philosophy rather than Islamic sources — has now appeared in HAYI's own published claim communiqué on 29 April, expanded into a fully Christian-framed call to action. The operators are not improvising one-off rhetorical errors. They are operating from inside Christian and Jewish theological frameworks, reaching for the most familiar piece of historical anti-Jewish vocabulary they have, and the one they reach for is Christian, not Islamic.

When CBS asked about the group’s structure and whether anyone was being paid, the administrator deleted the account.

That deletion is the moment the cover failed under direct questioning. The other tells in this section are tells of composition — what the operators wrote, in which language, with which vocabulary. The deletion is a tell of behaviour. Asked the operational question that any real militant group could answer with practiced rhetoric — we are a network of believers, we accept no payment, our cause is justice — the administrator chose silence and disappearance over even a propaganda answer. A real Shia operative would have welcomed the question as an opportunity to declaim. The HAYI administrator walked away.

CBS quoted Lucas Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, on the day of the attack: HAYI looks “less like a grassroots European cell that came out of nowhere and more like an astroturfed terror brand that has appeared suddenly in online ecosystems.” ¹¹ That phrase — astroturfed terror brand — is the technical term for what the operational fingerprint describes. The branding is real; the grass roots are manufactured. A Tech Against Terrorism analyst, on the day the pipeline was preparing to deliver the Iran-link framing to the public, told CBS what HAYI looked like to a specialist examining it. The framing the pipeline carried the next day did not absorb that finding.

The pipeline’s research-body stage — the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague — examined the same materials and produced findings the rest of the pipeline would carry forward. The ICCT report, published on the day of the Golders Green attack and titled Hybrid Threat Signals: Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement in Recent Attacks in Europe, contained the linguistic and visual analysis that mainstream outlets would cite the next day as institutional cover for the framing the IMDA’s earlier report had built. Read carefully, the ICCT’s own findings undermine the framing the report’s headline endorsed.

The ICCT’s central paragraph on HAYI’s authenticity, in the institute’s own words: “Doubts regarding the authenticity of HAYI are, however, not only raised by the appearance of its Telegram channel and the likely falsely claimed attack in Greece, but also by inconsistencies within the claim material itself. For example, the videos contain noticeable linguistic errors. Further, the Arabic inscription beneath the group’s logo, which closely resembles the flag of Hezbollah and other pro-Axis groups, except for featuring a Soviet SVD sniper rifle instead of the more typical AK-style imagery, includes multiple mistakes, including the misspelling of the word ‘Islamic.’” ¹²

Three findings in one passage, every one of them the ICCT’s own analysis.

The first: the videos contain noticeable linguistic errors. Plural. In the videos themselves — not just on a static logo. A supposedly Iranian-aligned Shia militant group whose own video output contains noticeable linguistic errors in the language it claims as its own.

The second: the logo is a near-clone of Hezbollah’s flag and the flags of other pro-Axis groups — except for one substitution. The AK-style rifle that appears in every actual pro-Iranian Shia militia’s iconography has been replaced with a Soviet Dragunov SVD. The Iranian-Iraqi-Lebanese militia ecosystem runs on Iranian-supplied or Iranian-copied AK-pattern rifles. The Kalashnikov silhouette is the universal symbol of every actual pro-Iranian Shia militia from Lebanon to Yemen.¹³ The Dragunov SVD is a Soviet-era designated-marksman rifle associated with Russian and Russian-aligned forces. For a supposedly Iranian-aligned proxy to brand itself with an SVD rather than an AK is the visual equivalent of an American militia branding itself with a British SA80 instead of an M16. It is the kind of detail that would never appear on real branding. It is the kind of detail you get when somebody reaches for generic menacing rifle rather than the appropriate symbol for the milieu being imitated.

The third: the Arabic inscription beneath the logo includes multiple misspellings, and the ICCT specifies one of them — the word Islamic. The error matters at the level of the vowel. As with the altered wa-jāhidū in the founding statement, the position of a single diacritical mark changes the word. The Arabic for Islamic — الإسلامية (Islamiyya)— requires a small symbol called a hamza placed beneath the initial alif: إ. The hamza signals the short vowel i — which is what makes the word read Islām. Move the hamza above the alif and the vowel becomes a, producing Aslām — not a word in Arabic. The position of the hamza is not decorative. It is taught in the first weeks of Arabic literacy and reproduced correctly by every Muslim child who learns to read the Qur'an. A supposedly Islamic militant group cannot spell Islamic in Arabic on its own logo. The institution whose research-body credibility the pipeline relied on for institutional cover, when it actually read the Arabic on HAYI's own branding, found multiple errors — including this one.

The ICCT’s report contains a fourth, separate finding on a piece of material the institute analysed in addition to the logo. The second HAYI Telegram channel — created on 21 March 2026, two days before the Golders Green attack, with a QR code in the claim video pointing directly to it — is also identified as inconsistent. The ICCT’s words: “there are also a number of inconsistencies with this account, foremost the misspelling of the Arabic channel name, likely resulting from an incorrect English translation.” ⁹

Read that carefully. A Telegram channel name is not a hand-drawn graphic where a letter might be miscopied. It is text typed into a box, with the option to correct it before publication. The ICCT’s specific characterisation — “likely resulting from an incorrect English translation” — is the institute identifying English as the source language for the channel name. Someone composed the name in English first and translated it into Arabic. The Arabic came out wrong. They published it anyway. A real Arabic-speaking group names itself in Arabic first and transliterates into English for foreign audiences. The direction documented here is the reverse — the signature of a non-native creator working from an English original.

These are real findings, and they are the findings of the institution whose research-body credibility the pipeline relied on for institutional cover. They are, in their own way, evidence that no Arabic speaker built HAYI’s brand. The altered Quranic verse in HAYI’s founding statement is not among them — the foundational error that requires Quranic literacy to identify is absent from the ICCT’s report.

But the more important analytical move the ICCT made is what it did with the inconsistencies it did identify. Julian Lanchès did not stop at the inconsistencies. He absorbed them into the Iranian-backed thesis. The misspelled Arabic, the SVD substitution, the dubiously authentic Telegram accounts, the falsely claimed attacks in Greece — all of it, in the ICCT’s reading, became evidence of a plausible-deniability layer on top of Iranian state backing. The argument runs: HAYI’s amateurism is too sloppy for Iranian intelligence operatives to have produced directly, but consistent with Iran outsourcing the operation to locally recruited disposable proxies on the Russian sabotage model. The inconsistencies, in this reading, are not evidence against Iranian involvement. They are evidence of Iranian involvement at one operational remove.

That move is the analytical decision the ICCT did not justify. The inconsistencies are consistent with Iranian backing via disposable proxies. They are also consistent with an operation that has nothing to do with Iran and is using Iranian-aligned distribution channels as cover. The same evidence supports both readings equally. The choice of which reading to fit the evidence to is the analytical move that determines the conclusion — and the ICCT’s reasoning for choosing the Iranian-backed reading rests on the dissemination through Iraqi militia channels, which is exactly the inference our analysis is contesting. Distribution is not origin. Channel administration can be genuine, persuaded, paid, infiltrated, or shared. The ICCT treated the dissemination network as evidence of origin, which allowed it to read the inconsistencies as plausible-deniability tactics rather than as evidence of fabrication. With a different starting assumption, the same inconsistencies become the fingerprint of an operation that is not what it claims to be.

The ICCT laundered the framing forward. Lanchès identified the inconsistencies and absorbed them into a thesis that the rest of the evidence — the altered Qur’an, the American English administrator, the Christian and Jewish philosophical reasoning, the no-Persian — does not support. He did not interrogate the upstream evidentiary base the IMDA had built. He did not test alternative readings. He published a report he knew or should have known would be picked up by mainstream outlets as institutional confirmation. The pickup happened the next day. The framing the public received rested on an analytical move the pipeline’s research-body stage made without justifying it, on a foundation the pipeline’s state-authoritative stage had built without disclosing what its evidence actually contained.

The institutional failure to identify HAYI’s source-language problem was not because the evidence was hidden. The evidence was published, by named specialists, in mainstream outlets, within days of the Golders Green attack. Two separate institutional sources, working independently, reached the same conclusion: HAYI’s materials were AI-generated.

The first was Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, examining HAYI’s multi-language communiqué for Middle East Eye. Al-Tamimi is one of the more credentialled subject-matter specialists on jihadist propaganda working in the open-source space. He holds a BA in Classics and Oriental Studies from Brasenose College, Oxford, and a PhD from Swansea University on the role of historical narratives in Islamic State propaganda — for which he received Swansea’s James Callaghan Thesis Prize for best doctoral thesis in 2024–25. He has been cited as expert by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, AFP, and the Associated Press. His professional affiliations include the Middle East Forum, the Hoover Institution, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and — relevantly — the ICCT itself.¹⁴ He is not a marginal figure. His finding on HAYI was published in mainstream English-language media on 24 March 2026.

Al-Tamimi’s reading of HAYI’s multi-language statement: “I think there was an initial AI prompt to give an answer in one of the three languages and then it was machine translated into the other two.” The same article reported that two separate AI-detection tools run by Middle East Eye gave the statement a “high likelihood of having been AI-generated.” ¹⁵

The second source was Adam Hadley, founder and CEO of Tech Against Terrorism, a UN-backed counter-extremism initiative. Hadley told The National that HAYI’s materials had been “generated using ChatGPT or similar,” describing HAYI as “probably the first AI-led terrorist movement.” ¹⁶ Two named institutional voices, working in different organisations, reaching the same conclusion. Both findings were on the public record before the pipeline’s framing reached its second day in the public mind.

A real Iranian-aligned Shia militant group does not produce its founding communiqué through ChatGPT. The IRGC has its own media apparatus. Hezbollah has its own media apparatus. Asaib Ahl al-Haq has its own media apparatus. These organisations have spent decades building production capability in Arabic, in Persian, in the visual and rhetorical idioms of their tradition.¹⁷ They do not need a machine-translation tool to write a claim of responsibility, and if they did, the document they produced would not be the document HAYI produced. The signatures the analysts identified — uneven multi-language output, machine-translation artefacts, ChatGPT-style phrasing — are signatures of an operation that had no in-house Arabic capability and substituted a commercial AI tool for the apparatus a real militant group spends years building.

That substitution is itself a finding. It tells you what the operators had and what they did not. They had access to AI tools, an English-fluent author, and the visual symbology of Iranian-aligned militancy at the level you can absorb from photographs. They did not have a native Arabic speaker, a Persian speaker, a Shia jurisprudential reasoner, or anyone with Muslim religious formation deep enough to catch a Quranic vowel. The gap between what the operators had and what a real Iranian-aligned Shia militant group has is the gap between an astroturfed terror brand and a real one — to use Lucas Webber’s phrase.

The way real institutional jihadist groups produce claims of responsibility is documented. Counter-terrorism analysts who track this material — the SITE Intelligence Group’s Rita Katz, The Long War Journal‘s Tom Joscelyn, others — have written extensively about how the architecture works.¹⁸ The Islamic State runs claim production through the Amaq News Agency, a semi-autonomous wire service inside the group’s Central Media Diwan. Provincial bureaus submit raw footage and event details. Central oversight enforces messaging protocols. The system was built over years of institutional investment. When the group is directly involved in an attack, the claim typically appears within twenty-four hours, includes specific details about the attacker, and is corroborated through the group’s verified-direct channel — for ISIS, the Nashir Media Foundation. When the group is not directly involved and is claiming opportunistically, the claim takes longer, lacks attacker details, and tends to appear only on the Amaq-equivalent broad-distribution layer.

The pattern is institutional. It rests on years of media-production capacity, dedicated personnel, established templates, encrypted distribution architecture, and chains of editorial review. Hezbollah operates al-Manar television and the Mayadeen network. Asaib Ahl al-Haq operates Sabereen News. The IRGC operates its own state media apparatus. These are not infrastructures that can be assembled in days. They are the products of decades of investment by movements with stable identities, recognised leadership, internal hierarchies, and institutional histories that the analyst community has been documenting for years.¹⁹

HAYI, on the public record, did not exist before 9 March 2026. There are no known references to the group online or offline before that date — the ICCT confirmed this in its own report. On 9 March, a Telegram channel affiliated with the Iraqi pro-Iranian militia Liwa Zulfiqar circulated a HAYI announcement of “the start of its military operations against US and Israeli interests around the world.” On 11 March, two days after the Liège attack, the first claim video appeared. By Rotterdam on 13 March, the production workflow had compressed to thirty-nine minutes from attack to branded video on Iraqi Telegram channels. For the Amsterdam Jewish school attack on 14 March, the ICCT's own timestamps showed a Telegram mention apparently preceding the attack itself by one minute — almost certainly clock drift or time-zone formatting, but the institute flagged it as an anomaly. By the Golders Green attack on 23 March, two weeks after HAYI first appeared online, the brand was producing claim videos with embedded Google Maps street views, photographs of the targeted ambulances, and biographical research on Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook to justify the primary target selection.²⁰

The technical production of a one-to-two minute branded video is fast. A competent editor with a pre-built template can assemble one in under an hour from supplied footage. That is not the analytical question. The analytical question is whether the institutional architecture HAYI’s materials demonstrate — distribution channels with hundreds of thousands of pre-arranged followers in the pro-Iranian Iraqi Telegram ecosystem, branding templates ready to deploy, the cultural-fluency layer that produces Religious Zionist vocabulary and Anglo-American Jewish religious-political reasoning, the multi-language statement-assembly capacity, the persona of a Shia militant group — could have been built between 9 March, when HAYI first appeared online, and the production of the first claim videos. The answer is no. The dissemination network pre-existed HAYI; the ICCT documented that the first HAYI Telegram channel was registered in 2023, two years before activation. The branding was prepared before the campaign began, applied consistently to incoming footage from 11 March onward. The cultural fluencies the materials demonstrate are not built in days. What appeared in fourteen days was the activation of pre-existing infrastructure plus the application of pre-prepared branding to attack footage. Which means the architecture was built before HAYI publicly existed. The group is either the cover for an operation that already had the apparatus in place, or the brand layer on top of someone else’s.

The same gap shows up in the soundtrack of HAYI’s videos. Sharon Adarlo, a conflict analyst writing for Militant Wire and quoted by CBS on the day after the Golders Green attack, noted that HAYI’s videos used orchestral music rather than the Islamic nasheeds commonly used as soundtracks on jihadist propaganda.²¹ Nasheeds — vocal religious chants, traditionally performed without instruments, drawing on a musical tradition rooted in the recitation of Qur’anic and devotional Arabic — are the standard soundtrack convention of Sunni and Shia jihadist media production. ISIS produces nasheeds through its Ajnad Foundation. Hezbollah produces nasheeds through its media wing. Real Islamist propaganda uses them because they are the genre Islamist audiences expect, the genre that signals religious seriousness, and — for many Salafi-jihadi traditions specifically — the only musical form considered religiously permissible. Instrumental music is theologically contested in Islamist circles, with significant traditions holding it impermissible.

HAYI used orchestral music. Western orchestral music, with strings and horns and the sweeping cinematic feel of film scoring. A choice that signals nothing to a jihadi audience and everything to a Western one — the soundtrack convention of action films and political thrillers, not of Islamist religious media. The choice is small. It is also revealing. The operators reached for what menacing sounds like in their own cultural vocabulary — the language of Western cinema — rather than for what menacing sounds like in the tradition HAYI claims as its own. Once again, the operators were fluent in something they should not have been, and unfluent in something they should have been.

The point is not that Iran cannot produce Western-cultural propaganda. It can, and it does. Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, Iran-based outlets — including Explosive Media, which has acknowledged to the BBC that the Iranian government is a customer — have produced an entire genre of AI-generated, LEGO-style animated videos using English-language hip-hop to mock Trump and reframe the war for Western audiences. Al Jazeera, MS NOW, and the BBC have documented the genre.²²

But these are different production tasks for different audiences. Iran’s LEGO videos are propaganda — outward-facing, made for Western non-Muslim audiences, aimed at winning narrative ground in the Western information space. The conventions of that task are hip-hop, LEGO animation, English-language lyrics, cultural reference points Westerners recognise. The form matches the function. HAYI’s videos are not making that kind of communication. HAYI’s videos claim to be internal Shia militant claims of responsibility for attacks framed as jihad — a sacred religious act, in the framework of Islamic militancy, declared to a Muslim audience inside the in-group conventions of the Axis of Resistance. That production task uses nasheeds. It uses Quranic recitation. It uses the visual idiom of Hezbollah and the IRGC. The conventions are solemn, religious, inward-facing — because the task is religious and inward-facing. Iran’s LEGO videos do not use nasheeds because LEGO videos for Western audiences are not religious communications. HAYI’s videos claim to be religious communications. They use orchestral music. The form does not match what HAYI claims to be.

There is one more language fact that closes the case for this section, and it is the language HAYI has not produced.

In nearly two months since HAYI announced itself, the group has issued statements and videos in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. It has not produced one word of Persian. CBS News reported the absence on the day after the Golders Green attack, and RFE/RL reported it again three weeks later. The Persian language has been entirely missing from HAYI’s output across the entire campaign.²³

This absence is not a small detail. Persian is the operational and ideological centre of gravity of the Iranian state and the network of proxies the pipeline’s framing places HAYI inside. The IRGC operates in Persian. Iranian state media operates in Persian. Khamenei’s communications are in Persian. The Iranian-language audiences that pro-Iranian militant groups care about read and listen in Persian. When Hezbollah wants to signal alignment with Iran, it produces Persian-language material alongside its Arabic. When Asaib Ahl al-Haq communicates with its Iranian sponsors, it does so in Persian. When the Houthis broadcast solidarity with Iran, Persian appears in the output. Real pro-Iranian militant groups produce Persian material as a matter of course. It is the language of the audience that matters to them.²⁴

A supposedly Iranian-linked Shia militant group that has never produced one word of Persian is not what it claims to be. The absence is structural. It is not the kind of gap a real Iranian proxy would have. It is, however, exactly the kind of gap an operation built by people whose source languages are English and Hebrew — and whose Arabic is produced by machine translation — would have. The languages HAYI does use are the three languages someone reading Western and Israeli media would default to. The language HAYI does not use is the one a real Iranian proxy could not afford to be without.

The synthesis is straightforward. The Qur’an in HAYI’s founding statement is altered. The vocabulary describes Israel and Jews in terms no Muslim militant uses. The English text was composed on American-defaulted hardware. The Telegram administrator wrote to CBS in American English, reasoned from Christian and Jewish philosophy, and deleted the account when asked who was paying. The ICCT found the logo Arabic misspelled, the iconography wrong, the second channel name machine-translated from English. Middle East Eye and Tech Against Terrorism found the materials AI-generated. The soundtrack does not match the production task HAYI claims to be performing. And the language a real Iranian proxy must produce is the one language HAYI has never produced.

There is a pattern in the operational fingerprint that has to be named. The errors HAYI’s materials contain are not the errors of a real organisation that has slipped on minor details. They are the errors of an operation built to be recognised as something it is not. The mistakes follow a consistent grammar — they are the mistakes of someone filling in a checklist of what Western analysts expect Iranian-aligned militancy to look like, without the deep knowledge of the tradition required to fill the checklist correctly.

Consider three of the findings already established. The Dragunov on the logo. Western analysts looking at Iranian-aligned militia branding have a mental model for what they expect to see — weapon imagery, raised fist, Arabic calligraphy, a flag-style composition. The HAYI logo has all of that. The general checklist is filled. What is wrong is the specific weapon. The Kalashnikov silhouette is the universal symbol of every actual pro-Iranian Shia militia from Lebanon to Yemen. The Dragunov is not. The error is not the absence of weapon imagery. It is weapon imagery filled in by somebody who knew the genre required a rifle and did not know which rifle.

The routing through Iraqi militia Telegram channels. Western analysts watch the Iraqi pro-Iranian militia ecosystem because that is where Iranian-aligned content normally appears. Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Liwa Zulfiqar, the Sabereen aggregator — these are the channels Western OSINT specialists already monitor. Content posted on those channels is content already pre-flagged for attribution. A real Iranian operation is not optimising its content placement for Western analyst detection — it has its own audience, internal to the Iranian-aligned ecosystem, that the placement is for. Content placed on exactly the channels Western analysts watch, in the sequence Western analysts would expect, is content placed for Western analyst consumption.

And the third instance, which appears in the post-Golders Green operational record. On 15 April 2026, an incendiary device was thrown into the car park of Iran International’s offices in Wembley — the most prominent Persian-language broadcaster critical of the Iranian regime, based in London. HAYI claimed responsibility. Three young men were arrested after a police chase: Oisin McGuinness, twenty-one, and Nathan Dunn, nineteen, both from Watford, and a sixteen-year-old. None of the three fits any ideological profile of pro-Iranian militancy. The device was thrown into a car park and went out on its own. The Met has stated it is not treating the incident as terrorism. Iran International has been a documented IRGC target on British soil for years — the UK’s own counter-terrorism leadership has flagged repeated Iranian state plots against the broadcaster, and the operational tradecraft of those plots involves contractors with surveillance teams and proper preparation, not teenagers throwing burning containers into car parks.²⁵

The point is not that Iran could not target Iran International. Iran has targeted Iran International, repeatedly, with the kind of professional tradecraft the documented record describes. The point is that an operation building a fictitious Iranian-aligned militant brand from scratch would, on any reasonable construction of the design problem, include an Iran International–style target on the list of attacks. Western analysts looking for Iranian-state activity in Europe have a known pattern: Iranian operations sometimes target Iran International. If the operation is being built to be read as Iranian-aligned, the target list has to include the targets a real Iranian operation would attack. Not including one would be the gap in the checklist that gives the brand away. Including one is the checkbox filled.

Three instances, the same logic. The Dragunov is the wrong rifle, but it is a rifle, because the genre requires one. The Iraqi channels are the right channels for distribution, because Western analysts watch them — but a real Iranian operation does not need to optimise for Western detection. The Iran International attack is the right kind of target for an Iranian-aligned brand, but the operational signature of the attackers is wrong for an actual IRGC operation against that target. In each case, the signature visible to Western analysts has been populated. The depth of execution beneath the signature is not what a real operation in that tradition would produce.

The operators are not necessarily inside any of the traditions whose imagery they are deploying. They are people who know what Iranian operations are supposed to look like to Western analysts, and they are giving the analysts what those analysts expect to see.

No Muslim hands on the production. Not in the Qur’an, not in the vocabulary, not in the source language of the Arabic, not in the conceptual framework of the administrator, not in the iconography, not in the soundtrack, not in the languages chosen, and not in the language conspicuously avoided. The fingerprint of the operators is the fingerprint of people fluent in Anglo-American Jewish religious-political life and in Western media production — and unfluent in Arabic, in the Qur’an, in Persian, in Shia jurisprudence, in the iconography of real Iranian-aligned militias, in the soundtrack conventions of jihadist media, and in the vocabulary Muslim militants actually use to describe Israel and Jews. That fingerprint is not the fingerprint of a Shia Islamic militant group. It is the fingerprint the original article’s conclusions already pointed toward. The new evidence is consistent with what The Silence After the Lie identified. It is not consistent with anything else.

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The Handler That Could Not Be in Iran

The Iranian-handler thesis the pipeline carried required a particular workflow to be running, in real time, from somewhere. The ICCT’s own report described it: “the close proximity of these channels to Iranian-aligned networks, combined with the near-immediate reporting and access to attack footage, suggests that they were informed of the incidents almost in real time, either directly by the perpetrators or via intermediaries.” ²⁶ That sentence describes a coordinator. Someone receiving mobile-phone footage from teenagers in Belgium and the Netherlands within minutes of attacks. Someone applying branded templates to that footage, producing edited claim videos, and pushing them through pre-arranged Telegram channels with hundreds of thousands of followers — fast enough to land branded content within thirty-nine minutes of an attack at four in the morning. A real-time editorial desk, with reliable two-way connectivity into European Telegram infrastructure, working through the night.

The framing the pipeline carried assumed this desk was Iranian, or directed by Iran. That is what Iranian-linked meant by the time it reached the British public. Either the IRGC was running the desk directly, or it was running through proxies it had directed and equipped. Either way, the operational coordination — the editorial work of receiving, branding, and distributing the material — was placed within the Iranian operational orbit. That placement is what allowed the framing to characterise the attacks as Iranian-backed. Without it, the framing has nothing to attach to.

This section examines whether that desk could have been running from inside Iran during the period in question. The answer, on the public record, is that it could not.

On 28 February 2026, following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, the Iranian government cut its country off from the global internet. NetBlocks, the network observatory that monitors connectivity disruptions worldwide, reported Iran’s internet connectivity dropping to roughly four per cent of ordinary levels within hours of the strikes. Cloudflare Radar described the traffic that day as “close to zero across all major regions.” Through March, the connectivity held at one to two per cent of pre-war levels — a near-total state-imposed blackout, sustained day after day, while the HAYI campaign was running.²⁷

By 21 April 2026, NetBlocks had recorded fifty-three consecutive days of disruption — the longest nationwide internet blackout ever recorded in any country. Iran is, NetBlocks noted, “the first country to have had internet connectivity and then subsequently lost it by reverting to a national network.” ²⁸ Not Russia during the invasion of Ukraine. Not Israel during the war on Gaza. No conflict, in the history of measured connectivity, had produced anything comparable. The Iranian government had imposed on its own population a deeper and longer informational lockdown than any other state had attempted.

The blackout was not a passive failure. The Iranian government built a whitelist. Ordinary Iranians, private businesses, and most of the country’s economy were offline. Connectivity was granted only to those the state had specifically approved — officials, state-affiliated media, security-cleared entities. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani stated that the state was permitting access only to those who could “get the voice out” — meaning those approved to broadcast on the state’s behalf. Whitelist applications were routed through the state-run Bale messaging app, registered with state telecoms. Every approved connection passed through the state’s gateway. Every packet was logged at the state level.²⁹

This is the connectivity environment the Iranian-handler thesis requires the editorial desk to have been running through. From inside Iran, during the period of the blackout, the desk would have needed reliable, low-latency, two-way connectivity into European Telegram infrastructure — receiving mobile-phone footage from teenagers in Belgium and the Netherlands, applying branded templates, pushing edited videos out to pre-arranged Iraqi militia channels, in some cases within thirty-nine minutes of an attack. That workflow requires bandwidth, speed, and operational privacy. The state-whitelist environment offered none of those things to anyone the state had not specifically approved. Every outgoing packet would have passed through the state gateway, logged and visible to the state security apparatus that had imposed the blackout precisely to prevent unmonitored outbound traffic.

Could the Iranian state itself have run the desk from inside the whitelist environment? The technical answer is yes. The operational answer is that doing so would mean direct state sponsorship of rapid-tempo European attack coordination at the exact moment the state was imposing the blackout to prevent that kind of outbound traffic. It would mean every editorial decision passing through the state’s logged gateway, with no plausible deniability, at the moment the state was demonstrably terrified enough of outbound information leakage to cut its entire population off the global internet. That is the opposite of how hybrid warfare operations are run. The architecture of plausible deniability requires distance between the state and the operation. The Iranian government, during the blackout, could not have given itself less distance from the operation if it had tried.

There is a further fact in the public record that complicates the Iranian-handler thesis from a different direction.

Within forty-six minutes of the Golders Green attack, scene footage of the burning ambulances was on a US-based news aggregator account with around a million followers, registered location Nashville, Tennessee. The post — at 02:21 AM London time — announced that the account had also “seen footage of the attackers” but did not yet publish it. Forty-nine minutes after that, at 03:10 AM, the same account published surveillance footage from the Machzike Hadath Synagogue’s own CCTV system. The footage shows the synagogue’s car park at the moment of the attack, with at least one Hatzola ambulance visible in the frame, bearing a visible in-frame timestamp of 01:36:06 on 23 March 2026 and a camera label reading “Front RHS” — consistent with one camera in the synagogue’s own multi-camera installation. By later that day, the same or related footage had appeared on Sky News, the Jerusalem Post, IBTimes UK, London Now, the National Pulse, Townhall, and the Jewish Edition. The Metropolitan Police’s senior officer on the case, Superintendent Sarah Jackson, said: “We are in the process of examining CCTV and are aware of online footage.” The Met was still examining the footage. Other parties had already published it.³⁰

The ICCT’s own description of the editorial workflow it was studying noted that the channels it identified were “informed of the incidents almost in real time, either directly by the perpetrators or via intermediaries.” The CCTV that appeared on Breaking911 documents the same phenomenon for a different set of intermediaries — people watching the attack location’s information environment closely enough, and connected to global media reliably enough, that internal synagogue surveillance footage was in the hands of a US-based aggregator within forty-six minutes of capture and on its public-facing account by 03:10 AM London time, with broadcast media following within hours. There was a someone. The someone was real. The someone moved fast.

How the footage moved between capture and global publication is not something this article can establish. The Met has not stated. The synagogue has not stated. No party has publicly described the path. What the article can say is what the path was not. The Machzike Hadath Synagogue’s CCTV system is not accessible to the Iranian state. It is not accessible to the IRGC. It is not accessible to Iranian-aligned proxies in Iraq or Lebanon. Whatever path the footage took into Anglosphere media within the first hour of the attack, that path did not run through Iran, and it did not require Iranian state involvement. The investigative question of who routed the footage and through what mechanism is a question for the institutions whose responsibility it is to investigate.

That has implications for the Iranian-handler thesis the pipeline carried. The thesis required real-time editorial coordination from somewhere — receiving footage, branding it, pushing it out fast. The thesis implied the somewhere was Iran or Iranian-directed. But the underlying material — the synagogue’s own surveillance of the attack — was already in Anglosphere media before HAYI’s branded claim video existed. The HAYI editorial desk that produced the branded claim video four hours later did not need to be in Iran to obtain attack footage. The footage was already moving through the open information environment, in the languages and on the platforms HAYI’s operators were demonstrably fluent in. Whatever the answer to the investigative question turns out to be, it is not the one the pipeline carried.

The clearest documented example of the editorial workflow the framing required is in the ICCT’s own report. The Rotterdam synagogue arson on 13 March 2026 occurred at approximately 03:40 AM. The first text mention of the attack on the four pro-Iranian Telegram channels the ICCT was studying was published at 03:57 AM — seventeen minutes later. The corresponding HAYI claim video, branded with the group’s logo and tagged with the date and location of the incident, was released at approximately 04:19 AM. From the moment the attack occurred to the moment a branded HAYI video was on a Shia militia Telegram channel, thirty-nine minutes had passed. The ICCT documented the timing in the body of its report.³¹

That is the workflow window the Iranian-handler thesis must explain. Attack at 03:40. First report at 03:57. Branded video at 04:19. Inside that window: someone received mobile-phone footage of the attack from teenagers in Rotterdam, applied the HAYI logo and the tagging template, and pushed the finished video to pre-arranged Iraqi militia Telegram channels. That is editorial work. It requires receiving raw material, processing it, and distributing the finished product. It cannot be done by someone passively watching a feed. It requires a desk.

The ICCT framed this workflow as evidence of Iranian backing — as material flowing from the perpetrators’ side, through Iranian-aligned coordination, into the amplification network. That framing is what the pipeline’s distribution stage carried to the public the next day. It is also the framing the analysis in this section is contesting on three grounds. The connectivity environment inside Iran during the period in question would not have supported the workflow. The underlying attack footage in the case of Golders Green was already moving through Anglosphere media before the HAYI claim video existed. And the same logic applies to Rotterdam: the footage of an arson attack at a synagogue in the early hours of a Friday morning is not material that could only have reached an editorial desk through Iranian intelligence channels. The phone footage of the perpetrators was on the perpetrators’ own phones, on whatever networks they used to share it, and the desk that produced the HAYI video needed only access to those networks — not to Iran.

That access raises the structural question section two has been working toward. If the desk does not have to be in Iran, where could it have been?

The logical possibilities are finite. The first is inside Iran, on the state whitelist, operating with explicit state approval and through the state’s logged gateway. The connectivity case has already been made. This possibility requires the Iranian state to be running the operation directly, with full visibility, at the moment the state was demonstrably terrified enough of outbound information leakage to cut its entire population off the global internet. It would mean the IRGC or its equivalent commanding the editorial desk through the state’s own monitored network, with no plausible deniability and no operational distance. It is the opposite of how hybrid warfare runs. It can be ruled out on operational grounds even though the technical possibility exists.

The second is through the Iraqi Telegram channels the ICCT documented as the dissemination network. Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Liwa Zulfiqar, the Sabereen aggregator channel, and others within the broader Iraqi Telegram ecosystem the ICCT studied. Iraq was not under blackout. Iraqi connectivity to European Telegram infrastructure was normal. An editorial desk operating through these channels could in principle have run the workflow the ICCT described. But this possibility, if accepted, dissolves the framing the pipeline carried rather than confirming it. The framing the pipeline carried was that the attacks were Iranian-backed — not Iraqi-routed, not ecosystem-adjacent, but directed by Iran. The militia organisations behind some of these channels — Asaib Ahl al-Haq most directly — have documented operational ties to the IRGC’s Quds Force.³² The Telegram channel administrators and operational chains of the channels themselves have not been independently documented. The militia’s political alignment does not transfer automatically to the channel’s operational chain. To accept that the workflow ran through Iraqi infrastructure is to give up the strong form of the Iranian-handler thesis the pipeline depended on, and to retreat to a weaker claim. That retreat is partly defensible and partly not. The dissemination of HAYI’s material through these channels is established on the public record. What is not established is that those channels originated the material, edited the material, were operationally directed by Iran in disseminating HAYI material, or were operationally responsible for the attacks themselves. The weaker claim, examined honestly, splits in two: the dissemination part runs through channels affiliated with Iranian-aligned militias; the production and execution parts do not. The retreat from Iran-backed to a weaker version is therefore not a retreat to a coherent thesis. It is a retreat that holds for one operational layer and collapses for the other two. And in any case, neither version of the claim is what the public was told. The public was told Iran-linked, in a tone that implied direction.

The third is somewhere else entirely, with the Iraqi militia infrastructure used as cover. Under this possibility, the editorial desk is operating from any location with reliable internet access — the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, anywhere in Europe, anywhere with a domestic broadband connection — and is pushing finished material into the Iraqi Telegram channels for amplification. The dissemination network does the political work of making the material look Iranian-backed. The actual editorial work is happening elsewhere. This possibility is consistent with everything section one of this article documented about HAYI’s operators: their fluency in English, in American spelling conventions, in Religious Zionist vocabulary, in the iconographic vocabulary of axis-of-resistance branding without the substance, in Christian and Jewish philosophical reasoning rather than Islamic. The desk that produced HAYI’s materials does not show the fluencies a desk inside Iran or running through Iraqi militia editorial structures would show. It shows the fluencies of operators working from somewhere with deep cultural literacy in Western and Israeli media space.

The article does not assert the third possibility. It identifies it as available. The ICCT did not identify it as available because the ICCT treated the dissemination network as evidence of origin. That assumption — that material distributed through Iranian-aligned channels must have originated within Iranian-aligned operational structures — is the analytical move the section has been working to dismantle. Distribution is not origin. A Telegram channel administrator can be genuine, persuaded, paid, infiltrated, or shared. A channel that amplifies particular content can amplify content the channel’s usual ecosystem did not originate. The Iraqi Telegram channels the ICCT identified were the route HAYI’s material took into the amplification ecosystem. They were not necessarily the place HAYI’s material was produced. The ICCT’s reading collapsed those two questions into one. The evidence does not support that collapse.

What the public record establishes about the editorial desk is structural. It moved fast. It produced AI-generated multi-language statements with English as the source. It used American spelling on a UK target. It reasoned from Christian and Jewish philosophy. It deployed Religious Zionist vocabulary on the founding statement of a supposedly Shia Islamist group. It altered a Quranic verse no Muslim composes. It used the visual idiom of axis-of-resistance branding without the substance. It used orchestral music where nasheeds belong. And it was demonstrably plugged into an information environment that had already moved synagogue surveillance footage of the Golders Green attack into US-based and broadcast media before the HAYI claim video for that attack appeared. None of that fingerprint is consistent with a desk inside Iran. None of it is consistent with a desk running through Iraqi militia editorial structures. All of it is consistent with a desk operating from a location with deep cultural fluency in Anglo-American Jewish religious-political life and Western media production, using the Iraqi militia channels as the relay path into the global information environment.

The handler that the pipeline’s framing required could not have been in Iran. The Iraqi militia infrastructure is a route, not an editor. Where the editorial desk actually was is a question for the institutions whose job it is to investigate. What this article establishes is that the question exists, and that the answer the pipeline delivered is not consistent with the public record.

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What Came After Golders Green

The first article documented the attacks HAYI claimed between 9 and 23 March — Liège, Rotterdam, two in Amsterdam, the Bank of New York Mellon site, Golders Green, alongside the falsely claimed incidents in Greece, Antwerp, Heemstede, France, and Haarlem. Five real attacks. Five fabrications or misrepresentations. The pattern of mixing genuine arson with falsely claimed incidents to manufacture the appearance of a coordinated transcontinental campaign was established in those first two weeks.

After Golders Green, the campaign continued. The pattern continued with it.

On 12 April 2026, two suspects climbed the fence of the Beth Yaakov Synagogue in Skopje, North Macedonia — the country’s only synagogue — poured accelerant on the entrance, and threw a firebomb. The doors and courtyard were charred. The fire did not sustain. The North Macedonian Foreign Minister condemned the attack publicly. The country’s top five religious leaders, including the head of the Islamic Religious Community, issued a joint statement of condemnation. North Macedonia had not seen a synagogue attack since the Holocaust. Three days later, on 15 April, HAYI released a video claiming responsibility, describing the synagogue as a “symbol of the historical and cultural identity of Jews of this region” with a “deep connection with the Zionist regime.” The vocabulary had shifted. Zionist regime is the standard hostile-rhetoric term used by Iran, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi Shia militias — the language a real axis operative would actually write. The operators were correcting the tells the earlier material had made visible.³³

The same HAYI video also claimed the Eclipse Grillbar in Munich, a Jewish-owned restaurant attacked the previous Friday with a small explosive device causing minimal damage. The video noted that the attack had occurred after midnight when the restaurant was closed, but added that it “could have happened during the day and the Zionists would have been killed.” The Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation, including an investigation of the HAYI video itself.³⁴

Then came the London cluster. On the evening of 15 April, an incendiary device was thrown into the car park of Iran International’s offices in Wembley — the attack discussed in section one of this article. On the same night, two men attempted an arson attack on the Finchley Reform Synagogue in north London by filling bottles with what was suspected to be petrol and throwing a brick at them.⁴³ When the bottles failed to ignite, the suspects fled. They were subsequently arrested and charged. Two days later, on the night of 17 April, an attempted arson hit the Hendon offices of a building that still bore the sign of Jewish Futures, a Jewish educational organisation. Three bottles containing accelerant were placed against the building and set alight; the bottles failed to ignite fully and the damage was minor. On 16 April, HAYI had posted a video claiming responsibility for a drone attack on the Israeli Embassy in Kensington, with two figures in protective clothing and a message that the embassy was being targeted with “radioactive and dangerous carcinogenic materials.” The Metropolitan Police investigated, closing public access to Kensington Gardens. The Met announced on Saturday 18 April that no hazardous materials had been found and that the incident was over. The HAYI claim of an Embassy drone strike — like the claimed attacks in Greece, Heemstede, France, and Haarlem before it — described an event that did not happen.³⁵

Overnight on 18–19 April, an arson attack hit the Kenton United Synagogue in Harrow. There was minor smoke damage to a room inside. A 17-year-old boy was arrested, charged, and pleaded guilty at Westminster Magistrates’ Court to arson not endangering life. In the police interview reported in court, the suspect said: “I have no hate towards the Jewish people or their community. I didn’t know it was a synagogue. I genuinely thought it was an empty building.” He was bailed pending sentencing, with conditions including staying away from synagogues. An accomplice filmed the attack, and the footage was released by HAYI in the claim video that followed.³⁶

The Met’s count by late April had moved to twenty-six arrests across the entire campaign, eight charges, one conviction. The first terrorism-related arrest came on 26 April, more than a month after Golders Green and after the entire London cluster — and it was on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts only, not on any predicate of foreign-state direction. Across the campaign, the suspect demographic has been consistent. The Rotterdam attackers were teenagers from Tilburg, aged seventeen to nineteen. The Golders Green attackers charged are eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and seventeen years old. The Iran International suspects are sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-one. The Kenton suspect is seventeen. The Finchley Reform suspects fled when their petrol bottles failed to ignite. None of the demographic profiles matches what an ideologically committed Shia militant cell, or any committed jihadi network, would produce. The profile that matches is the profile the Met has publicly named — paid criminal proxies, recruited for cash, with no allegiance to the cause.

There is a third fact the campaign produces that the demographic profile alone does not explain. Across Belgium, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom — across nearly two months and more than a dozen claimed attacks — not one person has been killed and not one person has been injured. Bottles fail to ignite. Fires fail to sustain. Accelerant is poured on benches and courtyards rather than on doors. A burning container thrown into the Iran International car park, in the Met’s words, “immediately put itself out.”⁴⁴ Attacks are staged at night, when synagogues are empty and Jewish-owned restaurants are closed. The Munich communiqué itself notes that the attack on the Eclipse Grillbar “could have happened during the day and the Zionists would have been killed” — an admission, in HAYI’s own words, that the timing was chosen to avoid this.

No real Shia militant campaign has a casualty record like that. Hezbollah’s bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 killed twenty-nine. The AMIA bombing in 1994 killed eighty-five. The Beirut barracks bombing in 1983 killed two hundred and forty-one US service members. The Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 killed nineteen. The Burgas bus bombing in 2012 killed six. The IRGC’s documented assassination operations against Iranian dissidents in Europe have killed people. Across forty years and on every continent, the consistent pattern of real Shia militant operations against Western, Israeli, and Jewish targets is the production of casualties — because that is the operational point of armed jihad in the framework these groups operate within. A supposedly Shia Islamic militant group, declaring jihad against Western and Israeli interests, conducting a transcontinental campaign over nearly two months, that produces a body count of zero, is not a campaign that exists anywhere in the historical record. HAYI is the first. The campaign was not designed to kill. It was designed to look as if it had been.

Two further structural facts emerge from the post-Golders Green record.

The first is that the fabrication pattern continued. The Israeli Embassy drone claim — like the Greece, France, Antwerp, and Haarlem claims before it, and the Heemstede episode the ministry's report attached — was not an actual attack. HAYI continued, after Golders Green, to claim incidents the public record does not contain. The behaviour of mixing real attacks with manufactured ones to amplify apparent reach was not a feature of the early campaign that the operators outgrew. It is a feature of the campaign throughout.

The second is the inverse fact. Between 23 March and the end of April, the campaign expanded its target set from synagogues, Jewish schools, and an American bank into Persian-language media (Iran International), an Israeli diplomatic site (the Embassy drone claim), and a Jewish educational charity. The targeting profile broadened in exactly the directions the brand needed to broaden to maintain its claim of being an Iranian-aligned militant organisation operating across multiple categories of legitimate-from-the-perspective-of-the-claimed-identity targets. Each new target type closed a checklist gap. By late April, HAYI’s claimed target set covered every category of target a Western analyst would expect a real Iranian-aligned militant campaign in Europe to attack — synagogues, a Jewish school, Jewish-owned businesses, an Iranian dissident broadcaster, and a claimed strike on an Israeli embassy. The brand had been completed.

The campaign that followed Golders Green did not contradict the analysis of section one. It extended it. The fingerprint stayed the same. The targeting evolved in the directions the brand-construction required. The fabrication pattern persisted. The suspect demographic remained — across multiple countries, multiple cities, multiple supposed cells — the same demographic of recruited teenagers and young adults with no identifiable ideological commitment to the cause they were nominally serving. And the Metropolitan Police, faced with this pattern, characterised it publicly as paid criminal proxies rather than as terrorism.

On 29 April 2026, HAYI did what its claim apparatus had done across the campaign — but for the first time, the underlying event involved real wounded people. A 45-year-old man, now named as Essa Suleiman of Camberwell, south London, walked through Golders Green in broad daylight with a knife and stabbed two Jewish men, aged 76 and 34. Earlier the same morning, he had attempted to murder a longtime Muslim friend, Ishmail Hussein, at Hussein's home in Southwark. He has since been charged with three counts of attempted murder. Scotland Yard has confirmed that Suleiman was referred to Prevent, the government's anti-extremism programme, in 2020, and that the case was closed the same year.⁴⁶ He did not flee. Hours later, at 15:21 BST, HAYI claimed Suleiman as one of their "lone wolves" — a man whose first attempted victim of the day was a Muslim he had known for twenty years. The pattern is the pattern the article has already catalogued. HAYI claimed the firebombing in Greece that did not happen. Its file carries the attack in Heemstede that never happened at all — an arrest of two teenagers with fireworks, an episode the group itself never claimed, written into its record by the Israeli ministry's report. It claimed an attack in Antwerp that was a botched theft from a Moroccan woman whose car was then set on fire. It claimed an attack in Haarlem that occurred before the supposed group existed. It claimed a drone strike on the Israeli Embassy that was three benign jars in Kensington Gardens. Now it has claimed the stabbing of two Jewish men by an unstable man with no established Iranian links and no established connection to any Islamic militant group. The claim apparatus claims everything. That is its function. It is not an apparatus that organises attacks. It is an apparatus that converts attacks — real, manufactured, falsely attributed, or unrelated — into evidence for the narrative the operators were paid to construct. The Golders Green stabbing was carried out by a man the police had reason to know about. The attack occurred at 11:16 BST. HAYI's claim video appeared on Telegram at 15:21 BST — four hours later.

The Met Now Says It

In the nearly two months since the Golders Green attack, the Metropolitan Police have made twenty-six arrests connected to the broader campaign of attacks attributed to HAYI. Eight people have been charged with arson-related offences. One has been convicted of arson. On 26 April, nearly two months after the Golders Green attack, one man was arrested on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts — the first arrest in the entire investigation under terrorism legislation. The investigation that began under the lens of an Iranian-directed Islamic terror campaign has been worked, in operational terms, almost entirely as a series of paid-proxy arson cases. The numbers tell their own story. Twenty-six arrests. Eight arson charges. One arson conviction. One terrorism-related arrest, nearly two months in.

The senior officers running the investigation have characterised it in their own words. On 19 April, after a series of attacks on synagogues and Jewish premises across north and northwest London, Deputy Commissioner Matt Jukes and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, the United Kingdom’s Senior National Co-ordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, gave a joint press conference outside Kenton United Synagogue in Harrow. Their statements are on the public record, archived in full on the Metropolitan Police website. They are not consistent with the framing the pipeline carried.³⁷

Evans’s characterisation of the operational pattern is precise. “I have spoken at length of the Iranian regime’s routine uses of criminal proxies. We are considering whether this tactic is being used here in London — recruiting violence as a service. Individuals carrying out these crimes often have no allegiance to the cause and are taking quick cash for their crimes. To anyone even considering getting involved — my message to you would be this: the stakes are high, and it is absolutely not worth the risk for a small reward. Those tasking you will not be there when you are arrested and face court. You will be used once and thrown away without a second thought.” ³⁷ That is the Met’s senior counter-terrorism coordinator describing what the investigation has actually found — not Iranian operatives committing attacks, but criminal proxies recruited for cash, with no ideological allegiance to the cause they are nominally serving. Violence as a service. The phrase she chose is the precise opposite of the framing the pipeline sold to the public. The pipeline framing was Iranian-directed Islamic terror. The framing the Met is now publicly using is recruited criminal violence dressed in cause language nobody believes.

Jukes drew the comparison directly. “We’ve seen a pattern with other actors of thugs for hire, people taking cash that looks like quick and easy money. This is part of the modern hybrid war fought by proxies.” ³⁸ The other actors he was referring to are documented. In March 2024, an arson attack hit a London warehouse linked to Ukrainian aid. Six men were later convicted — five of aggravated arson, a sixth of failing to disclose information about terrorist acts. The ringleader, Dylan Earl, had been recruited by Russia’s Wagner Group via Telegram and was sentenced in October 2025 to seventeen years for what the prosecution described as state-sponsored arson on behalf of Wagner — the first conviction under the National Security Act 2023. The pattern Jukes is describing — thugs for hire, taking cash, quick and easy money — is the pattern documented in the Earl case. Evans’s violence as a service names the same model. The Met is publicly characterising the HAYI cases as operationally similar to the Wagner-Earl proxy model, while continuing to leave the upstream-actor question open.

The Earl precedent is not the only documented payment trail in the proxy model. The Soufan Center, in its 17 April 2026 brief on the broader pattern, reported that the minors recruited for the foiled Bank of America Paris attack on 28 March were paid €500–1,000 each — small sums, in line with the quick cash characterisation Evans and Jukes have given the London cases. The proxy model the Met is now publicly describing is not a thesis. It is a documented operational pattern with named figures, in jurisdictions across Europe, in cases where the foreign sponsor has either been named or remains the open question.³⁹

What the Met is not doing is what the Earl case shows can be done. In the Earl case, the foreign sponsor was named at sentencing. The court heard evidence that Earl was acting as a Wagner proxy. The judge sentenced him on that basis. The state-sponsored hostile-activity legislation Parliament passed in 2023 — the National Security Act — was framed for exactly this scenario. It enables prosecutors to bring charges that name the foreign sponsor, that carry significant additional sentences, and that make the foreign-state involvement part of the public court record. Nearly two months into the HAYI investigation, with twenty-six arrests, eight arson charges, and one arson conviction, that legislation has not been used. The first arrest under terrorism legislation came on 26 April — nearly two months in, and on suspicion only of preparing terrorist acts, not on any foreign-state-direction predicate. The legislation Parliament wrote for the kind of attack the pipeline framing described is sitting unused. The Met has not named a foreign sponsor.

This is the disjunction that defines section three. The pipeline carried a story of Iranian-directed Islamic terrorism. The senior officers running the investigation are publicly characterising the cases as a paid-proxy criminal campaign, structurally comparable to the Wagner-Earl model. The legislation written for foreign-state-directed hostile activity is not being applied. No foreign sponsor has been named. Nearly two months in, the gap between what the public was told and what the Met is operating against is not a gap of nuance. It is a gap that requires explanation.

The Lie, the Silence, and What Comes Next

The Silence After the Lie named what happened.⁴⁰ The pipeline laundered misinformation into the mainstream. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies — a Washington-based pro-Israel organisation whose IRS filings state its mission as enhancing Israel’s image and educating the public on Israeli-Arab issues — set the predicate on 12 March 2026, when Joe Truzman in The Long War Journal floated the Iranian link in English-language coverage for the first time.⁴¹ The Israeli Foreign Ministry carried it on 15 March, in the state's own voice and on no further evidence. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague laundered it on 23 March, in a report that passed the conclusion forward without considering the motivations or operational backgrounds of its sources, despite the inconsistencies and doubts the report itself documented. The mainstream press, the BBC at its head, distributed it. And on 24 March the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism formalised it — last — in a special report stamping the predicate with the state's authority after the machinery had already moved it: a ministry whose stated remit is combating antisemitism but whose operational mandate, on the documented record, includes Israeli state propaganda operations.⁴² Not terror with bombs or bullets. Terror with narrative. Israeli terror by narrative. A PsyOp, executed against two communities at once.

This article has put the evidence behind that naming.

The fingerprint of the people who built HAYI is the fingerprint of operators fluent in Anglo-American Jewish religious-political life and Western media production. The altered Qur’an. The Religious Zionist vocabulary. The American English of the administrator. The Christian and Jewish philosophical reasoning. The deletion of the account when asked who was paying. The misspelled Islamic in Arabic. The orchestral music where nasheeds belong. The absence of one word of Persian in nearly two months of operation. The institutional architecture that did not exist before 9 March 2026 yet was running a thirty-nine-minute editorial workflow by 13 March. None of this is the fingerprint of a Shia Islamic militant group. All of it is the fingerprint of an operation built by people fluent in the cultural and religious vocabulary of the very community the campaign was designed to terrify, dressed in the symbology of the community the campaign was designed to blame.

The Iranian-handler thesis the pipeline carried is excluded by the public record. Iran was, during the period in question, under the deepest and longest state-imposed internet blackout ever recorded. The connectivity environment did not support the workflow the framing required. The synagogue’s own surveillance footage was already moving through Anglosphere media before HAYI’s branded video for that attack existed. Distribution through Iraqi militia channels is not origin. The framing the pipeline delivered to the public is not consistent with what was operationally possible.

The Metropolitan Police, nearly two months in, have confirmed the operational shape of the campaign without confirming the predicate the pipeline sold. Recruiting violence as a service, in the words of the senior counter-terrorism coordinator. Thugs for hire, in the words of the deputy commissioner. The Wagner-Earl proxy model, named explicitly. Twenty-six arrests. Eight arson charges. One arson conviction. The legislation Parliament wrote for foreign-state-directed hostile activity has not been used. No foreign sponsor has been named. The same Met that named Wagner in the Earl case has not named Iran in this one. The reason for the absence is on the public record by virtue of being absent. The evidence the Met would need to bring an Iran charge has not been built, because what was built was never aimed at Iran.

What was built was aimed at the British public. At Jewish families in Golders Green made to fear an enemy the evidence does not support. At Muslim families across Britain carrying the weight of an attack their communities had no part in and condemn without qualification. At a public made to absorb a manufactured threat and to accept the political consequences flowing from it — the IRGC proscription campaigns accelerated, the legislation expanded, the war policy hardened, the Counter-Islam industry refed. Both communities are victims. Neither is the beneficiary. The beneficiary is the state that manufactured the fear, and the industry that profits from harvesting it.

One fact above all others should sit at the centre of this accounting. The pipeline sold the British public a story of Iranian-directed Islamic terror. Terrorism, by the definition the framing relied on, kills. Nearly two months in, across six countries and more than a dozen claimed attacks against synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish-owned businesses, an Iranian dissident broadcaster, false claims, and a claimed strike on an Israeli embassy, the first injuries came on 29 April 2026 — at the hands of a man whose first attempted victim of the day was his Muslim friend.⁴⁶ The campaign that was framed as the gravest Iranian-linked Islamist threat to British Jews in a generation produced, while the war was still raging, an operational record of zero casualties. That is not a feature of any real jihadist campaign in living memory. It is the signature of an operation built to manufacture fear without paying the price in blood that real terror exacts. The framing was not just wrong about who. It was wrong about what.

The institutions that laundered the operation will not correct themselves. The FDD set the predicate doing exactly what a front organisation for Zionist Israeli interests is built to do. The Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs built the report doing exactly what a ministry whose operational mandate includes Israeli state propaganda is built to do. The ICCT gave the framing research-body credibility without the due diligence that would have caught the Quranic alteration the IMDA’s own copy contained. The BBC and the mainstream outlets that ran the framing did so without disclosing the provenance to their audiences. The propagandists were never in the business of accuracy. The mainstream outlets that should have stood between the PsyOp and the public failed to, and face no requirement to repair the damage. The well was poisoned by actors with motive, capacity, and institutional cover to do exactly what was done — and the cleanup will not come from the people who poisoned the well.

The British government and the Metropolitan Police are complicit in the operation’s continuing effect on the British public. Nearly two months in, with twenty-six arrests, the Met has downgraded the offence from terrorism to criminality without retracting the Iran attribution that justified the original framing. The British press has followed the Met’s lead, softening the framing without correcting it. The British state and its principal broadcaster sit inside a structural relationship with Israel — diplomatic, intelligence-sharing, treaty-grounded — that constrains what they are willing to say about an Israeli information operation directed at their own public. The European Union’s Association Agreement with Israel, the United Kingdom’s bilateral partnerships, and the broader Western state architecture make Israeli information operations on Western soil something Western governments are institutionally configured to overlook rather than confront. That is not innocence. That is complicity by structural alignment.

The first article asked why no foreign sponsor had been named. This article has documented why: because the foreign sponsor named at the door of the operation is not the one the pipeline pointed at. The narrative-construction layer is on the documented record — the FDD predicate, the IMDA report, the ICCT laundering, the BBC distribution. That layer is Israeli-built. The operational-execution layer — who built the HAYI brand, ran the editorial desk, and recruited the proxies on the ground — is a separate question this article does not answer. What the evidence establishes is that the actors the public was told to suspect are excluded by the operational record. What it does not establish is who is responsible. That question has not been investigated. It must now be asked.

The hate is not reinforced by the fire. It is reinforced by the silence after the lie. The silence is not an accident. It is the product. And until the framing is publicly put right, with the same prominence the framing received, both communities will continue to be forced to experience the effects of the operation. The Jewish community will continue to fear an enemy it does not have. The Muslim community will continue to carry the blame for an attack it did not commit. And the state that manufactured the fear will continue to harvest it.

Until it is put right, both communities cannot heal and the public cannot see the true problem.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Endnotes

¹ Metropolitan Police, “Further arrest in investigation led by counter terrorism officers,” 26 April 2026.

² Metropolitan Police, “Statements on linked arson attacks in north west London,” 19 April 2026. Statement by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, Senior National Co-ordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing.

³ Crown Prosecution Service, “How the CPS used new National Security Act legislation to prosecute the plot to sabotage Ukrainian aid warehouses on UK soil,” July 2025. R v Earl & others, sentenced at the Old Bailey by Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, 24 October 2025 — the first conviction under the National Security Act 2023.

⁴ International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), Hybrid Threat Signals: Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement in Recent Attacks in Europe, Julian Lanchès, 23 March 2026, on the HAYI announcement of 9 March 2026 circulated via Telegram channel affiliated with the Iraqi pro-Iranian militia Liwa Zulfiqar.

⁵ Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, "Special Report: Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia," 24 March 2026.

⁶ ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026.

⁷ HAYI Golders Green communiqué, circulated via Telegram, 23 March 2026, as reproduced in the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs special report on HAYI. The opening Quranic citation is from Surah At-Tawbah 9:41. The published image shows the verb form wa-jāhadū (past tense) rather than the canonical wa-jāhidū (imperative). The canonical Arabic text of Surah 9:41 is available in every standard mushaf.

⁸ HAYI Golders Green communiqué, 23 March 2026, as reproduced in the IMDA special report.

⁹ ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026, on the second HAYI Telegram channel created 21 March 2026: “there are also a number of inconsistencies with this account, foremost the misspelling of the Arabic channel name, likely resulting from an incorrect English translation.”

¹⁰ CBS News, “European antisemitism attacks: group threatens US-Israel interests worldwide,” Joe Stocker and Haley Ott, 24 March 2026.

¹¹ Lucas Webber, senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, quoted in CBS News, 24 March 2026.

¹² ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026, p. 6.

¹³ Adam Rawnsley, “Is that an AK-47 on Hizballah’s flag?”, Center for a New American Security, 6 September 2016.

¹⁴ Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi profile: Hoover Institution. Credentials: BA Brasenose College, Oxford; PhD Swansea University; James Callaghan Thesis Prize 2024–25; affiliations with Middle East Forum, Hoover Institution, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the ICCT.

¹⁵ Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, quoted in Middle East Eye, “Ashab al-Yamin: The obscure new group claiming the Jewish ambulance attack,” Areeb Ullah and Mohamed Mulla, 24 March 2026.

¹⁶ Adam Hadley, founder and CEO of Tech Against Terrorism (UN-backed), quoted in The National, March 2026.

¹⁷ Avi Jorisch, Beacon of Hatred: Inside Hizbullah’s al-Manar Television, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004.

¹⁸ Rita Katz, SITE Intelligence Group, quoted in NPR, “What Does It Mean When ISIS Claims Responsibility For An Attack?”, 24 May 2017.

¹⁹ Michael Knights, “Profile: Asaib Ahl al-Haq,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 27 April 2021.

²⁰ ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026.

²¹ Sharon Adarlo, Militant Wire, quoted in CBS News, 24 March 2026.

²² Jerusalem Post, “’The regime is a customer’: BBC interviews activist behind pro-Iran Lego propaganda videos,” April 2026.

²³ Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, “What Is HAYI, The Shadowy Islamist Group Claiming Attacks Across Europe?”, Meliha Kesmer, 17 April 2026.

²⁴ Counter Extremism Project, “Asaib Ahl al-Haq” profile, on al-Khazali’s Persian-language meetings with Khamenei and Soleimani.

²⁵ UK Intelligence and Security Committee, Iran (special report), published July 2025, on the Iranian state threat to the UK and Iran’s use of proxy criminals to target Iranian dissidents and Jewish/Israeli targets on UK soil. Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, annual threat update, October 2025, citing “more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” tracked since the prior year.

²⁶ ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026.

²⁷ NetBlocks, reports on Iran connectivity disruption beginning 28 February 2026.

²⁸ NetBlocks, statement on Iran reaching fifty-three consecutive days of disruption, c. 21 April 2026.

²⁹ Iranian government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani statement on whitelist access, March 2026, reported by Iranian state media. State-run Bale messaging app routing for whitelist applications: Article 19, “Iran’s national internet and the Bale app,” 2024.

³⁰ Breaking911 X account posts, 23 March 2026 (02:21 AM and 03:10 AM London time):

Statement of Detective Superintendent Sarah Jackson per Metropolitan Police press contact, 23–24 March 2026. Timestamp preservation:

³¹ ICCT, Hybrid Threat Signals, 23 March 2026, timing data for the Rotterdam attack of 13 March 2026.

³² Counter Extremism Project, “Asaib Ahl al-Haq” profile: “AAH is one of three prominent Iraqi Shiite militias funded and trained by Iran’s external military wing, the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).” U.S. State Department, designation of AAH as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, 3 January 2020.

³³ Times of Israel, “North Macedonian synagogue hit by arson in country’s 1st antisemitic attack since Holocaust,” 15 April 2026. HAYI claim: Jerusalem Post, “Ashab al-Yamin claimed responsibility for Skopje, Munich attacks on Jewish sites,” 15 April 2026.

³⁴ Jerusalem Post, “Ashab al-Yamin claimed responsibility for Skopje, Munich attacks on Jewish sites,” 15 April 2026.

³⁵ Iran International incident, 15 April 2026: Committee to Protect Journalists, “3 arrested after arson attack on London-based Iran International,” 16 April 2026. Finchley Reform, Jewish Futures Hendon, and Israeli Embassy drone claim: Times of Israel, “Arson attempt hits London synagogue; Iran-linked group claims attack,” 18 April 2026. Met response on the Embassy drone claim: Metropolitan Police statement, 19 April 2026.

³⁶ R v [name redacted under reporting restrictions], Westminster Magistrates’ Court, April 2026, reported in The Guardian / Irish Times, “Iran behind low-level ‘hybrid warfare’ attacks in Europe, analysts say,” 23 April 2026.

³⁷ Metropolitan Police, “Statements on linked arson attacks in north west London,” 19 April 2026.

³⁸ Matt Jukes, BBC interview, 19 April 2026, reported in Times of Israel, “UK arrests 2 teens as ‘thugs for hire’ after latest arson attack on London synagogue,” 21 April 2026.

³⁹ The Soufan Center, “Iran War Exacerbates the Terrorist Threat Landscape in Europe,” IntelBrief, 17 April 2026.

⁴⁰ James S. Coates, “The Silence After the Lie: How an Israeli Influence Operation Became the News — and No One Corrected the Record,” Fireline Press, April 2026.

⁴¹ Joe Truzman, “Purported Iran-backed group claims responsibility for attacks in Belgium and Greece,” The Long War Journal / Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 12 March 2026. FDD founding mission documented in Sima Vaknin-Gil (then Director General, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs), public remarks, 2018, reported in Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2018.

⁴² The Guardian, “Israel fund US university protest Gaza antisemitism,” 24 June 2024, on the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs’ propaganda operations.

⁴³ RFE/RL, “What Is HAYI, The Shadowy Islamist Group Claiming Attacks Across Europe?”, Meliha Kesmer, 17 April 2026: “None of the attacks caused casualties.” Confirmed across reporting on the campaign through 28 April 2026.

⁴⁴ Metropolitan Police statement on the Iran International incident, 17 April 2026, reported in Euronews, “Three charged over attempted arson on Persian-language TV channel, UK police say,” 17 April 2026.

⁴⁵ Jerusalem Post, "Two wounded in London terror stabbing against Golders Green Jews, HAYI takes responsibility," 29 April 2026. The HAYI claim was first reported by SITE Intelligence Group and circulated via Iraqi Shia militia–affiliated Telegram channels.

⁴⁶ Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, public statement at the scene of the 29 April 2026 Golders Green stabbing, reported in ITV News London, "'Shame on you': Met boss and local MP heckled after two Jewish men are stabbed in terror attack," 29 April 2026; and The Jewish Chronicle, "Golders Green stabbing: Suspect arrested as two injured," 29 April 2026. Suspect's actions and arrest detailed in Metropolitan Police statement, 29 April 2026, as reported across BBC, ITV News, Jerusalem Post, and Jewish Chronicle coverage of the same date. ITV News, "Essa Suleiman appears in court charged with attempted murder after Golders Green attack," 1 May 2026.

Corrections, 11 August 2026: An earlier version of this article dated the Amsterdam Jewish school attack to 16 March 2026; the attack occurred overnight into 14 March. It described the Heemstede incident as a household gas explosion claimed by HAYI; in fact no attack occurred at Heemstede — two teenagers were arrested nearby with fireworks and charged with preparatory acts, and the group never claimed the incident, which entered its record through the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs report. It also dated that ministry's special report to 16 March; the report is dated 24 March 2026 — after the ICCT's report and the Golders Green attack, not before — and the pipeline passage has been revised accordingly. The corrections strengthen the article's findings; none of its conclusions change.

Franco is not a random pundit. He holds a Juris Doctor from Creighton University. He served as Assistant Administrator for Latin America at USAID from 2002 to 2007 — one of the longest tenures in that role under the Bush administration. He was a foreign policy advisor on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and a surrogate for Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2024 campaigns. He served as chief counsel to the Chairman of the House International Relations Committee.¹ This is a man with legal training, government experience, and a professional obligation to know what international humanitarian law actually says.

He either does not know, or he does not care. Neither option is comforting.

President Trump had issued a series of public threats targeting Iran’s civilian infrastructure — bridges, power plants, electrical grids, desalination facilities — ahead of a deadline demanding Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz.² On 7 April 2026, he posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”³ The interviewer asked a fair question: do these threats constitute war crimes? Franco’s answer was a masterclass in confident wrongness. He made three claims:

One: you cannot commit a war crime by threatening to do something — only by doing it.

Two: the real war criminals are the Iranians, who have been striking civilian infrastructure in Gulf states.

Three: if threatening infrastructure is a war crime, then Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower are all war criminals.

Each of these claims is wrong, misleading, or both. And each maps onto a broader pattern — the way international law gets selectively invoked, selectively dismissed, and selectively explained depending on who is doing what to whom.

This article takes Franco’s claims one at a time. Not because he matters — he is one of hundreds of commentators making identical arguments across cable news and social media — but because his segment is a near-perfect specimen. Every evasion, every deflection, every confident falsehood that circulates in the public conversation about war crimes is present in ninety seconds of live television. If you can see through Franco, you can see through all of them.

“You don’t commit a war crime unless you do something”

Franco’s first claim is the foundation on which the rest of his argument sits. It sounds intuitive. You cannot be guilty of a crime you did not commit. In domestic criminal law, there is a version of this that holds — you generally cannot be convicted of murder for thinking about murder. But international humanitarian law is not domestic criminal law, and the distinction matters in ways Franco either does not understand or chose not to mention.

The United Nations Charter — which the United States signed on 26 June 1945 and ratified through the Senate, making it binding domestic law — addresses this directly. Article 2(4) states: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”⁴

Read that again. The threat or use of force. Not the use of force alone. The drafters of the Charter did not accidentally include the word “threat.” They included it because they understood — in 1945, in the wreckage of a war that killed tens of millions — that the threat of force against another state is itself a violation of international law. It does not require follow-through. It does not require a bomb to land. The threat is the violation.

This is not an obscure academic reading. The UN Security Council’s own repertoire confirms that Article 2(4) “prohibits the threat or use of force” and has been cited in dozens of resolutions addressing situations where states threatened the territorial integrity or political independence of others.⁵ The International Court of Justice has confirmed that the prohibition in Article 2(4) is not limited by weapon type or method of delivery — it applies to any threat or use of force, whether nuclear or conventional.⁶

Then there is Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1977. Article 51(2) states: “The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.”⁷

Again: threats of violence. Not acts alone. The law explicitly prohibits threatening violence against civilian populations when the primary purpose is to terrorise them. When a sitting president goes on social media and announces that he will destroy every bridge and power plant in a country of ninety million people — that is not a negotiating posture. It is a threat of violence against a civilian population. The text of Article 51(2) was written to cover exactly this.

Now, a fair objection: the United States never ratified Additional Protocol I. The Reagan administration rejected it in 1987, primarily due to Pentagon objections about the prohibition on reprisals and concerns about its application to national liberation movements.⁸ This is true, and it should be stated honestly. But it does not end the analysis. The US State Department has itself acknowledged that key provisions of Additional Protocol I — including Articles 51 and 52 on the protection of civilians — reflect customary international law.⁹ Customary international law is formed when a practice becomes so widespread and consistent among states that it is recognised as legally binding — regardless of whether any individual state has signed a specific treaty codifying it. The prohibition on targeting civilians and on using threats of violence to terrorise civilian populations has achieved that status. The United States cannot opt out of it by declining to ratify the document that wrote it down.

The Rome Statute adds another layer. Article 25(3)(b) establishes individual criminal responsibility for anyone who “orders, solicits or induces” the commission of a crime within the Court’s jurisdiction.¹⁰ Article 8(2)(b)(i) defines as a war crime “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities.”¹¹ A public order or inducement to attack civilian infrastructure — issued by the person with the authority to give that order — does not require the attack to succeed for criminal responsibility to attach.

Franco may respond that the United States does not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. That is also true. But non-recognition of a court does not change the underlying law. The United States does not recognise the ICC’s jurisdiction over American personnel — but it has enthusiastically supported ICC arrest warrants when they target adversaries. The law is either law or it is not. You do not get to choose which parts apply to you based on whether you like the court that enforces them.

There is a final dimension Franco’s framing erases entirely: the distinction between a private citizen’s angry words and a head of state’s public declaration of intent. When an anonymous account on social media posts angry rhetoric about bombing another country, that is objectionable but carries no operational weight. When the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on earth publicly identifies specific categories of civilian infrastructure he intends to destroy — bridges, power plants, desalination facilities — and then declares that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” that is a credible threat backed by operational capacity. The legal character of the statement changes categorically. Franco collapses this distinction as though it does not exist. It is the most important distinction in the analysis.

“What about Iran?”

Having failed to address the legal question he was asked, Franco pivots. The real war criminals, he insists, are the Iranians — who have been striking civilian infrastructure in Gulf states. “My god,” he says, “they’ve been hitting Oman and Azerbaijan, not to mention all of the other Gulf states, who of course have nothing to do with this conflict. They’ve hit civilian structures as targets. And no one talks about war crimes that I’ve heard of. For Iranian leaders.”

Set aside for a moment whether Franco’s factual claims about Iranian strikes are accurate. Even if every word is true — even if Iran has struck civilian infrastructure in Oman, Azerbaijan, and every other Gulf state — it does not answer the question he was asked. The question was whether Trump’s threats constitute war crimes. Franco’s answer is: but Iran did bad things too.

This is not a legal argument. It is a rhetorical manoeuvre with a Latin name and a long history of being rejected by every international court that has ever considered it.

It is called tu quoque — “you too.” The argument that if your adversary has committed the same crime, you cannot be held accountable for committing it yourself. It has an intuitive appeal. It sounds like fairness. It is not.

The tu quoque defence was invoked at Nuremberg. Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the German Navy, argued that he should not be convicted of unrestricted submarine warfare because the United States Navy had conducted identical operations in the Pacific.¹² Admiral Chester Nimitz provided testimony confirming that American submarines had indeed waged unrestricted warfare against Japan from the day after Pearl Harbor. The tribunal did not acquit Dönitz — but it declined to impose a sentence on the submarine warfare charges, creating what scholars have described as one of the most ambiguous moments in the tribunal’s legacy.¹³

The subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals were less ambiguous. In the High Command case, the tribunal stated: “Under general principles of law, an accused does not exculpate himself from a crime by showing that another has committed a similar crime, either before or after the commission of the crime by the accused.”¹⁴ In the Einsatzgruppen and Hostage cases, defendants argued that they could not be convicted of crimes against humanity because Allied bombings had also killed civilians. The tribunals rejected both arguments.¹⁵

Half a century later, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia closed the door entirely. In the Kupreškić case, the Trial Chamber ruled that tu quoque “has no place in contemporary international humanitarian law.” The defining characteristic of modern IHL, the Chamber stated, is “the obligation to uphold key tenets of this body of law regardless of the conduct of enemy combatants.” The obligations are absolute and non-derogable.¹⁶

That word — regardless — is doing the heavy lifting. It means that even if Iran has committed every violation Franco alleges, it does not create a legal permission slip for identical conduct by the United States. It does not reduce Trump’s legal exposure by a single degree. It does not make the threats less threatening or the law less applicable. The conduct of one party to a conflict does not modify the obligations of the other.

Franco knows this — or should. He is a lawyer. Tu quoque is not an obscure doctrine. It is one of the most well-established principles in international criminal law, precisely because it has been raised so often and rejected so consistently. If Franco were making this argument in a courtroom, the judge would not need to look it up. The judge would tell him to sit down.

Now — and this is important — none of this means that Iranian strikes on civilian infrastructure are acceptable or should be ignored. If Iran has struck civilian targets in Oman, Azerbaijan, or any other Gulf state, those strikes should be investigated, documented, and — where the evidence supports it — prosecuted. Franco’s underlying factual claim may be legitimate. But he is not making it as a standalone argument for accountability. He is making it as a shield — deploying Iranian conduct to deflect scrutiny from American threats. That is not a call for consistent application of international law. It is the opposite. It is an argument that the law should apply to them and not to us.

The distinction between “Iran should also be held accountable” and “Iran’s conduct means we cannot be held accountable” is the difference between a legal argument and a talking point. Franco is making the talking point.

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“Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, Eisenhower are terrible war criminals”

Franco’s third move is his most revealing. If threatening to hit infrastructure is a war crime, he argues, then Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower are all terrible war criminals. The implication is that this conclusion is self-evidently absurd — that no reasonable person would call the architects of Allied victory war criminals — and therefore the premise must be wrong.

The problem is that Franco is half-right. And the half he is right about destroys his own argument.

The Allied strategic bombing campaigns of the Second World War killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945 killed an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people in a single raid — more immediate deaths than either atomic bomb.¹⁷ The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 killed approximately 25,000 civilians in a city of limited strategic value.¹⁸ Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.¹⁹

Would these acts face prosecution under modern international humanitarian law? The honest answer is: almost certainly yes. The indiscriminate firebombing of civilian population centres, the deliberate destruction of cities with no meaningful military objective, the use of weapons whose effects could not be limited to military targets — each of these would constitute a grave breach under the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and a war crime under the Rome Statute.

Franco presents this as a reductio ad absurdum. If the law says Roosevelt is a war criminal, the law must be wrong. But that is not what the history shows. What the history shows is that the international community looked at what Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, and Eisenhower did — looked at the firebombings, the area bombings, the nuclear attacks on civilian cities — and decided to build an entire legal architecture to make sure it never happened again.

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 were drafted in the direct aftermath of the Second World War.²⁰ The Nuremberg Principles were confirmed by the UN General Assembly in 1950.²¹ Additional Protocol I, with its explicit protections for civilian populations and its prohibition on indiscriminate attacks, was adopted in 1977.²² The Rome Statute, establishing the International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over war crimes, was adopted in 1998.²³ Every one of these instruments exists because of what happened between 1939 and 1945. They are not abstract exercises in legal theory. They are direct responses to specific conduct by specific leaders — including the leaders Franco names.

Franco’s argument amounts to this: because the men who committed these acts were never prosecuted, the acts themselves must be legal. That is not how law works. The absence of prosecution does not create a legal precedent for legality. It creates an injustice — one the international community spent the next half-century trying to correct through the development of the very legal frameworks Franco is now dismissing.

There is a deeper irony Franco appears not to notice. The Nuremberg Tribunal — the same tribunal that tried the defeated Nazi leadership — declared that to initiate a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”²⁴ The tribunal was created by the same Allied leaders Franco cites. They built the system. They established the principle that leaders can be held personally accountable for violations of international law. Franco is invoking the architects of international criminal accountability as evidence that international criminal accountability does not apply.

He is using the men who built the house to argue that the house does not exist.

The temporal dimension matters too. Franco is applying pre-Geneva Convention conduct as a standard for post-Geneva Convention legality. The law in 1945 was different from the law in 2026. That is not a weakness of the legal system — it is the point of the legal system. Laws evolve in response to the horrors they failed to prevent. The fact that strategic bombing was not prosecuted in 1945 does not make threatening it legal in 2026, any more than the fact that slavery was legal in 1820 makes it legal today. Franco’s argument requires you to believe that international law froze in 1945 and nothing adopted since then counts. It is an argument that could only be made by someone who either has not read the Geneva Conventions or is hoping you have not.

The selectivity problem

Franco’s three claims share a common thread. Each one treats international law as something that applies to other people — other countries, other leaders, other conflicts. None of them engages with the possibility that the same legal standards might apply to the United States. This is not an oversight. It is the defining feature of how the United States engages with international humanitarian law — and it has been for decades. The pattern is so consistent it barely qualifies as hypocrisy any more. It is closer to a doctrine.

Consider the timeline. In 2022 and 2023, the United States government accused Russia of committing war crimes for launching missiles and drones at Ukrainian power plants, electrical substations, and heating infrastructure.²⁵ The argument was clear and correct: deliberately targeting civilian energy infrastructure to deprive a population of heating and power, with no proportionate military advantage, constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law. The State Department said so. The Pentagon said so. The President said so.

In April 2026, the President of the United States threatened to destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran. He declared that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” He was asked whether he was concerned about committing war crimes. He said he was “not at all.”²⁶

This is not a matter of interpretation. It is not a question of legal nuance or the complexities of dual-use infrastructure. It is the same conduct — threatening or executing the destruction of civilian energy and transport infrastructure — described by the same government in opposite legal terms depending on who is doing it.

When Russia does it to Ukraine, it is a war crime. When the United States threatens to do it to Iran, it is leverage.

The French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, stated publicly that attacks targeting civilian and energy infrastructure could constitute a war crime.²⁷ The UN Secretary-General’s spokesman said he was “deeply troubled” by the threats, stating that no military objective justified targeting civilian infrastructure.²⁸ Iran’s representative at the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani, described the threats as “incitement to war crimes and potentially genocide.”²⁹ Representative Jim McGovern called them “a genocidal threat to commit war crimes.”³⁰

These are not fringe voices. They are the French Foreign Minister, the United Nations, a senior member of Congress, and the representative of the targeted state. The international response to Trump’s threats was immediate, specific, and grounded in the same legal frameworks the United States itself invokes when the roles are reversed.

Franco mentions none of this. He does not address the Russia comparison. He does not acknowledge that his own government has described identical conduct as criminal when perpetrated by an adversary. He does not engage with the legal frameworks at all — because engaging with them would require him to explain why the law applies in one direction and not the other. And that explanation does not exist.

This is the deeper problem the article is about. It is not really about Adolfo Franco. It is about a political culture that has learned to treat international law as a costume — something you put on when it makes you look righteous and take off when it becomes inconvenient. The Geneva Conventions are sacred when Russia violates them. They are irrelevant when the United States does. The ICC is a beacon of accountability when it issues warrants for African and Russian leaders. It is an illegitimate overreach when it turns its attention to American or Israeli personnel.

The people on X repeating Franco’s arguments are not inventing this selectivity. They are absorbing it — from cable news, from social media, from commentators who say what Franco said and never get challenged on it. Every time a credentialed commentator dismisses the legal question, waves away the treaty obligations, and pivots to “but what about the other side,” the message is reinforced: the law is a tool, not a standard. It applies to our enemies. It does not apply to us.

A culture that no longer believes in the law is doomed to repeat the darkest moments in human history.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Banner image: Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials. Photograph by Raymond D'Addario, United States Army Signal Corps. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Endnotes

¹ Adolfo Franco biographical details: Al Jazeera contributor profile, aljazeera.com/author/adolfo-franco; Prabook, prabook.com/web/adolfo.franco/329562; LegiStorm, legistorm.com/person/bio/59052/Adolfo_A_Franco.html.

² Trump threats against Iranian civilian infrastructure reported across multiple outlets, including NBC News, PBS, and the Washington Post, 7–8 April 2026.

³ Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, 7 April 2026, 8:06 AM.

⁴ Charter of the United Nations, signed 26 June 1945, entered into force 24 October 1945, Article 2(4).

⁵ UN Security Council Repertoire, “Article 2(4) — Prohibition of threat or use of force in international relations,” main.un.org/securitycouncil/en/content/purposes-and-principles-un-chapter-i-un-charter.

⁶ International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, 8 July 1996.

⁷ Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Additional Protocol I), adopted 8 June 1977, Article 51(2).

⁸ Reagan administration rejection of Additional Protocol I: National Security Archive, “Humanitarian Law of War: The U.S.-NATO Review of Additional Protocol I, 1978–1986,” 21 September 2023.

⁹ Michael Matheson, Deputy Legal Adviser, US State Department, remarks at Red Cross–American University workshop, 1987. Matheson stated: “We support the principle that the civilian population as such, as well as individual citizens, not be the object of acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among them.”

¹⁰ Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted 17 July 1998, Article 25(3)(b).

¹¹ Rome Statute, Article 8(2)(b)(i).

¹² Admiral Karl Dönitz defence at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945–1946. See also “Trial of K Doenitz,” Judgement, International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1 October 1946, 1 IMT 171, at 310–15.

¹³ Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, interrogatory testimony submitted to the International Military Tribunal on behalf of the defence, 1946. The tribunal declined to impose a sentence on the unrestricted submarine warfare charges. See Nicole A. Heise, “Deciding Not to Decide: Nuremberg and the Ambiguous History of the Tu Quoque Defense,” 2009.

¹⁴ “Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb et al” (High Command Case), Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1948, XI TWC, at 481.

¹⁵ “Trial of Otto Ohlendorf et al” (Einsatzgruppen Case), Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1948, IV TWC, at 467; “Trial of Wilhelm List et al” (Hostage Case), Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 1948.

¹⁶ Prosecutor v. Kupreškić et al., Judgement, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Case No. IT-95-16-T, 14 January 2000, paras. 511, 515.

¹⁷ Firebombing of Tokyo, 9–10 March 1945 (Operation Meetinghouse). The US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated approximately 88,000 killed; the Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed; other estimates range up to 100,000 or higher. See Britannica, “Bombing of Tokyo”; Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999).

¹⁸ Bombing of Dresden, 13–15 February 1945. The Dresden Historians’ Commission, established by the Dresden city council in 2004, published its findings in 2010 and concluded that between 22,700 and 25,000 people were killed. See “Official report: Dresden bombing killed 25,000,” The Local (Germany), 17 March 2010.

¹⁹ Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945). The Radiation Effects Research Foundation estimates 90,000–166,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 deaths in Nagasaki within the first two to four months. Combined range: 150,000–246,000. See Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), rerf.or.jp; International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), icanw.org/hiroshima_and_nagasaki_bombings.

²⁰ Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, ratified by the United States on 2 August 1955.

²¹ UN General Assembly Resolution 95(I), “Affirmation of the Principles of International Law Recognized by the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal,” 11 December 1946; “Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal,” formulated by the International Law Commission, 1950.

²² Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions (Additional Protocol I), adopted 8 June 1977.

²³ Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted 17 July 1998, entered into force 1 July 2002.

²⁴ Nuremberg Tribunal, Judgment, 1 October 1946.

²⁵ US State Department, “Russia’s Attacks on Ukraine’s Energy Infrastructure,” press statement, 23 November 2022; Secretary of State Antony Blinken, remarks on Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, multiple occasions 2022–2023; US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, statement to the UN Security Council condemning Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure as war crimes, 23 November 2022.

²⁶ Trump stated he was “not at all” concerned about committing war crimes. Reported in NBC News, Washington Post, and PBS, 7 April 2026.

²⁷ French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot statement reported in PBS NewsHour, 8 April 2026.

²⁸ Spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, statement reported in PBS NewsHour, 8 April 2026.

²⁹ Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s representative at the United Nations, statement reported in PBS NewsHour, 8 April 2026.

³⁰ Representative Jim McGovern, statement posted on X, reported in NBC News, 7 April 2026.

Within hours, a group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia — a fictitious organisation that no intelligence agency, no counter-terrorism database, and no analyst had ever encountered — claimed responsibility via Telegram. The first institutions to introduce this group to the English-speaking world were not intelligence agencies or law enforcement. They were the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a front organisation for Zionist Israeli interests, and the Israeli state itself, asserting a link to Iran in its own voice. Then the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague provided the assessment that gave the narrative the institutional credibility mainstream media required before repeating it — and Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs formalised the attribution in a report published the day the story went mainstream. By the twenty-fourth of March, the BBC was reporting the attacks as potentially Iran-linked. The framing was set: Islamic terror had arrived in Europe.²

Then the evidence started arriving. And it did not match the story.

Five people have been arrested in connection with the Golders Green attack. Two British men, aged forty-five and forty-seven, were detained and released on bail — not charged with terrorism. Three more were arrested on the first of April: two British nationals, aged nineteen and twenty, and a seventeen-year-old dual British-Pakistani national. All were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson. Not one has been charged with a terrorism offence.³

The group that claimed responsibility cannot write its own name correctly in Arabic. Its communiqués misspell the word “Islamic.” Its logo changes between messages, consistent with AI generation. Its Telegram channels were created after most of the attacks they purport to claim. A Dutch professor specialising in transnational Shia militant groups examined the materials and concluded that the group’s inability to write fluent Arabic disqualifies it as a seriously organised radicalised cell.⁴

Between the ninth and the twenty-third of March, ten incidents across five countries entered HAYI's record — most claimed by the group, the rest attached to it by the reports that built its file — Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, France, and the United Kingdom. The record does not survive scrutiny. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism — the same institution whose assessment launched the narrative into mainstream media — flagged three of the ten incidents as likely disinformation: a purported attack in Greece on the eleventh of March, and claimed attacks in France and the Netherlands on the twenty-third of March. None appear to have occurred. Of the remaining incidents, one “attack” in Antwerp turned out to be a car fire belonging to a Moroccan woman named Fatia, whose vehicle was robbed of jewellery before being set alight. A “terror plot” in the Netherlands consisted of two teenagers, aged fourteen and seventeen, found in possession of fireworks. Half of everything on its record either did not happen or was not what it was presented as.⁵

No law enforcement agency in any country has confirmed a link to Iran.

But here is the part that matters: no one has said so. Not with the volume, the prominence, or the urgency that accompanied the original claim. The narrative that these were acts of Islamic terror — orchestrated by Iran, executed by radicalised operatives, representing a new front in a civilisational war — entered the public bloodstream through every major news outlet in Europe. The correction, such as it exists, has been confined to specialist analysts, independent journalists, and a handful of outlets that most of the original audience will never read.

The fear was planted. The hate was seeded. And when the evidence collapsed, the institutions that amplified the claim did not retract it. They simply went quiet.

This article is about that silence. It is about what happens when media, governments, and propaganda outlets amplify a narrative of Islamic terror — and then, when the facts fall apart, choose not to correct the record. It is about who benefits from the silence, who pays for it, and why it keeps happening.

Because this is not the first time. It is not even the second.

The Anatomy of Amplification

To understand how the Golders Green arson became “Islamic terror” in the public mind, it helps to trace the claim from its origin to its destination. The journey has three stops. Each one is necessary. Without the first, the claim has no content. Without the second, it has no authority. Without the third, it has no reach. Together, they form a pipeline — and the pipeline works the same way every time.

The first stop is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

On the twelfth of March 2026 — eleven days before the Golders Green attack, but three days after a small incendiary device damaged the door of a synagogue in Liège, Belgium — Joe Truzman, a research analyst at the FDD, published a short article on the organisation’s website and its affiliated Long War Journal. It was the first English-language source to float the possibility of an Iranian link to the European incidents. The article was cautious in its language but unmistakable in its direction: “The claimed attacks could signal that Iran or Iran-aligned actors are executing acts of terrorism in Europe.”⁶

The FDD is not a neutral research institution. It was founded in 2001 with the stated mission of working to “enhance Israel’s image.” The then-Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Sima Vaknin-Gil, publicly identified the FDD as a resource used by the Israeli government, telling a conference in 2018: “We have FDD. We have others working on this.” The FDD’s analysis of the European attacks gained limited traction on its own — picked up by a handful of niche pro-Israel outlets, but not by mainstream media. A front organisation for Israeli interests asserting an Iran link was not, by itself, newsworthy. The claim needed institutional weight.⁷

It got it three days later, from the second stop: the Israeli state itself. On the fifteenth of March, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared HAYI a jihadi group tied to an Iranian proxy — the state's own voice, carrying the claim on no more evidence than the FDD had offered. And behind that voice stands the ministry whose paperwork would close the pipeline rather than open it: Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism.

Its special report came on the twenty-fourth of March — the day after Golders Green, the same day the BBC took the story mainstream — formally attributing the European attacks to Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia and linking the group to Iranian terror networks. The report was detailed, branded with the authority of a government ministry, and distributed through diplomatic and media channels. It did not build the framework that English-language coverage adopted; the framework was already running. The report ratified it — a state's stamp on a narrative the machinery had assembled without it.⁸

The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is not a disinterested observer. Following the downgrading of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the Diaspora Ministry absorbed Israel’s international propaganda operations. Minister Amichai Chikli’s department relaunched the former Concert project as “Voices of Israel” after October 2023, directing it to go “on the offensive” against critics. The Ministry has allocated millions to covert social media campaigns, campus operations, and overseas cutouts designed to evade foreign-agent scrutiny. When this Ministry publishes a report attributing attacks to an Iranian proxy, it is not performing intelligence analysis. It is performing a communications function — putting the state's stamp on a narrative that serves Israeli strategic interests.⁹

But a state's bare assertion is not sufficient to move the BBC. For that, the claim needed its third stop: an institution that Western media would treat as independent.

On the twenty-third of March — the same day as the Golders Green attack — the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague published an assessment titled “Hybrid Threat Signals: Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement in Recent Attacks in Europe.” The ICCT receives core funding from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and lists NATO, the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs, USAID, and RUSI Europe among its partners. Its assessment was more cautious than the ministry's report would prove to be — it flagged linguistic errors in the group’s materials, noted that several claimed attacks were likely disinformation, and acknowledged the amateurism of the incidents. But its headline framing — “Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement” — was enough. Within twenty-four hours, the BBC, Fox News, and outlets across Europe were reporting the attacks through the lens the pipeline had constructed: a shadowy new Iranian-backed terror group was targeting Jews in Europe.¹⁰

Three sources. A front organization with documented ties to the Israeli government. A foreign government’s propaganda ministry running covert influence operations across multiple continents. And a Western-funded counter-terrorism institute whose junior researcher’s career runs through Zionist-linked organisations. This is not analysis. It is a PsyOp — a fabrication manufactured in one country’s strategic interests, laundered through successive institutions until it arrived on the desks of Western journalists looking indistinguishable from independent assessment.

This is how narratives are built. The FDD needs the threat narrative to justify its existence. The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs needs it to support IRGC proscription campaigns. The ICCT needs it to demonstrate relevance to its government funders. And the journalists at the end of the chain need a story — preferably one that arrives with enough institutional backing that they can report it without doing the verification themselves.

Someone in that chain knew what they were selling. The rest chose not to ask. And when the evidence began to contradict the narrative, no one in the chain issued a correction. Because the pipeline only flows in one direction.

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What Was Said and What Was Not

The communiqué that Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia published claiming responsibility for the Golders Green attack contains a passage that should have stopped every newsroom in Europe. It reads, in part: the Machzike Hadath Synagogue is “one of the important centers of Orthodox Judaism,” connected to Israel through “Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel and one of the most influential thinkers of Religious Zionism, who served at this synagogue before immigrating to the Land of Israel.”¹¹

Read that again. “The Land of Israel.” That is not a phrase used by Iranian operatives. It is not a phrase used by any Shia militia. It is not a phrase used by anyone in the Axis of Resistance. “The Land of Israel” — Eretz Yisrael — is a Zionist formulation. It is the vocabulary of Israeli nationalism, of Religious Zionism specifically, and of the settler movement. No Iranian proxy would use it. No Arabic-speaking militant group would use it. The phrase identifies the author as surely as a fingerprint.¹²

The communiqué also uses the American spelling of “center” rather than the British “centre” — despite purporting to describe a target in London. It demonstrates detailed insider knowledge of Rabbi Kook’s historical connection to the synagogue — a connection unlikely to be known by anyone outside the congregation or those with close familiarity with the institution’s history. And it describes the Machzike Hadath Synagogue as “one of the main bastions of support for Israel in Britain” — a claim that is not remotely true. The synagogue is a member of the Federation of Synagogues, a body gathering Hasidic and central-orthodox congregations. It is not an explicitly Zionist institution. There are hundreds of organisations in Britain with far stronger and more visible ties to the Israeli state. The communiqué reads like it was written by someone who knows the synagogue intimately but does not know how to pretend to be its enemy convincingly.¹³

These are not minor discrepancies. They are the kind of details that any competent journalist, any intelligence analyst, any counter-terrorism professional would notice — if they were looking. The BBC reported the Iran-linked framing on the twenty-fourth of March. Not one of these details appeared in the coverage. Fox News ran a feature on the “new terror group.” Not one of these details appeared. The broadsheets, the tabloids, the evening bulletins — all carried the story. None carried the evidence that contradicted it.

The silence extends beyond the media.

The Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit is leading the investigation. Five people have been arrested. Two were bailed. Three more were detained on the first of April. The charge is conspiracy to commit arson — not terrorism. The Met has not publicly stated whether the HAYI claim is considered credible. It has not publicly stated whether any link to Iran has been established or ruled out. It has issued careful, procedural updates about arrests and community reassurance. What it has not done is say the single sentence that the evidence demands: there is no confirmed connection between this attack and any Islamic terror group.¹⁴

The British government has not said it either. The Prime Minister called it a “deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack.” He was right. But in the vacuum left by institutional silence, the narrative that this was Islamic terror — Iranian-directed, religiously motivated, part of a coordinated campaign — remains the dominant public understanding. The people who read the original headlines have not been told that the group claiming responsibility appears to be fictional. The people who felt the fear have not been told that the evidence points away from Islamic extremism, not toward it.¹⁵

This is the accountability failure at the heart of this article. It is not that institutions got it wrong in the heat of the moment — early reporting is always provisional. It is that when the evidence arrived, when the arrests were made, when the analysts flagged the disinformation, when the communiqué’s language gave the game away — the institutions that amplified the original claim chose silence. The BBC did not update its reporting. The politicians did not qualify their statements. The propagandists of course did not revise their assessments. The fear was left to do its work undisturbed.

And the people who pay for that silence are the ones who always pay: Muslim communities who inherit the blame for an attack they had nothing to do with, and Jewish communities who inherit a fear that has been deliberately manufactured and deliberately sustained.

The Pattern

If the Golders Green case were an isolated incident — a single attack, a single false claim, a single failure to correct — it might be explained as the fog of a crisis moment. Newsrooms move fast. Governments react before investigations conclude. Mistakes happen.

But this is not an isolated incident. The same pattern — fabricated claims of Islamic or antisemitic terror, instantaneous amplification, and a correction that never arrives with the same force as the original narrative — has repeated across three continents in less than a decade. Each time, the machinery works the same way. Each time, the silence afterward is the same.

In early 2017, a wave of more than two thousand bomb threats struck Jewish Community Centres across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Schools were evacuated. Communities were terrified. Fighter jets were scrambled. The story dominated the news cycle for weeks. Politicians condemned the attacks. Commentators speculated about a coordinated antisemitic campaign. Some attributed the threats to the rise of right-wing populism under the new Trump presidency. Others pointed the finger at Islamic extremism. The threats were covered, overwhelmingly, as evidence of a rising tide of ideological hatred — and for Muslim communities in a country already deep into the War on Terror’s second decade, the implication was familiar and dangerous.¹⁶

Two people were eventually arrested. The first was Juan Thompson, a disgraced former journalist who had been fired from The Intercept for fabricating quotes. Thompson had made at least twelve of the threats — not out of antisemitism, but as part of a campaign to frame his ex-girlfriend. He pleaded guilty to cyberstalking and making hoax bomb threats and was sentenced to five years in prison. The second was Michael Ron David Kadar, a dual American-Israeli citizen living in Ashkelon, Israel, who was responsible for the vast majority of the threats. Kadar had been rejected from enlistment in the Israel Defence Forces due to mental health issues. According to Israeli police, he had used advanced technologies to disguise his voice and mask the origin of his calls. He had also advertised a service on the dark web offering to threaten any school for thirty dollars. He was convicted on hundreds of counts and sentenced to ten years. His motive, according to investigators, was boredom.¹⁷

Neither perpetrator was Muslim. Neither was motivated by Islamic extremism. Neither had any connection to any terror group. A disgraced journalist stalking his ex-girlfriend and a teenager in Israel acting out of boredom — these were the authors of a “wave of antisemitic terror” that shaped political discourse across multiple countries for months.

The correction, when it came, received a fraction of the coverage the threats had generated. The politicians who had condemned the attacks did not return to the microphones to note that the perpetrators were not who the public had been led to imagine. The commentators who had built segments around the threat did not revisit their analysis. The fear — and the political utility of that fear — remained undisturbed.¹⁸

Seven years later, the pattern repeated in Australia.

Between late 2024 and early 2025, Jewish communities in Sydney and Melbourne were subjected to months of escalating attacks. Synagogues were firebombed. A childcare centre near a Jewish school was set alight. Vehicles and homes of community leaders were vandalised with antisemitic graffiti. A caravan packed with explosives was discovered on the outskirts of Sydney, containing a list of Jewish targets. Politicians described the situation as an unprecedented national crisis. The Prime Minister called the caravan discovery an act of terrorism. New South Wales and the federal government invoked the attacks to pass sweeping hate speech legislation targeting, in practice, opponents of the war in Gaza. The head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation warned that the attacks had “not yet plateaued.”¹⁹

On the tenth of March 2025, the Australian Federal Police held a press conference and dismantled the entire narrative.

The caravan plot was a hoax — fabricated by an organised crime network. The explosives were forty years old. There was no detonator. The caravan had been deliberately placed where it would be easily found. The criminals behind it intended to tip off police and then leverage the information to bargain for reduced sentences in unrelated proceedings. The wave of arsons and graffiti attacks that had terrorised Jewish communities for months had been carried out by the same network — petty criminals hired and paid by an offshore figure, not one of them ideologically motivated. The AFP’s deputy commissioner called it “a criminal con job.”²⁰

Not a single perpetrator was Muslim. Not a single attack was motivated by Islamic extremism. The entire wave — every firebombing, every piece of graffiti, every terrifying headline — had been manufactured by criminals for money.

The correction was devastating in its implications. The legislation that had been passed on the back of the fear was already law. The public perception that Australian Jews were under siege from Islamic or pro-Palestinian extremism had already calcified. The politicians who had invoked the attacks did not return to Parliament to acknowledge that the evidentiary basis for their laws had collapsed. The media outlets that had covered the crisis daily for months did not run the correction with anything approaching the same intensity. And six months later, the Australian government pivoted to blaming Iran — despite the fact that the charges filed against the perpetrators make no mention of Iranian involvement and the NSW Police confirmed they had no information connecting Iran to the attacks.²¹

Three continents. Three waves of fabricated or misattributed threats against Jewish communities. In every case, the amplification was instantaneous — politicians, media, propaganda outlets, all moving in lockstep to frame the incidents as evidence of a coordinated ideological threat. In every case, the perpetrators turned out to be something entirely different from what the public was told. And in every case, the correction was buried — not retracted, not amplified, not given the prominence the original claim received. Simply allowed to die in the specialist press while the fear lived on in the public mind.

These are the cases documented in this article. They are not the only ones. The pattern repeats more often than most people realise — because the corrections never reach the audience that absorbed the fear. The lie is the headline. The truth is the footnote. And the footnote does not trend.

This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern. And the pattern has a beneficiary.

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The Industry That Feeds

The question that every case in the previous section demands is not how the correction failed to arrive. The mechanics are straightforward: a retraction gets less airtime than the original claim, a correction runs on page twelve, an update is published without the headline that accompanied the accusation. The question is why. Why does the same pattern repeat? Why do the same institutions amplify the same kind of claim, from the same kind of sources, and then fall silent when the claim collapses? Why does no one learn?

The answer is that the silence is not a failure. It is a feature. There is an industry that depends on the perception of an Islamic threat — and that industry cannot afford corrections.

In 2011, the Center for American Progress published a report called “Fear, Inc.” that mapped, for the first time, the counter-Islam network in the United States as a traceable system: identifiable organisations, documented funding streams, and a pipeline that runs from think tank to media to legislation. What the researchers found was not a conspiracy. It was something more effective — a small, tightly connected group of organisations funded by a handful of foundations, whose manufactured claims about Islam were amplified through conservative media and converted into policy by sympathetic legislators. Seven foundations spent $42.6 million between 2001 and 2009 funding the intellectual core of this network. By 2014, the inner core organisations alone had access to at least $119.6 million in total revenue.²²

This is the machinery that makes the silence possible. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies — the same organisation that first floated the Iran link for the European attacks — is a node in this network. It was founded to “enhance Israel’s image.” Its analysis serves Israeli strategic interests. When it publishes a report attributing attacks to an Iranian proxy, it is not performing journalism or intelligence work. It is feeding raw material into a pipeline that converts fear of Islam into policy outcomes — in this case, the proscription of the IRGC as a terrorist organisation across Europe, a goal that pro-Israel lobbying networks have pursued for years.²³

The propaganda outlets need the threat narrative to justify their funding. The media figures who amplify the narrative need it to sustain their audience. The politicians who legislate on the back of it need it to justify the laws they have already passed. And the governments that have committed to the narrative — whether through IRGC proscription in Europe or hate speech legislation in Australia — need it to avoid the admission that they acted on fabricated evidence.

This is why the correction never comes. It is not that journalists are lazy, or that politicians are forgetful, or that these organisations make honest mistakes. It is that every institution in the chain has a structural incentive to leave the lie undisturbed. A retraction would require the BBC to admit it amplified an unverified claim from a foreign government’s propaganda ministry. It would require the Australian government to admit it passed laws on the basis of a criminal hoax. It would require the FDD to admit that its analysis served a geopolitical agenda rather than an analytical one. It would require the ICCT to admit that its assessment gave institutional cover to a PsyOp.

None of them will do this voluntarily. And so the fear remains.

The counter-Islam industry — documented in detail in “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” published on this platform — is not a fringe operation. It is a funded, staffed, transatlantic network with a product. The product is fear of Islam. The market for that product is Western public opinion. And the silence that follows every debunked claim is not an accident. It is inventory management. Every correction that fails to reach the public is a unit of fear that remains in circulation — available to be drawn on the next time a politician needs a threat, a think tank needs a grant, or a government needs a war.²⁴

The result is a ratchet. Each fabricated claim that goes uncorrected raises the baseline of public fear. Each unchallenged attribution of violence to Islamic extremism makes the next attribution easier to sell. The audience does not remember the correction that never came. It remembers the headline. And the headline always says the same thing.

Muslims inherit the blame for attacks they did not commit. Jews inherit the fear from threats that were manufactured. And the industry that profits from both — the propaganda outlets, the media amplifiers, the politicians, the defence contractors, the surveillance firms — faces no accountability for any of it.

The industry does not fight hate. It farms it. And the silence after the lie is the harvest.

The Accountability Gap

Accountability, in this context, is not a philosophical abstraction. It is a list of specific things that specific institutions have failed to do — and could do tomorrow.

The BBC reported the Golders Green attack through the lens of a potentially Iran-linked terror campaign. The source of that framing was a pipeline that began with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — a front organisation for Zionist Israeli interests — was carried in the Israeli state's own voice, and arrived at the BBC's newsroom laundered through a Western-funded counter-terrorism institute — with the formal report of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which runs covert influence operations across multiple continents, stamping the story the day it went mainstream. The BBC did not report this provenance. It did not tell its audience that the narrative originated with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs. It did not note that the group claiming responsibility could not write its own name correctly in Arabic, that its communiqués used Zionist vocabulary no Iranian proxy would use, or that half the incidents the group claimed were fabricated. It reported a PsyOp as analysis. It owes its audience a correction — not buried in a follow-up, not phrased as “questions have been raised,” but with the same prominence and the same certainty with which the original framing was delivered.²⁵

The Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit is leading the investigation. It has issued procedural updates about arrests and community reassurance. It has not issued a public statement addressing whether the HAYI claim is considered credible. In the absence of that statement, the narrative that this was an act of Islamic terror stands unchallenged in the public record. The Met does not owe the public a conclusion before the investigation is complete. It does owe the public a single, clear sentence: no link to any Islamic terror group has been established. If that sentence is true — and the evidence strongly suggests it is — then the failure to say it is a choice to let the lie stand.²⁶

The British government called the attack “deeply shocking” and “antisemitic.” Both descriptions are accurate. But the Prime Minister did not qualify his statement when the arrests revealed that the suspects were not Islamic extremists. He did not address the fabricated claim of responsibility. He did not note that the narrative of Iranian-directed terror had no confirmed evidentiary basis. In the political climate of a war with Iran, the failure to clarify is not neutral. It is a contribution to the atmosphere that makes the next fabrication easier to believe.²⁷

The governments that carried IRGC proscription forward in the wake of these incidents — Britain, the last major holdout, above all — owe an accounting of the evidentiary basis for those decisions. If the attacks attributed to HAYI formed part of the justification — and the timing strongly suggests they did — then the fact that half the claimed incidents were fabricated and the rest were carried out by teenagers and petty criminals is not a footnote. It is a challenge to the integrity of the policy itself.²⁸

The propagandists — the FDD, the ICCT, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs — will not correct the record. They were never in the business of accuracy. Their assessments were not mistakes to be revised. They were operations to be executed. And they were executed successfully. The narrative is in the bloodstream. The fear is doing its work. The mission is accomplished.

But the media are not propagandists. Or at least they claim not to be. The BBC, the broadsheets, the evening bulletins — these are institutions that present themselves as bound by editorial standards, by obligations to accuracy, by a duty to their audience. They are not supposed to pass unverified claims from a foreign government’s influence operation directly to the public and then walk away when the claims collapse. If a person yells fire in a crowded theatre and there is no fire, they are arrested. If a news organisation amplifies a fabricated claim of Islamic terror to millions of people through algorithmic distribution, generates fear, fuels hatred, and shapes government policy — and then the claim turns out to be false — they face no consequence whatsoever. No obligation to reach the same audience with the correction. No requirement to match the prominence of the retraction to the prominence of the original claim. No accountability for the hate crimes, the legislation, and the foreign policy decisions that their unchecked amplification helped to produce.

This is the accountability gap. Not that propagandists propagandise — that is what they do. But that the media organisations and governments that are supposed to stand between a PsyOp and the public failed to do so, profited from the failure, and face no requirement to repair the damage. A foreign influence operation was played on our nations. The public deserves to know. And the institutions that served as its delivery mechanism owe more than silence.

This article is that demand.

The evidence documented in this article leads to a conclusion that no mainstream outlet will state, so I will state it here: what happened in Golders Green — and in Belgium, and in the Netherlands, and in the pattern that stretches back through Australia and the United States — is not Islamic terror. It is Israeli terror.

Not terror with bombs or bullets. Terror with narrative. A front organisation for Zionist Israeli interests manufactured a fictitious Islamic extremist group. The Israeli government amplified it, attributed a wave of attacks to it, and fed that attribution through a pipeline of institutional laundering until it reached the front pages of every major news outlet in Europe. The result was not the defeat of Iran or the protection of Jewish communities. The result was Muslim communities blamed for attacks they did not commit, and Jewish communities in the diaspora left more frightened, more isolated, and more dependent on the very state apparatus that manufactured their fear.

This is what the operation achieved. Jewish families in Golders Green are afraid to walk to synagogue — not because of Islamic extremism, but because an Israeli influence operation made them believe Islamic extremism was at their door. Muslim families in the same neighbourhood carry the weight of a lie that was designed, from its inception, to fall on them. Both communities are victims. Neither is the beneficiary. The beneficiary is an industry — and a state — that needs the fear to continue.

The hate is not reinforced by the fire. It is reinforced by the silence after the lie. And the silence is not an accident. It is the product.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

This article was updated on 21 April 2026 to correct the attribution in the closing section. The original text attributed the manufacture of the fictitious group to the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs. The corrected text distinguishes between the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which first introduced the group, and the Ministry, which amplified and formalised the attribution.

Article Image: CCTV footage released by Metropolitan Police

Endnotes

¹ Metropolitan Police statement, 23 March 2026; Hatzola Northwest; “Jewish volunteer ambulances fire Golders Green suspected arson antisemitic,” The Guardian, 23 March 2026.

² Foundation for Defense of Democracies / Long War Journal, Joe Truzman, 12 March 2026; Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, "Special Report: Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia," 24 March 2026; International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), “Hybrid Threat Signals: Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement in Recent Attacks in Europe,” 23 March 2026; BBC News, 24 March 2026.

³ Metropolitan Police, “Further arrests made in Golders Green arson investigation,” 1 April 2026; Metropolitan Police statement, 25 March 2026 (initial arrests). Ages, nationalities, and charge details per Met Police statements.

⁴ ICCT, “Hybrid Threat Signals,” 23 March 2026 (linguistic errors); The Grayzone, “Who’s Behind the Mysterious ‘Iran-Backed Terror Cell’ Haunting Europe?”, 28 March 2026 (Dutch professor, logo inconsistencies); Washington Examiner, “The emerging terrorist group claiming attacks across Europe,” 24 March 2026 (ICCT quotation on misspelling and amateurism).

⁵ ICCT, “Hybrid Threat Signals,” 23 March 2026 (Greece, France, and Netherlands claims flagged as likely disinformation); HLN / Nieuwsblad (Antwerp car owner identified as Fatia M., Moroccan national); NL Times, 23 March 2026 (Heemstede arrests, teenagers with fireworks); Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, "Special Report," 24 March 2026 (acknowledged Greece incident "may constitute disinformation" and Heemstede connection unconfirmed).

⁶ Joe Truzman, “Purported Iran-backed group claims responsibility for attacks in Belgium and Greece,” Long War Journal / Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 12 March 2026.

⁷ FDD founding mission: see “Foundation for Defense of Democracies,” Wikipedia; Sima Vaknin-Gil quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2018.

⁸ Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, "Special Report: Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia," 24 March 2026. Available at gov.il.

⁹ Ministry of Diaspora Affairs absorption of hasbara operations: The Guardian, “Israel fund US university protest Gaza antisemitism,” 24 June 2024; “Voices of Israel” relaunch: Al Mayadeen English; covert social media campaigns: New York Times, “Israel campaign Gaza social media,” 5 June 2024; campus operations funding: Peace Now.

¹⁰ ICCT, “Hybrid Threat Signals: Assessing Possible Iranian Involvement in Recent Attacks in Europe,” 23 March 2026; BBC News coverage, 24 March 2026; Fox News, “Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya: What to know about new terror group,” March 2026; ICCT funding and partners listed on icct.nl/about.

¹¹ HAYI communiqué on the Golders Green attack, circulated via Telegram, 23 March 2026. Text reproduced and analysed in The Grayzone, Wyatt Reed, “Who’s Behind the Mysterious ‘Iran-Backed Terror Cell’ Haunting Europe?”, 28 March 2026.

¹² “The Land of Israel” (Eretz Yisrael) as Zionist terminology: see analysis in The Grayzone, 28 March 2026. The phrase is standard in Religious Zionist discourse and Israeli nationalist vocabulary. It does not appear in the lexicon of Iranian proxy groups, Shia militias, or Axis of Resistance communications.

¹³ American spelling and insider knowledge of Rabbi Kook’s connection to the synagogue: HAYI communiqué, circulated via Telegram, 23 March 2026. The communiqué’s description of Machzike Hadath as “one of the main bastions of support for Israel in Britain” is not supported by the evidence — the synagogue is a member of the Federation of Synagogues (federation.org.uk), a body gathering Hasidic and central-orthodox congregations, and is not an explicitly Zionist institution. The discrepancies in vocabulary, spelling, and insider knowledge have been independently noted by multiple analysts.

¹⁴ Metropolitan Police statements, 25 March and 1 April 2026. Charge details: conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life. No terrorism charges have been filed against any suspect as of 2 April 2026.

¹⁵ Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s statement on the Golders Green attack, 23 March 2026.

¹⁶ “2017 Jewish Community Center bomb threats,” Wikipedia; Anti-Defamation League reports on JCC threats, January–March 2017; media coverage compiled in Newsweek, “In College, Bomb Threat Suspect Juan Thompson Had…,” 10 March 2017.

¹⁷ Juan Thompson: United States Department of Justice, Southern District of New York, sentencing statement, 20 December 2017; United States Secret Service press release, 20 December 2017. Michael Ron David Kadar: “2017 Jewish Community Center bomb threats,” Wikipedia; Israeli police statements; Israeli court conviction, June 2018.

¹⁸ Media coverage disparity between the original threats and the subsequent arrests and convictions is documented in the coverage archives of ABC News, CBS News, and Haaretz, all of which covered the arrests but with significantly less prominence than the original threat reporting.

¹⁹ Australian Federal Police, Deputy Commissioner Krissy Barrett, statement on Operation Kissinger, 10 March 2025; CBS News, “Australia police say seemingly antisemitic terrorism incidents were really ‘criminal con job,’” 10 March 2025; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Antisemitic terror plot in Australia was fake and staged by a crime boss, police say,” 11 March 2025; ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess, annual threat assessment, February 2025.

²⁰ AFP Deputy Commissioner Barrett, 10 March 2025: “The caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit.” NBC News, “Explosives-filled caravan was planted by criminals to play on fears of antisemitic attacks,” 11 March 2025; Al Jazeera, “Mob faked attack on Australian synagogue: Police,” 10 March 2025.

²¹ Post-correction political response: World Socialist Web Site, “Australian Labor government accuses Iran of ‘antisemitic’ attacks to justify Trump’s criminal war,” 4 March 2026 (documenting the pivot to Iranian attribution six months after the hoax admission); NSW Police confirmation of no Iranian connection to the Lewis’ Continental Kitchen attack; charges filed against perpetrators reference arson and criminal damage, not terrorism or foreign interference.

²² Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and Faiz Shakir, “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” Center for American Progress, 26 August 2011; Corey Saylor, “The U.S. Islamophobia Network: Its Funding and Impact,” Council on American-Islamic Relations, April 2014 ($119.6 million figure).

²³ FDD founding mission and Israeli government ties: see “Foundation for Defense of Democracies,” Wikipedia; Sima Vaknin-Gil, Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2018. IRGC proscription campaigns: documented across European parliamentary debates and lobbying disclosures, 2023–2026.

²⁴ James S. Coates, “Antisemitism and Counter-Islamism: The Industry,” Fireline Press, 2026. The article provides a comprehensive mapping of the counter-Islam network’s funding, personnel, and policy pipeline across the United States and the United Kingdom.

²⁵ BBC News coverage of Golders Green attack, 24 March 2026. No subsequent correction or update reflecting the absence of a confirmed Iran link has been published as of 2 April 2026.

²⁶ Metropolitan Police statements, 25 March and 1 April 2026. No public statement addressing the credibility of the HAYI claim has been issued as of 2 April 2026.

²⁷ Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s statement on the Golders Green attack, 23 March 2026. No subsequent qualification or update has been issued.

²⁸ European IRGC proscription timeline: the European Union reached unanimous political agreement on 29 January 2026 and formally adopted the designation on 19 February 2026 — before HAYI's first appearance; the United Kingdom, the last major holdout, designated the IRGC on 13 July 2026. See Council of the European Union, press release, 19 February 2026; written ministerial statement HCWS218, UK Parliament, 13 July 2026.

This article was further updated on 11 August 2026 to correct the date and sequence of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs special report (24 March 2026, after the ICCT assessment and the Golders Green attack, not before — the ministry's 16 March publication was its routine periodic bulletin, a separate document), and to update the IRGC proscription timeline, including the United Kingdom's designation of 13 July 2026. The corrected sequence strengthens the article's findings; its conclusions are unchanged.

This was not merely an act of aggression against Iran. It was a betrayal — of the Iranian people who had come to the table, of the constitutional system that reserves the power of war to Congress, of the international legal order that the United States itself authored, of the American people in whose name these acts were committed, and of every allied nation in the region now absorbing the direct consequences of a war they did not choose: the Gulf states managing missile threats and refugee flows, the economies destabilised by the disruption of energy markets, and the nations beyond the Middle East contending with the ripple effects of a conflict that was launched while diplomacy was winning.

But law alone has never stopped a war that enough people wanted. Millions of Americans were primed for decades to support this one, and they have reasons — or at least they believe they do. The nuclear threat. The theological mandate. The media narrative. The political calculation. Four arguments, each carrying enough surface plausibility to survive a cable news segment, each repeated often enough to feel self-evident.

This article takes each on its own terms.

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The Nuclear Threat

The nuclear argument — which Netanyahu has been pushing for decades, since before Iran even had a civilian nuclear programme — suggests that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, diplomacy had failed, and military action was the only remaining option to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. It sounds reasonable. It is also circular, and the circularity is the argument’s fatal defect.

In 2015, the United States and five other world powers negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the JCPOA, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. The agreement constrained Iran’s nuclear programme with a specificity that no military strike could match. Iran agreed to reduce its operating centrifuges by two-thirds. It accepted limits on uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent — far below the roughly 90 percent needed for a weapon. It capped its stockpile of low-enriched uranium at 300 kilograms. It redesigned the Arak heavy water reactor to close the plutonium pathway to a bomb. And it submitted to the most intrusive verification regime in the history of nuclear diplomacy, granting the International Atomic Energy Agency access to monitor compliance at every stage.⁵⁹

The JCPOA was not perfect. Critics pointed to sunset provisions — limits on centrifuges that would expire after ten years, enrichment caps after fifteen. These were legitimate concerns. But the verification regime had no sunset. And the deal’s core achievement was measurable: under the JCPOA, Iran’s breakout time — the time needed to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a single bomb — was extended to over one year. That year was not a guarantee of safety. It was a window — a window for detection, for diplomacy, for response. It was the difference between a programme that could be monitored and one that could not.⁶⁰

On the eighth of May 2018, President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA.⁶¹

He did so while Iran was in compliance. The IAEA had confirmed it in every report since the deal’s implementation. Trump’s own Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, acknowledged that the IAEA had found no evidence of non-compliance. General Joseph Dunford, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in September 2017 that “Iran is adhering to its JCPOA obligations” and that the agreement “has delayed Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.”⁶² The intelligence community agreed. The inspectors agreed. The military agreed. The President withdrew anyway.

What followed was predictable, because it was predicted. Within fourteen months of the withdrawal, Iran had exceeded its enrichment limits. It began producing uranium at 4.5 percent, then 20 percent, then 60 percent. It installed advanced centrifuges the deal had prohibited. It restricted IAEA inspector access. By the time the IAEA issued its November 2024 report, Iran’s breakout time had collapsed from over one year to approximately one week.⁶³

Let the arithmetic speak. The deal constrained the programme. The withdrawal removed the constraints. The programme expanded. And the expansion of the programme is now cited as the justification for bombing it.

This is not an argument. It is a circle. The administration that created the conditions for Iran’s nuclear advancement now presents that advancement as the reason the war was necessary. It is like a man who burns down the fire station and then points to the ashes as proof that the neighbourhood needs better fire protection.

Laura Rockwood, who spent twenty-eight years at the IAEA and now serves as a senior fellow at the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, stated it plainly: Iran’s nuclear advancement occurred “not because of the JCPOA, but because President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA.” Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University who worked as a special envoy for Iran under the Biden administration, confirmed: “Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA in 2018 had a significant accelerating effect on the program.”⁶⁴

But the circularity is only half the indictment. The other half is the negotiations.

As documented in Part One, on the twenty-fifth of February 2026, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated publicly that a deal to avert military conflict was “within reach.” On the twenty-seventh of February — one day before the strikes — Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News and disclosed that Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium, irreversible downgrading of existing stockpiles, and full IAEA verification. He called it “a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved in previous rounds of negotiations.”⁶⁵ This was not the JCPOA being reheated. This was a commitment that went beyond what the JCPOA had secured.

The President had a diplomatic victory on the table — his own diplomatic victory, achieved through his own administration’s negotiations, mediated by an ally he himself had engaged. He chose war. The strikes began on the twenty-eighth of February. The additional talks scheduled for the following Monday in Vienna never took place.

The nuclear argument for this war does not merely fail. It collapses into its own contradiction. The man who abandoned the deal that constrained the programme, who watched the programme expand as a direct and predicted consequence of that abandonment, who then had a second deal on the table that went further than the first — that man chose to bomb what diplomacy had already solved, twice, and asks us to believe there was no alternative.

There was an alternative. He was looking at it. And he turned away.

Which means the nuclear threat was never the reason. If preventing a nuclear-armed Iran were the genuine objective, then Iran’s agreement to zero stockpiling and full IAEA verification — disclosed on American television the day before the strikes — would have ended the conversation. The problem would have been solved. The bombs would have been unnecessary. But the bombs fell anyway, because the nuclear argument was the justification, not the cause. Oman’s foreign minister, the man who had spent weeks mediating between the two sides, confirmed as much after the war began: the strikes were not prompted by an imminent threat but were “solely an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favour.”⁸⁹

The nuclear threat was the label on the box. What was inside was something else entirely.

The Faith-Based Justification

In my article “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” published on the eighteenth of March, I documented the infrastructure that made this war legible — even desirable — to tens of millions of Americans.⁶⁶ The dispensationalist theology that reads Middle Eastern conflict as biblical prophecy unfolding in real time. The Pentagon prayer services. The commanders who told their troops, with grins on their faces, that Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon.” The two hundred complaints across every branch of the military. I will not repeat that documentation here. Read it if you have not. It matters.

What I want to examine here is the specific theological narrative that the Iran war has activated — a narrative that goes beyond generic dispensationalism into something with a name, a history, and a political function. It is called the Cyrus narrative. And it is doing more work in this war than most Americans realise.

Cyrus the Great was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire — the first Persian Empire. In 539 BCE, he conquered Babylon and issued a decree permitting the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. For this, he is celebrated in Jewish tradition and is the only non-Jewish figure described as a messiah — an anointed one — in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah 45:1 reads: “Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him.”⁶⁷

In 2015, a charismatic preacher named Lance Wallnau took that verse and built a political theology around it. Wallnau, a figure in the New Apostolic Reformation who presents more like an infomercial pitchman than a holy man, published a book positioning Donald Trump as “God’s Chaos Candidate” — an unlikely, irreligious ruler chosen by God, just as Cyrus was, to advance the divine plan. The parallel was deliberate: Cyrus was not Jewish, not devout, not particularly interested in theology. He was a conqueror who happened to serve God’s purposes. Trump, in this framework, is the same — a flawed vessel through whom prophecy moves.⁶⁸

The narrative caught fire. Benjamin Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus at multiple public events beginning in 2018, after Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem.⁶⁹ Evangelical leaders adopted the framing with enthusiasm. Roughly a third of white evangelicals told pollsters they believed Trump’s election reflected God’s will.⁷⁰ And in January 2026, as the war loomed, even Reza Pahlavi — the exiled crown prince of Iran — invoked the “Time of Cyrus” alongside the “Time of Trump,” envisioning a transformative alliance that would reshape the Middle East.⁷¹

The irony should not be lost. Trump is being cast as a Cyrus figure — a Persian king, the founder of the civilisation whose modern inheritor he is currently bombing. The theology that celebrates Cyrus as God’s instrument for the liberation of the Jews is being used to justify the destruction of the nation Cyrus built.

But irony is the least of the problems. The real problem is what happens when this narrative meets the machinery of war.

In the first week of the Iran strikes, the FlashPoint television programme — a major platform for charismatic evangelical media — broadcast a series of episodes that treated the war as eschatological vindication. Wallnau declared that because of Trump’s war on Iran, “Israel and the return of Jesus is back on the menu.” He called it a “Last Days-moment” with “Cyrus Trump leading the greatest gentile nation in history.” Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit pastor who delivered a prayer at Trump’s inauguration, called Trump “our modern day Cyrus” and said the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader had turned spiritual warfare literal: “That which people have been doing in the spirit, we saw it manifest in the natural.” He celebrated the killing of another human being by spending the day in the West Wing, mingling with the president’s advisers, telling his audience he could see “the angels surrounding” the Secretary of State.⁷²

This is not fringe theology confined to anonymous social media accounts. This is broadcast media, with direct access to the White House, celebrating the killing of a head of state as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy — and doing so while thirteen American families are burying their dead.

And then there is the projection.

On the fourth of March 2026, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the press that “crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons.”⁷³ This from the man who has held monthly Christian worship services in the Pentagon since May 2025. The man whose personal mentor advocates Christian theocracy. The man whose commanders told troops the war was God’s divine plan to spark Armageddon. The man who declared at the National Prayer Breakfast that military service earns eternal life.

Hegseth accused Iran of being driven by religious delusion while presiding over a Pentagon where religious delusion was being broadcast on the department’s internal television network, posted on its official social media accounts, and preached from its podium. The accusation is not ironic. It is diagnostic. It tells you what the accuser sees when he looks in the mirror — and what he refuses to recognise as his own reflection.

The First Amendment is clear. The Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”⁷⁴ These are not obscure historical footnotes. They are the foundational commitments of the republic in whose name this war is being fought. When foreign policy is driven by eschatology — when the decision to bomb a sovereign nation is legible to the decision-makers as the advancement of God’s prophetic timeline rather than a strategic calculation subject to rational scrutiny — it is not Iran that has a theocracy problem. It is the Pentagon.

The Media Narrative

Ask an American what Iran is and you will get one of a handful of answers. The ayatollahs. The hostage crisis. The nuclear programme. Terrorism. “Death to America.” A monolith — dark, fanatical, implacable. A nation whose more than ninety million people have been compressed into a single image: the bearded cleric, the burning flag, the chanting crowd.

There is no Iranian civil society in this picture. No women who risked their lives in the streets. No students who wrote on their university walls that the system had “taken our future hostage for forty-seven years.”⁷⁵ No poets. No filmmakers. No reformists who won elections and tried to open the country from within.

And no acknowledgment that those reformists were crushed, again and again, not only by the hardliners in Tehran but by American policy that handed those hardliners their best arguments. When George W. Bush declared Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” in January 2002, President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government was in the middle of the most significant opening in Iranian politics since the revolution. The reformists were reaching out. They were met with a label that empowered every hardliner who had warned that America would never accept a moderate Iran.⁹⁰ The pattern has repeated for decades: every time Iranian civil society moves toward openness, American policy delivers a gift to the forces that want to shut it down.

No Mahsa Amini — the twenty-two-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman whose death in the custody of Iran’s morality police in September 2022 sparked the largest anti-regime uprising since the revolution, and whose name became synonymous with a movement the world briefly noticed and then forgot. And no mention that Iranian women graduate in STEM fields at nearly three times the rate of American women, or that Iran has ranked first in the world for female engineering enrolment⁹¹ — facts that do not fit the image of a nation reducible to bearded clerics and burning flags.

When Amini was arrested by Iran’s morality police in September 2022, she died in custody three days later. What followed was the largest anti-regime uprising since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Protests erupted in over a hundred and fifty cities across all thirty provinces. Young women stood on cars and cut their hair. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” became a global rallying cry. The regime responded with the machinery it knows best: security forces using live ammunition, mass arrests, executions. Over five hundred people were killed. More than twenty-two thousand were detained. At least ten were executed after trials that international observers described as shams.⁷⁶

This was not a distant event. It was broadcast in real time on every social media platform in the world. The Iranian people — overwhelmingly the young, overwhelmingly women — showed the world exactly who they were and what they wanted. They wanted freedom. They wanted accountability. They wanted the regime gone. And they were willing to die for it.

And then the world moved on.

By late 2025, Iran was convulsing again. New protests erupted in December — described as the largest since 2022. Protesters chanted “Death to the Dictator.” Students at Shahid Beheshti University declared that the system “won’t be changed with reform or with false promises.” The government responded with the same playbook: live ammunition, heavy machine guns, snipers targeting heads and vital organs. A Tehran doctor reported that security forces were “shooting to kill.”⁷⁷

These are the people being bombed. Not only the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard commanders — but the people. The fourteen hundred dead in the first two weeks of Operation Epic Fury are not all regime figures. They include the women who marched under “Woman, Life, Freedom” and the men who stood beside them. They include the students and the shopkeepers and the mothers and the poets. They include the hundred and seventy-five people — most of them schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve — who were in the Minab girls’ school on the morning of the twenty-eighth of February and were not alive by the afternoon.⁷⁸

And if there was opposition to the regime — and there was, in the streets, in the universities, in the protests that were still burning when the first bombs fell — the hundred and seventy-five dead schoolgirls in Minab crushed it. You cannot bomb a people into revolution. You can only bomb them into solidarity with the only power that remains standing. Every parent who pulled a child’s body from the rubble of that school is not thinking about regime change. They are thinking about who dropped the bomb. The strikes did not weaken the regime. They gave it the one thing it could not manufacture on its own: a reason for the Iranian people to stop fighting their government and start fighting ours.

The failure to distinguish between regime and people is not merely a media failure. It is the precondition for the war itself. You cannot bomb more than ninety million people if you see them as people. You can only bomb them if they have been reduced to a single word — Evil — and that word has been emptied of every human particular. The media narrative that presents Iran as a monolith is not incidental to the violence. It is the anaesthesia that makes the violence possible.

And the anaesthesia was applied at precisely the moment when the antidote was available. On the twenty-seventh of February 2026, Oman’s foreign minister appeared on CBS and told the American people that a peace deal was within reach. How many Americans saw that interview? How many cable news hours were devoted to the breakthrough compared to the hours spent on the threat narrative? The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi suggested that Al Busaidi went public deliberately — “so that the American people knew that peace was within reach when Trump instead opted for war.”⁷⁹ But knowing requires someone to tell you. And the machinery of American media was not built to tell you that the enemy was ready to negotiate. It was built to tell you that the enemy was coming to harm you.

The White House’s gamification videos — Call of Duty kill scores over real explosions, SpongeBob asking “do you want to see me do it again?” — are not a separate phenomenon. They are the media narrative’s logical endpoint. Once you have erased the humanity of more than ninety million people, the next step is entertainment. The “+100” hovering over a real explosion does not inform. It confirms. There are no people on the other end. Only targets. Only content. Only fun.

But the narrative is fracturing. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll conducted in the first week of March found that fifty-five percent of Americans see Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. Fifty-six percent oppose the military action. Among eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds — the generation raised on social media, the generation that watched the Mahsa Amini protests in real time — approval of Trump’s handling of Iran stands at twenty-five percent.⁸⁰ The monolith is cracking. Not fast enough. But cracking.

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The Political Theatre

On the ninth of March, the Quinnipiac University poll reported President Trump’s overall approval at thirty-seven percent. His approval on the economy — traditionally his strongest issue — stood at thirty-nine percent, with fifty-eight percent disapproving. That was the highest economic disapproval Quinnipiac had ever recorded for this president.⁸¹ His approval on the situation with Iran was thirty-eight percent.

The war arrived at a moment when every other political metric was collapsing — and when the administration was haemorrhaging credibility on another front entirely. The Epstein files, released in waves since December 2025, had become a political crisis in their own right. By late January, the Department of Justice had published 3.5 million pages of documents in which Trump’s name appeared over three thousand times. Members of Congress who viewed the unredacted files reported content directly related to the president. On the sixth of March — one week into the war — the DOJ released additional FBI documents describing a woman’s allegations that Trump had sexually assaulted her as a teenager after being introduced to her by Epstein.⁹² The war did not make the Epstein files disappear. But it did move them off the front page.

And the question every honest observer must ask is whether the timing was coincidental.

War has always served domestic political purposes. It rallies the base. It changes the subject. It transforms the president from a politician into a commander-in-chief, and opposition from legitimate criticism into something that can be framed as disloyalty. Political scientists call it the rally-around-the-flag effect — the surge in presidential approval that typically follows the initiation of military action. George H.W. Bush saw his approval jump to eighty-nine percent at the start of the Gulf War. George W. Bush reached ninety percent after the eleventh of September. The effect is one of the most consistent findings in the study of American public opinion.⁸²

It is not working.

Nate Silver’s approval tracker, which aggregates multiple polls, found no rally-around-the-flag effect from the Iran war. Trump’s net approval moved from minus 13.5 at the start of March to minus 13.9 by the fourteenth — not a collapse, but not the surge that every modern wartime president has enjoyed. The war is not helping.⁸³ And the historical pattern — confirmed by the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq — suggests that once the initial window for a rally closes, public opinion only moves in one direction: against the war, and against the president who started it.

The fracture is visible even within Trump’s own coalition. Tucker Carlson — who was more muted after the June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — called the March war “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Megyn Kelly expressed “serious doubts.” Fox News host Will Cain questioned the clarity of the mission.⁸⁴ These are not Democratic operatives or academic critics. These are the voices of the American right. And while they do not represent the majority of rank-and-file Republicans — seventy-seven percent of whom still support the strikes in the most favourable polling — the erosion is measurable. A Reuters-Ipsos poll found Republican support for the Iran strikes had dropped from sixty-nine percent during the June 2025 operations to fifty-five percent in March 2026. Forty-two percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to oppose the mission if American troops were killed or injured.⁸⁵ American troops have been killed. More will be.

Even Fox News’s own polling — conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company — found that fifty-one percent of voters believed Trump’s handling of Iran had made the United States less safe. Only twenty-nine percent said he had made it safer.⁸⁶

That twenty-nine percent floor is worth examining. It maps almost precisely onto the roughly quarter of the American electorate that identifies as white evangelical Christian — the same demographic whose theological framework, documented in this article and in “Holy War,” treats Middle Eastern conflict as biblical prophecy rather than policy. When the only Americans who believe the war has made them safer are the Americans who believe the war is God’s plan, the political calculation is not a calculation. It is a confession.

But if the base reveals the truth by what it celebrates, the administration reveals it by what it conceals. Trump has used the word “excursion” repeatedly to describe what is happening in Iran — the latest in a seventy-six-year tradition of creative language designed to avoid calling war what it is. Truman called Korea a “police action.” Obama called Libya “kinetic military action.” Trump calls a sustained bombing campaign that has killed over fourteen hundred people, destroyed an entire nation’s economic infrastructure, and assassinated a head of state an “excursion.”⁸⁷ The euphemism is not a verbal tic. It is a tell. It reveals that even the people waging the war understand it cannot survive contact with an honest description of itself.

The rally-around-the-flag effect depends on a precondition that no longer exists: national unity. The effect works because war, in its opening days, creates a moment of shared identity that transcends partisan division. But in a polarised electorate where everything — weather, vaccines, the shape of the earth — is contested along partisan lines, that shared identity is no longer available. There is no flag for everyone to rally around, because there is no everyone. There are only factions, each with its own media ecosystem, its own facts, its own version of the war. The rally effect requires a nation. America, at this moment, is not one.

And so the political calculation fails on its own terms. Thirteen Americans are dead. Over fourteen hundred Iranians are dead. The president who sent them to war is polling at thirty-six percent approval on his handling of Iran, fifty-four percent disapproval.⁸⁸ The war has not improved his numbers. It has not changed the subject from the economy. It has not unified the country. It has consumed the lives of American service members and Iranian civilians for a political return that is not merely diminishing — it was never there.

What Remains

Every argument for this war collapses under scrutiny. The nuclear argument is circular — the administration that abandoned the deal now bombs the programme its abandonment accelerated, while a second and better deal lay on the table. The faith-based argument is unconstitutional — a war legible to its architects as biblical prophecy is a war the First Amendment was written to prevent. The media narrative erases the people being bombed — compressing more than ninety million human beings into a target, a threat, a monolith called Evil. And the White House turned that monolith into a video game. And the political calculation treats American and Iranian lives as expendable currency in a domestic power game that is not even paying dividends.

So if the nuclear argument is circular, the theological argument is unconstitutional, the media narrative is manufactured, and the political calculation is failing — then what was this war actually for?

The answer was given to us before the first bomb fell, by the man who had spent weeks trying to prevent them. Oman’s foreign minister stated that the war was “solely an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favour.” That assessment deserves to be taken seriously, because Al Busaidi is not a commentator. He was the mediator. He was in the room.

Israel’s interest in this war is not hidden and it is not new. Netanyahu has sought the destruction of Iran’s military capability for decades — not because Iran poses an existential nuclear threat that diplomacy cannot resolve, but because Iran is the last major regional power capable of challenging Israeli dominance in the Middle East. With Hezbollah decapitated in Lebanon, Assad toppled in Syria, and Hamas broken in Gaza, Iran was the final obstacle. The war is the capstone of a project that predates Trump, predates the JCPOA, and predates the nuclear programme itself: the reshaping of the Middle East into an architecture that guarantees Israeli supremacy from the Mediterranean to the Gulf. Netanyahu said as much himself. In his first press conference since the war began, on the twelfth of March, he listed his conquests — Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran — and declared that Israel was becoming a “global superpower.”⁹³ The mask did not slip. He took it off.

Saudi Arabia’s interest runs on a parallel track. The Kingdom’s rivalry with Iran is older than the Islamic Republic — it is a contest for regional leadership rooted in sectarian competition, oil politics, and competing visions of the Muslim world. Riyadh did not need to fire a single missile to benefit from this war. Every bomb that falls on Iranian infrastructure weakens Saudi Arabia’s primary regional competitor. The Saudis have managed the war carefully — absorbing Iranian retaliatory strikes on their territory while avoiding direct military involvement, positioning themselves to emerge from the conflict with their rival diminished and their own standing enhanced.

And waiting in the wings, as he has been for forty-seven years, is Reza Pahlavi — the exiled crown prince, son of the Shah whose dictatorship was installed by a CIA coup in 1953 and toppled by the revolution in 1979. Pahlavi is in direct contact with the Trump administration through special envoy Steve Witkoff. He has appeared on Fox News, CBS, and Lara Trump’s show. On the fourteenth of March — while the bombs were still falling — he declared himself ready to lead a “transitional system” the moment the Islamic Republic collapses. He is scheduled to speak at CPAC later this month.⁹⁴

The pattern is seventy-three years old. In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who nationalised Iran’s oil industry. The CIA and MI6 overthrew him and installed the Pahlavi monarchy — a compliant dictatorship backed by American arms and the SAVAK secret police for twenty-six years, until the revolution that produced the very regime now being bombed.⁹⁵ The cycle is not hidden. It is the operating logic of American policy toward Iran: undermine every internal movement toward reform, ensure that the only alternatives are the hardliners or a Western-aligned exile, and then cite the hardliners as the reason for the next intervention. Khatami’s reformists were crushed by the “Axis of Evil.” The JCPOA was abandoned. The February 2026 negotiations were bombed. And each time, the man waiting to inherit the wreckage is a Pahlavi — aligned with Israeli and Saudi interests, promising democracy for a country he has not set foot in since 1978.

“Regime change” does not mean what the American public has been led to believe it means. It does not mean democracy. It has never meant democracy — not in 1953, not now, not ever. It means the installation of a government that serves the interests of the powers that installed it. The Iranian people have been trying to change their own regime — through reform, through protest, through elections, through revolution — for decades. They have been undermined at every turn, not by the absence of American intervention but by its presence.

These are not American interests. The average American — the reservist from Iowa, the sergeant from Nebraska, the pilot from Alabama whose twins will grow up without a father — has nothing to gain from the reordering of the Middle East in Israel’s favour or the advancement of Saudi Arabia’s regional ambitions. The thirteen dead Americans did not die for American security. They died for someone else’s project, sold to the American public through decades of theological conditioning, media narrative construction, and political manipulation so thorough that the people inside it no longer recognise it as manipulation. The four arguments dismantled in this article are not independent phenomena. They are the delivery mechanism — the packaging through which Israeli and Saudi strategic interests were translated into language that American voters, American soldiers, and American taxpayers could be persuaded to accept.

What remains when every justification has been stripped away?

What remains is force without reason. The thing that law — all law, from the earliest codes to the Geneva Conventions — was built to prevent. Part One of this series made the legal case. Part Two has examined the arguments that were supposed to supply the moral case, the strategic case, the democratic case. They are empty. What we are left with is what the law says we are left with: an act of aggression, undertaken by choice, against a nation that was at the negotiating table when the first bombs fell.

The promise of “Never Again” — the principle that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War, from the death camps and the firebombed cities and the atomic craters — was never reserved for one people. That was its power. That was the entire point. “Never Again” meant that the international community would build a legal order robust enough to prevent the strong from devouring the weak whenever it suited them. It meant that the suffering of the few would be recognised as the concern of all, because the alternative — a world where sovereignty means nothing and power means everything — was a world that had already been tried, at a cost of eighty million lives, and found to be unsurvivable.

The law exists because empathy alone is not enough. Empathy can be switched off. It can be narrowed — reserved for those who look like us, speak like us, pray like us. It can be anaesthetised by distance, by euphemism, by a “+100” hovering over a real explosion. The law exists to hold the line when empathy fails. It exists to say: even when you do not feel the suffering of strangers, you may not cause it. Even when the media has erased their faces and the president has called their destruction fun, they are protected — not by your compassion, which is unreliable, but by a structure that does not depend on whether you care.

That structure is what is being dismantled. And what is lost in its dismantling is not only the protection of the Iranians being bombed today. It is the protection of everyone, everywhere, who might one day need the law to stand between them and a more powerful adversary. Including Americans. Especially Americans, who have more enemies and more to lose than any other nation on earth when the rules collapse.

A hundred and seventy-five people died in a girls’ school in Minab. Most of them were between seven and twelve years old. They were not combatants. They were not threats. They were not “enemy targets.” They were children, and they were in school, and they are dead. No nuclear argument justifies their deaths. No biblical prophecy justifies the means to this end. No media narrative can erase them, however hard it tries. No political calculation can destroy their lives and call it strategy.

They are the cost. Not of a policy disagreement. Not of a strategic miscalculation. But of the slow, incremental surrender of conscience that makes war possible when no honest argument supports it. The surrender happens in small steps. You accept the euphemism. You stop seeing the faces. You let the legal fiction pass unchallenged. You watch the gamification video and feel nothing. Each concession seems small — perhaps nothing. Perhaps even reasonable. But the arithmetic is unforgiving. What begins as a small accommodation to expedience ends as something else entirely. The word for it is old, and it is not fashionable, but it is precise: depravity. The state in which the machinery of destruction operates without resistance, because the conscience that might have resisted has been surrendered, piece by piece, until there is nothing left to resist with.

This is not only Iran’s tragedy. It is a test — of American law, of international order, of the principle that human life has a value that cannot be overridden by the calculations of the powerful. That test is being failed. And the failure reverberates — not only in the streets of Tehran and the rubble of Minab, but in the erosion of the moral authority that once made the world listen when America spoke, in the alliances fraying under the weight of a war no ally endorsed, in the economic instability that follows when the world’s reserve currency is wielded as a weapon and the world’s most powerful military is deployed without legal authority, and in the precedent — the quiet, devastating precedent — that tells every other powerful state on earth that the rules are optional, that sovereignty is a fiction, and that the strong may do as they please.

The struggle is not only for the people of Iran, though they are paying the highest price. It is for the soul of a nation that once believed it could be governed by law rather than by the will of the most powerful. It is for the idea — fragile, contested, never fully realised — that human civilisation can be organised around something better than force. And it is for each of us, individually, because the conscience that looks away today is the conscience that will not be there tomorrow, when the machinery turns in a direction we did not expect and the law we allowed to be broken is the one we needed most.

The law is not an abstraction. It is the infrastructure of a world in which Declan Coady’s family gets a phone call instead of a folded flag, in which Alex Klinner’s twins grow up knowing their father, in which a hundred and seventy-five girls in Minab finish their school day, go home, and one day complete their STEM degrees. Every argument for this war has failed. What remains is the choice: rebuild the law, or live in the ruins.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

Banner image: Mass funeral for victims of US-Israeli strikes in Iran. Credit: Al Jazeera

Endnotes

⁵⁹ The JCPOA was finalised on 14 July 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany) plus the European Union. It was implemented on 16 January 2016 after the IAEA verified Iran’s compliance with initial commitments. For the specific constraints: enrichment limit of 3.67%, stockpile cap of 300 kg of low-enriched uranium, reduction from approximately 19,000 centrifuges to 6,104 (with only 5,060 enriching), redesign of the Arak reactor, and comprehensive IAEA monitoring. Council on Foreign Relations, “What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal?”; Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, “Fact Sheet: The Iran Deal, Then and Now,” updated June 2025; European Council, “Iran’s Nuclear Agreement — JCPOA.”

⁶⁰ Breakout time under the JCPOA estimated at over one year. Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, op. cit. The IAEA confirmed that the JCPOA verification regime provided unprecedented transparency into Iran’s nuclear programme.

⁶¹ Trump announced the withdrawal on 8 May 2018 in a speech at the White House. The White House, “President Donald J. Trump is Ending United States Participation in an Unacceptable Iran Deal,” 8 May 2018.

⁶² General Joseph Dunford, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, 26 September 2017. Pompeo’s acknowledgment of IAEA compliance findings reported in multiple outlets. FactCheck.org, “Trump’s Claim About the Obama Nuclear Deal and Iran’s Nuclear Development,” 12 March 2026.

⁶³ Iran exceeded low-enriched uranium stockpile limits by July 2019 and began enriching beyond 3.67% by the same month. It subsequently enriched to 60% and installed advanced centrifuges. The IAEA’s November 2024 report estimated breakout time at approximately one week. Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, op. cit.; IAEA reports cited therein.

⁶⁴ Laura Rockwood, senior fellow at the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation (28 years at the IAEA), quoted in FactCheck.org, op. cit. Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at Columbia University and former special envoy for Iran at the State Department, quoted ibid.

⁶⁵ The negotiations timeline and Al Busaidi’s CBS appearance are documented in Part One, endnotes 52–57. Araghchi’s 25 February statement: Al Jazeera, “Iran’s FM says deal with US ‘within reach,’” 25 February 2026. Al Busaidi’s 27 February CBS appearance: CBS News, “U.S.-Iran deal is ‘within our reach,’ Omani mediator says,” 27 February 2026.

⁶⁶ James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 18 March 2026.

⁶⁷ Isaiah 45:1 (English Standard Version). Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and issued the Cyrus Decree permitting the return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem. The decree is referenced in 2 Chronicles 36:22–23 and Ezra 1:1–4.

⁶⁸ Lance Wallnau, God’s Chaos Candidate (Killer Sheep Media, 2016). Wallnau is a figure in the New Apostolic Reformation. The Cyrus parallel was central to his 2015–2016 advocacy for Trump among evangelical audiences. CBS News, Charisma magazine, and multiple outlets reported Wallnau’s framing. See also Contrarian News, “Why Do Christian Nationalists Support Trump War With Iran?” March 2026, for detailed reporting on Wallnau’s FlashPoint appearances during the Iran war.

⁶⁹ Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus at multiple public events beginning in 2018, particularly in connection with the embassy move to Jerusalem. See CounterPunch, “Biblical Bloodlust: Huckabee, Cyrus, and the Zionist Greater Israel Fantasy Fueling the Iran War,” 6 March 2026; CBS News; Charisma magazine.

⁷⁰ Pew Research Center survey finding roughly a third of white evangelicals believed Trump’s election reflected God’s will, cited in CBS News and multiple analyses of evangelical political theology.

⁷¹ Reza Pahlavi’s invocation of the “Time of Cyrus” alongside “Time of Trump” in January 2026 statements and interviews. Wall Street Journal; Beit HaShoavah analysis, 18 January 2026.

⁷² FlashPoint TV broadcasts during the first week of Operation Epic Fury. Wallnau: “Israel and the return of Jesus is back on the menu”; “It’s about Cyrus Trump leading the greatest gentile nation in history, in a Last Days-moment.” Sewell: Trump as “our modern day Cyrus” who turned spiritual warfare literal. Documented in Contrarian News, op. cit., with detailed transcription of broadcast segments.

⁷³ Hegseth’s statement reported by Al Jazeera, “Why are the US and Israel framing the ongoing conflict as a religious war?” 4 March 2026. See also CAIR’s condemnation of the Pentagon’s “dangerous” and “anti-Muslim” rhetoric, reported in the same article.

⁷⁴ Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate on 7 June 1797 and signed by President John Adams. The full text of Article 11: “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims]…”

⁷⁵ Students at Shahid Beheshti University, statement during the 2025–2026 Iranian protests. Wikipedia, “2025–2026 Iranian protests,” citing Iranian press and protest documentation. The full quote: “This criminal system has taken our future hostage for 47 years. It won’t be changed with reform or with false promises.”

⁷⁶ The Mahsa Amini protests of 2022–2023: Amini was arrested on 13 September 2022 and died on 16 September. Protests spread to over 150 cities in all 30 provinces. Casualty and detention figures from Human Rights Watch, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, Amnesty International, and ACLED. Seven individuals were executed in connection with the protests as of spring 2023; the total reached ten by August 2024 (Amnesty International). See also UN OHCHR, “Justice and accountability: Woman, Life, Freedom protests,” April 2025, documenting crimes against humanity findings.

⁷⁷ The 2025–2026 Iranian protests began in late December 2025 and were described as the largest since 2022. Security forces used live ammunition, DShK heavy machine guns, and snipers. A Tehran doctor quoted in The Guardian (13 January 2026) reported that security forces were “shooting to kill.” The Abdorrahman Boroumand Centre cited evidence of forces targeting heads, eyes, and vital organs. Wikipedia, “2025–2026 Iranian protests,” accessed 16 March 2026, citing The Guardian, IranWire, AP, and Human Rights Watch.

⁷⁸ The Minab girls’ school strike and casualty figures are documented in Part One, endnotes 10 and 13.

⁷⁹ Trita Parsi quoted in Common Dreams, “Oman’s Foreign Minister Said US-Iran Deal Was ‘Within Our Reach.’ Then Trump Started Bombing,” 1 March 2026. See Part One, endnote 57.

⁸⁰ NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, conducted 2–4 March 2026, n=1,591 adults, margin of error ±2.8 percentage points. Fifty-six percent oppose military action; thirty-six percent approve of Trump’s handling of Iran; fifty-five percent see Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. Approval among 18–29 year-olds at twenty-five percent. NPR, “Poll: A majority of Americans opposes U.S. military action in Iran,” 6 March 2026; Marist Poll, “War with Iran, March 2026.”

⁸¹ Quinnipiac University Poll, conducted 6–8 March 2026, n=1,002 registered voters, margin of error ±3.8 percentage points. Overall approval: 37%. Economy disapproval: 58% (described as the highest Quinnipiac had ever recorded for Trump). Iran handling: 38% approve, 57% disapprove. Quinnipiac University Poll, release 9 March 2026.

⁸² The rally-around-the-flag effect is one of the most studied phenomena in American political science. See John Mueller, “Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 1 (1970); Marc Hetherington and Michael Nelson, “Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism,” PS: Political Science and Politics 36, no. 1 (2003).

⁸³ Nate Silver / Silver Bulletin, Trump approval tracker, accessed 16 March 2026. Net approval moved from −13.5 at the start of March to −13.9 by 14 March. Silver noted: “We’re no longer seeing a rally-around-the-flag effect… but Trump’s support hasn’t declined either.”

⁸⁴ Tucker Carlson quoted as calling the war “absolutely disgusting and evil” in CNN, “Analysis: How much is Trump’s base on board with war with Iran?” 3 March 2026. Megyn Kelly’s “serious doubts” and Will Cain’s questioning reported ibid.

⁸⁵ Republican support for Iran strikes dropped from 69% (June 2025 operations) to 55% (March 2026) in Reuters-Ipsos polling. Forty-two percent of Republicans said they would be more likely to oppose the mission if US troops were killed or injured. CNN, op. cit.

⁸⁶ Fox News poll conducted by Beacon Research (left-leaning) and Shaw & Company Research (right-leaning), 28 February–2 March 2026, n=1,004 registered voters, margin of error ±3 percentage points. Fifty-one percent said Trump’s handling of Iran made the US less safe; twenty-nine percent said safer. Overall foreign policy approval: 40% approve, 60% disapprove. Newsweek, “Donald Trump’s Approval Rating for Iran War Ahead by Double Digits: Poll,” 6 March 2026.

⁸⁷ Trump’s repeated use of the word “excursion” to describe the Iran war reported by NPR, “New poll shows Americans are skeptical of Trump’s Iran war,” 11 March 2026. The pattern of euphemism is documented in Part One: Truman’s “police action” (Korea), Obama’s “kinetic military action” (Libya), and previous uses of “consistent with the War Powers Resolution.”

⁸⁸ NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, op. cit. Thirty-six percent approve, fifty-four percent disapprove, of Trump’s handling of Iran.

⁸⁹ Al Busaidi’s post-war characterisation reported in Al Jazeera, “Oman renews push for diplomacy, says ‘off-ramps available’ in Iran war,” 3 March 2026. See Part One, endnote 55.

⁹⁰ President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, 29 January 2002, designated Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” At the time, President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government (1997–2005) had pursued a “Dialogue Among Civilizations” initiative, recognised by the United Nations, and had cooperated with the United States on intelligence sharing after the September 11 attacks. The “Axis of Evil” designation strengthened hardliners within Iran who had argued that engagement with the United States was futile and weakened the reformist movement that had won two consecutive presidential elections.

⁹¹ UNESCO data shows women account for approximately 35% of STEM graduates in Iran, compared to 12.7% in the United States as of 2021. In engineering, Iranian female enrolment has ranked first in the world; in science fields, second globally. UNESCO Institute for Statistics Data Browser; Snopes, “Checking claims about Iran’s female literacy, STEM graduate rates,” 26 June 2025; Purdue University School of Engineering Education, “The STEM Paradox: Why are Muslim-Majority Countries Producing So Many Female Engineers?”; Parhami, B., “Women in Science and Engineering: A Tale of Two Countries,” ASEE, 2021.

⁹² The Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed into law on 19 November 2025. The DOJ released 3.5 million pages by 1 February 2026, including over 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. Trump’s name appeared over 3,000 times in the released files. DOJ, “Department of Justice Publishes 3.5 Million Responsive Pages in Compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” 1 February 2026. Members of Congress viewing unredacted files reported content related to Trump: Rep. Maxwell Frost stated he had only “scratched the tip of the iceberg” but that “a lot of these did relate to Donald Trump” (Wikipedia, “Epstein Files Transparency Act,” citing contemporaneous reporting). On 6 March 2026, the DOJ released additional FBI documents describing a woman’s allegations of sexual assault by Trump as a teenager after introduction by Epstein: Al Jazeera, “Epstein files with claims against Trump released by US Justice Department,” 6 March 2026. Trump’s approval on handling the Epstein case stood at 23% in a December 2025 Reuters poll.

⁹³ Netanyahu’s press conference, 12 March 2026 — his first since the war began. He listed Israel’s campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran and declared Israel was becoming a “global superpower.” Al Jazeera, “Netanyahu says Israel ‘stronger than ever’ in first speech since Iran war,” 12 March 2026; GlobalSecurity.org, “Statement by PM Netanyahu — 7 March 2026” (full translated text of his earlier address); Times of Israel, “Netanyahu says he doesn’t know if Iranians will oust regime, threatens new supreme leader,” 12 March 2026.

⁹⁴ Pahlavi’s contact with the Trump administration via Steve Witkoff: NBC News, “An exiled crown prince says he can lead Iran to democracy, but Trump hasn’t endorsed him,” 25 January 2026; The Hill, “Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi says he’s been in contact with Trump administration,” 14 March 2026. Pahlavi’s declaration of readiness to lead a “transitional system”: Fox News, “Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi announces readiness to lead Iran’s post-regime transition,” 14 March 2026. CPAC appearance: confirmed in The Hill, op. cit. CBS appearance calling for Trump to “intervene sooner”: CBS News, “Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi urges Trump to ‘intervene sooner’ so regime ‘finally collapses,’” 12 January 2026. The Nation described Pahlavi’s alliance with “an unsavory crew of authoritarians headed by US President Donald Trump, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”: The Nation, “Trump’s Regime Change Fantasy Involves Bringing Back the Shah,” 8 August 2025.

⁹⁵ The 1953 CIA-MI6 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (Operation Ajax / Operation Boot) is extensively documented. The CIA formally acknowledged its role in 2013. See Britannica, “1953 coup in Iran”; National Security Archive, “CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup”; Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (The New Press, 2013). Mossadegh had nationalised Iran’s oil industry in 1951. The coup installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose dictatorship lasted until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Just for fun.

Thirteen American service members are dead.² Six of them — reservists from Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Florida, California — were killed on the first of March when an Iranian drone struck a makeshift operations centre at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait.³ They were not combat troops storming a beachhead. They were logistics personnel, sustainment soldiers, the people who keep the machinery running. Four of them had served together in Kuwait in 2019. They knew each other’s families.⁴ Captain Cody Khork, thirty-five, from Winter Haven, Florida — his family called him “the life of the party.” Sergeant First Class Noah Tietjens, forty-two, from Bellevue, Nebraska — a mentor who “made you feel important,” whose twelve-year-old son is now growing up without a father. Sergeant Declan Coady, twenty, from West Des Moines — the youngest, promoted posthumously to a rank he will never wear, studying cybersecurity at Drake University between shifts. He had been texting his family updates every hour. When the texts stopped, his father said, “Your gut starts to get a feeling.”⁵

On the eighth of March, Sergeant Benjamin Pennington, twenty-six, from Glendale, Kentucky, died of wounds sustained at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on the first of March. He had held on for seven days. Flags in Hardin County flew at half-staff.⁶

Then, on the twelfth of March, a KC-135 Stratotanker — call sign Zeus 95 — went down over western Iraq. Six aircrew.⁷ Major Alex Klinner, thirty-three, from Auburn, Alabama, left behind seven-month-old twins and a two-year-old son. His brother-in-law said the hardest thing to say was also the simplest: “He was just a really good dad.” Captain Ariana Savino, thirty-one, had only earned her pilot wings the year before. Technical Sergeant Tyler Simmons, twenty-eight, had what his family called a “million-dollar smile.”⁸

Thirteen families who will set one fewer place at the table. Children who will grow up knowing their mother or father only from photographs and the stories other people tell. That is the cost of this war on the American side, and it is real, and it deserves to be named.

Now turn the mirror.

Iran’s Health Ministry reports more than fourteen hundred people killed since the twenty-eighth of February. Over eighteen thousand injured. In Tehran alone, ten thousand homes have been damaged or destroyed.⁹ A school was struck — a hundred and seventy-five students and teachers killed.¹⁰ Secretary of War Hegseth boasts that more than fifteen thousand “enemy targets” have been struck.¹¹ Targets. He does not say homes. He does not say schools. He does not say the bakery on the corner where a man bought bread for his children every morning before the morning there was no bakery and no man and no children. The language of targeting does what it is designed to do: it makes people disappear before you have to look at what you did to them.

And the man who commands this machinery — who holds the power to end it or to escalate it, who bears the constitutional responsibility for every life spent in its execution — describes bombing a sovereign nation’s economic infrastructure as something he might do again “just for fun.”

This is not a policy disagreement. It is a window into something deeper. “Just for fun” is the language of a man who has never personally absorbed the cost of a single decision he has made. Not in business, where bankruptcy was a strategy and other people lost their homes. Not in politics, where cruelty is a brand and other people bear the consequences. Not in war, where the dead are props for a rally and their parents are told to be proud. When you have spent your entire adult life insulated from consequences — by money, by lawyers, by subordinates paid to absorb the damage — other people’s suffering becomes abstract. Entertainment. Content. Fun.

And it is not just the President. It is the administration. In the first two weeks of the war, the White House posted a series of videos to its official social media accounts that spliced real footage of American strikes on Iran with gameplay from Call of Duty, complete with the game’s “+100” kill score notifications superimposed over actual explosions. One video opened with a Grand Theft Auto meme — “Ah shit, here we go again” — before cutting to live strike footage. Another showed a real bombing followed by a clip from SpongeBob SquarePants in which the cartoon character asks, “do you want to see me do it again?” before showing another strike. A third flashed the word “wasted” — Grand Theft Auto’s kill confirmation — over footage of a real attack on what appeared to be an Iranian vehicle. A fourth ended with audio from Mortal Kombat: “Flawless victory.”¹² The White House posted these videos while the Department of War was investigating whether American forces had bombed an elementary school in Minab that killed a hundred and seventy-five people, most of them schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve.¹³

Senator Tammy Duckworth — a combat veteran who lost both legs in Iraq — responded: “War is not a f*cking video game. Six Americans are dead and thousands more are at needless risk because of your illegal, unjustified war. And you’re calling this a flawless victory.”¹⁴

She is right. And the gamification is not incidental to the pathology. It is the pathology. When a government presents the killing of human beings in the visual language of entertainment — when it borrows the reward mechanics of games designed to make violence pleasurable — it is not just failing to take the war seriously. It is actively training its own population not to feel what is being done in their name. The “+100” hovering over a real explosion does not inform. It anaesthetises. It turns the viewer into a spectator, then into a player, then into someone for whom the next strike is not a moral event but a content drop. This is what happens when a nation’s leadership has no personal connection to the cost of war. It becomes a brand exercise. A content strategy. Fun.

But “just for fun” is not merely callous. It has a legal name. Kharg Island is not a military installation. It is the economic lifeline of more than ninety million people — the terminal through which the oil revenues flow that pay for food, for medicine, for the infrastructure that keeps a nation functioning. Bombing it does not hurt the regime. The ayatollahs have bunkers and reserves and alternative supply chains. The shopkeeper in Isfahan does not. The mother in Shiraz who cannot afford bread because the economy has been severed at its artery does not. When you bomb a nation’s economic infrastructure to pressure its government, it is the population that absorbs the damage. Every time. Without exception.

This is not a novel observation. It is a pattern so consistent it should disqualify the strategy on its own merits. Sanctions on Iraq did not topple Saddam Hussein — they killed hundreds of thousands of children while the regime built palaces.¹⁵ The blockade on Gaza did not weaken Hamas — it radicalised a generation while civilians went hungry. In every case, the logic is the same: punish the population until they rise up against their rulers. In every case, the result is the opposite: a starving population does not rise up. It survives. The regime becomes the only entity with the resources to distribute what remains, the population becomes more dependent on it, not less, and whatever energy might have fuelled resistance is spent instead on finding the next meal, the next dose of medicine, the next safe place to sleep. You cannot bomb and starve a people into revolution. You can only bomb and starve them into submission — and the entity they submit to is the one you claimed to be fighting. It is not just cruel. It is strategically illiterate. And under international humanitarian law, it has a specific name: collective punishment. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits it explicitly.¹⁶ Targeting civilian economic infrastructure to coerce a population is not a grey area. It is a war crime.

Declan Coady was twenty years old. He was not fun. He was a person. Alex Klinner’s twins are seven months old. They are not content. They are children who will never know their father’s voice. And somewhere in Tehran, a mother is pulling her daughter’s school uniform from the rubble, and she is not an enemy target. She is a human being whose government and whose attackers have both failed her.

Was any of this legal?

That is the question this article exists to answer. Not whether it was popular. Not whether Iran’s regime deserved to fall. Not whether the strikes were strategically effective. Whether they were lawful — under the Constitution that every one of those thirteen service members swore to support and defend, and under the international order that the United States itself built and once claimed to lead.

The answer, on both counts, is no.

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The Constitution

The text is not ambiguous. Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution grants Congress — and Congress alone — the power to declare war. Not the President. Not the Pentagon. Not the Secretary of War. Congress. The Founders were explicit about this, and they were explicit for a reason: they had lived under a king who could send men to die on his own authority, and they designed a system to ensure that no American executive would ever hold that power unchecked. The decision to go to war — to spend the lives of citizens in organised violence against another nation — was to be made by the representatives of the people, not by one man in one room.

The last time Congress formally declared war was 1942.¹⁷

Every American conflict since — Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Iran — has been waged without a declaration of war. This is not a minor constitutional footnote. It is the single most consequential erosion of democratic authority in the history of the republic, and it has been built brick by brick, by presidents of both parties, over eighty-three years.

The erosion began in 1950, when President Truman committed American forces to Korea under a United Nations Security Council resolution and called it a “police action.” He never asked Congress for authorisation. Congress never demanded it. Thirty-six thousand, five hundred and seventy-four Americans died in a police action.¹⁸ The constitutional question went largely unasked, and the silence was read as consent.

In 1964, President Johnson persuaded Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — an authorisation based on a naval incident that, as subsequent investigation revealed, did not happen as described.¹⁹ That resolution was used to escalate American involvement in Vietnam to the point where over five hundred thousand troops were deployed and nearly fifty-eight thousand Americans were killed. It was not a declaration of war. It functioned as one. And when it was over, Congress recognised that it had allowed a president to fight a full-scale war under authorities that looked nothing like what the Constitution required — and that the power to decide when America goes to war had been quietly stripped from the institution the Founders had entrusted with it.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was Congress’s attempt to reclaim its authority, passed over President Nixon’s veto after the revelation of secret bombings in Cambodia that Congress had never authorised.²⁰ The Resolution required the president to notify Congress within forty-eight hours of committing forces to hostilities and to withdraw those forces within sixty days unless Congress granted authorisation. It was meant to be a constraint. In practice, it became a licence. Before 1973, any military action without congressional approval was constitutionally suspect. After 1973, presidents claimed an automatic sixty-day window for any operation they chose to define as “limited.” The tool designed to check executive war-making inadvertently expanded it.

And every subsequent president tested the boundary further. Reagan deployed troops to Lebanon in 1982 without citing the War Powers Resolution and did not seek congressional authorisation until after service members had already died. Clinton bombed Kosovo in 1999 and continued the campaign for more than two weeks past the sixty-day deadline, arguing that congressional funding constituted implicit authorisation — even though the War Powers Resolution explicitly states that funding alone does not constitute authorisation. Obama bombed Libya in 2011 for seven months, calling it “kinetic military action“ rather than war and claiming American involvement was “limited“ — while the United States was conducting seventy-five percent of all aerial refuelling sorties and seventy percent of the operation’s intelligence and surveillance.²¹ In his first term, Trump struck Syria without authorisation and assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, calling it a defensive action.²²

Each violation made the next one easier. Each congressional failure to act was read by the executive as permission. Each creative legal fiction — “police action,” “kinetic military action,” “consistent with the War Powers Resolution” — expanded the zone of presidential authority until the exception became the rule.

But what is happening in Iran is not another incremental expansion. It is the pattern’s logical endpoint.

On the twenty-eighth of February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a full-scale military campaign against a sovereign nation. The operation — designated “Epic Fury” — has included the sustained bombing of military and civilian infrastructure, the assassination of a head of state, the destruction of a nation’s economic lifeline, and the explicit pursuit of regime change. The President has stated that military operations could continue for four to five weeks or longer.²³ Thirteen American service members are dead. Over a hundred and forty have been wounded.²⁴ This is not a limited engagement. It is a war by any definition the Founders would have recognised.

And Congress did not authorise it.

Trump’s war powers report, submitted to Congress on the second of March, relies on the President’s authority under Article II of the Constitution — his power as Commander in Chief.²⁵ It does not invoke the 2001 Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which covers al-Qaeda and the Taliban and has no application to Iran. It does not invoke the 2002 Iraq AUMF, which was repealed. It does not invoke any statutory authorisation at all, because none exists. The legal basis for this war is the President’s assertion that he has the inherent constitutional authority to launch it. Nothing more.

Constitutional scholars across the political spectrum have rejected this claim. Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and former special counsel at the Department of Defense, has called the strikes “blatantly illegal” and stated that for the president to make the decision to go to war “unilaterally, without going to the Security Council, without going to Congress, and putting U.S. troops and allies at risk is really extraordinary and clearly unlawful.”²⁶ Iran did not attack the United States. The strikes of the twenty-eighth of February were not defensive. They were offensive, pre-planned, and launched while diplomatic negotiations were still underway. Even under the most permissive reading of Article II — the Office of Legal Counsel’s own framework, which allows presidential action where it serves “sufficiently important national interests” and does not constitute a “prolonged and substantial military engagement”²⁷ — a weeks-long bombing campaign that has killed a head of state and destabilised an entire region cannot plausibly be called limited.

Congress had the tools to stop this. The War Powers Resolution provides a fast-track process for exactly this situation. On the fourth of March, the Senate voted on a resolution that would have required the President to obtain congressional authorisation for further military action in Iran. It failed, 47 to 53, along party lines.²⁸ The following day, the House voted on a similar resolution. It failed, 212 to 219.²⁹ Congress did not authorise this war. But it also refused to end it. The effect is the same as Truman’s Korea: silence read as consent, and consent treated as authorisation.

This is what eighty-three years of erosion produces. A president can now launch a full-scale war against a sovereign nation, kill its head of state, bomb its economic infrastructure, pursue regime change, and lose American service members in the process — all without a single vote of Congress authorising the action. The constitutional power to declare war has not been repealed. It has been abandoned. Not by amendment, not by judicial decision, but by the slow, bipartisan accumulation of precedents, each one a little larger than the last, until the original design is unrecognisable.

Every one of those thirteen dead service members swore an oath. The same oath every American in uniform takes: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They kept their oath. The question is whether the government that sent them to die kept its.

International Law

The constitutional case is damning. The international case is worse.

The United States did not build the post-war international legal order by accident. It built it deliberately, after two world wars had demonstrated what happens when powerful nations treat the sovereignty of weaker nations as optional. The United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco in 1945, was America’s answer to the catastrophe of the first half of the twentieth century. Its foundational principle is simple: states do not get to bomb other states.

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.³⁰ There are exactly two exceptions. The first is authorisation by the UN Security Council under Chapter VII.³¹ The second is self-defence under Article 51, which preserves “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs.”³²

Neither exception applies to the war in Iran.

No Security Council resolution authorised the strikes of the twenty-eighth of February. None was sought. None could have been obtained — Russia and China would have vetoed any such resolution, and the United States knew it. The multilateral framework that America itself designed to legitimise the use of force was simply bypassed.

The self-defence argument fails on its own terms. Article 51 requires an armed attack — or, under the most expansive interpretation, an imminent one. Iran did not attack the United States. Iran did not attack Israel. Iran was, at the time the strikes were launched, engaged in diplomatic negotiations with the United States through Omani mediation. The standard for anticipatory self-defence in customary international law — the Caroline Doctrine, formulated in 1837 and reaffirmed at Nuremberg — requires that the necessity of self-defence be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.”³³ A pre-planned military campaign launched two days after the most intensive round of diplomatic negotiations does not meet this standard. It does not come close.

The administration has pointed to Iran’s nuclear programme, its ballistic missile development, and its support for proxy forces as justifications for the strikes.³⁴ These are grievances. They may even be legitimate grievances. But under international law, grievances — however serious — do not authorise the use of force. If they did, any nation with a sufficiently long list of complaints about its neighbour could bomb it at will. The prohibition on the use of force exists precisely to prevent powerful states from acting as judge, jury, and executioner against weaker ones. The United States understood this in 1945. It wrote the rule.

The distinction between preventive war and pre-emptive self-defence matters here, and the administration has blurred it deliberately. Pre-emptive self-defence — striking first when an attack is genuinely imminent — has a narrow and contested legal basis. Preventive war — striking to eliminate a potential future threat — has none. The International Court of Justice has never endorsed it. The UN Charter does not permit it. The Nuremberg Tribunal, at which the United States served as chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes, classified the waging of aggressive war as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”³⁵ That language was not directed at a hypothetical. It was directed at states that launched wars of choice against sovereign nations.

The international response has confirmed the illegality, even in unprecedented fashion among traditional allies. French President Emmanuel Macron stated on the fourth of March that the strikes were conducted “outside the framework of international law, which we cannot approve.”³⁶ Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez rejected the strikes outright, refused the use of Spanish military bases, and called the war an escalation that “contributes to a more uncertain and hostile international order.”³⁷ Trump threatened to cut off all trade with Spain in response.³⁸ British Prime Minister Keir Starmer initially refused to allow UK bases to be used for offensive operations — a decision that drew public criticism from Trump, who said it took “far too long.” Starmer reversed his position on the first of March, citing the need to protect three hundred thousand British civilians in the region and to defend allied countries under Iranian retaliation. Hours later, a drone struck RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. The UK Ministry of Defence later confirmed the drone was not launched from Iran — it was likely fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon, caused minimal damage, and produced no casualties.³⁹ Nonetheless, Starmer used the strike and the broader threat to British lives to justify opening Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford to US bombers for supposedly ‘defensive’ strikes on Iranian missile sites. Russia called the strikes “a deliberate, premeditated, and unprovoked act of armed aggression” and “a betrayal of diplomacy.”⁴⁰ China’s Foreign Ministry stated that the strikes “have no UN Security Council authorization and violate international law,” while Foreign Minister Wang Yi called it “unacceptable for the U.S. and Israel to launch attacks against Iran in the process of the ongoing Iran-U.S. negotiations, still less to blatantly attack and kill the leader of a sovereign country.”⁴¹ Switzerland accused the United States and Israel of violating international law.⁴² Norway emphasised the illegality of the war.⁴³ At the UN Security Council, China’s ambassador declared the conflict had “neither legitimacy nor legal basis.”⁴⁴ A hundred and thirty-five countries co-sponsored a Security Council resolution on the crisis — reportedly the largest number of co-sponsors in Security Council history.⁴⁵ The European Council on Foreign Relations concluded that there is “little question that the US and Israeli war against Iran is an unlawful act of aggression” and noted that “no European leader has argued the war is lawful.”⁴⁶ Professor Mohamed Arafa, writing in JURIST, described the strikes as violations of “both US constitutional law and foundational international norms, setting a dangerous precedent for unchecked executive war-making.”⁴⁷

No allied government has called this war legal. No adversarial government has called it legal. No neutral government has called it legal. Not one.

And the proportionality question compounds the illegality. Even if one were to accept — for the sake of argument — that some limited defensive action against Iranian military assets could be justified, the scope of Operation Epic Fury obliterates any proportionality defence. This is not a targeted strike on a missile launcher. It is a sustained bombing campaign that has killed over fourteen hundred people, destroyed ten thousand homes in Tehran alone, struck a girls’ school, assassinated a head of state, bombed civilian economic infrastructure, and pursued explicit regime change. The principle of proportionality under international humanitarian law requires that the harm to civilians not be excessive in relation to the concrete military advantage anticipated.⁴⁸ A campaign that bombs an oil terminal “just for fun” is not calibrating proportionality. It has abandoned the concept entirely.

The law is not ambiguous. The United States waged aggressive war against a sovereign nation without Security Council authorisation, without an armed attack to trigger self-defence, without imminence, and without proportionality. It did so while negotiations were underway. It did so against the explicit objections of its closest European allies. And it did so in violation of the legal order that the United States itself created to prevent exactly this from happening.

What is being demonstrated in Iran is not a modern exercise of power. It is a sixteenth-century mindset operating with twenty-first-century weapons — the logic of conquest dressed in the language of counterterrorism. The international legal order was built to move humanity past that logic. If it can be discarded whenever a sufficiently powerful state decides a sufficiently villainous regime deserves it, then it was never law at all. It was permission — granted by the strong to themselves, and revocable at will.

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The Precedent

There is a question that runs beneath the legal arguments — beneath the constitutional text and the UN Charter and the Caroline Doctrine and the Nuremberg judgment. It is the question that the people cheering this war have not asked, because asking it would require them to think past the next news cycle.

The question is: what happens when it is your turn?

International law is not an abstraction that exists to protect distant countries and foreign people. It is the infrastructure that protects everyone — including the nation that is currently powerful enough to ignore it.

This is not a foreign concept imposed on the United States from outside. It is the foundational American idea — taken to its logical international conclusion. Aristotle said it first: “It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens.”⁴⁹ Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, made it the cornerstone of the American revolution: “In America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”⁵⁰ John Adams enshrined it in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 as “a government of laws, and not of men” — a phrase that became one of the foundational principles of American constitutional theory.⁵¹ The post-war international legal order was nothing more than the extension of this principle beyond national borders: the belief that relations between states, like relations between citizens, should be governed by law rather than by the will of the most powerful. The United States did not merely sign that order. It authored it. And it was this — not the aircraft carriers, not the nuclear arsenal, not the size of the economy — that made the world look up to America after 1945. The idea that the most powerful nation on earth would voluntarily submit itself to the same rules it asked others to follow. That was the source of American moral authority. I still have friends in Europe who believe in this vision of America — who grew up admiring what it represented, not what it could destroy. What is happening in Iran is the author tearing up its own manuscript, and with it, the reason anyone ever looked up to it in the first place. The prohibition on aggressive war does not exist because Iran deserves protection. It exists because the alternative — a world in which any state strong enough to bomb another state may do so whenever it decides the cause is sufficient — is a world in which no state is safe. Not even the strongest one. Especially not the strongest one, because the strongest one has the most enemies and the most to lose when the rules collapse.

The person cheering the bombing of Tehran today is the person who will need international law tomorrow. They will need it when a rising power decides that American military bases on its border constitute an intolerable provocation. They will need it when an adversary concludes that American sanctions amount to economic warfare justifying a military response. They will need it when the precedent set by Operation Epic Fury — that a sufficiently powerful state may launch a war of regime change against a sovereign nation without legal authorisation, while negotiations are still underway — is cited by someone else, against someone else, in a conflict that does not serve American interests. Precedents do not belong to the nations that set them. They belong to everyone who comes after.

And there is a darker question that no one in Washington seems willing to ask. The United States has now established that a sufficiently powerful state may assassinate another nation’s head of state as part of a campaign of regime change. What happens when America is no longer the most powerful state in the room? What happens when decades of military adventurism, economic overextension, and the slow erosion of alliances have weakened the republic to the point where another power — or a coalition of powers — decides that the American government itself constitutes a threat requiring removal? The protocols exist to prevent a decapitation strike on American leadership. But protocols are technical solutions to a problem that is, at its root, political. The real protection was never the bunkers or the continuity-of-government plans. It was the norm — the international consensus that heads of state are not legitimate military targets, that sovereignty means something, that regime change by force is the one thing powerful nations agreed not to do to each other. That norm is now in ruins. The United States shattered it. And the shards do not care who picks them up.

This is not speculation. It is the lesson of every international order that has ever been dismantled by the nation that built it. Rome did not fall to barbarians at the gates. It fell because it had spent centuries treating its own rules as optional — applying them to its subjects while exempting itself — until the rules meant nothing and there was no structure left to hold the empire together. The post-war order that the United States built in 1945 was designed to prevent precisely this cycle. And it worked — imperfectly, inconsistently, with glaring failures and shameful exceptions — but it worked well enough to prevent a third world war for eighty years. What is being tested in Iran is not whether the ayatollahs survive. It is whether that order survives. And if it does not, the nation that will suffer most from its collapse is the one that is currently tearing it apart.

The people who have abandoned their respect for law — who have decided that the rules are a constraint on American power rather than a foundation of American security — have made a calculation. They have calculated that the United States will always be the strongest. That no coalition will ever form against it. That no precedent it sets will ever be turned against it. That is not a strategic assessment. It is a fantasy. And it is the same fantasy that every empire in history has entertained in the years before it discovered that the rules it broke were the ones holding it up.

And here is where the legal case and the moral case converge into something that should keep every honest observer awake at night.

On the twenty-fifth of February 2026, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated publicly that a “historic” agreement with the United States to avert military conflict was “within reach.”⁵² On the twenty-sixth of February, a third round of indirect talks took place in Geneva, mediated by Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi. On the twenty-seventh of February — one day before the strikes began — Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News and told the American people that a “peace deal is within our reach.”⁵³ He disclosed that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, to downgrade its existing stockpiles to the lowest level possible, and to submit to full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency. He called it “a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved in previous rounds of negotiations.”⁵⁴ This was not an Obama-era concession being reheated. This was a commitment that went beyond what the JCPOA had secured — zero stockpiling, full IAEA verification, irreversible downgrading of enriched uranium. It was, by any honest measure, a diplomatic victory for the Trump administration. The President had a win on the table. Additional talks were scheduled for the following Monday in Vienna.

They never took place. On the twenty-eighth of February, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury.

Oman’s foreign minister — the man who had spent weeks shuttling between the two sides, who had staked his country’s credibility on the negotiations — later said that the war was not prompted by an imminent threat. It was “solely an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favour.”⁵⁵ Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson called the strikes “an attack on the very principle of mediation.”⁵⁶

Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, noted the unprecedented nature of Al Busaidi’s CBS appearance and suggested that the Omani foreign minister went public deliberately — “so that the American people knew that peace was within reach when Trump instead opted for war.”⁵⁷

Only twenty-one percent of Americans supported initiating an attack on Iran.⁵⁸ The negotiations were producing results that went beyond what the Obama-era JCPOA had achieved. Iran was at the table. The mediator was telling the world that a deal was close. And the President of the United States chose war anyway.

This is not a story about law in the abstract. It is a story about thirteen families who will never be whole again, about fourteen hundred Iranian dead who did not choose this war, about a school full of girls between the ages of seven and twelve who were alive on the morning of the twenty-eighth of February and dead by the afternoon. It is a story about a world that built rules to prevent exactly this, and a nation that decided the rules did not apply to it.

The law is not ambiguous. The war is illegal. The question is whether that still means anything — and if it does not, what we have become.

The legal case is clear. But law alone has never stopped a war that enough people wanted. Millions of Americans support this one, and they have reasons — the nuclear threat, the theological mandate, the media narrative, the political calculation. In Part Two, we examine each of those reasons on its own terms.

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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.

© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press

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Endnotes

¹ Trump interview with NBC News, 15 March 2026. Trump stated that US forces had struck Kharg Island and added, “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.” Reported by NPR, CNN, and others.

² As of 16 March 2026, thirteen US service members have been killed in Operation Epic Fury: seven by enemy action, six in a KC-135 crash under investigation. An additional service member, Major Sorffly Davius, 46, died of a medical incident at Camp Buehring, Kuwait. Approximately 140 have been wounded, eight severely. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell confirmed the figures to TIME on 10 March 2026.

³ US Central Command statement, 1 March 2026. The drone struck a tactical operations centre at Port Shuaiba, Kuwait. All six soldiers were assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command, Army Reserve, Des Moines, Iowa.

⁴ Retired US Army Colonel Josef Sujet, then chief of staff of the 103rd Sustainment Command, told CNN that four of the six soldiers had previously served together in Kuwait in 2019. CNN, “Many of the six US troops killed in the war with Iran served together years earlier in Kuwait,” 6 March 2026.

⁵ Soldier identifications, biographical details, and family statements drawn from: Pentagon identification statements, 4–5 March 2026; NPR, “Iran war: Pentagon ID’s last 2 of the 6 U.S. soldiers killed in Kuwait attack,” 4 March 2026; CBS News, “Pentagon releases names of 6 U.S. Army Reserve soldiers killed during the ongoing war with Iran,” 4 March 2026; CNN, “Many of the six US troops killed in the war with Iran served together years earlier in Kuwait,” 6 March 2026; NBC News, “What we know about the U.S. service members killed in the Iran war,” 5 March 2026.

⁶ CNN, “Seventh US service member killed in Iran war is identified as Army sergeant,” 8 March 2026. Pennington was assigned to 1st Space Battalion, 1st Space Brigade, Fort Carson, Colorado. He was wounded at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, on 1 March and died on 8 March.

⁷ US Central Command statement, 13 March 2026. The KC-135 Stratotanker crashed in western Iraq during Operation Epic Fury. Call sign: Zeus 95. The crash involved two aircraft; the second landed safely. CENTCOM stated the loss was not due to hostile or friendly fire. The incident is under investigation. An Iranian proxy group claimed responsibility but provided no evidence.

⁸ Crew identifications and biographical details drawn from: Pentagon identification statement, 14 March 2026; Air & Space Forces Magazine, “Six Airmen Dead in KC-135 Crash During Iran Ops,” 15 March 2026; CNN, “Pentagon identifies six airmen killed in plane crash in Iraq,” 14 March 2026; Military Times, “Pentagon identifies six airmen killed in KC-135 crash in Iraq,” 15 March 2026. Klinner’s family details from GoFundMe page and family statements reported by CNN and Times of Israel.

⁹ Iran’s Health Ministry figures as reported by Al Jazeera, “Iran war: What is happening on day 16 of US-Israel attacks?” 15 March 2026. Tehran damage figure from Tehran’s governor, reported in the same article.

¹⁰ The strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan province, occurred on 28 February 2026. Iranian authorities reported 175 killed; the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stated victims were mainly girls aged between 7 and 12. Multiple investigations — by the New York Times, NPR, BBC Verify, CNN, and Al Jazeera — concluded the United States was likely responsible, with evidence pointing to a US Tomahawk cruise missile. A preliminary Pentagon investigation determined the strike resulted from outdated targeting coordinates provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Sources: UN OHCHR press release, 3 March 2026; CNN, “US strike likely hit school in Minab, Iran due to outdated intelligence,” 11 March 2026; NPR, “Pentagon probe points to U.S. missile hitting Iranian school,” 11 March 2026; TIME, “More Than 100 School Children Were Killed in Iran. Evidence Points to a U.S. Missile Strike,” 11 March 2026.

¹¹ Al Jazeera, “Iran war: What is happening on day 16 of US-Israel attacks?” 15 March 2026, citing Secretary of War Hegseth’s claim that more than 15,000 “enemy targets” had been struck.

¹² White House video game footage: ABC News, “White House posts so-called ‘hype’ videos combining real Iran war footage alongside movie, video game clips,” 7 March 2026; CNN, “White House posts video about Iran strikes using ‘Call of Duty’ video game footage,” 5 March 2026; Truthout, “White House Propaganda Videos Splice Horrific Iran War Footage With Video Games,” 7 March 2026; France 24, “White House releases video montages gamifying Iran war on social media,” 7 March 2026; Courthouse News Service, “’Not on the bingo card’: Use of Call of Duty footage for Iran war hype raises eyebrows,” 5 March 2026; Axios, “How America gamified its war with Iran,” 14 March 2026.

¹³ See endnote 10. The White House videos were posted between 5 and 7 March 2026. Secretary of War Hegseth announced a formal investigation into the Minab school strike on 13 March 2026. Fox News, “Hegseth announces probe of US role in strike at girls school in Minab, Iran,” 13 March 2026.

¹⁴ Senator Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth), X post, 6 March 2026, quote-tweeting the White House account’s “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY” video.

¹⁵ UNICEF estimated that sanctions on Iraq contributed to the deaths of approximately 500,000 children under five between 1991 and 1998. The figure has been debated by scholars, but the broad consensus is that sanctions caused mass civilian suffering while the regime remained intact. See: UNICEF, “Child and Maternal Mortality Survey 1999”; Richard Garfield, “Morbidity and Mortality among Iraqi Children from 1990 through 1998,” Fourth Freedom Forum, 1999.

¹⁶ Geneva Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 12 August 1949, Article 33: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

¹⁷ The United States declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania on 5 June 1942, the final formal declarations of war issued by Congress. See: National Archives, “Declarations of War and Authorizations for the Use of Military Force.”

¹⁸ Korean War casualty figures from the Department of Defense, Defense Casualty Analysis System.

¹⁹ The Gulf of Tonkin incident of 4 August 1964 — the alleged second attack on the USS Maddox — was later determined to have likely not occurred. The NSA’s own declassified internal history, published in 2005, concluded that the signals intelligence used to justify the resolution was flawed. See: Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified 2005.

²⁰ War Powers Resolution, 50 U.S.C. §§ 1541–1548, enacted 7 November 1973 over President Nixon’s veto.

²¹ US involvement in the 2011 Libya intervention: the seventy-five percent aerial refuelling and seventy percent intelligence figures are from congressional testimony and Department of Defense reporting, as cited in the War Powers Resolution article on Wikipedia and PBS reporting. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified in March 2011 that the administration did not need congressional authorisation. Obama’s characterisation of the operation as not constituting “hostilities” was widely reported.

²² Trump ordered airstrikes on Syria in April 2017 and April 2018 without congressional authorisation. The assassination of General Qasem Soleimani occurred on 3 January 2020 at Baghdad International Airport. Trump cited the 2002 Iraq AUMF and Article II authority. See: Oona Hathaway, “The Soleimani Strike Defied the U.S. Constitution,” The Atlantic, 4 January 2020.

²³ Trump stated on 3 March 2026 that military operations could last “four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that.” NPR, “6 U.S. soldiers have been killed as the war with Iran further engulfs the region,” 2 March 2026.

²⁴ Casualty and wounded figures confirmed by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell to TIME, 10 March 2026. TIME, “What We Know About the U.S. Service Members Killed in the Iran War,” 10 March 2026.

²⁵ Lawfare, “The Law of Going to War with Iran, Redux,” March 2026. The article confirms that Trump’s 2 March war powers report relies on Article II authority alone, not any statutory enactment such as the 2001 AUMF. The 2002 Iraq AUMF was repealed in 2024.

²⁶ Hathaway called the strikes “blatantly illegal” in an X post on 28 February 2026, reported by FactCheck.org, “Legality of Latest Iran Attack in Question,” March 2026, and the Yale Daily News. Her extended quote — “For the president to make that decision unilaterally, without going to the Security Council, without going to Congress, and putting U.S. troops and allies at risk is really extraordinary and clearly unlawful” — from The New Republic, “Congress Won’t Act on the Iran Strikes. That Doesn’t Make Them Legal,” June 2025, addressing the earlier Twelve-Day War strikes but with legal analysis applying with greater force to the February 2026 campaign. See also: The Hill, “Trump’s murky legal landscape on attacking Iran,” March 2026.

²⁷ The Office of Legal Counsel framework — allowing presidential use of force where it serves “sufficiently important national interests” and does not constitute a “prolonged and substantial military engagement” — is discussed in Lawfare, “The Law of Going to War with Iran, Redux,” March 2026, and in FactCheck.org, “Legality of Latest Iran Attack in Question,” March 2026.

²⁸ Constitution Center, “Does the War Powers Resolution debate take on a new context in the Iran conflict?” March 2026. The Senate rejected the war powers resolution 47–53 on 4 March 2026.

²⁹ Al Jazeera, “US House narrowly rejects resolution to end Trump’s Iran war,” 5 March 2026. The House voted 219–212 against the resolution.

³⁰ Charter of the United Nations, Article 2(4): “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

³¹ Charter of the United Nations, Chapter VII, Articles 39–51.

³² Charter of the United Nations, Article 51: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

³³ The Caroline test, formulated in diplomatic correspondence between US Secretary of State Daniel Webster and British envoy Lord Ashburton in 1842, following the destruction of the American steamboat Caroline in 1837. Webster stated that a self-defence claimant must show “a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” The standard was reaffirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal. See: Yale Law School Avalon Project, “British-American Diplomacy: The Caroline Case.”

³⁴ Trump’s war powers report to Congress, 2 March 2026, stated that strikes were undertaken “to protect United States forces in the region, protect the United States homeland, advance vital United States national interests, including ensuring the free flow of maritime commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, and in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.” Reported by FactCheck.org, “Legality of Latest Iran Attack in Question,” March 2026.

³⁵ International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Judgment, 1 October 1946: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

³⁶ Macron’s televised address, 4 March 2026: “The United States of America and Israel have decided to launch military operations, conducted outside of international law, which we cannot approve.” Reported by Al Jazeera, “France walks ‘fine line’ as US-Israel war on Iran escalates,” 12 March 2026; Ynet News, “Macron slams US-Israeli strikes on Iran, sends flagship aircraft carrier to Middle East,” 4 March 2026; The Telegraph via Yahoo News, “Macron: Strikes against Iran are illegal,” 4 March 2026.

³⁷ Sánchez statement on X, 28 February 2026, rejecting “the unilateral military action by the United States and Israel, which represents an escalation and contributes to a more uncertain and hostile international order.” Spain refused the use of Spanish military bases for strikes on Iran. Reported by Reuters via NewsNation, “World leaders react to Iran military strikes,” 28 February 2026; European Council on Foreign Relations, “War over law: Europe’s unforced errors over the use of force in Iran,” 12 March 2026.

³⁸ Trump stated on 4 March 2026 that he had ordered his Treasury chief to look into cutting “off all trade” with Spain. Reported by The Telegraph via Yahoo News, “Macron: Strikes against Iran are illegal,” 4 March 2026.

³⁹ Starmer initially refused to allow UK bases to be used for offensive action, a decision Trump publicly criticised. He reversed on 1 March, citing the protection of 300,000 British civilians and allied countries under attack. The drone strike on RAF Akrotiri occurred hours later, shortly after midnight on 2 March. The UK Ministry of Defence confirmed the Shahed-type drone was not launched from Iran; officials believe it was fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah. It caused minimal damage and no casualties. Sources: TIME, “British Base Hit in Cyprus, Drones Downed as Iran War Widens,” 2 March 2026; Middle East Eye, “UK says drone attack on Cyprus base was not launched from Iran,” 5 March 2026; Al Jazeera, “Starmer lets US use bases for Iran clash: UK’s military, legal quagmire,” 2 March 2026; Wikipedia, “United Kingdom involvement in the 2026 Iran war,” accessed 16 March 2026; House of Commons Library, “US-Israel strikes on Iran: February/March 2026,” research briefing, March 2026.

⁴⁰ Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia at the UN Security Council emergency session, 1 March 2026, called the strikes “a deliberate, premeditated, and unprovoked act of armed aggression against a sovereign and independent Member State, in violation of the UN Charter and international law” and “a betrayal of diplomacy.” UN News, “Iran strikes ‘squandered a chance for diplomacy’: Guterres,” 1 March 2026; Security Council Report, “Emergency Meeting on the Military Escalation in the Middle East,” 28 February 2026.

⁴¹ Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stated on 2 March 2026 that “the U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran have no UN Security Council authorization and violate international law.” Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated it was “unacceptable for the U.S. and Israel to launch attacks against Iran in the process of the ongoing Iran-U.S. negotiations, still less to blatantly attack and kill the leader of a sovereign country and instigate government change.” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, press conferences of 2 and 3 March 2026.

⁴² Swiss Defence Minister Martin Pfister, interview with SonntagsZeitung, 8 March 2026: “The Federal Council is of the opinion that the attack on Iran constitutes a violation of international law. In our view it constitutes a violation on the prohibition of violence.” Reuters, “Iran attacks breach international law, Swiss Defence Minister says,” 8 March 2026.

⁴³ European Council on Foreign Relations, “War over law: Europe’s unforced errors over the use of force in Iran,” 12 March 2026, noting that “Norway’s government has also emphasised the illegality of the war.”

⁴⁴ China’s Ambassador Zhang Jun at the UN Security Council, as reported by Al Jazeera, “UN Security Council adopts resolution condemning Iran’s attacks in the Gulf,” 12 March 2026: the conflict had “neither legitimacy nor legal basis.”

⁴⁵ Al Jazeera, “UN Security Council adopts resolution condemning Iran’s attacks in the Gulf,” 12 March 2026. Al Jazeera’s correspondent noted that 135 countries co-sponsored the resolution, described as “the largest number of countries ever to cosponsor a Security Council draft resolution.”

⁴⁶ European Council on Foreign Relations, “War over law: Europe’s unforced errors over the use of force in Iran,” 12 March 2026. The analysis stated: “There is little question that the US and Israeli war against Iran is an unlawful act of aggression. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except when authorised by the Security Council or in cases of self-defence against an armed attack. There is overwhelming agreement among legal scholars that neither of those applies in this case. No European leader has argued the war is lawful.”

⁴⁷ Professor Mohamed Arafa, “No Authorization, No Imminence, No Plan: The Iran Strikes and the Rule of Law,” JURIST, March 2026.

⁴⁸ The principle of proportionality in international humanitarian law is codified in Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977), Article 51(5)(b), which prohibits attacks “which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”

⁴⁹ Aristotle, Politics, Book III, Chapter 16.

⁵⁰ Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776).

⁵¹ Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, Part the First, Article XXX, drafted by John Adams: “In the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

⁵² Al Jazeera, “Iran’s FM says deal with US ‘within reach’; Trump says he’s ‘not happy’ with talks,” 25 February 2026. Araghchi stated that the “historic opportunity to strike an unprecedented agreement” would depend on whether “diplomacy is given priority.”

⁵³ CBS News, “U.S.-Iran deal is ‘within our reach,’ Omani mediator says,” 27 February 2026. Al Busaidi appeared on “Face the Nation” and stated: “I can see that the peace deal is within our reach… if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.”

⁵⁴ Ibid. Al Busaidi disclosed that Iran had committed to “never, ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb,” that existing stockpiles would be “blended to the lowest level possible” and “converted into fuel, and that fuel will be irreversible,” and that Iran would grant the IAEA “full access” for verification. He called this “something that is not in the old deal” and “a very important breakthrough.” See also: Al Jazeera, “Peace ‘within reach’ as Iran agrees no nuclear material stockpile: Oman FM,” 28 February 2026; Common Dreams, “Oman’s Foreign Minister Said US-Iran Deal Was ‘Within Our Reach.’ Then Trump Started Bombing,” 1 March 2026.

⁵⁵ Al Jazeera, “Oman renews push for diplomacy, says ‘off-ramps available’ in Iran war,” 3 March 2026. Al Busaidi pushed back on the Trump administration’s characterisation of an “imminent threat” and maintained that “significant progress” had been made before the strikes. The characterisation of the war as an attempt to reorder the Middle East in Israel’s favour is from Wikipedia, “2025–2026 Iran–United States negotiations,” citing Al Busaidi’s post-war comments, accessed 16 March 2026.

⁵⁶ Al Jazeera, “Oman renews push for diplomacy, says ‘off-ramps available’ in Iran war,” 3 March 2026. Majed al-Ansari, spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made the statement following Iranian retaliatory strikes on Omani territory.

⁵⁷ Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, quoted in Common Dreams, “Oman’s Foreign Minister Said US-Iran Deal Was ‘Within Our Reach.’ Then Trump Started Bombing,” 1 March 2026.

⁵⁸ Common Dreams, ibid., citing a survey released in February 2026 showing twenty-one percent support for initiating an attack on Iran “under the current circumstances.”