Stopping The Genocide of Palestinians Will Stop Attacks Like Colorado

Edited by Sam Thielman

EVERYONE WHO HAS pulled a trigger—or pulled a knife, or fired an improvised flamethrower—on and since October 7 made and is responsible for their own decisions. But to paraphrase Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire, they didn't make those decisions in a vacuum. 

That is certainly true of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who is charged in connection with throwing a Molotov cocktail and firing a homebrew flamethrower at a Boulder, Colorado demonstration in support of the remaining Israeli hostages. Most of Soliman's victims were elderly people. Not a single one of his victims had the power to stop the genocide in Gaza, which Soliman's reported statements to investigators—and his reported words at the scene of his crime—indicate were his motivation. 

What is true of Soliman is also true of Joseph Czuba, who is now convicted of murdering the 6-year old Wadea al-Fayoume in the weeks after Oct. 7, while reportedly yelling "You Muslims must die." We could continue naming perpetrators—not to minimize any such atrocity, but to understand that what Israel does in Gaza, with the ongoing material and diplomatic support of the United States, will not stay there. It is also to underscore that war is dehumanization, which spreads like wildfire as long as the war lasts. More than 80 percent of Israeli Jews in a recent poll, reported on last week by Haaretz, support "forcibly expelling Palestinians—both from Gaza and from within Israel's borders."

Ever since October 7, apt comparisons to the political moment spawned by September 11 have proliferated. The Colorado attack provides us with another reminder. Much as the horror and trauma of 9/11 obscured—deliberately; that obscurity was cultivated—the violent U.S. exploitation of the Middle East that prompted it, so too does the horror and trauma of Colorado obscure the plain reality that ending the genocide would have prevented it and will prevent the next attack. 

It took many years and many hundreds of thousands dead after 9/11 before many Americans accepted the connection between U.S. foreign policy and the attack; and some still do not. We cannot afford for that to be the case with the U.S.-enabled Israeli genocide in Gaza. 

9/11 Politics, and I suppose we can now say 10/7 Politics, operate by filtering out just responses until all the remaining ones reinforce the circumstances that prompted the attack in the first place. Rather than accepting that imperialism prompts resistance and accordingly dismantling the structures of U.S. imperial domination, the U.S. launched the War on Terror, which intensified them and unspooled a cascading nightmare of violence worldwide. Rather than accepting that making Gaza an open-air prison camp for more than two million people prompted October 7 and accordingly dismantling the structures of Israeli domination, Israel launched a genocide. 

Similarly, the post-October 7 U.S. administrations launched and escalated a military campaign to reopen Red Sea lanes instead of forcing an end to the genocide that prompted the Houthis to target those lanes as a means to pressure Israel. As with the War on Terror, decoupling those two obviously connected events filtered a U.S. response to something violent and ultimately futile. As with the War on Terror, such futility was preferable in two White Houses to actually addressing the problem at its root. 

There can be no sympathy with Soliman. Millions around the world protest the genocide without commiting acts of violence. Anyone who says things like Well, have those protests stopped the genocide? ignores the structures of power—including American power—that perpetuate the genocide. Soliman didn't challenge those daunting structures, he violently assaulted random Jews. The fact that such assaults are legible cries against a genocide does not justify them – just as it does not justify ICE taking Soliman's family into custody.  

Likewise, condemnation of Soliman's Colorado attack is not sympathy with or license for what Israel is doing to Gaza. In just the past week, Israel and the U.S.' substitution of 400 United Nations-administered aid distribution sites in Gaza with four contractor-run centers has forced desperate people into a kill box. A paragraph from Tuesday morning's New York Times on the latest Israeli attack on one of those sites in Rafah cited a doctor at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis saying that "most of the victims were children aged 10 to 13, many with gunshot wounds to the head or the chest." (That line seems to have been removed from the current writethru.) 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the Knesset on May 11 (via translation, and via FOREVER WARS friend Murtaza Hussain): "The Gazans we evacuate will not return. They will not be there—we will govern there. There is no other goal. Any other goal is a bluff." Yet Jonathan Greenblatt, the leader of the ADL whose tolerance for antisemitism turns out to be flexible, said in a recent interview that calling Israeli actions in Gaza genocidal is a "blood libel" that incites attacks like Soliman's. Greenblatt went on, once again, to shift blame to Hasan Piker—recently detained at an airport by Customs and Border Protection as if his politics were acts of violence—as well as anti-genocide speakers at college commencements. You might call it Greenblatt's personal Operation Rough Rider/Prosperity Guardian. 

Condemnation of Soliman's Colorado attack, like condemnation of Israel's genocide, is an attempt to force us all to cling to our basic humanity. We can end the genocide and work toward a free Palestine from the river to the sea, democratically accountable and safe for all the people who live there. Or we can see Solimans and Colorados proliferate, alongside the many graves of Gaza and indeed the West Bank. Having lived through the very long War on Terror, we have no excuse for not learning that lesson. Calls to address the problem at its foundation are not, as propagandists would have you believe, calls to embrace a terrorist agenda. They are appeals to save the lives that future reprisal attacks threaten.

VIA SAM BIDDLE AND DEFENSE ONE'S LAUREN C. WILLIAMS, the U.S. military command responsible for operations in the "Indo-Pacific" recently including in their wargaming exercises an AI system called Thunderforge, built by Anduril, Microsoft and a company I don't know called Scale AI. Williams reports that Thunderforge is "designed to help commanders make decisions using AI to synthesize sensor data into actionable information." A senior command official called it "a step to agentic AI," defined by a piece Williams linked to as a system that "doesn’t just follow instructions; it can dynamically determine the best course of action based on its environment." 

Given that we were just talking in the last essay about pre-filtered responses, here comes a system that will now filter warfighter responses ahead of and presumably during combat operations. The old talk of keeping a human in the loop for life-or-death decisions is now becoming outmoded in favor of robotic pre-determination of the loop. And all of this is proceeding like we don't see the actual manifestations of AI-enabled warfare in Gaza. [For all my skepticism of “agentic AI” claims, I’ve become convinced that AI will work well enough to do harm, and will be broken enough to do harm.—Sam]

PALANTIR'S EVOLUTION into a central data processor for the U.S. government, capable of collating highly specific and revealing data on Americans across databases, should be understood as advancement of a War on Terror process. (I originally wrote culmination, but Palantir has surely not reached its final form.) More than a decade ago, a coterie within the U.S. Army with substantial congressional influence began boosting Palantir as a superior datamining capability for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. A central figure boosting Palantir was Mike Flynn, then the head of intelligence for the Afghanistan wartime command. Palantir fought very hard and ultimately became a contractor for the Army's priority data-environment tool. We should today understand the rise of Palantir as part of a sea change within the military-industrial complex that has serious implications not only for the political economy of U.S. warfare but for the weaponization of people's government-stored information. 

AN UNHINGED State Department Substack post castigates Europe for "an aggressive campaign against Western civilization itself. …[European] governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage." They didn't want to title this post "Blood And Soil," but the department's senior advisor for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Samuel Samson, defends the AfD Party in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France and similar illiberal right-wing movements as forces confronting "a decadent governing class afraid of its own people." This is an essay that could have been delivered as a shout from a balcony while the speaker keeps sweeping his greasy forelock back into place. 

FROM SAM: Just wanted to note that the purge of gay and trans people even as an abstract concept from the U.S. military is taking shape simultaneously with all the adventurism and insanity Spencer details above. Drunken sex pest Pete Hegseth has ordered that the oiler USNS Harvey Milk, named for the assassinated American gay-rights leader elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, be renamed. [It is no coincidence Hegseth did this during Pride Month – Spencer.]

You can roll your eyes at the rainbow imperialism of naming an oiler after a figure in a movement so horribly and thoroughly opposed by this country’s government, but that seems to be the point. Even that much acknowledgement is so offensive that Hegseth wants to rename an already-commissioned vessel. CBS also reports that departing trans servicemembers are being given a JDK discharge, which is only technically honorable and acts as a flag to other government agencies that the servicemember was discharged for security concerns. For being trans.

TWO WEEKS AGO we covered a purge at the National Intelligence Council for delivering an assessment unconducive to the mass-deportation agenda. An alternative FBI assessment became cudgel for the purge, purporting to find a connection between the Venezuelan government and the Tren de Aragua gang that the National Intelligence Council considered chimerical. Last week, the Times' Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer revealed that the Bureau mumbled through its own unreliability:

The F.B.I. put its assessment at “medium” confidence and said it was considering moving that to lower confidence “due to the primary sources, who were one-time contacts with indirect access and who may have been motivated by the perceived possibility of a favorable immigration decision.”

Also, it appears that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's new chief of staff is an Elon-connected CIA veteran.

DON'T MISS FOREVER WARS FRIEND JONATHAN KATZ on Erik Prince's plans for Haiti. Nor FOREVER WARS friends Danny Bessner, Derek Davison and Mike Duncan talking about the state of the history profession on Danny and Derek's American Prestige podcast.