An Open Letter To My Neoliberal Friends After World Central Kitchen Murders

It's tribalism vs. universal liberalism, AUKUS vs. Israel, humanity vs. AI

Benjamin Netanyahu kills us with impunity because he can.

“We are at the beginning of a new era for humanity, the era of artificial intelligence,” Netanyahu said after meeting Elon Musk in June of last year. “Things are changing at a dizzying pace, and Israel must formulate a national policy on this issue.”

Because I love you I have told you the truth, my dear neoliberal friend. You did not deserve the truth but I gave it to you anyway because I love you. To love something is to sacrifice for it.

I did it at great danger to myself, to my career, to my reputation, and to my life. You will never thank me — that’s not what you do — but in your quiet moments you’ll realize that yes, Charles was right about what they were up to.

You are well on your way to learning what those of us they branded “antisemites” or “beyond the pale” or “crazy” have known all along. The murders of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen now know it, too. No, you are not safe from the Zionist war machine. Every soul from an AUKUS country and yet AUKUS has yet to respond as one. Can it even respond? Or is it too penetrated?

Sir Alan Duncan is rightly calling out the Tories and their compromise. At one point Suella Braverman was looking to work with Clearview.AI. Now I learn she’s denying that a famine is even taking place. The Conservative Friends of Israel like the Zionist Organization of America needs to be shut down.

No, you are not safe in your Michelin stars, with your passports, or with your conventional takes arrived at precisely the right time on every subject. You are not safe with your hashtags, with your flags, with your pins and with your quiet words.

Your “rules based order” is nothing but an empty phrase said by empty suits. Your diplomatic approach is but a pose before you go and lobby for a foreign government, sell out to a megacorporation or work for a “think tank” where again you have the conventional take arrived at precisely the right time on every subject. You’ve used your credential to give you the illusion of protection, a patina of moral rectitude and Ivy League isolation and liberal arts sophistry that the rest of us could never afford even if we were given occasion to purchase it.

You have lived your life as a free rider off the courage of people like me. You steal our ideas and sometimes even our companies. You sit in chairs funded by people who were braver than you. You work for a government found by polymaths while you hyperspecialize. You don’t deserve what you have. You know it and I know it. But this is the way it is. Maybe one day we can settle up with this fundamental inequality. Maybe you’ll call the nerds who do your homework not when there's a crisis but when there’s an opportunity? Then again, maybe not.

You say you like courage but you don’t support it. You looked the other way when we lost our jobs and then our marriages so you could feel good with the monopolists who funded your startups, backed as they were with labor (and protection) from the IDF. Benjamin Netanyahu wants to get as many of these IDF spies into as many of our companies as he can. It makes us harder to hold him accountable. And yes, it’s working. He calls it the “binational security state.” Look it up.

Now you come to us when your friends are savagely targeted and then murdered and then mocked in Zionist telegram channels.

First it’s time for introspection. You can’t feed the world if you can’t think seriously about the world, about who the heroes and villains are.

This cant from Ed Luce of the Financial Times won’t do. Luce incidentally canceled a meeting when he was confronted with the reality of the Zionist war machine in St. Louis. I’ve seen the text messages. Shameful stuff, really.

I had excused this cowardice as the sort of thing that happens when you take a one year sabbatical to work as a speechwriter for Larry Summers.

But now that the war is at his doorstep here he is.

Put simply, Andrés is a Washington celebrity. He was one of the pioneers of high-quality restaurants in an early 1990s Washington that had a well-deserved reputation for dowdy food. Andrés’s Jaleo introduced Spanish-style tapas food to America’s capital. In 2016, his restaurant, Minibar, was one of Washington’s first batch to merit a two-star Michelin award. Among others, Nancy Pelosi, the former US Speaker, has nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. When I spoke to Andrés during the pandemic, he was keeping dozens of local restaurants alive by ordering food deliveries from them to supply homeless shelters, hospital staff and other essential workers. From the front lines of war-torn Ukraine, to the devastation of natural disasters around the world, Andrés’s WCK has become a global Good Samaritan like no other.

You care because Andrés was of your tribe, Mr. Luce. You believe that because Andrés is good he will win out. So what if he doesn’t?

Maybe you need those of us who tried to recruit Netanyahu’s son as a confidential source. Maybe you need those of us who have confronted the enemy in the backrooms, not the boardrooms and Georgetown salons. Maybe it’s rude to cancel a meeting and then lie about why you canceled it.

Both Bibi and Putin seek to use food as a weapon. So it was only natural that those providing the food to their enemies must die.

You don’t want to hear that. You don’t want to talk about sayanim and the challenge that they pose to your hope that the whole world might live as one in some sort of John Lennon song.

You don’t want to think seriously about how people might feel loyalty to their tribe over and above anyone else, in spite of anyone else. You don’t want to think about how this tribalism gives their life meaning because you don’t want to think about the challenge it poses to your life.

World Central Kitchen’s founder José Andrés says the murders were against “humanity” and in a sense he’s right but since when has Netanyahu cared about humanity? A more confident America would dispatch the assassination squads. Why haven’t we? Would it be antisemitic to prevent ourselves from being targeted by the Israeli machine?

You are beginning to see what a lot of us have experienced. It has an anodyne expression — “transnational repression” — but what it really means is that other countries fuck with Americans in their own country. It’s been going on a long time. The defamation machine has targeted Hunter Biden, Prince Harry — and Matt Gaetz. Those of us who have survived it have built support groups — and means of counterattack. We have done so without the resources of anyone but ourselves, few and precious those are.

Some of us are better educated than you are, my neoliberal friends. We read their books. We talk to their dissidents. We talk to them. When they tell us they want a greater Israel from Baghdad to Cairo we take them seriously. We understand that they have nuclear weapons. So do they. Do you?

Most of all we understand them. We do not live in a bubble of bohemian lifestyles, of Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. We are not like Ed Luce who believes that the right associations will win out. We are the old hands who have seen the world though some of us are quite young indeed. Did you know that Facebook and Jeffrey Epstein targeted us as children?

We’ve been to Gaza. We’ve put on the dark glasses and walked — without escorts — about the local people. We learn the languages. We sleep with the local women. We take them seriously. We listen.

Most of all, we do the work while you go to the parties. No need to thank us. The job itself is the reward. But it is time for some of you to step aside and to follow our lead.

Terribly sorry, Mr. Josh Paul, but a legalistic approach won’t do. Nor will a hopeful workmanlike approach by Mr. James Bamford get the job done. You believe in law but these are gangsters. They’ll only accept strength. Appeal to law all you want but when you have judges and politicians on the take it’s harder to imagine that the law will deliver the outcome you need. We are in the state of exception. We are in a war. There will be more casualties until we recognize things as they are.

The lack of humanity is becoming more apparent too. They call their new weapon artificial intelligence. Their commander — outed as the amateurish Yossi Sariel by The Guardian — goes into some detail about how The Human Machine Team will transform warfare. Where then is the humanity in the Zionist war machine? The Nazis learned that “just following orders” didn’t protect them. Will just following the machine’s orders protect the IDF butchers?

We learned this past week that the Israeli war machine has a kill list of 37,000+ people and that it accepts an error rate of 10 percent, or 3700 people. That’s roughly one September 11th, or if you want, a roughly threefold whoops factor for October 7th.

We know that they have similar programs which target our Israeli skeptic politicians. We know that they do this online with their troll army. We know that they do it with their botnets. We know that these things are used to manipulate public opinion. We know that these networks fear being doxxed — that is outed — not because they are ashamed of what they are doing but because they fear consequences. We know that they blackmail our politicians and our billionaires alike.

In a just world those of us who have been their targets would lead us out but the lobby is powerful and merciless.

We are in the wilderness. We are Churchill warning of Hitler — and being mocked. We are in the underground, gathering resources.

It won’t be long now because the world can’t wait.

Don’t worry, we’ll still let you go to your parties but it’s time for the real adults to take the steer the ship of state.

Like Churchill, history will be kind to us for we intend to write it. Will it be kind to you?