The Rape of Nanking: Massacre or Myth?
By Jonas E. Alexis • Unz Review • May 21, 2026
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang was unquestionably an incendiary and highly tendentious work that quickly generated considerable controversy in both the United States and Japan following its publication in 1997. The book received praise from major publications such as the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The book achieved such remarkable success that it prompted then fifty-year-old Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL, to produce the documentary film Nanking, which he described as a “labor of love.”[1] According to Ted Leonsis, the film was intended to be comparable to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.[2]
Chang, who was Chinese American, was only twenty-seven years old when she began writing The Rape of Nanking. However, Chang died by suicide in 2004 near Los Gatos at the age of thirty-six.[3] Before taking her own life in her automobile, Chang left three suicide notes, one of which stated in part:
“I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me.”[4]
Whether Iris Chang’s fears were intensified by the medications she was taking, or whether she genuinely believed that certain organizations were pursuing her, lies beyond the scope of the present analysis. Her references to groups such as the CIA raise additional questions regarding the nature and origin of those concerns.
In any event, what remains undeniable is that Iris Chang’s book helped revive widespread public discussion of the so-called Nanjing Massacre. In a 1998 review of the work, George Will of the The Washington Post declared that: “it has stimulated seminars and conferences at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and many other places, and is assisting those honorable Japanese who are combatting their country’s officially enforced amnesia regarding what the Imperial Army did in December 1937 and January 1938.”[5]
In the same article, Will agreed with Chang’s position and declared that
“Japanese soldiers killed tens of thousands of surrendered Chinese soldiers and almost certainly more than 300,000 noncombatants. (Civilian deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki totaled 210,000. Britain and France suffered a combined total of 169,000 civilian deaths from 1939 to 1945.) The Nanking killing continued for seven weeks in front of international witnesses, without any attempt at concealment, and with the sadism of recreational killing. Chinese were used for bayonet practice and beheading contests. People were roasted alive, hanged by their tongues from hooks, mutilated, drowned in icy ponds, buried up to their waists and then torn apart by German shepherds, buried up to their necks and run over by horses or tanks. In addition to pandemic rape by Japanese soldiers even of young children, some of them tied to beds or posts for days, fathers were forced to rape their daughters, sons their mothers.”[6]
According to these accounts, the alleged atrocities occurred within a period of less than two months. The implicit assumption, therefore, is that Japanese soldiers were killing approximately 5,000 civilians each day! An obituary published in the New York Times similarly stated that “in less than two months they [the Japanese] murdered more than 300,000 civilians and raped more than 80,000 women.”[7] Chang placed the estimated number of rape victims between 20,000 and 80,000, rather than “more than 80,000.” Chang wrote:
“Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city were horrified.”[8]
Such an extraordinary claim would appear to require equally extraordinary evidence, thereby prompting several preliminary questions. Why did Mao Zedong— who had Jews fighting for him[9] and who later presided over policies that allegedly resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese citizens[10]—not make substantial use of this alleged evidence against Japan? Why did he never publicly suggest that Japanese soldiers were raping more than 1,300 women per day during the events in question? Is it being suggested that Mao was entirely unaware of such allegations, or that he failed to recognize their potential political significance?
Why did Chiang Kai-shek—who received support from both the Soviet Union and anti-Japanese propagandists such as Morris Cohen and Harold Isaacs in the United States—fail to address these allegations in any substantial manner? Moreover, if Harold Isaacs was deeply sympathetic to revolutionary movements in Asia and maintained associations with figures connected to Leon Trotsky, why did he not emphasize these claims more prominently in his own political and journalistic work?[11] One may ask whether Chang exaggerated certain aspects of the events in question or incorporated claims that were insufficiently substantiated or even fabricated, whether deliberately or unintentionally.
At this point, it is important to note that the book cannot be taken seriously, largely because her book omits many of the issues and questions raised above. Moreover, unlike historians such as David Irving, whose works are often grounded extensively in archival research, Chang’s book relies heavily on secondary sources rather than primary archival documentation. Furthermore, unlike detailed historical studies such as Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War by R. M. Douglas, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military by Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s War by David Irving, or After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh,[12] Chang’s ambitious work is not primarily based on extensive archival materials or a substantial body of primary-source evidence. This is not to suggest that there is anything inherently problematic about the use of secondary sources. Rather, the concern is that many of the sources upon which Chang relied contain their own uncertainties, ambiguities, or expressions of skepticism.
In all honesty, assessing Chang’s The Rape of Nanking is almost like scrutinizing Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, a fraudulent book which was quickly denounced for its historical inaccuracies, methodological weaknesses, and a lack of balance. Hitler’s Willing Executioners is indeed filled with citations, but they were largely distortions of the actual facts.
In fact, Goldhagen made things up whenever possible in order to prove the preposterous thesis that ordinary Germans were responsible for what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany. When scholars exposed his clear errors and deliberate deceptions, Goldhagen did not apologize. Instead, he wanted to sue those scholars—a response that is completely contrary to genuine scholarship and historical research.[13] Of course, the Holocaust establishment had an interest in promoting Goldhagen’s threadbare hoax. Like Goldhagen’s book, the American establishment also almost certainly had an interest in promoting Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. After all, didn’t Japan attack Pearl Harbor? Didn’t Japan ally itself with Germany? Wasn’t Japan considered one of the villains of the war?
What is especially striking about this controversial debate is that Chang deliberately left out important issues from her book—issues that would have seriously weakened her thesis. For example, she never mentioned the Tongzhou Incident, which took place in the same year as the alleged Nanking Massacre.. In July 29, 1937, a group of some 3,000 Chinese soldiers ambushed Japanese garrison’s barracks
“and proceeded to raid Japanese shops, inns, and private homes. Approximately 200 of the 380 Japanese residents of Tongzhou were slaughtered. The 120 who survived did so only because they fled to the barracks, seeking refuge, before they were surrounded. These acts were flagrant violations of international law relating to the conduct of war (hereafter referred to as ‘international law’). Four days after the incident, the aforementioned director officially condemned the Chinese troops for the abduction, rape, and slaughter of Japanese citizens. Defense attorneys submitted his statement to the Tokyo Trials, but it was rejected by William Webb, the presiding justice, without explanation. The Allies were unwilling to allow any mention of the Tongzhou Massacre in the courtroom.”[14]
In April of 1947,
“defense attorney Levine called Kayashima Takashi (a former lieutenant-general in the Japanese Army) to the witness stand.” Takashi testified that the Chinese were committed brutal acts of rape and murder. His soldiers were called to Tongzhou in order to rescue the Japanese settlers. His accounts obviously make one wonders why Chang completely dismissed the entire incident in her book: The scene inside the town was ghastly. Brutally murdered bodies of Japanese settlers were lying everywhere. Most of them had ropes tied around their necks. I had to force myself to look at the mutilated corpses of women and innocent children. I no longer have the report I wrote at the time. I have relied on my memories for this statement. But I assure you that what I witnessed was so horrifying that I will never be able to forget it.
“I went to a restaurant (I think it was called Asahiken) to investigate. There were seven or eight women there, ranging in age from 17 or 18 to 40. They had all been raped, and then shot to death as they lay naked on the floor. Four or five of them had been stabbed in the genitals with bayonets. … The living quarters had been ransacked, and all the furniture, bedding, and clothing stolen. The situation was virtually the same at the homes of the other Japanese victims. The scene at the Kinsuiro Inn was gruesome. Since many of the Japanese had gathered there, sensing danger, there had been mass carnage. … The owner of Kinsuiro and the maids had been tied together, raped, and decapitated.”[15]
Similar incidents also took place in places such as Tanggu and Tianjin. The Japanese made several attempts to resolve the conflict peacefully, but those efforts failed. In fact, a peace conference between the Japanese and the Chinese was scheduled in Shanghai for August 9, but it never took place because soldiers from the Chinese Peace Preservation Corps killed Navy Sublieutenant Oyama Isao and First Class Seaman Saito Yozo on that very day.[16]
Edouard Helsey, China’s correspondent for a Paris newspaper, wrote in 1938:
“An unfortunate incident occurred on August 9, in which a Japanese naval officer was murdered by Chinese sentinels from the Rainbow (Hong) Bridge Airfield. Perhaps the Japanese officer should have been more cautious, but there is no denying that this was a Chinese plot. It is clear that the Nanking government had decided to go to battle in Shanghai at least 15 days prior to this incident. Their plan was not simply to split the Japanese forces in South China, but also to entice them into the Neutral Zone, which act would certainly cause international problems. It was a malicious trick, this engineering of incident upon incident, the misinterpretation of which would sway public opinion in the West.
“Chiang Kai-shek himself concurred that that was his intention, and he seemed rather pleased with himself. When I met with him at the end of October (1937) in Nanking, I asked him the following question. ‘That was a clever ploy, since Shanghai is a thorn in Japan’s side. Until it is extracted, the Japanese will be paralyzed, will they not?’ Chiang replied, through an interpreter: ‘You are right. I believe it was successful.’ At that time, the Japanese government and military authorities were attempting to avoid a war. They viewed an attack on Shanghai as a real danger.”[17]
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, about 22,000 Japanese living around the Yangtze River evacuated to Shanghai. It was agreed that the Japanese government had the right to protect those citizens in that area. At the same time, many foreigners from the United States, Britain, France, and Italy were also living in Shanghai. Because of the Boxer Rebellion around 1900, these governments had signed agreements with China that explicitly gave them the right to protect their citizens in Shanghai. So by August 11,
“Japan dispatched a naval landing party of 4,000 to Shanghai, to protect the lives and property of Japanese citizens. But by then, the Chinese force, shielded by pillboxes and creeks, had already swelled to 150,000. Therefore, the Japanese government decided to send two more divisions from Japan to Shanghai on August 13. On the night of August 14, five days after Sublieutenant Oyama was assassinated, as hostilities and tension heightened, Chinese Air Force planes bombed Shanghai. Several aircraft flew toward Shanghai at 10:00 a.m., and dropped bombs on the Japanese Consulate, Naval Landing Force Headquarters, Japanese warships, and on the streets of Shanghai. At about 4:00 p.m., a dozen aircraft bombed the moored warship Izumo, the French Settlement, and the International Settlement. An entry in The China Year Book 1938 reads ‘Chinese planes drop bombs in International Settlement.’ Those bombs killed 1,741 persons and wounded 1,868. Most of the victims were Chinese. The Chinese Air Force had intentionally dropped bombs on its own people, setting a world record, however disgraceful.”[18]
All of these historical backgrounds were completely omitted from Chang’s The Rape of Nanking. Chang claimed that Nanking’s population was around 600,000 when the city fell, but independent estimates place the population closer to 200,000 to 250,000. “The population did not reach 600,000 until June 1940, 30 months after the Japanese occupied the city.”[19]
It gets more interesting. As historian Higashinakano Shudo convincingly puts it,
“If 300,000 were indeed massacred over a period of two months, then 5,000 people would have been killed each day, at a rate of three or four per minute, for a period of 60 days… The total area of the Safety Zone was only 3.86 square kilometers. If, in such a small space, 100,000, or 300,000, individuals were massacred, there would have been corpses everywhere.”[20]
If Chang’s claims are incorrect, then what is the historical truth behind the debate? Is it historically accurate to say that the Japanese mercilessly tortured and massacred more than 300,000 noncombatants and raped between 20,000 and 80,000 women? What would the Japanese military have gained from such actions? And is it reasonable to believe that the international community knew these events were taking place and did nothing?
Japanese historian Shudo Higashinakano wrote in his documented work The Nanking Massacre: Fact versus Fiction that Chang’s book “relies on faked photographs and hugely exaggerated accounts.”[21]
Higashinakano also sent Penguin, the publisher of The Rape of Nanking, a list of no fewer than ninety historical errors found in just the first sixty pages of the book. Penguin eventually corrected some of those errors.[22]
Higashinakano was not the only historian to point out factual errors in Chang’s book. Shortly after the book was published, Ikuhiko Hata, one of Japan’s leading historians, wrote a lengthy article highlighting what he described as serious deceptions involving at least eleven photographs used in the book. I also had the opportunity to receive Hata’s book on comfort women in South Korea through one of his university associates. As the San Francisco Chronicle put it one year after Chang’s book was published:
“One photo, which the book credits to the military Politburo of the Chinese Nationalist government, shows women and children walking across a bridge with Japanese soldiers, and carries the caption: ‘The Japanese rounded up thousands of women. Most were gang-raped or forced into military prostitution.’ “The truth is, Hata said, that, although the photo was published with a similar caption by the Chinese Nationalists in 1938, apparently as anti-Japanese propaganda, it originally appeared the previous year as one of four in a Japanese newspaper, Asahi Gurafu, showing peaceful scenes of Chinese villagers under Japanese occupation, with women and children returning home from the fields.
“In the sharper original photo, it is possible to see that two of the villagers are smiling, and there is a woman pulling a cart of freshly harvested cotton that was cropped out of the Nationalist Chinese version. The cropped photo appeared in a recent book on Nanjing by a Japanese professor as an illustration of Japanese army atrocities in China. But after its interpretation was challenged, the publisher of his book apologized and retracted it.
“Other mistakes occur in Chang’s book, which quotes as ‘compelling evidence’ a secret telegram by Japan’s foreign minister admitting that Japanese troops, ‘in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns,’ had slaughtered ‘not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians.’ This was, in fact, a quotation from the cable of a British reporter, and concerned deaths not only in Nanjing but elsewhere. The book also describes Japan as the first nation to use air power ‘as a means of terrorizing civilian populations,’ a distinction generally attributed to the Germans in World War I.”[23]
Chang’s thesis is now beginning to fall apart. Historian David M. Kennedy of Stanford noticed similar problems. Although Kennedy praised the book, especially for its many photographs—likely unaware that critics had challenged the authenticity of several of them—he still stated that the book contains “intellectually insufficient” assertions.[24] In a similar vein, historian Roger B. Jeans of Washington and Lee University declared that Chang’s book is “half-baked history.”
Chang, said Jeans, was “greatly inflating the population of Nanjing (Nanking) at that time and uncritically accepting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and contemporary Chinese figures for the numbers of Chinese civilians and soldiers killed.”[25] Historian Timothy M. Kelly put the final nail in the coffin. When academics and the media were praising Chang’s book, Kelly wrote:
“In light of the discrepancies I found in Chang’s book, it makes me wonder whether any of the reviewers know enough about the subject (Chinese and Japanese history, WWII, war crimes, historiography, not to mention the pertinent scholarly literature) to venture an informed opinion about the merits of Chang’s book… The mass media and those who write for it are often incredibly irresponsible and they need to be told so.”[26]
Kelly argued that the problem with the book can be placed in four categories: “simple carelessness, sheer sloppiness, historical inaccuracies, and shameless plagiarism.”[27]
Kelly provided multiple examples to support his accusations—far too many to discuss in full here. We will mention only a few of them. On page 166 of her book, Chang writes: “The Westerners themselves were often sprayed with Lysol upon entering the city.” Kelly responded,
“It’s incredulous that Chang would use a brand name here. Does she expect her readers to believe that Japanese authorities really sprayed foreigners with the particular product called Lysol? Surely the generic word ‘disinfectant’ would have been more adequate, not to mention accurate.”[28]
On page 13, Chang says: “In the documentary In the Name of the Emperor, one Japanese historian dismisses the entire Rape of Nanking with these words: ‘Even if twenty or thirty people had been killed, it would have been a great shock to Japan.” Kelly responded: “Chang does not identify this historian here or in the Notes section. Who is this historian? Is he/she a major or minor player? What impact has this historian had?”[29]
Chang: “When Shanghai finally fell in November, the mood of the imperial troops had turned ugly, and many, it was said, lusted for revenge as they marched toward Nanking.” Kelly: “Chang does not document the source of this statement, that is, who said it. This rhetorical device only gives the appearance that Chang is reporting fact.”[30]
Chang: “In July 1853, he (Matthew Perry) sent two ships belching black smoke into Tokyo Bay — giving the people of Japan their first glimpse of metal-clad, steam-powered ships. Surrounding himself with some sixty to seventy aggressive-looking men armed with swords and pistols, Perry strode through the capital of the Shogun and demanded meetings with the highest-ranking officials in Japan.”
Kelly: “The capital Chang refers to here is Edo, the present-day Tokyo. The historical truth is that Perry never set foot in the capital. He was officially, though reluctantly received, after some delay, on the beach at Uraga, some 35 miles from Edo at the entrance to Edo Bay, which has since been renamed Tokyo Bay. At the completion of the ceremonies Perry ordered his fleet of four vessels to a new anchorage about ten miles into the Edo Bay. He later proceeded in the Mississippi further into the bay to a point where he could see the Shinagawa area of Edo.”[31]
Chang: “In March 1944, the United Nations created the Investigation of War Crimes Committee …” Kelly: “How is this possible? The United Nations was not chartered until October 24, 1945. Chang again has her facts wrong.”
Once again, that is only the tip of the iceberg. If you believe Chang’s book is accurate, Kelly’s detailed research will likely come as a major shock. Even historian Takashi Yoshida Western Michigan University, who does not support the Japanese revisionist interpretation of what happened in Nanking, admits that Chang’s book contains “numerous errors and inaccuracies.”[32]
Even if we grant Chang’s questionable thesis that The Rape of Nanking is somehow accurate, it still would not fit with what the Allies actually did to Japan after World War II. Chang never discussed the fact that the Allied forces—especially the United States—committed sexual crimes and abuses, including the rape of many Japanese civilians, after the war. She called on Japan to apologize and pay reparations, yet she said nothing about what the United States did to Japan after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Moreover, Chang never discussed reports that some Chinese soldiers raped Chinese women and then blamed the crimes on Japanese soldiers. Even The New York Times—hardly a Japanese propaganda outlet—published an article in 1938 titled, “Ex-Chinese Officers Among U.S. Refugees: Colonel and His Aides Admit Blaming the Japanese for Crimes in Nanking.” It stated:
“The ex-Chinese officers in the presence of Americans and other foreigners confessed looting in Nanking and also that one night they dragged girls from the refugee camp into the darkness and the next day blamed Japanese soldiers for the attacks.”[33]
When the American professors who had protected those former Chinese officers realized that the officers themselves were involved in wrongdoing, they became “seriously embarrassed.”[34]
Chang mentioned none of these. Shudo argues:
“20 days before and immediately prior to the fall of Nanking, the city’s population was 200,000, according to Europeans and Americans who were there at the time. Eight days after the fall and on Christmas Eve, it was still 200,000. No one indicated a vast decrease in population due to mass slaughter. Confronted by these facts, how can anyone claim that 300,000 noncombatants were murdered in Nanking?
“Prior to the capture of the city, Chinese troops stripped off their uniforms and mingled with the civilian population. By doing so, they became unlawful combatants not protected by the Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land annexed to the Hague Convention. No Chinese military personnel inside the city walls surrendered to the Japanese. Accordingly, during the 11-year period spanning December 13, 1937, the day Nanking fell, to December 1948, when the Tokyo Trials ended, no one accused Japanese troops of having killed prisoners of war in violation of the aforementioned regulations. Confronted with these facts, how can anyone claim that the Japanese murdered prisoners of war?
“The Japanese are accused of having murdered 7,000 persons each day, i.e., 300,000 persons over a period of six weeks. But according to ‘Daily Reports of Serious Injuries to Civilians,’ the only killing witnessed by a European or American in Nanking was one ‘lawful execution.’ The contents of these reports (issued on a daily basis and submitted to the Japanese Embassy in Nanking) are corroborated by data gathered from the testimonies of European, American and Chinese residents in Nanking, and from Japanese military records (all of which data has been computerized and analyzed). How do we explain a massacre with no witnesses?”[35]
Harold Timperley, a British reporter for the Guardian, wrote the book What War Means, which helped spread the claim that Japanese forces were frequently killing civilians. However, the book itself did not provide documented evidence to support those accusations. Shudo continued:
“Rev. Miner Searle Bates and George Fitch submitted material for What War Means (both used pseudonyms). The ostensible intent of the book, edited by Timperley, was to impress upon the reader the horrors of war via accounts written by disinterested parties (European and American residents of Nanking). But Timperley was, in fact, an advisor to the Nationalist government’s Ministry of Information. Rev. Bates, a famous Christian missionary who taught at the University of Nanking, was also an advisor to the Ministry of Information. And Mrs. Fitch was a close friend of Mme. Chiang Kai-shek.
“It has also become clear that What War Means is a propaganda book compiled and published by the Counterintelligence Division of the Nationalist Ministry of Information’s International Propaganda Section. Timperley was paid by the Ministry of Information for editing the book. Thus, What War Means, perceived as proof of the ‘Nanking Massacre,’ was not written from an impartial standpoint. On the contrary, it can be viewed only as war propaganda.”[36]
As noted earlier, Chiang Kai-shek was aligned with Joseph Stalin in efforts to weaken or defeat Japan. In fact, scholar Li Yuzhen writes that Chiang made several attempts “to secure the direct participation of Soviet forces in China.” Yuzhen argues that Chiang’s cooperation with Stalin contributed significantly to Japan’s defeat during World War II.[37]
Both the Soviets and Chiang “were committed to defeat the Axis powers of Germany and Japan… War necessity compelled two men [Stalin and Chiang] who had every reason to distrust each other to overcome a long history of mutual suspicion and animosity to find common ground.”[38]
In other words, although Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph Stalin had their differences, they were united in their determination to defeat Japan and Germany. As Yuzhen puts it:
“As the threat of Japan to China increased, and that of Germany and Japan to the Soviet Union, China and the Soviet Union moved gingerly toward an accommodation. While Chiang hoped for Soviet material aid and actual Soviet military involvement in China’s war with Japan, Stalin’s strategy was to trap Japan in China so as to be able to concentrate on Europe and avoid a war with Japan on its eastern frontier. Stalin had the best cards, including a far more powerful army. He resisted China’s pressure to throw Soviet forces into China’s war with Japan until the last two weeks of the war.”[39]
It was Stalin himself who pressured the communist party in China to accept Chiang as their leader. “Soviet financial and military aid was instrumental in sustaining China’s war effort during the first five years of the war against Japan. Even though it is fair to say that the Soviets gained the most, the accommodation between Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek paid dividends for both sides.”[40]
Anyone with a minimum level of intellectual honesty would acknowledge that it would have been in Chiang’s interest to promote the so-called Nanking massacre. Yet he never mentioned it. This suggests that the Nanking issue is far more complex than what has been portrayed by publications such as The New York Times and the Chicago Daily News. In addition, numerous key documents from the period of the alleged events in Nanking do not mention the incident either. In fact,
“the International Information Department (a branch of the Ministry of Information established not long before the fall of Nanking) sponsored 300 press conferences for foreign journalists between December 1, 1937 and October 24, 1938. During that time, emergency press conferences were called whenever important news broke (even in the dead of night, according to reports), and the news was transmitted all over the world. But no press conference was ever called to announce a massacre in Nanking.”[41]
So, the so-called rape of Nanking appears to have been shaped by wartime propaganda in the United States and possibly by Chinese authorities at the time. In the next articles, we will interview several Japanese writers and historians to hear their perspectives on this important issue.
Notes
[1] Thomas Heath, “Ted Leonsis Takes a Sharp Turn,” Washington Post, July 31, 2006.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Heidi Benson, “Historian Iris Chang won many battles / The war she lost raged within,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 2005; Kathleen E. McLaughlin, “Iris Chang’s suicide stunned those she tried so hard to help,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 20, 2004. The prevailing vision is that hate mail and threatening notes from Japanese ultranationalists may have contributed to her death. Implausible. First of all, the Chang family never told us who those “ultranationalists” were. The fact is that Chang’s book was widely criticized by Japanese academics for its lack of historical accuracy and intellectual honesty. Furthermore, Chang must have known that writing books like The Rape of Nanking was a huge enterprise which had the potential to create enormous controversy and historical debates. It sounds like she was not prepared to faced criticism and the complete historical inaccuracies in her book.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Chang .
[5] George Will, “Wartime Sadism: Nanking Remembered,” Washington Post, February 19, 1998.
[6] Ibid.
[7] “Iris Chang, Who Chronicled Rape of Nanking, Dies at 36,” NY Times, November 12, 2004.
[8] Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 6.
[9] Tom Segev, “The Jews Who Fought With Mao,” Haaretz, July 27, 2012.
[10] See Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010).
[11] For a meticulous study on these issues, see Joshua Blakeney, Japan Bites Back: Documents Contextualizing Pearl Harbor (Non-Aligned Media, 2015).
[12] R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Brian Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2002); David Irving, Hitler’s War and the War Path (London: Focal Point Publications, 1991).
[13] See Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Verso, 1998).
[14] Shudo Higashinakano, The Nanking Massacre: Fact versus Fiction (Minato-ku, Tokyo: Sekai Shuppan, Inc., 2005), 5.
[15] Ibid., 6.
[16] Ibid., 10.
[17] Ibid., 12.
[18] Ibid., 13.
[19] Ibid., 191
[20] Ibid., 150.
[21] Ibid., i.
[22] https://web.archive.org/web/20070705013557/http://www.jiyuu-shikan.org/nanjing/errors.html.
[23] Charles Burress, “Wars of Memory / When Iris Chang wrote ‘The Rape of Nanking,’ to memorialize one of the bloodiest massacres of civilians in modern times, she wasn’t prepared for the firestorm she started,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 26, 1998.
[24] David M. Kennedy, “The Horror: Should the Japanese atrocities in Nanking be equated with the Nazi Holocaust?,” Atlantic, April 1998 issue.
[25] Roger B. Jeans, “Victims or Victimizers? Museums, Textbooks, and the War Debate in Contemporary Japan,” Journal of Military History, January 2005: 149-195.
[26] Timothy M. Kelly, “Book Review: The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang,” Edogawa Joshi Tanki Daigaku Kiyô no.15, March 2000: http://www1.edogawa-u.ac.jp/~tmkelly/research_review_nanking.html.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 146.
[33] Higashinakano, The Nanking Massacre, 179.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid., iii.
[37] Li Yuzhen, “Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph Stalin During World War II,” Hans van de Ven and Diana Lary, eds., Negotiating China’s Destiny in World War II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), chapter 8.
[38] Ibid., 142.
[39] Ibid., 141
[40] Ibid., 142.
[41] Higashinakano, The Nanking Massacre, v.
Douglas Macgregor: NATO Attacked Russia; U.S. Being Pushed Out of the Middle East
Glenn Diesen | May 21, 2026
Merkel Urges EU to Keep Regulating Social Media Speech
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | May 21, 2026
Angela Merkel used her first major European platform since leaving office to tell the EU exactly what it wanted to hear: keep regulating speech online, and don’t worry too much about getting it wrong.
The former German chancellor, speaking Tuesday at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, urged the bloc to “continue regulating the social media” and artificial intelligence. “To believe that responsibility for spreading information is no longer necessary, that accountability – there should be no accountability for lies, then that would undermine democracy,” she told the chamber.
Lies. Who decides what counts as a lie? In the EU’s model, that question gets answered by the European Commission, by government-appointed regulators, by “trusted flaggers” that platforms are legally required to obey. Not by courts. Not through anything resembling due process.
Merkel knows this system well. Her government built the prototype. Germany’s NetzDG law, passed under her chancellorship in 2017, required platforms to delete “clearly illegal” content within 24 hours or face fines up to €50 million.
The people whose speech got censored under it included a satirical magazine, a political street artist, and an opposition party leader. NetzDG became an export product, copied by governments in Russia, Turkey, and across Southeast Asia, each adapting it to their own definition of “illegal.”
The EU took the concept continent-wide with the Digital Services Act, which requires major platforms to assess and reduce “systemic risks,” a category broad enough to cover “civic discourse,” “electoral processes,” and “public security.”
The Commission writes the rules, decides whether platforms comply, and levies fines of up to 6% of global revenue when they don’t. No independent prosecutor. X is currently challenging the first DSA fine ever imposed, a €120 million penalty from December 2025, arguing the process involved “grave procedural errors” and “systematic breaches of rights of defence and basic due process.”
More than 50 European NGOs have warned that the DSA’s vague terms could violate the EU Charter’s own free expression protections. The Commission’s response was to declare the law “content-agnostic” and move on.
Merkel acknowledged none of this. She told parliamentarians that “perhaps mistakes will be made, but we learn through mistakes.” That’s cold comfort when the mistakes involve censoring legal speech and silencing political opposition through systems with no judicial oversight and no meaningful appeal.
Her remarks came at the inaugural ceremony for the European Order of Merit, where she was honored alongside 19 other laureates, including Lech Wałęsa, Moldovan President Maia Sandu, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She framed regulation as essential to democracy. “We’ve had 75 years of European thought,” she said. “Peace, prosperity, and democracy.”
Democracy requires that citizens can speak, argue, and be wrong without a regulator deciding which claims are permissible. The EU’s apparatus does the opposite. Merkel said mistakes would be made. She didn’t say who would pay for them. The answer, as always, is the people who get silenced.
The Rank Hypocrisy of the Trump Indictment of Raúl Castro
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | May 21, 2026
Now that Trump is snared by the “escalation trap” in Iran, he has turned his attention to overthrowing the government of Cuba. In addition to a new round of crippling sanctions on trade, travel, and oil shipments, the latter responsible for shortages and blackouts, the Trump administration unsealed an indictment of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro over the 1996 shoot-down of Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. Castro, now 94, was Cuba’s defense minister at the time.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that Castro and other former senior members of Cuban leadership and the military are facing charges of conspiracy to kill US nationals, destruction of aircraft, and four individual counts of murder.
“For nearly 30 years, the families of four murdered Americans have waited for justice,” Blanche said during a ceremony in Miami to remember those who were killed in the incident. “They were unarmed civilians and were flying humanitarian missions for the rescue and protection of people fleeing oppression across the Florida straits.”
CIA Operative José Basulto and Brothers to the Rescue
Brothers to the Rescue (Hermanos al Rescate ) is an activist group based in Miami headed by José Basulto. The organization claims to be a humanitarian group that assists and rescues raft refugees emigrating from Cuba and to “support the efforts of the Cuban people to free themselves from dictatorship through the use of active non-violence,” according to an archived Hermanos web page.
News reports generally avoid background on Hermanos and its leader, Basulto, a CIA operative and an admitted terrorist. During testimony in the trial of Gerardo Hernández, a Cuban intelligence agent (a member of the Cuban Five, or Miami Five), Basulto “shared with jurors his history as a 1960s anti-Castro CIA operative and his admitted cannon assault on a Cuban hotel nearly 40 year ago,” the Miami Herald reported in early 2001.
A native of Santiago de Cuba, Basulto testified that he was a young Boston College student when he joined the CIA-led war against Castro. Basulto trained in Panama, Guatemala and the United States and was infiltrated back into Cuba—posing as a physics student at the University of Santiago—to help prepare the ground for the Bay of Pigs invasion.
During an interview with Gonzalo Porcel in 1999, Basulto admitted he trained with the CIA in Virginia “in different things like demolitions, foreign armaments, and intelligence, propaganda, and a few other things that were pertinent to the type of work we were doing, like psychological operations and so forth.”
Brothers to the Rescue was founded in 1991 and conducted over 2,400 aerial missions, reportedly rescuing more than 4,200 individuals during the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis. However, saving Cuban rafters at sea was not the organization’s only mission.
The Brothers “started to redefine their mission as one of not helping innocent people at risks for their lives but to carry out a political agenda of harassing and threatening the Cuban government by over flights, dropping leaflets (from the air into Cuba),” said former White House advisor Richard Nuccio, the top advisor on Cuba to President Bill Clinton. “It made the Cubans angry.”
The commander of the Cuban air force and air defenses “was instructed that violations . . . should no longer be tolerated and that he was authorized, if such a situation arose again, to decide personally on military interception and shooting down, if so required.”
Cuba Warned It Would Shoot Down Aircraft Violating its Airspace
On February 24, 1996, two Brothers to the Rescue Cessna Skymasters, which were engaged in the act of dropping leaflets on Cuba, were shot down by a Cuban Air Force MiG-29UB, killing four people.
A year prior to the shoot-down, the Cuban government filed multiple protests on repeated violations of its airspace by Brothers to the Rescue aircraft overflying populated areas and dropping thousands of leaflets and other materials calling for popular insurrection against the government, according to documentation at the National Security Archive. The FAA opened a protracted investigation and warned Basulto numerous times not to continue his “taunting” provocations.
Nuccio and State Department undersecretary Peter Tarnoff, along with Secretary of Transportation Federico Peña, repeatedly voiced their concerns to the FAA. They emphasized the need for Brothers to the Rescue flights to be permanently grounded and cautioned that Cuba’s redlines, which are meant to safeguard its security, should be taken seriously.
After the shoot-down, the FAA issued a clear and unambiguous “cease and desist” order to Basulto. This order was issued in response to Basulto’s “careless or reckless” operations, which posed a significant risk to the lives and property of others, according to documents released through the Freedom of Information Act.
On the day before the shoot-down, according to the 2014 book Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana, by American University Cuba specialist William LeoGrande and Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh, Nuccio
sent an email to National Security Advisor Sandy Berger alerting him that Basulto intended to fly the next day. “Previous overflights by Jose Basulto of the Brothers have been met with restraint by Cuban authorities,” he reported. “Tensions are sufficiently high within Cuba, however, that we fear this may finally tip the Cubans toward an attempt to shoot down or force down the plane,” he warned.
Nuccio contacted the FAA and instructed them to block the flights. The FAA, however, refused and only promised to warn Basulto about the overflights. While no explanation for the refusal was given, it was likely at the behest of the CIA, although there is no documentation of that.
“Cuban officials used every means of communication available: diplomatic notes, military briefings, intermediaries, and back-channel contacts to make clear their patience had run out,” notes Nicholas Greven for Jacobin.
History of Terror Attacks Against Cuba
In the 1990s, the US government, CIA, and the Cuban exile community in Miami were busy attempting to subvert the Cuban government. The following is taken from Summary of Terrorist Actions against Cuba (1990-2000):
- “Cuban Liberation Army” terrorists, led by Higinio Diaz Anne, entered Cuba at Santa Cruz del Norte to engage in sabotage.
- Counter-revolutionaries from Miami infiltrated Cuba to sabotage tourist shops.
- A group of terrorists set out from the United States in order to attack economic targets along the Havana coastline.
- Brothers to the Rescue assisted a terrorist operation sabotaging an economic target in Villa Clara province.
- In 1992, the Melia Varadero Hotel was attacked by Miami-based terrorists.
- The following year, Tony Bryant, leader of the terrorist group “Commandos L” announced plans to carry out attacks against hotels in Cuba.
- Brothers to the Rescue planned to blow up a high-tension pylon near San Nicolas de Bari in Havana province in 1993.
- Brothers to the Rescue encouraged attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, while Andres Nazario Sargen, head of terrorist group ALPHA 66, publicly announced that his organization had carried out five illegal operations against Cuba.
- Humberto Perez, spokesperson for ALPHA 66, threatened to murder tourists visiting the island. In 1994, the Guitart Cayo Coco Hotel was attacked a second time. Three years later, an explosive device was detonated in the Melia Cohiba Hotel in Havana. Additionally, bombs exploded in the Triton, Chateau Miramar, and Copacabana Hotels.
- Terrorist Luis Posada Carriles and five of his accomplices attempted a failed assassination of Castro in late 1994.
- In 1996, the FBI arrested and then released five armed terrorists intercepted at Marathon Key and headed for Cuba.
- An unidentified person was arrested when he was caught sneaking into Cuba through Punta Alegre, Ciego de Avila, on a boat carrying weapons and a large cache of military equipment.
- The Cuban government arrested Raul Cruz Leon, responsible for placing six bombs that exploded in various hotels in the Cuban capital, including one that killed Italian tourist, Fabio Di Celmo.
Double Standards
The decades-long illegal effort by the US to destabilize and terrorize the Cuban people is not part of the argument in regard to the arrest Raúl Castro and his involvement in the downing of Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. There would be little argument if the US had shot down Cuban aircraft assisting anti-American terrorists in Miami.
Finally, consider that not a single person was arrested and charged in the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, a routine commercial flight from Bandar Abbas, Iran, to Dubai. The civilian aircraft was blown out of the sky by a missile launched from the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf on July 3, 1988. Then Vice President George H. W. Bush represented the United States at the Security Council and defended the action as appropriate for the circumstances.
“After this unforgivable crime, the American authorities tried to justify this hostile act as a mistake,” reported the Iran Press. “However, due to the fact that the Vincennes was equipped with the most advanced radar and computer systems, as well as the specificity of the type of aircraft, it became clear that there was no possibility of mistake, and this action was completely deliberate and hostile.”
For the United States, there are two versions of justice—one for designated enemies, and another for crimes perpetuated by the US and its allies and co-conspirators, including anti-Castro terrorists plotting to murder civilians at tourist hotels in Cuba.
The poster child for this hypocrisy is Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban terrorist responsible for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. Posada was acquitted on all charges against him in 2011 and lived out the remainder of his life in Miami.
Trump’s Gaza ‘peace’ board in turmoil as funding pledges fail to materialise
MEMO | May 21, 2026
Donald Trump’s controversial “Board of Peace” for Gaza has warned that a gap between pledged funds and money actually disbursed must be closed urgently, raising fresh doubts over the US-led scheme already widely viewed as the president’s vanity project rather than a serious plan to rebuild the besieged Palestinian enclave.
A report submitted to the United Nations Security Council said: “The gap between commitment and disbursement must be closed with urgency.” It warned that funds pledged but not transferred mark “the difference between a framework that exists on paper and one that delivers on the ground for the people of Gaza.”
Trump established the Board of Peace to oversee his plan to end Israel’s genocide on Gaza and rebuild the territory, large parts of which have been reduced to rubble after more than two years of bombing. The reconstruction effort is estimated to cost around $70 billion, while $17 billion has reportedly been pledged to the board so far.
The board had previously denied that it faced funding constraints, insisting that it was an “execution-focused organisation that calls capital as needed.” However, its own report to the Security Council now urges countries that have made pledges to accelerate disbursement and calls on non-member states and international organisations to contribute without delay.
The United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are among the states said to have pledged funds, alongside Kuwait, Morocco and Uzbekistan. Yet the future of Gulf commitments now appears more uncertain following Trump’s war on Iran, which has deepened regional instability and exposed the fragility of US-led security arrangements in the Middle East. The Iran war has widened rifts between Washington and its allies, with European leaders saying they were not consulted before US-Israeli strikes on Iranian leadership and infrastructure.
The funding concerns add to longstanding criticism that the Board of Peace is less a credible reconstruction mechanism than an exercise in Trumpian self-promotion. The initiative is widely seen as “aggrandising theatre” and warned that it erases Palestinian political rights while recasting Gaza as a development site rather than an occupied territory whose people are entitled to freedom, dignity and self-determination.
The board was created after Trump’s broader Gaza plan, which placed the US president at the centre of the transitional initiative. It is chaired by Trump and tasked with supervising a still-to-be-formed Palestinian technocratic government and reconstruction under the second phase of the ceasefire deal.
Critics say the plan fails to confront the root causes of Gaza’s destruction: Israel’s occupation, siege and military assault. Analysts have pointed out that Gaza does not need a branding exercise or a donor board dominated by Washington and its allies, but a political settlement rooted in Palestinian sovereignty and international law.
The board’s report says 85 per cent of Gaza’s buildings and infrastructure have been destroyed and that around 70 million tonnes of rubble must be cleared. Despite an October ceasefire, Israel has kept troops in a large part of Gaza and continued air strikes, while the second phase of Trump’s plan — including broader Israeli withdrawal, reconstruction and the disarmament of Palestinian factions — has not been implemented.
Many states remain reluctant to channel reconstruction funds through Trump’s board because of concerns over transparency, oversight and political control. Under the board’s charter, member states reportedly hold three-year terms unless they pay $1 billion to fund its activities and secure permanent membership, raising further questions over whether Gaza’s reconstruction is being treated as a humanitarian obligation or a pay-to-play diplomatic platform.
Palestinian Prisoners Club says Israel uses detention of solidarity activists to intimidate global supporters
MEMO | May 21, 2026
The Palestinian Prisoners Club said on Wednesday that Israel has turned the detention and abduction of international solidarity activists into a systematic policy aimed at intimidating supporters of the Palestinian cause worldwide.
In a statement, the organisation said Israeli authorities seek to send a message that anyone showing solidarity with the Palestinian people could face detention, abuse, arrest and torture.
The statement followed the circulation of videos released by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir showing the mistreatment of activists from the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and the “Global Solidarity Flotilla,” who were detained by Israeli forces while attempting to reach the Gaza Strip.
According to the Prisoners Club, Israeli authorities intercepted the activists in international waters and forcibly transferred them to the Port of Ashdod.
The organisation described the scenes shown in the videos as involving humiliation, mistreatment and abuse, arguing that they reflect treatment routinely experienced by Palestinian and Arab detainees in Israeli prisons.
The group further stated that the involvement of Ben-Gvir in the filmed incidents highlighted what it characterised as the broader policy of intimidation directed against international solidarity movements supporting Palestinians.
US Provided Most of Israel’s Missile Defense During Iran War
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | May 21, 2026
The US fired hundreds of its most advanced interceptors to protect Israel from Iranian missiles during the first five weeks of the war.
According to a Department of War assessment described to The Washington Post, the US used 200 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors and over 100 SM-3 and SM-6 missiles in defense of Israel. Israel only used 100 Arrow interceptors and 90 David’s Sling missiles.
Speaking about the imbalance, an administration official told The Post, “In total, the U.S. shot around 120 more interceptors and engaged twice as many Iranian missiles.” The official added that “The imbalance will likely be exacerbated if fighting restarts.”
The imbalance occurs because Washington and Tel Aviv developed a strategy for the defense of Israel, where the US advanced interceptors handled the bulk of the Iranian missiles. The official said that the policy resulted in a significant “drawdown” of the US interceptor stockpile.
During the conflict, the US used about half of its stockpile of advanced interceptors, including Patriots, SM-3, SM-6, and THAAD interceptors. The US intelligence community says Iran has over 70% of its pre-war launchers and missiles. Additionally, Tehran has resumed drone production, and it’s rebuilding its military production at a surprising rate.
A US official also told The Post that Israel’s offensive capabilities were slowing down. They explained that by the end of March, Israel was conducting 50% fewer strikes against Iran because its air force was exhausted by operations against Lebanon and Yemen.
In recent days, President Donald Trump has threatened to restart the war against Iran if Tehran does not comply with his demands. However, the President had made similar threats throughout the six-week-long ceasefire and has always backed down.
The Post reports that the US has positioned additional naval assets near Israel to assist with missile defense if the war restarts.
Ukrainian drone could have caused mass casualties – Greek defense minister
RT | May 21, 2026
A Ukrainian naval drone found off a Greek island earlier this month could have sunk a civilian ship and led to mass casualties, Greek Defense Minister Nikos Dendias has said.
The unmanned surface vessel (USV) was reportedly a Ukrainian Magura V3 kamikaze drone, capable of carrying an explosive payload of up to 300kg. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and senior government officials were reportedly briefed on the matter last week, according to CNN.
Speaking at a conference on Wednesday, Dendias refused to divulge the details of the investigation, but stressed that the drone could have caused immense damage.
“It was obviously something extremely dangerous… there is not the slightest doubt – I repeat, the slightest doubt – that this is a Ukrainian sea drone,” he said, adding that if a cruise liner crossed paths with the USV, the ship would have been at “the bottom of the sea.”
How many dead would we have mourned? And how permissible is this thing in the Mediterranean?
Dendias stressed that Kiev owes Athens “a very big apology,” as well as “the absolute assurance that something like this will not happen again in the wider region.”
Ukraine has used such drones for months to attack ships in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, targeting vessels it sees as linked to Moscow. Russia has condemned the strikes, calling them “terrorism and maritime piracy.”
Ukrainian UAVs targeting Russian infrastructure have also increasingly flown through the territory of other countries, such as the Baltic states and Finland, according to Moscow. Several Ukrainian drones have crashed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland in recent weeks.
Russian Security Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu said in April that should these countries deliberately allow Ukrainian drones to pass through their airspace, they become “open accomplices in aggression against Russia.” In that case, Moscow has the right to self-defense against such an “armed attack,” he warned.
Germany at the Crossroads: Revanchism Versus Diplomacy
Sputnik – 21.05.2026
Amid the conflict in Ukraine, voices in the German establishment increasingly call for strengthening the armed forces to counter the perceived Russian menace.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has pledged to make the German army the strongest in Europe, while Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warns of a new military threat from Russia, which Europe has “forgotten over the last 20 to 30 years.”
An art installation in Berlin’s Thomas Schulte Gallery displayed the Ukrainian phrase “The best gift — dead Russians”, sparking debate over the anti-Russian provocation when the exhibition claims to condemn violence.
But not all politicians support militarization or war:
Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Alice Weidel said war, even in Ukraine, is “absolutely fatal” and a massive security threat for Germany.
Sarah Wagenknecht, leader of the left-wing BSW bloc, wrote on X that Merz’s policies serve the elite and make German taxpayers participants in an endless war.
Former BSW MP Sevim Dagdelen wrote for NachDenkSeiten that dialogue with Russia is slipping away as the German government tries to win a victory.
AfD MP Tino Chrupalla warned the Ukrainian dream of ‘final victory’ harms both Ukraine and Germany and the proxy war wastes tax money.
Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico said the European Union must maintain normal dialogue with Russia and intermediaries like Schroeder could help.
Slovak MEP Lubos Blaha said only extremists deny the need for talks with Russia.
Former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski said post-war Europe will have to rebuild relations with Russia, which will it will not just disappear.
Former Italian prime minister and leader of the Five Star Movement Giuseppe Conte said German rearmament won’t increase security but only it creates instability and enriches the elite.
Former Serbian vice-president Aleksandar Vulin said modern Germany dreams of revenge rather than learning from history, threatening peace.
The debate shows a growing rift between calls for war and those for diplomacy and caution.
‘Unprecedented act of savagery’: How Israel’s new law places Palestinians on death row by default
By Zeynep Conkar | TRT World | May 19, 2026
Israel has become the first Western-aligned “democracy” to legislate a mandatory death penalty targeting a single ethnic group under military occupation, and this week, it put that law into force.
The order was signed on Sunday by Major General Avi Bluth, commander of the Israeli army’s Central Command, at the request of Defence Minister Israel Katz, the same minister who once ordered the immediate cut-off of water supply to Gaza and has publicly threatened Gaza’s civilians with “total devastation” in what South African prosecutors and international legal experts cited as evidence of genocidal intent before the International Court of Justice.
Under the new law, military courts prosecuting Palestinians whose attacks resulted in the death of an Israeli must apply the death penalty as the sole available sentence, unless the court finds special circumstances allowing for life imprisonment instead.
Once a final ruling is handed down, the sentence must be carried out within 90 days.
Within Israeli courts, military orders always take precedence over Israeli and international law, according to Nasir Qadri, an international law practitioner and a critical legal scholar at Koc University.
“The system was never designed to adjudicate guilt; it was designed to administer a colonised population through the form of law, and a 96 percent conviction rate is its proof,” Qadri tells TRT World.
“The 90-day execution deadline and the prohibition on pardon or commutation remove formal residues from a structure already characterised by arbitrary arrest, incommunicado detention, secret evidence that defendants cannot challenge, and confessions extracted under torture,” he adds.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, whose far-right Jewish Power party had long campaigned for the measure, hailed the signing as a political victory, declaring “we promised and we fulfilled.”
The law was passed by the Knesset on 30 March 2026, by a vote of 62 to 47, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu present in the chamber to support the bill.
Before the vote, it had already drawn wide condemnation, not only from Palestinian organisations and international human rights bodies, but from within Israel’s own legal establishment.
This is a discriminatory behaviour under international law, Qadri argues.
“This law converts the colonial administration of Palestinian life into the colonial administration of Palestinian death, and does so through the same legal instruments, military orders, security classifications, and jurisdictional exclusions,” says Qadri.
“The prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of life under Article 6 of the ICCPR, as interpreted by the Human Rights Committee in General Comment 36, requires in capital cases the strictest observance of fair trial guarantees.”
“The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination stated in May 2026 that the law is de facto applicable to Palestinians only, given that its threshold, intent to negate the existence of the state, structurally excludes Israeli Jewish defendants by definition,” says Qadri.
A dual discriminatory system
The legislation’s reach is defined by the dual legal system operating across the occupied West Bank.
Palestinians there live under military law, while Israeli settlers fall under civilian law, two parallel frameworks in the same territory.
The death penalty provision applies only through the military courts, which means it applies exclusively to Palestinians. In the civilian track, the law only covers those acting with the intent to deny the existence of the State of Israel, a definition designed to exclude Jewish defendants.
The law operates across two legal orders that share only a maximum penalty, according to Qadri.
“Palestinian defendants in the West Bank face military courts where judges are uniformed officers, confessions extracted under interrogation constitute primary evidence, and the conviction rate is 96 percent.”
“Israeli defendants face civilian courts with independent judges, full evidentiary standards, and a Supreme Court appellate structure. Placing the same capital sanction across both frameworks without equalising the procedural conditions that determine whether it is applied fairly is a structural guarantee of differential outcomes,” Qadri explains.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said the law rolls back Israel’s long-standing de facto moratorium on executions, in place since 1962, and noted with concern that it “prohibits mitigation, commutation or pardon of the death penalty” once a sentence is handed down.
UN experts have warned that the mandatory nature of the sentence violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel ratified in 1991, under which mandatory death sentences are prohibited as inherently arbitrary.
What it means for Palestinians behind bars
The law comes into force against a backdrop of severe and worsening conditions for Palestinians in Israeli arbitrary detention.
As of March 2026, approximately 9,500 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, with about half under administrative detention or labelled “unlawful combatants,” held without charge and unable to defend themselves in court.
Palestinian prisoners’ rights groups have described the new law as an “unprecedented act of savagery,” accusing Israel of codifying violence against detainees amid mounting reports of torture and deaths in custody since the genocide in Gaza intensified.
“Administrative detention is a colonial relic, the bitter fruit of Britain’s 1945 Emergency Regulations, exported and perfected across an archipelago of twenty-five detention centres, prisons, and interrogation facilities, twenty-one of them inside Israel itself,” Qadri says.
“What the death penalty law changes is not the material conditions of detention; the torture, the medical neglect, the enforced disappearance of hundreds of families still unable to determine whether their loved ones are alive, detained, or dead; but the existential conditions, so that every unanswered question about a detained relative now carries the weight of an execution deadline,” he adds.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, alongside Adalah and several other rights organisations, has petitioned the High Court against the law, arguing it is racially discriminatory, unconstitutional, and that the Knesset has no authority to legislate directly for the occupied West Bank.
The court has yet to issue a final ruling. In the meantime, the law is in force, and for Palestinians facing military prosecution, the death penalty is the default sentence the law prescribes.
“This is the precise function of what international law has failed to name, not merely to kill, but to make an exposed population live in permanent, calibrated proximity to death as a technique of control over the living,” Qadri says.
“The law is not addressed to the defendant; it is addressed to the population,” he adds.
Naftali Bennett Is Running A Campaign To ‘Fix Israel’s Hasbara’
The Dissident | May 21, 2026
Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Israeli opposition challenging Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, shares the exact same genocidal, expansionist vision of greater Israel as Netanyahu, arguably in an even more extreme way.
Bennett, who has described himself as “more right-wing than Bibi”, has called to annex the majority of the West Bank, celebrated the genocide in Gaza, justified the IDF shooting Palestinian children, supports the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, and supports the war on Iran.
As the Times of Israel noted, Bennett and his coalition partner, Yair Lapid, “broadly accept Netanyahu’s security assumptions — hardline on Iran, hawkish on Gaza and Lebanon, opposed to Palestinian sovereignty under current conditions”.
One of the major ways Bennett is differentiating himself from Benjamin Netanyahu is by campaigning on improving Israel’s propaganda machine, effectively supporting the same Greater Israel policies of the Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, but doing a better job in hiding them from the world.
Israel recently suffered another PR crisis after its national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, released a video showing his forces abusing detained activists who were attempting to bring food aid to Gaza.
In repose, Naftali Bennett did not oppose the torture of international activists, but criticized the damage Ben-Gvir did to Israel’s propaganda machine by publishing the video of it, saying, “The Netanyahu-Ben Gvir-Deri coalition has weakened Israel’s international standing to an unprecedented low, endangering IDF soldiers abroad and arming our antisemitic enemies around the world.”
He then announced one of the key planks of his campaign platform, “how we will fix Israel’s hasbara”.
Announcing his plan, Bennett laid out an organized attempt to run social media troll farms and to plant Israeli propagandists in media in order to silence criticism and factual reporting on Israel’s war crimes.
He said that he will “establish a powerful national hasbara authority:
The authority will set Israel’s messaging strategy, coordinate between bodies, and ensure that the Israeli response is swift, unified, and professional. It will have an independent budget, a professional director, and its own power”.
This “powerful national hasbara authority,” according to Bennett’s plan, “will recruit experts in international media, social networks, public opinion research, crisis management, creativity, data, and technology”.
Bennet called to create a pool of Israeli propagandists in the media to be activated to do damage control for Israel.
As part of his plan, he called to “create a pool of spokespeople in major languages who will appear in global media, podcasts, universities, and social networks.
We will initiate a presence—in every language, in every arena, at every hour.”
He also called to establish a social media troll farm to silence criticism of Israel, calling to “establish a consciousness and technology war room” which “will operate an advanced war room that will monitor the discourse in real time, identify disinformation before it takes hold, and distribute sharp, accurate, and fast content.”
He called to coordinate this campaign with existing Israeli troll farms, writing, “Today, there are many excellent private hasbara efforts operating out of a sense of mission around the world, but they operate alone. We will connect them to a coordinated campaign, one fist for Israel.”
Finally, he called to work with Western government backing Israel in this major propaganda operation, writing, “Israel is not alone. There are other democracies grappling with disinformation attacks and attempts at influence by foreign actors. We will work together with technological, legal, and media tools to fight the lie machines that poison young people around the world.”
Naftali Bennett will be at least as genocidal and expansionist as the Netanyahu coalition government, but he will do a better job at hiding Israel’s crimes from the world by running an even more sophisticated propaganda operation, as he has openly admitted.
Boxed into a Corner: Iran Has Outsmarted Trump Every Step of The Way
By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | May 21, 2026
US President Donald Trump has boxed himself into a corner that his ego will not allow him to get out of. Instead of Tehran surrendering, it is Washington that has to accept defeat, or risk dragging this regional conflict into a much wider and bloody war. The bottom line– Iran is better at wars of attrition.
From the first moments of the US-Israeli attack in February 2024, up until the temporary cessation of hostilities came into effect, the Iranians were in the driver’s seat. Iran’s former leader, Seyyed Ali Khamenei, had remained in his publicly known office and was killed almost immediately, almost too easily, it should be noted.
Unlike at the beginning of the 12-Day War, last June, the Iranians didn’t take 15 hours to respond to the aggression against them. Instead, it took only a few hours until missiles were raining down across the Persian Gulf and on Israeli targets.
The message that has been sent to both the Israelis and the US appears to be one that they are incapable of comprehending: assassinations don’t win wars against the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance. Despite its overwhelming technical and military advantages, the US-Israeli alliance watched on as the Iranians absorbed hit after hit, maintaining the capability to continue firing every single day and inflicting significant retaliatory blows.
Around 16 US bases and hundreds of American military assets were crushed, while the military casualties numbered at least into the hundreds; that we know about. Iran, however, flipped the tables completely and decided to make what could be construed as a territorial gain– they now control the Strait of Hormuz.
The only answers the Trump administration has been able to come up with, in response to the Strait of Hormuz closure and Iran’s proven ability to continue fighting, are that he directs enormous strikes on civilian infrastructure or puts boots on the ground. Both these options will result in severe consequences, regionally and domestically, for the United States.
All of this could be solved if the US government were capable of making its own decisions, independent of Israel. However, we live in the real world, where President Trump openly says he isn’t thinking of his own citizens’ financial position, but instead about what Israel cares about (“Iran can’t have nuclear weapons”).
It is also apparent that Trump doesn’t actually care about Iran potentially building nuclear weapons, because if he did, the path to preventing this outcome is a deal that replicates the 2015 Nuclear Deal. The US’s problems with Iran have never been about nuclear weapons; they seek regime change in Tehran for two reasons: Iran is an independent nation, and Israel wants to see it fall.
Evidently, the Trump administration is in the back pocket of the US-based Israel Lobby and is incapable of saying no, which has gotten them into this current mess. A leader like Trump, whose shallow ego makes him incapable of admitting defeat, has been led into a disaster that he can’t get out of.
Instead of weakening the Islamic Republic, if the war were to end on the simple terms that Iran has set out – namely, a ceasefire on all fronts, a new system governing the Strait of Hormuz, and the lifting of sanctions, in addition to handing over frozen assets and compensation – then Tehran will be transformed into a major regional power. If it were militarily battered and had no leadership, as President Trump consistently claims, this would not even be on the table.
The Trump administration fell for the bait of attacking Iran and launching a decapitation strike; now it is being made to pay a price. The Iranians are not about to throw away their leverage for nothing; they want to use this opportunity to free their nation economically and to achieve victory across the region.
Then came the “Uno reverse card” strategy, Washington imposing a blockade on top of Iran’s blockade. If you were to believe the White House, the Iranians are already begging on their knees due to this strategy. If you instead trust your own perceptions, then the reality couldn’t be further from this fictional and egotistical depiction.
Iran can easily outlast its opponents when it comes to surviving an economic war, because it has suffered through this for 47 years. Which means that Trump is running out of time.
On the Lebanon front, Hezbollah is grinding down the Israeli ground forces who are currently attempting to impose an occupation in the south of the country. Washington’s solution has been to try to use the deeply unpopular Lebanese government in an attempt to stir civil unrest inside Lebanon, but also to drag it into a normalization agreement with Tel Aviv, one that will present the Israelis with a propaganda victory.
Hezbollah, both Washington and Tel Aviv told the world, was supposed to have been defeated in 2024. Instead, it is now using asymmetric warfare to batter the Israelis and impose a new equation that will eventually force a retreat that will represent an even more consequential retreat than occurred as a result of the 2000 liberation of South Lebanon.
So the Trump administration is running out of time, the economic pressure on his Persian Gulf Arab allies is immense and the Israelis are feeling the heat of Hezbollah’s blows. There are two ways forward: to escalate again militarily or to bow to Iranian demands. The military option is a non-option, because there is simply nothing more that can be achieved without enormous consequences. Yet, Donald J Trump, the weakest President in American history, appears incapable of saying no to Israel.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
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From the Archives
Examples of hate speech by Israel against Palestine
1. “There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies, not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.” Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
2. “The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more”…. Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time – August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2000
3. ” [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.” Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the Beasts”. New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
4. “The Palestinians” would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.” Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
5. “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
6. “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.” Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.
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