Empire of Silence
How the U.S. Oligarchy Is Funding Genocide, Criminalizing Dissent, and Burying the Truth in Gaza
They’re bombing children and calling it defense. They’re turning off the water, blocking the food, and dropping U.S.-made weapons on refugee camps. And somehow, the people funding it—the senators, the billionaires, the evangelical pastors—are still pretending this is complicated. It’s not. It’s genocide. And we are paying for it.
This isn’t a foreign war. This is a mirror. It reflects who we are, who we protect, and who we’re willing to erase. While Gaza is reduced to ash, the United States is shipping billions in weapons, shielding Israel from accountability, and silencing anyone who dares to speak the truth.
This is what oligarchy looks like: war for profit, violence as policy, and bipartisan votes bought and sold by AIPAC and defense contractors. This isn’t diplomacy. It’s a racket. Senators from both parties didn’t just vote to send weapons to Israel—they were paid to. These aren’t donations. They’re legal bribes, bundled through a system built to reward loyalty to power and punish dissent.
To understand how this became normal, you have to understand Zionism. Not the vague idea of "supporting Israel" that most Americans associate with the word. Zionism is a 19th-century European political movement born out of fear and nationalism. It was a response to rising antisemitism and the belief that Jews could only be safe if they had a nation-state of their own. The land they chose? Palestine.
But Palestine wasn’t empty. It was home to hundreds of thousands of Arabs—people with families, cultures, lives. When the British took control after World War I, they issued the Balfour Declaration: a promise to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine while somehow preserving the rights of the Arabs already living there. That contradiction was never resolved.
And here’s the part Western governments don’t like to talk about: they didn’t want the Jews either. In the years before and during the Holocaust, the United States, the UK, and Europe slammed their doors shut on Jewish refugees. In 1939, a ship called the St. Louis carrying over 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany was turned away from American shores. Many of those passengers later died in concentration camps.
Why? Because antisemitism wasn’t just a German disease. It lived in the parliaments and press rooms of the so-called "civilized" world. After the war, when the scale of the Holocaust was undeniable, those same nations chose the easiest option: support a Jewish homeland, somewhere else. Somewhere they controlled. Somewhere colonized. And that place was Palestine.
Israel’s founding in 1948 wasn’t a miracle. It was a military operation. More than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes in what they call the Nakba—the catastrophe. Entire villages were wiped off the map. It was ethnic cleansing, justified by the world’s guilt, and carried out with the blessing of empires who didn’t want the responsibility of justice.
That history isn’t over. It’s happening now. Gaza is an open-air prison, blockaded and bombed with precision. Families are being wiped out in minutes. Schools, hospitals, mosques—flattened. And the U.S. is not just watching. We are underwriting it.
AIPAC and its army of affiliated super PACs pour millions into elections to protect this system. Politicians don’t need to be convinced—they need to be paid. And if they step out of line? They get primaried, smeared, and buried under attack ads. The result is a Congress too afraid to speak, and a public too lied to understand what’s being done in our name.
Follow the money, and it all becomes clear. The bombs dropped on Gaza are made by Raytheon. The fighter jets are built by Lockheed Martin. The surveillance tech used to monitor Palestinians is field-tested in Gaza before being sold to U.S. police departments. What looks like war to the rest of us is just another quarter of profit to the American defense industry. And they have every incentive to keep the blood flowing.
And behind it all stands a vast Christian nationalist machine—a movement of white evangelicals who believe Israel’s domination over Palestine is part of God’s plan. They don’t care about democracy. They care about prophecy. They don’t see Palestinian lives. They see stepping stones to the Second Coming. That toxic theology turns war crimes into holy missions and gives cover to the unspeakable.
They pray while bombs fall. They preach while families dig through rubble. They vote for the politicians who make it all possible. This is not fringe Christianity—this is the base of the Republican Party, and they have turned faith into a weapon of empire.
Meanwhile, the media refuses to name the horror. Every headline hedges, every news anchor qualifies. We don’t hear about murdered children—we hear about "clashes." We don’t hear about ethnic cleansing—we hear about "complex conflicts." The truth is buried under euphemism, and every euphemism is a shovel of dirt over another mass grave.
And now, even speaking out is treated as a crime. Across the country, the U.S. government has begun disappearing people—literally detaining and deporting those who dare to write or speak in defense of Palestinian life. Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and Palestinian activist, was snatched from his New York apartment and held without charges in a Louisiana ICE facility. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts, was taken by masked agents after co-authoring a pro-Palestinian op-ed. Momodou Taal, a Cornell doctoral student, had his visa revoked for protesting and fled the country in fear. These aren’t isolated incidents. They are a message. Dissent will be punished. Solidarity will be criminalized. And while activists fight for their freedom, the justice system is acting as a reluctant referee. In Khalil’s case, a federal judge temporarily blocked his deportation and rejected the government’s attempt to move his hearing to Louisiana—a known deportation stronghold—insisting it remain in New Jersey where he was first detained. Öztürk’s legal team also scored a small victory: her case will be heard in Vermont, not Louisiana, despite the administration’s push to isolate her far from her support network. Taal, distrustful of any justice he might find here, left the country before his lawsuit could be heard. The courts are slow, imperfect, and deeply influenced by politics—but they are, for now, one of the few obstacles slowing the machinery of repression.
So yes, this is genocide. But it’s also something more. It’s the logical endpoint of empire, money, and myth. It’s what happens when oligarchs buy the rules, when religion is weaponized, and when we stop seeing the people we kill as human.
We cannot let this be wrapped in soft language. We cannot let another bipartisan betrayal be mistaken for consensus. This isn’t ancient history. It’s a live crime scene. And it will not stop unless we stop funding it.
Genocide is happening. And America is the bank.
The only question left is: how long will we keep signing the checks?
And let me be clear—just writing these words puts me in the crosshairs too. In a country now detaining students, silencing activists, and targeting anyone who dares to challenge the empire's chosen allies, telling the truth is dangerous. But silence is deadlier. If they come for me, let it be because I refused to look away. Let it be because I believed that speaking out—while we still can—is not just a right, but a moral obligation.