The No World Order

Meir Kahane, Netanyahu, Trump, and the war beyond Iran.

In 1989, terrorist rabbi Meir Kahane made a promise.

“A horrible world war is coming,” Kahane told journalist Robert I. Friedman. “Tens of millions will die. It will be the Apocalypse. God will punish us for forsaking him. But we must have faith. The Messiah will come. There will be a resurrection of the dead: all the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated. The amount of suffering we endure will depend upon what we do between now and the end.”

Kahane did not live to see his vision realized. In 1990, the year Friedman published The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, the 58-year-old Kahane was shot to death while giving a speech imploring American Jews to move to Israel. The alleged assailant, Egyptian-American El Sayyid Nosair, was acquitted by a jury but sentenced by the judge. In death as in life, the circumstances surrounding Kahane are murky and violent.

Friedman had an eye for figures of the 20^th century who would define the 21^st. Ten years after The False Prophet, he published Red Mafiya: his investigation of a transnational crime syndicate whose members came from the USSR and spent the 1990s infiltrating governments and corporations worldwide. The head of that syndicate, Semyon Mogilevich, put a contract on Friedman’s life.

Death threats were nothing new for Friedman. He’d been getting them from Israelis ever since he wrote the Kahane biography. Friedman had also angered the FBI by claiming they could have prevented the 1993 World Trade Center attacks and correctly warning, years in advance, that the towers would be attacked again. Wary of institutional constraints, Friedman embraced the freedom of a freelancer. In 2002, Friedman died of cardiac arrest. He was 51.

He never saw the future he worked so hard to stop.

Red Mafiya gained a cult following during Trump’s first term. The book elucidates the structure of Trump’s life and presidency: a merger of organized crime, white-collar crime, and government by criminals who elude, then rewrite, borders and laws. Some blame Russia for the US downfall, some blame Israel, but it was always both — along with American collaborators and assorted global operatives.

Red Mafiya names key villains and locales, including Trump Tower, which functioned as a dormitory for organized crime. Mogilevich became an early investor in Trump Tower after fleeing the USSR by getting an Israeli passport in 1988 from Robert Maxwell, the father of Jeffrey Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine. To say Red Mafiya is timeless is to acknowledge we’ve been frozen in hell for forty years.

The False Prophet, on the other hand, is largely ignored. It is in demand but hard to find: used copies of the out-of-print book sell for over $100. I bought mine before the Kahanists — Kahane’s acolytes — returned to power in Israel.

I’ve been wanting to write about The False Prophet for years. I held back since it scares me more than any other book. If it were only history, I would not be so frightened. But The False Prophet describes current events: the extremism that Kahane espoused, and Friedman documented, now dominates Israel and in turn, the United States.

I was born during the Iranian Revolution. As a result, I’ve spent my entire life listening to US officials call for war with Iran. In Israel, the calls are even louder, drowning out reasonable voices who know such a war would be apocalyptic.

The architects of the Iran War know that too, but do not care. Elderly fanatics — from Netanyahu to Elliott Abrams, an Iran-Contra villain who served in nearly every administration of my life — understand that the time to see their goals reach fruition is running out. Trump is not the architect of the Iran war, only its vehicle.

“This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years,” Netanyahu said as the war began, thanking “the United States, my friend, US President Donald Trump, and the US military.”

Netanyahu now says openly what he said behind closed doors in 2001: “America is a thing you can move very easily.”

One cannot understand the Iran War without understanding the Kahanists. But I rarely see analysts mention them. Maybe they did, and it was behind a paywall. If a war crime is subscription-only, does it make a sound? Is that sound a stifled scream?

* * *

Meir Kahane was a terrorist. The New York-based Kahane became an Orthodox rabbi before working as an undercover informant for the FBI to spy on Black Americans, whom he obsessively hated, believing, as Friedman writes, that “Black demands for equality would somehow sabotage Jewish achievements.” In 1970, Kahane and his followers plotted to mass murder the Black residents of Crown Heights.

In his spare time, Kahane worked secretly for the CIA to promote the Vietnam War and partnered with Italian-American mafia head Joseph Colombo. The union between Kahane and Colombo was brokered by mob lawyer Barry Slotnick, who later brokered another union: the prenup for Donald and Melania Trump.

In 1968, Kahane formed the Jewish Defense League with the stated goal of “combatting antisemitism”. The reality was violence. The JDL carried out bombings, shootings, and other acts of terror under the guidance of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a veteran of the Zionist terrorist group Lehi. Kahane was popular with New York Jewish businessmen who sought, as Friedman relays, to “do something about the n-----s”. They showered the JDL with money.

In 1971, Kahane, convicted for manufacturing explosives, fled to Israel: a path his murderous American acolytes would emulate in the decades to come. He started his own political party, Kach, and turned his wrath on Arabs: seeking to drive Palestinians out of Israel, and as Israel expanded, all Arabs out of existence. Kahane was a genocidaire. It is grimly ironic that he coined the phrase “Never again”: a phrase invoked by people who oppose genocide anywhere, but which Kahane meant to apply exclusively to the Holocaust and its Jewish victims.

At first, Israel welcomed Kahane. In 1984, he was elected to the Knesset. But many Israelis rejected his policies (which included a ban on Jewish-gentile relations and perpetual warfare against neighboring countries) and his methods (blowing things up.) By 1987, only 21% of Israelis approved of his views. In 1988, Israel banned Kach for racism, and the FBI allegedly turned against their informant. In response, Kahane renounced his US citizenship, but continued to visit until he died.

His legacy endured. In 1994, Kahanist Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians worshipping at a mosque in Hebron. Later that year, Israel declared Kach a terrorist organization. In 1997, the US added the group to its terror watchlist.

Kach remained on the US terror watchlist until May 2022, when Biden removed it. The removal was ominous. The Biden administration claimed the group was “inactive”, but nothing could be further from the truth: the Kahanists were now in the Knesset. They had regrouped under new names but never changed their fascist ideology.

In 2021, Netanyahu, who, like Trump, was indicted and widely disliked, built a new political coalition out of the remains of Kach. He found support in a younger generation of Kahanists who celebrate genocide and align with white supremacists. The coalition includes Itamar Ben Gvir, a leader of the fascist Otzma Yehudit party who led the Kach youth movement as a teenager in the 1990s. Much as the second Trump administration is more extreme than the first, Netanyahu’s return to power was made possible by a coalition of once-derided fanatics who exult in violence.

Under prior US terrorism rules, Kahanists like Ben Gvir would have been sanctioned. Thanks to the Biden administration, they operate freely, meeting with Evangelical extremists like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Following the October 7 attack, the US showered Israel with a record amount of money and backed the ensuing genocide of Palestinians. Now, under Trump, the US aids the most extreme government in Israeli history in one of its oldest plans: war on Iran.

And one even older than that: the end of the world.

* * *

By the 1970s, Kahane was convinced he was destined to usher in the Messianic age. While proclaiming all Jews to be the chosen people — “We are not equal to the Gentiles. We are different. We are higher,” he said — some Jews were more chosen than others. At the top of God’s list, according to Kahane, was Kahane.

“Kahane was swept up in a kind of Messianic passion,” Friedman recounts in The False Prophet. “Words like apocalypse, redemption, and Messiah took over his political vocabulary…The JDL was rapidly evolving into a fundamentalist cult with Kahane — like some medieval cabalist — twisting and turning the Torah to explain why expelling the Arabs would usher in the Messiah.”

Americans may find this rhetoric familiar. Several high-ranking US officials have proclaimed themselves chosen for office by God instead by US voters. Though of varied faiths, they all believe their duty is to serve Israel. They serve Israel at the expense of the American people: both their tax money and their peace of mind.

Among them are Mike Johnson, who said his state visit to Israel was the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy; Chuck Schumer, who told the New Yorker he was placed in the Senate by God to protect Israel; former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who based foreign policy around the Rapture; and of course, Trump, who said that Israeli Jews view him as “The King of Israel” and “the second coming of God.”

Trump was told that he was the Jewish Messiah by Lev Parnas, a felon with ties to organized crime who has since reinvented himself as an anti-Trump pundit. Parnas’ declaration was based on Jewish gematria and made in a conversation that Trump was not aware was recorded. Parnas gave Trump a gift from rabbis in Ukraine and Israel and encouraged Trump to ask Jared Kushner, whose criminal family has been friends with the criminal Netanyahu family for decades, for clarification.

Trump seemed unmoved by his divine destiny: the messiah, after all, is an unpaid position. More mysterious is why Parnas — a transnational criminal until he was caught — and his son came to be leading operatives for the Democratic Party during Biden’s term. That seems spectacularly unwise, but then again, doesn’t everything?

Americans have a history of basing policy on the Apocalypse: one could ostensibly date it back to the Puritans. But extremism became sharper after Reagan’s embrace of the far right. Cabinet officials like James G. Watt, for example, opposed environmental protections because the end was nigh; might as well drill. The younger George Bush allegedly spoke of the End Times prophecy of “Gog and Magog” while his cabinet framed the invasion of Iraq as a holy war. Whether they believed it matters less than that they got the catastrophic result they desired.

No country benefited from that catastrophe more than Israel.

In 1982, Oded Yinon, an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, devised a plan for “Greater Israel”: an Israel that subsumes six surrounding states, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. For decades, “Greater Israel” and “The Yinon Plan” were dismissed by Israeli officials as antisemitic myths.

The idea that Israel is not pursuing “Greater Israel” would be more convincing had Israeli officials not put emblems of “Greater Israel” on IDF uniforms; invaded Lebanon and proclaimed it part of “Greater Israel”; announced that Israel would also conquer Jordan and parts of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq and call that “Greater Israel”; made a “Greater Israel” amulet for Netanyahu; and displayed maps of “Greater Israel” that exclude Palestinians, whom Netanyahu calls “Amalek” while declaring their fate is to be slain.

The idea of “Greater Israel” dates back to Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, but Yinon devised its borders for the post-WWII era. In 2007, Wesley Clark, a US general who opposed the Iraq War, recalled that ten days after 9/11, he was given a memo on “how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Over the next twenty-five years, every country on that list was a target of US and Israeli military incursions.

Now, in 2026, we arrive at a full-fledged attack on Iran from the most autocratic regimes in both Israeli and modern US history. Regimes that respect neither international law nor the sanctity of human life and no longer make a pretense of doing so. Regimes that seek to destroy the world while wrapping themselves in mantles of piety and prophecy.

For Kahanist Israel, the goal is clear: the fulfillment of the “Greater Israel” agenda. Iran has long been an obstacle to that agenda by funding regional militia groups that oppose Israel and by declaring itself Israel’s steadfast enemy. That Israel’s government is bad does not make Iran’s government good. Iran’s government commits massive human rights violations, including the slaughter of protesters.

But that is not why Israel attacks it. They attack Iran because it’s in the way.

For the US, the motive is questionable, for there is no domestic benefit to an Iran War. After the disastrous Iraq War, the US regained international respect for about five minutes in 2009 when, in a fit of delirium, international observers awarded Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush.

Obama went on to pursue war under a different name, through drone strikes and administrative protection of corrupt financiers. Obama was followed by Trump, who horrified allies and pleased dictators in proportion to their relative sadism; then Biden, who backed a genocide; and once again Trump, now an American autocrat tasked with carrying out the long-planned attack on Iran.

There is a myth that the Iran War is driven by Christian nationalism. The myth is so powerful that it spurred articles about events that never occurred, like a debunked narrative from an apparent huckster, Mikey Weinstein, claiming that the Pentagon told troops they were fighting to bring Armageddon on behalf of a Christ-like Trump.

The most disturbing part of this narrative, besides that it went viral despite being fabricated, is that it reflects wishful thinking. There are American Christian nationalist fanatics who see the Iran War as a holy war and wish their faith were the central concern. But more influential are ultra-Zionist hawks, like Elliott Abrams, who never recovered from the Iranian Revolution and have sought revenge since 1979. (In the 1980s, some of these alleged “foes of Iran” worked out their complicated feelings by making illicit weapons deals to supply Nicaraguan death squads.)

Christian nationalism is not the main motivation for the Iran War. Nor is it about Trump’s desire for autocratic consolidation (the war impedes it, given its massive unpopularity); nor is it a distraction from the Epstein files (I’ll get to that); nor is it about Trump’s desire for Middle East peace (I’ll get to that when I stop laughing.)

The Iran War is being fought for Greater Israel — and for annihilation. The doctrine of annihilation is not unitary. Christian fanatics, Jewish fanatics, secular accelerationalists, and technofascists seeking depopulation all have their own agendas.

There is a desire to usher in the messianic age, but that gets tricky with competing Messiahs in play. The only certainty is carnage in the Middle East, possibly culminating in the destruction of Al Aqsa Mosque and the building of the Third Temple: a goal shared by Jewish and Christian extremists (though the extremists diverge radically in what they think happens once their preferred Messiah shows up) that horrifies Muslims worldwide and would expand the war to multiple fronts.

This is not a New World Order. This is a No World Order.

* * *

In 1973, Senator J. Wiliam Fulbright went on TV and announced that the US Senate had become a subsidiary of Israel.

“The Senate is subservient to Israel, in my opinion much too much. We should be more concerned about the United States interest rather than doing the bidding of Israel. This is a most unusual development…. The great majority of the Senate of the US — somewhere around 80% — are completely in support of Israel, anything Israel wants. This has been demonstrated time and again and this has made it difficult for our government.”

His statement was controversial then, and uncomfortable now, but accurate. Funding Israel is the only issue on which Congress unites, even when it is to the detriment of the United States. AIPAC is a near-universal donor to US politicians on both sides of the aisle, and Israeli spyware steps in when folks get feisty.

Fulbright was worried about the Jackson Amendment that would allow Jewish emigration from the USSR to the US. This was one of the causes Kahane proclaimed to care most about while carrying out terror campaigns that had nothing to do with it. When the amendment passed, it allowed innocent Soviet Jews facing oppression to find freedom abroad. Unfortunately, it also allowed Mogilevich and other mobsters to get to the US, where they made their fortunes with partners like Donald Trump.

Trump came of political age in the 1970s New York of Meir Kahane. He was mentored by mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, a secular Zionist who partnered with other Zionists, Jewish and Christian, in pursuit of money and power. (Cohn, like Netanyahu, would engage in antisemitism against other Jews in order to achieve his goals.) Like Kahane, they recognized Israel’s utility as a “get out of jail free card”. Mafiosos hightailed it to Israel when RICO or sanctions rolled in. JDL terrorists found sanctuary in Israel after committing brutal murders, like the 1985 assassination of Palestinian-American interfaith peace activist Alex Odeh.

Trump’s father, Fred Trump, became friends with Netanyahu in the 1980s, when Netanyahu was Israel’s ambassador to the UN. The friendship extended to Donald. Trump’s closeness to Netanyahu grew stronger when Ivanka Trump married Jared Kushner, whose family was so close with the Netanyahus that Netanyahu used to sleep in Jared’s bed (when Jared was not in it.)

Jared Kushner works closely with Netanyahu and brokers foreign deals “for the US” despite not being a member of the Trump administration. No one in Congress does anything meaningful to stop him. An unelected son-in-law carrying out the will of an autocrat is typical in a kleptocracy. The unusual part is that Kushner is not working for the country for which his father-in-law is president.

Trump is not in control of the Iran War. Netanyahu is, and Kushner is his lackey.

Trump enjoys violence but is wary of war. War is unpredictable and Trump cannot function in unscripted reality for too long. He likes overseas attacks to be “one and done”: a dramatic plot twist in the season finale of his reality TV presidency. Kidnap the president of Venezuela; drop a MOAB on Afghanistan. Why? To show he can.

A quagmire war is another matter: one Trump wishes to avoid. Too messy, too boring, and too likely to wrest control from him to others.

Trump’s propensity for “one and done” overseas attacks should stoke fear: there is an obvious and terrible way to do a “one and done” on Iran. Trump likely hopes killing Ayatollah Khamenei is enough to satisfy Israel, along with the international coalition of scumbags who made their own trades and investments with an Iran War in mind. Given the plans for Greater Israel, a dead Ayatollah is unlikely to suffice. The Iran War may not prove a Trumpian season finale but a series finale — for Earth.

Though much has been made of Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons, the only countries in this war that surely have them are the US and Israel. Israel spent decades denying that its nuclear program existed. It locked up whistleblowers like Mordechai Vanunu, who made the mistake of giving documents proving the weapons’ existence to the Daily Mirror, not realizing that Robert Maxwell, who owned the Mirror, was not a “British media magnate” but an espionage operative for Israel. Vanunu was kidnapped by Mossad and thrown in an Israeli prison.

This is the same Robert Maxwell who sired Ghislaine and played a role in Iran-Contra with Trump pals like arms trader Adnan Khashoggi (a relative of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who was murdered allegedly with Kushner’s approval to please his friend, Saudi leader MBS.) The same families appear, again and again, in a transnational crime network that profits off war.

Many reacted to the Iran War by proclaiming it a distraction from the Epstein files. Aside from the grotesque nature of declaring the mass murder of civilians, including children, a “distraction”, the Iran War can only remind one of Epstein and Maxwell, for many of the same people tied to them are also tied to this war.

It reminds people that Israel slaughters girls and the Epstein operation rapes them and the US government abets both.

* * *

Did the partial release of the Epstein files push Trump into a war he would rather avoid? Possibly. Trump usually does not need to be blackmailed into evil: he’s a volunteer. He is largely incapable of shame. Anything that can control him has to be worse than what has already been revealed. Given Netanyahu’s half century of close ties to Trump and Kushner, Epstein’s ties to Trump, and Maxwell’s connection to Israel, it is likely that if anyone has that kind of blackmail, Israel does. (This does not rule out other countries from having it as well.)

How does this end? In Trump’s mind, the “one and done” attack may be nuking Iran. Trump has been obsessed with nuclear weapons since the 1980s and expressed a belief that the world will end in nuclear war. In 1984, he said that Roy Cohn wanted him to study nukes for his future. Trump’s trepidation turned to intrigue in 2016, when, while running for office, he said, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” Trump may cope with his fear of annihilation by being the one who can push the button.

In ideal circumstances, rational powerbrokers would do everything they could to curtail this catastrophe. But Trump is surrounded by warmongers like Netanyahu who have spent decades planning an Iran War. They are not going to stop now. Netanyahu’s own power relies on Kahanists who see committing mass murder as part of their divinely mandated destiny. In the US, Christian nationalists like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth applaud the war, along with Kushner: some in Kushner’s sect think the Iran War means Moshiach is on the way.

Over the past decade, operatives built a narrative to present Trump as an arbiter of an apocalyptic and messianic age. The least convincing participant has been Trump, a void of a man who now may feel he has no choice but to strike the final blow. The tragedy is that it’s the rest of the world that is out of options: other than to show our opposition, retain our moral code, and help each other the best we can.

Robert Friedman concluded The False Prophet with this warning:

“Between now and an apocalypse that Kahane could well trigger, world Jewry should come to terms with how powerful a force Jewish fundamentalists like Kahane have become, and then do something to stop them before they destroy Israel and poison the future of the Jewish people. That, too, is up to us.”

Friedman was Jewish and wrote out of heartache for the future he foresaw. His investigations of terrible people were motivated by compassion for those who do not deserve to suffer under their sway. That includes people of every ethnicity and creed.

We can no longer prevent an Iran War, but we can shine light on the past and let the facts inform the present. I wish officials had heeded Friedman’s warnings in 1990, when I was a child. I wish they had at least tried. There are children who need us to try now. That is reason enough to do right, regardless of all that’s gone wrong.

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Behold, a pale horse! It was pretty. Added because something in this apocalypse article needs to not be horrific. Photo by me.