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The Normalization of Assassination
How did we get to this terrible point?George D. O’Neill Jr.
Sep 29, 2025
The news has been filled with reports of assassinations, attempted assassinations, and shootings targeted against law enforcement. The spate of political violence has seriously eroded America’s legitimacy as a moral and decent state. How did we get here?
U.S. state violence on the world stage may help explain the rise of political violence here at home.
The idea of political assassination gained traction with the U.S. intelligence services during World War II, which was viewed (somewhat understandably) as an existential struggle that justified any act, however illegal, that was necessary for the cause.
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Then came the big enchilada: The September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington birthed the Global War on Terror.
The previous existential threat of the Cold War had fizzled out with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This new existential threat provided the excuse to invade and wreck a number of nations the ZioCons had had in their sights for decades. Who could argue against fighting terrorists?
Since the GWOT was deemed existential, the George W. Bush administration saw fit to torture and kill suspected terrorists without any due process. Not wanting to be accused of sympathy for terrorists, many politicians and media figures held their tongues or even actively supported the White House. As a result, the U.S. regime’s policy morphed from secretly murdering people to bragging about the number of suspected terrorists killed.
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When Barack Obama, after campaigning against dumb wars, came to power (winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the first year of his presidency), he had to prove he wasn’t soft on terrorists, so he upped the rate of killing of suspected terrorists.
President Donald Trump continued the practice and still brags about the 2020 killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, which was another turning point. Soleimani, the top Iranian general, was killed near Baghdad airport on his way to a diplomatic conference. The U.S. regime’s excuse was that he was a terrorist. (Note: According to research by Larry Johnson, it appears that most of the terrorism in the Middle East is committed by Sunni groups, including those backed by Israel and the U.S., not Iranian-backed Shia militants).
The American people have been conditioned by decades of Zionist propaganda about terrorists, so there has been no establishment resistance to these illegal assassinations.
Recently, Israel has been more brazen and public about assassinations targeting the leadership of its opponents.
In September 2024, the Israelis executed the horrific exploding pager operation against Hezbollah in which thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon and Syria. Hundreds of civilians including children were killed or maimed. Upon Israel’s Prime Minister Neranyahu's next visit to the U.S., he presented Trump with a golden pager as a trophy. Trump’s acceptance indicated his approval of this ghastly act (though he reportedly was disturbed by the gift).
On June 13, Israel attempted a decapitation strike against Iran just days before a planned diplomatic meeting between U.S. and Iranian negotiators. Trump demonstrated his complicity by bragging about it and bombing Iran shortly afterward.
On August 28, the Israelis killed the prime minister and 10 civilian cabinet members of the Yemeni government.
A September 9 attack targeting Hamas negotiators gathering in Doha (to prepare for negotiation with U.S. diplomats) caused real alarm among the Gulf states. Washington’s obvious support for this and other assassinations demonstrates to the world that it is not only Israel which is disinterested in diplomacy, but also the U.S. regime.
Israel has had a long history of assassinating people they do not like, including many members of the press, diplomats, and civilian officials. Now the U.S. (as Israel's largest weapons supplier and financier) is closely associated with and openly supportive of the current wave of killings.
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The Normalization of Assassination
How did we get to this terrible point?
