Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Elder of ZiyonA federal indictment, a tenuous network of victims, and the philosophy that turns a portfolio dispute into a license to kill.
On June 10, a federal grand jury in Detroit unsealed a sixty-three-page indictment charging eight people with an eighteen-month campaign of violence: jars of butyric acid hurled through the windows of family homes, nails scattered in a driveway, houses marked with the inverted red triangle that Hamas uses to designate targets for death, a vow by one defendant to become a woman's physician and poison her slowly, and a plan to follow another target home and "burn it down." Kile B. Jones has assembled the full documentary record; the defendants are presumed innocent of every count.
The perpetrators were University of Michigan students and recent students, several of them honors students, one a medical student, operating within the TAHRIR Coalition — the umbrella of dozens of campus organizations led by Michigan's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The indictment alleges that the coalition's own social-media accounts broadcast the threats, that its lead student group was asked for "money for autonomous actions," and that the cell's targets matched the coalition's published demands.
And whom did they attack? They seem to have little in common. The university president and chief investment officer, who declined to divest the endowment. The personal injury law firm that employs a regent. The provost. A campus police officer who had policed the protests. A fellow student suspected of talking to the FBI. And the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit — a communal charity with no role in university governance, no control over the endowment, no connection to the decision the campaign was ostensibly about — defaced on the first anniversary of October 7. The targets share no obvious thread. A car-accident lawyer, a refugee cop, a charity, a classmate: what list contains all of these, and why?
The conventional answer is that hatred overwhelmed them, that the violence was a breakdown of reason. The evidence points the other way. In the very exchange where he discussed poisoning a patient, one defendant explained that he wanted to act because it was "the only way to clear my conscience." Not to silence his conscience — to clear it. The violence was the discharge of his moral sense, not its suppression. These students experienced themselves, throughout, as the few with the seriousness to do what was required. Their philosophy didn’t just allow violence against families of regents who still invested in Israel as a small percentage of the entire endowment. It demanded it.
Step one: a theory of who is guilty
The first move is to replace acts with positions. Ordinary moral and legal reasoning assigns guilt for what a person did: you are culpable for your conduct, and innocent where you did not act. The framework these students absorbed assigns guilt for where a person sits. In the structure of oppression, culpability flows from your location — your identity, your institution, your associations — rather than from anything you chose to do. A regent who votes against divestment is guilty; but so, in principle, is anyone the structure places on the wrong side, whether or not they lifted a finger.
This is originally derived from Marx, down through Maoist and Soviet class theory, filtered down to today. People aren’t guilty for what they do, they are guilty for what positions they occupy in the class system. In recent years this idea has extended to anyone who is perceived as being “privileged.” (Which always seems to exclude the ones who are deciding who is privileged.)
When you extract humans from the decision of who is guilty, you have erased any concept of personal responsibility — not only on the victim side but on every side.
This is a coherent and fundamentally immoral philosophical position, and it is very popular. But the TAHRIR folks made it even worse.
Step two: "directly or indirectly"
The second move is the one that removes every limit, and it appears in the indictment in the conspirators' own operating language. The targets, the document states, were those believed to support Israel "directly or indirectly."
The enemy isn’t Zionists; it is anyone perceived as not being anti-Zionist enough. That can include literally everyone. For example, when Hamas and Fatah argue with each other, they each accuse the other one of being Zionist.
The endowment holds shares in firms that do business in Israel: that is a real, traceable relationship, however attenuated by the time it reaches a regent's vote. But "indirectly" has no boundary at all, because indirect connection is transitive and the chain never terminates. If the regent is complicit through the endowment, then the firm that employs the regent is complicit through the regent, and the charity that shares his community is complicit through that, and the officer who guards the people who manage the building is complicit through the institution, and onward without any principle that says stop here. Once indirect association counts, the boundary of the guilty category is no longer fixed by anything. It is set by whoever is drawing the connections, and it can be drawn to include anyone.
This is not a slippery-slope worry about where the logic might go. It is a description of where the documented attacks already went. The best way to see it is to map the actual targets that were attacked (not just threatened,) and count the steps from the center of their universe, Israel.
The gray chain is the institutional one, and even it stretches thin. Israel, then firms with Israeli business, then the endowment that holds those firms, then the board of regents that governs the endowment, then one individual regent who sits on that board, then the personal-injury law firm that employs him: by the time the campaign reaches the firm it actually attacked, it is five links from the source, and not one of those links is about anything the law firm did. The university branch is no tighter — endowment, university, and then a fellow student or a campus police officer, each reached by membership or employment rather than by any decision about Israel. (The officer is the one partial exception worth conceding: campus police broke up the encampment, so the cell may have had a grievance against him as police, independent of Israel entirely — which, if anything, means the "supporting Israel" rationale was a pretext even by their own logic.)
The amber chain is stranger and more telling. The Jewish Federation has no organizational link to Israel whatsoever — no shares, no governance, no employment. Its path to the center runs Israel, then Zionists, then Jews, then the Federation: three steps, each one a substitution of categories rather than a real relationship. A state becomes an ideology, an ideology becomes an ethnicity, an ethnicity becomes a particular charity that happens to be Jewish. The Federation sits the same distance from the center as the board of regents — three rings out — but the board got there through three organizational facts and the Federation got there through three acts of redefinition. That is the Protocols logic rendered as a network diagram: by the final step, "connected to Israel" has come to mean "is Jewish," and the map shows the exact rung where the meaning was swapped.
We’ve seen this logic before.Bristol professor David Miller maps these elaborate diagrams of his fevered imagination of complicity that invariably land on Jews. Students for Justice in Palestine came under fire in 2022 for mapping out institutions in Massachusetts under the same guilt-by-position logic that ended up reaching every Hillel in New England, the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston and the jewish Arts Collaborative.
What the picture demonstrates is that "directly or indirectly" has already done its work. The people these students actually attacked were, by the campaign's own theory of connection, three to five links removed from the thing they were angry about. The arbitrariness is not a future risk. It is the documented present.
Step three: the license to kill the nodes
A map of the guilty is not yet a reason to hurt anyone. Positional guilt plus "indirectly" tells you who is on the wrong side, and draws the side as wide as you like, but on its own it justifies a boycott, a denunciation, a divestment demand — not acid through a window. The final element is what converts a node on a diagram into a body.
That element is Frantz Fanon's doctrine of redemptive violence. The Wretched of the Earth argued that violence by the colonized against the colonizer is a cleansing, recreating act rather than a regrettable necessity — the means by which the oppressed remake themselves into free agents. This is the doctrine that lets a medical student describe planned poisoning as the way to "clear my conscience." Within the Fanonist frame, the violence is not the abandonment of his morality; it is its fulfillment. Restraint would be the failure.
Fanon was describing an armed colonial settler and the colonized subject shooting back. His colonizer was a person with a gun and a farm on expropriated land, an active agent of a violent occupation. Nothing on the Michigan map is close to that. But when Fanonism is combined with the never ending mapping of who is bad, we arrive at a situation where literally anyone who is perceived as being on the wrong side of history — defined by what position they are in, not what they do — they are subject to being murdered in the name of justice.
That’s how you get to young people saying that their conscience cannot stand it if they don’t attack the families of the people they perceive as being four or five degrees separated from Israel.
That is the combination, and it is the whole of it. Positional guilt supplies the brush. "Indirectly" makes the brush infinitely wide. The map shows the brush has already painted a car-accident lawyer and a Jewish charity. And their flavor of Fanonism hands anyone holding the brush a license to kill whatever it has painted, for the killer's own moral redemption.
Each element is survivable alone. A theory of structural complicity, by itself, produces seminar papers. Fanon, by himself, applied to actual colonial war, produces a contestable but bounded argument. It is the multiplication that has no edge: an unlimited target set crossed with a therapeutic license to destroy its members.
Everyone is a node
The logic never ends. If the law firm is a legitimate target for employing a regent, then so is any company the endowment invests in, and so is anyone who works for that company, and so is any student who accepts a scholarship funded by it or a job offer from it. Each is connected to Israel by exactly the kind of indirect link the framework has already ruled sufficient, and each is therefore paintable, and therefore — under Fanon — killable for the satisfaction of the one who decides it. The same logic that placed a refugee cop on the list places the sophomore who took the internship. There is no node the framework excludes, because the only thing required to become a node is a connection, and the framework has defined connection so that everyone has one.
This is where the philosophy, not the temperament, is the danger. It has no brakes. Nothing in this philosophy says that the person who bought a lamp from a garage sale by the cousin of a manager who once hired an Israeli security guard is not equally guilty. A moral framework with no internal brakes will, given enough sincere adherents, eventually produce followers who sincerely think that braking is immoral and everyone they do not like must be hounded, harassed and attacked.
It would be comforting to treat the indictees as an aberration. The harder truth is that they are a faithful execution. They took published philosophies literally, strung them together, followed where they lead, and were stopped not by anything in the philosophy but by the FBI.
There were other components here — the vanguardism that produced the cell structure by imitating militant movements of the 1960s, the genocide-emergency framing that set the tempo, the long-falsified Third-Worldist romance that the academy keeps teaching with its body count edited out. Each deserves its own accounting. But they are accelerants on top of the core mechanism. The mechanism is simple enough to state in a sentence, and damning enough to end on: give people a theory that makes everyone guilty by association and then makes killing the guilty an act of self-purification, and the only question left is who among them will be sincere enough to act on it.
|
Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
 |
