There is a conflict for fighters to endure. Not the most obvious of overcoming oneself, the obstacles leading to competition or the opponent. Finding the balance between pride and self preservation. Too much pride, means we become reckless. Brave but stupid. We take risks and go blow for blow, toe for toe and allow the ego to overcome us. We do silly things that can risk the fight itself while also hurting us long term. This goes for training as well. When we should be working, practising and developing skills we can get into gym wars to settle a score or prove a point that never needed proving.

“Giving it all away for free,” as one veteran pro once noted while two young fighters slugged it out inside an empty gym.

No one remembers their names.

And on the other side is self preservation, the unwillingness to stand and fight. Instead a fighter will avoid the hard work, making sure to always remain fresh and to win safe. This does them no favours as a draw card and when they need to put in the effort to snatch victory, they have become so familiar with the safer approach they remain guided by their self preservation. Their health as a person and longevity as a fighter is always on their mind, they are wise to do so. For the fans and as a competitive fighter, it’s less than exciting and can see victory slide away from them.

Over the years, I wish more fighters did lean into the self preservation. The respect for themselves, their training partners and the dignity of combat. Instead of relying on brutal thinking and hoping to win over a forgetful crowd where they leave it all in the ring-cage and gym only to return to a life outside with injuries and ill health. The spectators mostly forget the wars. Forget their names and move on to the next spectacle of violence. The pornographic appeal of the combatants providing the voyeurs with as much ejaculatory concern, once it’s done. They move on and most often forget what aroused and excited them for that brief period of a fight. The warriors to be disposed of by the promotions and fandom.

Only their fellow combatants remember, know who they were and what they did. Those of us who still have our wits and memories, should it not be claimed by the dementia of the arena. We remember, we know. We also regret.

It is with an educational clarity that young fighters, and even those longer in their teeth should watch the first two Sugar Ray Leonard versus Roberto Duran fights. The first meeting is great, a toe to toe battle between the best in their era. Duran a veteran of violence, the encapsulation of brutal pride and machismo. Versus the sweet moving, Olympic golden darling of his age, Ray Leonard. In the lead up to the fight, Duran was able to throw barbs at Leonard, enticing his masculine pride by mentioning his wife in a deplorable manner. Leonard hated Duran and wanted to beat him, Duran’s way.

Instead of boxing and moving, using his skills and supremacy of footwork and the movement that made him great, Leonard traded and fell into the trenches with Duran. There he got muddy and bloody, elbows, low blows, shoulders and foot stepping against the ropes and in small perimeters of violence. Leonard proved himself as a man, as a warrior but at a cost. He would lose the fight, hoping to satisfy a dignity against a man who had little regard for such a word or the politeness of a world beyond the violent sport. Duran shoved Leonard the moment he dared to raise his hands. A “fuck you” to a fellow warrior who had stood with him for fifteen rounds, so deep was the pride and hate. It was always personal, never professional or competition.

Some months later, Leonard would have his revenge. The vulgar curses and repulsive slurs from Duran no longer had any effect. Leonard held to his self preservation, he had a game plan and would stick to it. His fight name was Sugar for a reason. Duran had enjoyed the first victory and was certain of winning again. His arrogance, his pride was confident in its certainty that he would beat Leonard with ease, again. Instead, we got the famous No Mas fight. No More! Duran declared. He submitted, yielded out of frustration to the disciplined supremacy of Leonard. No excuses can be offered, other than Duran could not draw from Leonard a proud toe to toe war, instead he and the world witnessed a boxing master class. It would take several fights for Duran to beat away the stigma as a quitter.

To quit is an ugly word in boxing, in all combat sports for that matter. Even those which allow for submissions. The crowd and promoters prefer for the fighters to go out on their shield. To suffer great pain and punishment, a cuckolded sadomasochism ensuring those watching feel gratified in knowing that others suffered and endured for their entertainment. Whether amateur or elite level pro, to quit is a slight, a disgusting act. Considered even so by those to lazy, ill disciplined and cowardly to enter the arena themselves. It’s one of the understood elements of sport, especially fighting.

Another example from that eras four kings, occured between Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns. Both on top of their divisions, meeting at Middleweight for Hagler’s crown. Both men wrecking balls with considerable skill as boxers, and knockout power. It was anyone’s fight. Instead of feeling one another out or moving with his reach from behind his great jab, Thomas Hearns went blow for blow with Hagler. And instead of wearing his man down, and searching and destroying him, Hagler dug in his toes and threw every shot with the intention of knocking Hearns out. The world got a short but intense war, with a cut, a broken hand and in the end Thomas Hearns was laid out. Pride over coming any sense of self preservation, despite breaking his hand, he did not relinquish his desire to stop Hagler. So Hearns went down fighting.

Social media and incentives from promotions push for fighters to take risks and stand and trade. Even if they really don’t need to. It will excite the mob and satisfy the ego which most of us fighters carry around with us. Unfortunately in each combat sport we have cautionary tales of warriors whose bodies and mind were snatched from them, not all at once but over time in the arena and gyms. The stagnant camera positions for the phone viewing has invented sports like slapping or leg kick competitions, no self preservation or skill other than to endure punishment. Pain, and damage. The mob watching from their screens eager to bear witness to proud stupidness. Courageous beings performing for uncourageous masses.

Footage of young fighters recklessly beating on each other for social media content creation or to bully sparring partners is meaningless and wasteful. It does not help them grow and learn, it may satisfy their ego or win them points with their friends and the ignorant alike. But to use the words from that old veteran again, “why give it away for free.”

The impulse to over train is ever apparent. Especially now that we tend to film everything. Instead of working it out, every session leans into being a work out. Strength and conditioning coaches, most of them virgins of competition with their academic theories will tell fighters buzz words full of bullshit in the hopes of making them the centre stage of the athletes performance. The art and craft of violent competition transcends mere athleticism. Learning to be efficient, composed and wise under pressure is an important element of fighting that can only be learned from experience and application. Training hard to burn out and exert can in fact have the opposite effect in combat, especially when injuries and age begin to take their toll. The fighter is a human being, not a machine. Some who insert themselves into the equation don’t understand the distinction.

The older versions of George Foreman, Larry Holmes and Bernard Hopkins were able to do what they did through their understanding of the craft of combat. They trained hard, certainly. They also did not over train. Instead they leaned into experience and their pride was a fuel, in keeping them competing and in the gym. Their pride kept them from partying and indulging recklessly. Their pride kept them on their feet, moving forward and staying up with much younger men. Their self preservation ensured longevity and they earned their mastery over the sport and the art of fighting. They understood the subtle and elements of fighting that fans overlook or simply refuse to know. They understood the nuance and subtext of violence that only fighters at high level do. An understanding that comes from experience, there’s and those around them. An understanding born from the marriage of pride and self preservation that younger fighters tend to learn when they are being handed defeat by someone they should or are meant to beat.

These lessons transcend the arena of combat sports. They can be applied in our wider lives. The urge to always win an argument or be proven correct, can ruin relationships and in the end achieves little. The excessive need for self preservation soon turns into cowardice or at least the voyeurism of the inexperienced. Certain of absolutely nothing gained from witnessing others from afar. It keeps one healthy and away and out of danger but it gives them no insight or experience. No character. Our character and reputations are built on what we do, what we have endured and risked. How we overcame and how we dealt with adversity and defeat. To get there, it required both pride and self preservation. Finding the balance comes with experience. Yours and those around you who have done and endured. Never be too proud to always hurt and know more than you think you do. And never have too much self preservation that you never risk or experience, because in the end life is too brief and careers in the arena, all the more so.

The New York Times is heavily featured in my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict for its propensity to report about the topic in ways that mask the true nature of US government policy.

Take, for instance, this recent summary from the Times of the US role in the so-called “peace process” and the rise to power of Hamas in Gaza:

For decades, support for a two-state solution has been official United States policy. But successive American governments also believed that Palestinian statehood should be realized after full peace negotiations settled between Israel and the Palestinians, not through unilateral declarations or U.N. resolutions.

Last year, the United States blocked the U.N. Security Council from moving forward on a Palestinian bid to be recognized as a full member state at the United Nations. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, explained that “Palestinians don’t have control over a significant portion of what is supposed to be their state. It’s being controlled by a terrorist organization,” she said, referring to Hamas.

The United Nations has continually supported the idea of a Palestinian state, and the idea has underpinned peace negotiations over decades. The Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993, laid out a timeline for Palestinian self-determination, which was dashed by violence and mistrust.

In 2006, Hamas, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, won the Palestinian legislative elections, then seized control of Gaza. Years later came the Oct. 7 attack, when Hamas fighters killed some 1,200 people in Israel and took 250 people hostage.

Since then, Israel’s war on Hamas has led to widespread destruction, hunger and the death of about 65,000 people in Gaza, according to Gazan health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

First, the Times‘ wording conceals how the US has only feigned support for the two-state solution while working to block its implementation.

This deception is achieved by falsely conflating the two-state solution with the goal of the “peace process”, and specifically the Oslo Accords. In truth, as extensively documented in my book, the “peace process” was always the means by which Israel and its superpower benefactor blocked implementation of the two-state solution.

Whereas the two-state solution is premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict, the now defunct “peace process” was premised on a rejection of international law and the idea that the Palestinians must negotiate with their oppressors over how much of their own land they could continue living in and maybe someday exercise some kind of limited autonomy over.

The Times only hints at that in the first paragraph quoted above by saying the US has expressed support for “a two-state solution”—not to be confused with the two-state solution—and alluding to the US position that Israel must have an effective veto power over Palestinian self-determination.

Of course, the US did not oppose unilateral declarations or UN resolutions back in 1948, when the Zionist forces busy ethnically cleansing Palestine unilaterally declared the existence of the state of Israel, citing UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which, contrary to popular myth, neither created Israel nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their declaration.

In other words, US policy is characterized by a rejection of Palestinians’ right to self-determination, but the Times won’t say so.

The Times suggests the Oslo Accords “laid out a timeline for Palestinian self-determination”, which just means that there were supposed to be phases of negotiations on a final peace agreement, which never happened in large part because Israel persisted in prejudicing the outcome of talks by expanding expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank.

The Accords also created the Palestinian Authority (PA) to effectively serve as Israel’s collaborator in enforcing its occupation regime.

The PA’s corruption and complicity in the occupation was a major reason why Hamas did so well in the 2006 legislative elections. But the Times jumps from that event to Hamas seizing control of Gaza, omitting the critical context of how the US and Israel colluded with PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party to overthrow the elected Hamas-led government.

The result was that Hamas expelled Fatah from Gaza and continued to rule there while the PA ruled the West Bank, with Abbas still in power even though his legal term ended in 2009.

The Times then jumps from Hamas becoming the governing authority in Gaza to “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” on October 7, 2023, omitting how Israel maintained an illegal blockade of Gaza to collectively punish the civilian population for living under Hamas rule.

The Times‘ summary of events also omits how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintained a policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any renewed movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

The Times describes Israel’s systematic assault on the defenseless civilian population and infrastructure of Gaza as a “war” when it clearly violates the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Illustrative of how the Times provides cover for this US-supported crime against humanity, it says this “war” has “led to” widespread hunger, as though it were an unintended consequence and not a deliberate policy of Israel’s to deprive the civilian population of goods and services necessary for their survival.

For numerous case studies of how the Times serves to manufacture consent for the US government’s longstanding policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, read Obstacle to Peace.

For more about how this policy has escalated under the Trump administration, read my March 27 special report “How Trump Greenlighted the Resumption of Israel’s Gaza Genocide” and my August 13 article “Israel’s Genocide Isn’t Stopping“.

Antiwar.com recently published an article jointly written by Institute Director Scott Horton and this author (Weeks). The piece, “Strategic Treason: The Empire Fetes Man Who Killed US Troops,” discussed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s trip to New York City, which took place last week.

Al-Sharaa once went by the war name “Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.” He fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) during Iraq War 2. The man personally killed American troops. Yet Washington supported Jolani when he took his Jihad to Syria and helped lead a protracted dirty war to topple Bashar al-Assad’s government. Now the Empire outright partners with him.

Last week, al-Sharaa extended one of his blood-soaked hands to embrace Retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, and President Donald Trump.

Now, of course, this is not what the American People want. This is what Israel wants. As we are constantly lectured by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: his country’s wars are America’s wars.

This should shock the American consciousness to its core because, in fact, Israel’s enemies are Al Qaeda’s enemies. Israel’s target is the so-called Axis of Resistance, which includes Tehran, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, the Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as Hamas. Whereas America’s coalition is made of the Resistance Axis’ enemies: Israel, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.

Hence, Washington’s unconditional bipartisan support for Israel’s effort to set the entire region ablaze during the Joe Biden and Trump administrations has led to a vastly more powerful Al Qaeda. The butchers of New York City now control Damascus. a major Arab capital city, with U.S. support.

“At long last, the Assad regime has fallen…A fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice,” Biden declared last December before describing Al Qaeda’s victory as a “historic opportunity.” Likewise, Netanyahu dubbed the fall of Damascus to Al Qaeda “a historic day in the history of the Middle East.” The Israeli leader publicly took credit for the regime change during a visit to the illegally occupied Golan Heights, gloating that “this is a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, the main supporters of the Assad regime.”

The American people, on the left and right, are always characterized as hopelessly divided, unable to reach a consensus on any of the day’s myriad hot-button issues. But now there is one exception: Israel. This is an entirely new phenomenon in American politics, which has seemingly crashed the Israeli PR machine.

Poll after poll over these last two years has demonstrated an increasing shift where majorities among both self-identified Democrats and indeed Republicans, particularly young conservatives, are now decidedly against America’s “special relationship” with Israel.

The parasitic pariah state, and its nakedly genocidal project in Gaza, which is now being expanded to the illegally occupied West Bank, has never been more universally unpopular. Israel’s days on the U.S. dole are numbered.

This poses a unique threat to the Blob (the foreign policy establishment), which thrives on domestic division, allowing both parties to get away with immiserating both working- and middle-class Americans on behalf of the Empire and its brutal, corrupt satellites, epitomized by Tel Aviv.

Luckily for the hawks, during a college event in Utah, Charlie Kirk was recently executed. He was shot in the neck while discussing gun violence and the Second Amendment. Both sides, left and right, played their roles perfectly. Before Kirk’s body was cold, right-wingers called for war on the entire American left, and an assortment of moronic liberals, as well as leftists, callously cheered and mocked the deceased conservative activist’s slaying.

Predictably, our Israel First Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is now using Kirk’s death as a PR prop to increase U.S. military recruitment. This comes as preparations are being made for what will surely be a catastrophic continuation of Washington’s unconstitutional war with Iran.

This is especially egregious because Kirk —although he ultimately backed U.S. strikes on Iranian civilian nuclear sites — had repeatedly made clear his vehement opposition to a potential U.S.-led “regime change war” against Iran. In a worst-case scenario, such a war could retrigger the draft, which, shamefully, was never abolished following the Vietnam War, in which nearly 60,000 American boys were slaughtered.

Nothing scares Netanyahu, Trump, America’s Zionist billionaire oligarchs, and their dutiful media stooges more than an organized, invigorated, and united American youth opposing U.S. troops fighting what they perceive to be Israel’s wars.

We have witnessed the immense costs of such destructive policies during the roughly $3 trillion Iraq war, in which, depending on when you stopped counting, at least one million Iraqis were killed. Additionally, thousands of American troops lost their lives, while tens of thousands more returned home as completely broken men and committed suicide.

If the draft is reactivated, it would not be the first time a dictatorship has conscripted young men to fight and die in a needless war against Iran. In 1979, America’s old friend Saddam Hussein conscripted young Shi’ite boys to invade the Islamic Republic as a way of preventing the spread of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution next door.

Evenly split on both sides, the Iran-Iraq war saw approximately one million Iraqis and Iranians killed over the next decade. The war would perhaps never have taken place absent U.S. support for Baghdad and its notorious assistance in helping Hussein acquire chemical weapons. He unleashed these diabolical weapons on Iranian cities, targeting civilians and soldiers alike.

In Horton’s Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, we find that Hussein was intent on forcing young Iraqis to fight as a way of cementing their ethnic and national identities lest, given their devotion to the Shi’ite sect of Islam, they emulated the Persians next door and launched their own Islamic revolution.

Saddam was a Sunni Muslim. Despite being only 20 percent of the population, Sunnis dominated the national government. This government ruled over the 60 percent Shi’ite super majority. The Persian Muslims next door in Iran were Shi’ites. Saddam feared Shi’ite solidarity and in fact, many Iraqi Shi’ites fled their nation when he launched the war to fight on Iran’s side.

Similarly, in America today, the majority of Americans oppose U.S. support for Israel and its genocidal project. However, we, the majority, are dominated by a powerful minority of Zionist billionaires and their well-funded lobbyists, pro-Israel foreign policy apparatchiks and war profiteers, as well as a bipartisan coalition of corrupt Israel First politicians and presidents. Together, these nefarious forces act as a dictatorship, especially regarding what is ostensibly U.S. foreign policy.

A U.S. war on Iran would be a nightmare for the American people but would benefit Israel tremendously, or at least its government. This tracks with the thesis that Israel controls the United States. That, of course, is the thesis’s maximalist version. There are more qualified versions, from the Israeli government controls the U.S. government to the Israeli government has a great deal of influence over U.S. Middle East policy. Versions of this thesis are put forth by Patrick Buchanan, Norman Finkelstein, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Max Blumenthal, and Aaron Maté.

There is also the antithesis: The United States controls Israel. In this geopolitical model, Israel is a tool of the United States Imperial Government (USIG). It is a military enforcer in the Middle East, existing as a massive U.S. aircraft carrier; “Airstrip3” after Britain and Japan. Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Ilan Pappé put forth versions of this thesis.

The tension between the above thesis and antithesis provides a space for our intervention:

Thesis: Israel controls the United States
Antithesis: The United States controls Israel
Synthesis: Coalitional Zionists dominate Washington, D.C. and beyond, but the U.S. national government dominates the Israeli government at the corporate agent level.

Donald Trump is surrounded by Zionists, and they are extremely influential within the U.S. national security apparatus. In fact, they dominate throughout what veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern has called the MICIMATT (Military Industrial Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank) Complex.

As arch neoconservative Norman Podhoretz bluntly explained in the 1970s, Zionists are committed to keeping D.C. engaged in the business of empire so that Washington is always capable and available to crush Israel’s rivals in the Middle East and beyond.

The Zionists are engaged in a high-stakes project of shaping the symbolic order of our society so that it remains eternally, unquestioningly pro-Israel. The neoconservatives, Israel’s fifth column in America, have led the push for every war over many decades.

So, within the American National government and throughout centers of power and influence within our society, Zionists are extremely prominent. All of that empirical data tracks with the model of our thesis that Israel controls America. However, at the more profound collective action level, our antithesis that America controls Israel gains traction when viewed through the discourse of corporate agency. Here, it becomes immediately apparent that the United States government is a corporate agent that towers above the corporate agent that is the Israeli government.

The fact that the Zionists must come to America, the heart of the Empire, and work within the structure of the U.S.government reveals this dynamic. For an illustrative juxtaposition, consider the relationship between the U.S. government and the British government. Similar to our organized criminal enterprise with Israel, this is also dubbed a “special relationship.”

But according to the American historian Stephen Kotkin, that’s just being polite. Britain is America’s bitch. Now that’s our characterization; some of our colleagues prefer the term “puppet.”

But given that the United Kingdom is sending people to prison for Facebook posts now, we feel comfortable calling it a bitch, and certainly that characterization tracks with Britain’s history as a subservient sidekick to the clearly dominant American Empire.

After sharing this idea with U.S. soldiers who have engaged in combat, this author (Weeks) was told that when these men deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq or elsewhere, the British were there as well, only because the Americans were there.

In other words, British troops just go along with whatever America wants. That’s why no one claims that the British government controls Washington, D.C. The ubiquitous consensus is that the U.S. government dominates the British government. London is a vassal within Washington’s global imperial order.

Now, in the Brits’ case, we don’t see London filled with Americans who are dual citizens who served in the U.S. military and now wear their U.S. uniform to their job as a member of parliament, or work as an advisor to the Prime Minister, or fill key positions within the ministry of defense, or in military intelligence, or whatever they call their state department. This is because the real power lies in Washington. That’s the center of the Empire, not Tel Aviv. The fact that all these Zionists need to come to D.C. undermines the thesis that Israel controls America.

Yes, our national government is filled with Zionists who routinely put the interests of Israel above the American people’s interests. Or at least they prioritize what they perceive to be the interests of Israel above virtually anything else.

We should confront and interrogate that reality, and forge a stronger anti-imperialist, antiwar, anti-Zionist movement. For it is not enough to merely oppose the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Although doing so, especially in mass movements, is a heroic act of collective moral rebellion and such activism is most imperative.

But our synthesis allows us to do that while recognizing why the Zionists must come to Washington, because D.C. is where the true imperial power is located. Therefore, that is precisely where it must be defeated.