Dehumanization:
A Spiritual Crisis

Dr. Hussam Abu Safieh was the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza — one of the last functioning hospitals in the north. When Israeli forces raided the facility, when siege conditions made evacuation the rational choice, when colleagues and administrators fled to save themselves, he stayed. His patients had nowhere else to go. A doctor's first obligation is to his patients. He honored it.

His 15-year-old son Ibrahim was killed by an airstrike at the hospital entrance.

In December 2024, Israeli forces detained Dr. Abu Safieh. He has been held without charge. He has lost over 40 kilograms. He is kept in an underground cell without sunlight. He has been subjected to severe physical beatings. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has called him a hostage. He is now among 96 Palestinian medical workers facing execution under Israel's death penalty for hostages law.

A doctor. His son killed at the hospital entrance. Now facing execution.

Dr. Hüssam Ebu Safiya'nın da aralarında bulunduğu 9500 Filistinli idam edilecekler listesinde yer alıyor.

Susmak
Suça ortak olmaktır.

Avazınız çıktığı kadar haykırın..
Görmezden gelmeyin !#FreeDrHussamAbuSafiya pic.twitter.com/ZLHM4CY6np

— 🇹🇷🇹🇷 Hakan Boyav 🇵🇸🇵🇸 (@hakanboyv) April 26, 2026

The word that made all of this legally possible — that stripped him of the protections every human being is owed, that placed him in the category where none of the rules apply — is a single word. Terrorist.

Before we trace how that word traveled from a political speech to an underground cell, we have to sit with something. Because the instinct, reading this, is to move quickly toward the architecture — the systems, the companies, the contracts. That instinct is partly what got us here. The architecture is real and we will document it fully. But Ibrahim was 15 years old. He was killed at the entrance to the hospital where his father was saving lives. That is not data. That is a child. And if we cannot feel that before we analyze it, we have already surrendered something essential to the machine.

The Word Before The Bullet

In the United States, "domestic terrorism" is defined in federal law — but it has never been charged. Zero people have ever been prosecuted under it. It exists as a definitional tool: a label that shapes investigations, sentencing, funding priorities, and public perception without ever requiring proof in a courtroom. The word is a weapon with no legal fingerprints.

What was politically useful for ratcheting up support for a policy involving more surveillance or passing bills became a threat to actual politicans. Congress deliberately left the definition vague because too many lawmakers feared a precise statute would be turned against their own constituents. Both sides. Every administration. The result: a term powerful enough to end careers, authorize surveillance, and justify military operations — while the person who deployed it bears zero legal consequence for what it activates.

Scholars call what this enables stochastic terrorism — the use of mass communication by public figures to incite violence that is statistically probable but individually unpredictable. The mechanism has four stages: demonization, dehumanization, desensitization, and then violence — after which the speaker denies responsibility because no specific plan was ever issued. The word travels from the podium into the population, finds a receptor in the apparatus, and executes. No fingerprints. No charges. No legal consequence for the speaker.

Watch it operating in real time. A pope is called "weak on crime." A foreign leader is told her country will "be blown to bits." Supreme Court justices are "fools and lapdogs." A reporter becomes "Maggot Hagerman." An entire nation is warned "a whole civilization will die tonight." Each statement is legally protected speech. Each one recalibrates what is acceptable to do to the person named. The threshold for violence — institutional, rhetorical, physical — moves a little further each time. Nobody pulls a trigger. The language rearranges the conditions under which the trigger gets pulled.

Now apply this to Gaza. Palestinians are described as "human animals." Hamas — a specific militant organization — becomes the frame through which 2.3 million civilians are perceived. A doctor who refuses to abandon his patients during a siege is classified as an "unlawful combatant." That classification is not a legal finding. It is an assertion. But it has the same operational effect as a conviction: it removes him from the category of people to whom protections apply.

Ibrahim was 15 years old. He was not Hamas. He was at the entrance of his father's hospital. The airstrike did not distinguish. The system that authorized it did not require distinction. The word had already done the work of removing the distinction.

The Label That Justifies the Elimination

The word does not operate alone. It requires infrastructure. And that infrastructure — in Gaza, in Iran, increasingly everywhere — is American, corporate, classified, and deliberately insulated from accountability.

In April 2021, Google and Amazon signed Project Nimbus: a $1.2 billion cloud technology contract with the Israeli government. The contract was explicit — Google and Amazon were forbidden from denying service to any branch of the Israeli government, including its military. Google's own lawyers documented concerns that the services could be linked to human rights violations at least four months before the contract was signed. They signed anyway. The infrastructure was in place before October 7, 2023. Before Ibrahim. Before the hospital raid. Before the underground cell.

In January 2024, Palantir entered a strategic partnership to provide AI systems for processing surveillance data on Palestinians and targeting them in "war-related missions." That same month, Palantir established a permanent desk at the Civil Military Coordination Center in southern Israel — the US-led body nominally managing humanitarian aid delivery to Gaza. Aid delivery. Subordinate to a surveillance and targeting architecture. Running on American software. Accountable to no one.

The AI systems deployed in Gaza have names. The Gospel reviewed surveillance data and recommended bombing targets to human analysts — generating up to 100 targets per day, compared to approximately 50 per year that human analysts previously identified. A 700-fold acceleration in the pace of destruction. Lavender placed 37,000 Palestinians on a kill list. Intelligence officers reported spending 20 seconds per target before authorizing strikes — enough time only to confirm the target was male. A third system, Where's Daddy, tracked individuals to their family homes, designed specifically to locate them when they returned to their children.

The Israeli military knew — according to documents — that approximately 10% of the people the machine marked for killing were not Hamas militants. The accepted collateral damage ratio for junior operatives was fixed at up to 20 civilian deaths per target. For senior commanders, the military authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in a single assassination. These are not allegations. They are documented accounts from Israeli military sources who described being "shocked by committing atrocities."

The female observers who watched this coming knew before anyone. Young women — barely out of their teens, serving as the IDF's frontline eyes on the Gaza border — spent months filing detailed reports of Hamas conducting intense training that looked exactly like a large-scale border assault. They begged for reinforcements. Their commanders told them they were "just spotters" who didn't understand what they were seeing. One told Haaretz: "They would laugh." The dismissal, multiple survivors said later, carried the unmistakable flavor of sexism. Their human intelligence was overruled. Many were killed or taken hostage on October 7. The system that replaced their human judgment with algorithmic calculation was the same system that had refused to hear them.

Sixteen were killed at Nahal Oz base alone. Some were burned alive in the command center as militants set it on fire. The irony is almost unbearable: the women whose eyes and voices were dismissed as insufficient were replaced by a machine that operates without eyes, without voice, without conscience — and that machine is now being sold to 130 countries as proof of concept.

Gaza as Product Demonstration

This is the part that requires the most honesty, because it is the part most likely to be dismissed as too dark to be true. It is not too dark. It is documented.

When defense companies market weapons internationally, the phrase "battle-tested" carries a specific commercial meaning. It means the system has been used on real targets, in real conditions, against a population that could not refuse. Gaza was that population. Israeli arms exports reached $14.8 billion in 2024 — double the value of five years prior. The Gaza war did not disrupt this. It drove the increase. Promotional materials explicitly boast of products proven in battle. The battle they reference is Gaza. The people who could not refuse were Palestinians.

Investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein, whose book The Palestine Laboratory documented this model before the current Iran war began, named the mechanism plainly: "I think Israel sells two things — what weapons you can use to murder and target Palestinians, but also how to get away with it." The civilian deaths are not a failure of the system. They are the demonstration of its capability. The secrecy that surrounds what happened in Gaza is not incidental to the sales pitch. It is the warranty.

The same model transferred directly to Iran. On the first day of Operation Epic Fury, February 28, 2026, US forces struck over 1,000 targets. A Tomahawk missile struck Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab. Between 175 and 180 people were killed — most of them girls between seven and twelve years old. The school had been classified in a Defense Intelligence Agency database as a military facility. The database had not been updated since at least 2016, when satellite imagery shows the school was already separated from any adjacent compound. The Pentagon investigation remains ongoing. No findings have been made public. No one has been charged.

Over 11,000 targets in Iran by early April. A June 2026 deadline when Maven begins transmitting 100% machine-generated intelligence to combatant commanders — no human in the approval loop at all. The governance framework for that system does not exist. Congress has passed no comprehensive federal AI law. The White House blocked state attempts to build one with a one-line memo offering no explanation. The accountability architecture is not lagging behind the technology. It is being actively dismantled.

The Accountability Gap Is Enforced

On March 24, 2026, a federal court in the Northern District of California found that the United States government had designated an AI company a national security threat not to protect security, but to punish it for drawing public attention to how its technology was being used. That company was Anthropic. The ruling established something that had never appeared in federal case law before: that a company can be retaliated against for transparency about its own product's military use.

Anthropic had drawn two documented red lines in its July 2025 contract with the Pentagon: no mass domestic surveillance of Americans, no fully autonomous weapons. The Department of War demanded those restrictions be removed. When Anthropic refused, it was designated a supply chain risk — a classification historically reserved for Chinese equipment like Huawei. Never before applied to an American company. The court found it was retaliation. OpenAI and xAI had already signed "all lawful purposes" agreements with the Pentagon within hours of the designation. The lesson every AI company watching received: stated red lines produce punishment. Opacity is the rational corporate survival strategy.

The engineers who opposed what their tools were being used for learned this lesson earlier. In 2018, 4,000 Google employees signed a petition against Project Maven. Google declined to renew the contract. Palantir took over — calling Google's withdrawal "treasonous," signing with no ethical objections, receiving sole-source designation. In 2024, Google engineers protested Project Nimbus at the company's New York and Sunnyvale headquarters. Twenty-eight were fired. In 2026, the CBP's top privacy officer, a privacy branch chief, and the director of CBP's FOIA office were all removed after objecting to orders to mislabel surveillance records and block public release of documents about a face recognition system that stores images of Americans for 15 years without consent. The pattern across three separate institutions over eight years: the people who object to how the systems are used are removed. The systems continue.

The records themselves are being destroyed. USAID staff were instructed to shred critical documents. CIA failed to preserve any messages from the Houthi group chat. NSC members used personal Gmail accounts for discussions of military positions. DOGE teams worked out of Google Docs to avoid preserving communications. By the time FOIA litigation eventually succeeds, it will surface an empty archive. The accountability mechanism is not blocked. It is defeated by deletion.

The Financial Architecture Behind The Silence

Follow the money and the silence makes sense. The Board of Peace — Trump's private Gaza reconstruction initiative announced at Davos in January 2026 — charges $1 billion for permanent membership. Among its executive board members: Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management. Senate Finance Committee findings show that Rowan's predecessor at Apollo paid Jeffrey Epstein $170 million between 2012 and 2017. Those payments, as documented in a $62 million settlement with the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, partially funded Epstein's trafficking operations. Rowan himself had documented contact with Epstein between 2013 and 2016, sharing Apollo's most sensitive internal financial calculations.

Jared Kushner sits on the same Board of Peace, presenting a $25 billion plan to transform Gaza into a "regional economic hub" — funded primarily by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund that invested $2 billion in his private equity firm six months after he left the White House. Epstein's network had tracked Kushner's financial desperation in real time during his White House years. Senate prosecutors weighed whether to merge their Epstein and Kushner financial investigations. The same Gulf states connected to Epstein's network paid the $1 billion Board of Peace entry fee. Saudi Arabia. UAE. The same nations whose sovereign wealth funds flow through Kushner's firm.

The Board of Peace has no humanitarian oversight, no Palestinian representation, no independent monitoring, no conflict of interest rules. The $1 billion entry fee is not a donation to reconstruction. It is a seat at the table where the territory's future is decided — without the people who live there, without the institutions that were supposed to protect them, without the accountability that would otherwise apply.

Gaza Marine — a natural gas field containing 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas, legally belonging to Palestinians — has been blocked from development since 2000. The population being displaced from Gaza's coast has legal claim to that resource. The Board of Peace's reconstruction plans do not include them.

The Permission Architecture and Its Precedents

None of this arrived without precedent. The Powerlessness article in this series documented the unbroken thread from the USS Quincy handshake in 1945 — oil for military protection, the arrangement that has governed the actual world for eighty years while the UN performed the governance of it — through the Safari Club, through Iran-Contra, through the 28 pages, through Madeleine Albright saying on camera that half a million dead Iraqi children was "worth it," through the Oil-for-Food corruption that US companies contributed 52% of, through the invasion that the UN's own weapons inspectors were still investigating when the bombs dropped.

The pattern is not new. Create the humanitarian crisis. Administer its relief. Corrupt the administration. Use the corruption to justify dismantling the institution. Replace it with private infrastructure answerable to no one. Iraq was the proof of concept for that model. Gaza is its refinement. Iran is its expansion. Cuba — where the Navy is already repositioning, where the economic strangulation has been running for decades, where Trump has said "almost immediately" — is being set up the same way.

What October 7 enabled was activation, not construction. The infrastructure was already in place. Project Nimbus was signed in 2021. The Palantir CMCC desk came after. The arms exports had been doubling for four years. The female observers' warnings were filed and ignored for months before the attack. Likud had deliberately funded Hamas through Qatari cash — Netanyahu told a closed meeting in 2019 that supporting Hamas was necessary to prevent a unified Palestinian front. The attack that "justified" the response was enabled by the same government that used it as permission.

This is the same logic as 9/11. Fifteen of nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals. The 28 pages — classified for 15 years — documented indirect financial connections between Saudi government officials and the hijackers. The response was the invasion of Iraq, a country with no operational connection to the attack, while the country whose nationals flew the planes was reaffirmed as America's closest ally and 140 of its citizens were evacuated while American airspace was still locked. The arrangement does not pause for accountability. It is the context in which accountability is decided.

A Weaponized Political/Religious Landscape

James Talarico, a Texas state legislator, recently wrote: "We are living in an era of corruption. I don't just mean illegal activity. I mean corruption in the deeper sense — the rotting of something from the inside... This is, at its root, a spiritual crisis."

The responses underneath his post are worth studying. Not because they are surprising — because they are precise. Every response sorted itself into an identity category. Democrat. Border. Cartel. Censorship. Not one engaged the structural argument. The algorithm that delivered those responses to those people did exactly what he described, in real time, underneath the post that described it. The machine does not need to suppress the message. It needs only to ensure the message arrives surrounded by enough noise that the structural observation drowns in the identity conflict it describes.

This is dehumanization at the epistemic level. Before you can dehumanize a person, you have to dehumanize a conversation. Before you can make a doctor into a terrorist, you have to make the word "terrorist" into a category that stops thought rather than starting it. The word does not describe. It assigns. Once assigned, the assignment does the work. The 20 seconds an intelligence officer spends approving a kill list target is only possible if the word has already done its work. The officer is not approving the killing of a person. They are approving the elimination of a categorized threat. The category preceded the killing. The category is the killing.

People engaged in both politics & religion know clearly when dehumanization is first, hatred follows. It requires work to hate a person. It requires almost no work to hate a category. The category travels faster than the person. It arrives before he does. By the time Dr. Hussam Abu Safieh was detained, the category had already built his cell.

Spiritual Crisis as Ongoing Crucifixion

Another hidden crisis is the perversion of God being on their side to commit mass atrocity at scale. This lack of forgiveness & compassion is everything Jesus came to abolish in every one of his teachings, yet at the same time he brought the warning "Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another that shall not be thrown down.”, he also said "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." and he said many more things like "love your enemy" that are completely ignored by those who claim to be religious.

The Safe Harbor article in this series makes a precise observation about what Likud built: "The strategy that was built to guarantee safe harbor has become the thing that keeps safe harbor forever out of reach." The harder you strike, the more the concept regenerates — in the minds of the next generation, in the next refugee camp, in the next international report. Nothing can stop this cycle. Not artificial intelligence. Not kill chains. Not dominance through technology. Only rehumanization. The slow, painful, honest recognition that the people on the other side are not categorized threats but breathing women and children and families — created, in the language of every tradition that has tried to name this, for a purpose only their Creator fully knows.

What Democracy Requires That We Are Losing

Democracy was designed as an open system. Distributed inputs. Legible rules. Reversible decisions. The ability to course-correct. What is being built now — the classified systems, the sole-source contracts, the vendor lock-in, the deleted records, the removed privacy officers, the FOIA offices placed on administrative leave, the epistemic infrastructure outsourced to platforms that determine what patterns mean — is a closing system. Not seized. The exits close quietly.

The interpretive layer is what has been captured. It is not just that a company hosts the data. It is that the platform determines what the data means — what gets flagged, what counts as a threat, what pattern triggers a strike. When government cannot see its own citizens without a vendor's interface, the vendor is the government. When the vendor holds an explicit ideological worldview and controls the interpretive infrastructure, those are no longer separate things. The ideology is the infrastructure.

The reversibility test is the right one. The question is not whether any individual decision was wrong. The question is: could we change course if we needed to? How many real choices remain? Project Nimbus cannot be unsigned. The 37,000 people on the Lavender list cannot be un-listed. The Minab school cannot be un-struck. Ibrahim cannot be brought back. The accountability mechanisms that might have prevented these things were removed before they were needed — FOIA offices closed, privacy officers fired, records deleted, red lines punished.

Over one million people have died from the gutting of USAID — preventable deaths from preventable diseases in preventable conditions, across multiple continents, because the financial backbone of the UN humanitarian system was dismantled by a team working out of Google Docs to avoid leaving a paper trail. The number of deaths in Gaza is reported at approximately 80,000 — but 90% of homes have been destroyed. You cannot have 90% of homes destroyed and 80,000 dead. The actual number is unknown because the institutions that would count it have been compromised, defunded, or removed from access. The number we don't know is the number that matters most.

An Urgent Call

Dr. Hussam Abu Safieh is in an underground cell right now. Without sunlight. Having lost 40 kilograms. His body broken. Facing execution. He stayed for his patients. His son was killed at the entrance. The word "terrorist" is what put him there — a word with no legal charge, no required proof, no consequence for the person who applied it, full consequence for the person it was applied to.

He is not alone. There are 95 other medical workers facing execution under the same law. There are hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza whose deaths are not being counted by functioning institutions because those institutions were defunded, defanged, or deleted. There are girls in Minab between seven and twelve years old who were killed by a missile guided by a database last updated in 2016. There are children in the care of an immigration enforcement system whose for-profit operators saw their stock surge 73% when the policies that fill their facilities were announced. There are a million people dead from the quiet gutting of the programs that kept them alive.

None of this is hidden. All of it is in plain sight. The arrangement does not require secrecy. It requires that no single person be responsible for saying it plainly, in one place, as one connected story.

The spiritual crisis is how many people that claim to be good allow so much evil to flourish. That we protect people from accountability simply because we're afraid of demanding it. The doctor has a name. His name is Dr. Hussam Abu Safieh. He stayed for his patients. His son's name was Ibrahim. He was 15 years old. The algorithm flagged him. The database classified him. The law authorized it. The contract enabled it. The word prepared it. Nobody killed him. The machine did. And the machine was built, piece by piece, contract by contract, designation by designation, by people who will never spend a day in an underground cell.

Rehumanization is not a policy proposal. It is a decision — made by each person, in each moment, to refuse the category and see the person. To refuse to look away and ask an honest question. Not what category he belongs to, but ask what he is feeling, and why, and what that means to anyone that calls themselves a human being.

How long will we watch what is being done to others before we consider we may be next?