Yesterday I happened to read two articles that I disagreed with. The first one, was a little difficult for me. It was written by a Palestinian and it was how they said we shouldn't use the word "terrorist" against the Netanyahu government or the "settlers" illegally pushing West Bank Palestinians off their land.
Settler colonial violence is, of course, real and terrifying, but “terrorism” is the wrong framework for understanding and confronting it, because it was designed to serve imperial designs and make settler violence look like an aberration. In this way, the label of “Israeli terrorism” often misleadingly characterizes settler violence as confined to the Israeli far right, even though it’s the product of a broad Israeli consensus and a systemic feature of Israel’s colonial regime.
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The terrorism framework did not emerge from positive or emancipatory values, but has been exclusively weaponized against oppressed and marginalized peoples in the service of imperial agendas. While in the 1960s, the terrorism framing was used by western imperial interests against anti-colonial struggles (Algeria, South Africa, Vietnam, to name a few), the post 9/11 global “terrorism” narrative shifted to focus on a new “global enemy” — Islamic fundamentalism — and used to justify military occupations and atrocities across the world under the banner of the “War on Terror.” More dangerously, it was used to build a legal arsenal encroaching on people’s rights and freedoms, undermining the rule of law and peoples’ sovereignty under the cover of legality.
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There is a reason why terrorism has no agreed-upon definition under international law. It is a political tool whose meaning has been shaped by those with the power to wield it. A framework built and weaponized by imperial powers against colonized peoples cannot become the tool through which we dismantle colonial violence.
Another danger of embracing the “terrorism” label for settlers is that it exceptionalizes their violence, turning masked settlers who kill Palestinians, burn their homes, and attack their villages into a violent fringe — “bad apples” supposedly detached from an otherwise legitimate Israeli state and Zionist establishment.
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The inconvenient reality is that decades of international impunity are the central reason why the colonial settlers’ movement has reached such levels of unleashed violence today. Calling settlers “terrorists” offers another escape from that accountability: it isolates individual perpetrators while leaving intact the system that arms, protects, and enables them.
I believe the “terrorism” label should not be used for any group, globally. West Bank settler violence is state-backed settler colonial violence. It is part and parcel of a century-long Zionist settler colonial project. Confronting this violence means confronting the institutions, policies, and structures that produce it — not simply the individuals who carry it out. Call it what it is.
Some valid points. But I disagree. Yes, "terrorism" is an amorphous, politically subjective term. But it's also a powerful one. It has penetrated the psyche of Western consciousness. And if it can be thrown back in the faces of those who cynically employed it in the first place, then we should do so. Especially since, while there might not be a genuine, legal definition of "terrorism" there are serviceable definitions of the word:
Concepts of political discourse are hardly models of clarity, but there is general agreement as to what constitutes terrorism. As a point of departure we may take the official United States Code:
“act of terrorism” means an activity that — (A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State; and (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.3
The concept is not precisely delimited. First, the boundary between international terrorism and aggression is not always clear. On this matter, let us give the benefit of the doubt to the United States and its clients: if they reject the charge of aggression in the case of some act of international violence, we will take it to fall under the lesser crime of terrorism. There is also disagreement over the distinction between terrorism and retaliation or legitimate resistance, to which we return.
US sources also provide more succinct definitions of “terrorism.” A US Army manual on countering terrorism defines it as “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.”
And, it requires no stretch of the imagination to see how Israeli behaviour aligns with this definition. I said that the writer had some good, valid points. But there's something to be said for the opposite position and I think there are better uses of anti-genocide people's time than debating the terminology to describe zio-nazi behaviour.
The other article employs Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to attempt to debunk the idea that rising yields in the bond market signify the weakness of the Trump regime's erratic political-economic policies and that these higher yields will put some sort of break on Trump's mismanagement of the world system.
Commentators point to large federal deficits, growing public debt, and the volume of Treasury securities coming onto the market. From this perspective, higher yields are the market’s response to excessive government borrowing, and the Trump administration’s policy amounts to fiscal recklessness. This interpretation rests on an old and misleading conception of financial markets. It treats government and private borrowers as competing for a limited pool of savings, so that larger deficits necessarily drive interest rates upward. But interest rates in a modern monetary economy are not determined in this way. The Federal Reserve (Fed) directly sets the short-term policy rate and strongly influences the entire yield curve through changes in the composition and size of its balance sheet and through expectations about future rates.
The current rise in long-term rates is better understood from this monetary perspective. Inflation remains above the Fed’s 2 percent target, and the energy shock associated with the Iran war has reinforced fears that inflation will persist. These fears are exaggerated. Inflation above 2 percent is not, by itself, evidence of an inflationary crisis, particularly when there is no distributive conflict capable of generating a self-sustaining wage-price spiral. The deeper problem is the Fed’s commitment to an excessively low inflation target.
This goes against the argument of Jack Rasmus (same thing here or here) which is that the bond markets are genuinely worried about the over-extension of the US dollar and that the nation's ability to raise funds without simply printing it is going to limit Trump's ability to continue his wars and for the USA as a whole to maintain its standard of living as a devalued dollar makes imports more expensive.
The US has continued to run massive budget deficits averaging more than $2 trillion a year since 2020. In past decades before 2000, the US used to cover its deficits with economic growth and tax revenues. But growth has slowed sharply since 2020, on average barely 2% per year, and tax cuts for corporations and investors have accelerated. So Sales of US Treasuries have been key to financing the annual $2 trillion plus US budget deficit.
Should foreign buyers of Treasuries continue to buy fewer Treasuries, like China has been doing, or worse, start selling off their Treasuries—how will the US finance its annual $2 trillion and rising budget deficit?
The US will have to either cut spending, raise taxes, or sell more Treasuries to domestic US buyers. But to sell more domestically, it will have to entice US domestic buyers to do so. How? By increasing the interest rate on the Treasuries it will pay them if they buy more.
Which brings us back to the recent events regarding Japan, its Yen, and its increasingly competitive Japan government bond rates that offer interest rates to buyers nearly equivalent to US Treasury bond rates.
Japan is about to sharply reduce its purchases of US Treasuries. That means less global demand for US Treasuries. At the same time, Japan has started selling off some of its $1.1 trillion hoard of Treasuries. That increases the supply of Treasuries globally. Lower demand higher supply both mean falling prices for US Treasuries and, in turn, rising long term US bond interest rates.
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To assist Japan—and discourage it from selling even more US Treasuries—US Treasury Secretary Bessent last month intervened in global currency markets and started buying Yen to assist Japan trying to prop up the value (price) of its Yen. But that’s just the appearance. The real Bessent objective is to assist Japan to prevent it from selling off even more US Treasuries.
In an interesting twist, Bessent didn’t enter the global currency market to buy Yen with dollars. He used the US Treasury’s stock of Euros currency to buy Yen. That may have temporarily helped Japan, but it undermined the value of the Euro and European economies. That did not make the Europeans too happy.
On August 30, 2026 Bessent bragged the US action had stabilized the Yen. But evidence suggests otherwise. The Yen is likely to continue to fall below the benchmark Yen-Dollar exchange of 160 to the $1. When it does, Japan will likely dump (sell) more of its US Treasury holdings in order to buy more of its currency to prop it up. That means Japan, like China, will reduce its holdings of US securities well below the $90 billion it already expended since July. If it’s selling Treasuries it’s certainly not going to buy more. So both Japan’s demand and supply of Treasuries will push up US long term Treasury bond interest rates. US long bond rates are already at 5.3%! They’ll likely go higher now.
That will pull up US mortgage rates. So US consumers can forget about US housing affordability before the US November elections. It’ll get worse, not better. It’s already happening.
Rasmus says more about various countries pulling out of US Treasuries, as well as the enormous financial appetite of the AI debacle. Obviously, the financial markets aren't thinking of MMT, and neither do any Western governments. Whether they did or not is irrelevant. They don't have the well-being of ordinary people at heart. It's "heads they win, tails we lose" as usual.
