Trump and Israel’s Fatal Attraction

While Israel is falling apart, Netanyahu is recklessly swinging for the fences, desperately trying to pull in the US and urban renew the Middle East. He needs to read the back of the Book.

I am utterly convinced that the whole world has little idea how late the hour is right now. This holds especially for my people the Evangelicals, who were specifically charged by Jesus Christ to be sure to stay awake, watch and pray (Mk 13:33), for in the middle of very ordinary-looking times (Mt 24:38), the day of the Lord would come upon the whole world like a snare (Luke 21:35).[1]
 
What I am referring to is a coming together, a fatal attraction, of two phenomena destined to tripwire World War III and the Great Tribulation—Donald Trump and his MAGA following and a very desperate Israel, both of which function like cults, and thus share a lot of common characteristics. While American Christians are consoling themselves that the Supreme Court will throw a contested election to Trump if need be (thus “holding back the darkness!”of course), Israel is falling apart as we speak. The entire Zionist project is in danger of complete internal collapse, and has been for some time now.
 
We are not just talking about the devastating effects a year of continuous war has had on Israel. This collapse has been building for years, as Israeli society has been slowly cracking under the weight of irreconcilable priorities between secularists on the left and increasingly-fanatical religious and settler parties on the right, not that dissimilar to what we see happening in the United States right now.
 
It started to reach a head in early 2023 with a proposed law that would have made it harder to remove a Prime Minister from office while weakening the power of the courts to rein in wholesale settler abuse of West Bank Palestinians. Huge protests rocked the land, and by that summer, the country was on the verge of civil war.
 
The Hamas attack in October was thus not so much a God-send, but a trauma foreknown and allowed by Netanyahu and the ruling government, to desperately and at least temporarily, save the 70+ year project by triggering the one thing they all have in common—their hatred of Muslims and Palestinians, standing in the way of their delusions of grandeur.
 
It was also a desperate attempt by Netanyahu to stay out of jail (another parallel to the US), but also a war that has no plan, nor endgame. Unless of course Israel goes for broke, swings for the fences, and attempts to complete their long-standing dream of occupying the whole region from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates River, a true Hail Mary pass.
 
That of course would entail pulling the US into a full-scale confrontation with Iran, risking a nuclear world war in the process, and finding a way to help Trump get back into power.[2] Where they are going to find the people to settle all that land, no one knows. Settlers are now openly discussing planting Israeli settlements on southern Lebanese land, even as thousands of their own people are still not returned to northern Israel, and the Israeli army has hardly taken a village in their push into Lebanon. They are living in a fantasy world every bit as much as Hitler drawing up grandiose building plans as Berlin is burning.

To say this is a volatile situation is putting it mildly, but everything in Netanyahu’s actions scream that he’s trying to escalate this situation by provoking as many neighbors as possible, and turn this into regional war. It’s a reckless move that could kill a lot of US service personnel before the election, ruining Harris’ election bid. I do not think he will succeed right now, but at some point he will. Donald Trump’s love for violent fantasies and impatience in dealing with complex situations, will move him to just eliminate entire populations of people who stand in the way of entitled elites like him (Dan 8:24).
 
This attempt at escalation explains Netanyahu’s reckless murder of a thousand Lebanese by exploding pagers, his multiple assassinations of high-ranking Axis of Resistance leaders, his bombing of densely-populated areas of Beirut, the displacement of 1.2 million Lebanese refugees and the like. All this frenetic aggression only illustrates his desperation.

Israel Is Falling Apart

It is common in political analysis, especially by partisans on either side, to “talk up” how much their side is winning. Therefore, you might be inclined to consider my words above to be the usual sensationalism, wishful thinking or exaggeration. Not that I really take sides, but critics of Israel persistently suffer wild accusations that all they want to do is “see Israel destroyed,” because they “hate all the Jews,” etc.
 
But this time it’s objectively true. Israel’s economy has shrunk 20% by conservative estimates since October 7. Bankruptcies have increased 75%—46,000 small businesses so far, with a possibility of reaching 60,000 by the end of the year. Tourism is at a virtual standstill. Most of their army are reservists, and being taken from their jobs for a year has really hampered their economy. Intel Corporation has reneged on plans to invest $25 billion in new manufacturing there, undermining Israel’s “start-up nation” plans. Because Netanyahu has chosen to whip up his population yet again into a frenzy of anti-Arab hatred, no one wants to invest in a country where their plant might get blown up.
 
While the Hamas attack a year ago looked like a reckless suicide mission, it’s aim has worked. They made a strategic gamble with October 7, knowing that Israel would over-react, and knowing it would take a heavy toll on the Gazan people. But the astronomic death toll, especially compared to past Israeli invasions, would be so excessive as to finally tip the scales of world public opinion in their direction. Israel’s predictable “go beserk” response has united the Arab world more than anything possibly could have. Last June, the 22-member Arab League declared they were no longer designating Hezbollah a terrorist group.
 
The Israeli military is exhausted. They have an immediate need for 10,000 troops they simply don’t have. The vast majority of their military are conscripts. They are not well-trained, nor sold on the Prime Minister’s leadership.[3] The wars they are used to are short ones, heavy on violence and bombing, but not on-the-ground confrontations.
 
Hamas is still operational, and Hezbollah is prepared for a fight that they won in 2006. A home-grown defense militia borne of the Israeli invasion and occupation of 1982, Hezbollah today has many more troops, battle-hardened from fighting in Syria, and a much bigger and more lethal arsenal than they had 18 years ago.
 
Except for Israel’s obvious skill at pulverizing everything that moves, courtesy of the US taxpayer, her “success” in the war of 2024 is yet more propaganda phantasmagoria. In Lebanon, they are almost sure to suffer resounding defeat with a ground invasion that will only enrage them to lash back with increased bombing of civilians in Beirut and elsewhere. Now, they’re picking a fight with the Russians by bombing their bases in Syria. Obviously, they’re doing all they can to escalate tensions and drag the US into a possible world war.
 
Worst of all, 550,000 Israelis have fled the country for good, with a possibility of that increasing to two million before long! That in a nation of just 7 million Jews! Even worse yet, this is the cream of Israeli society—their executives, scientists, academics, doctors, professionals—the top tier of people who keep the society afloat. They’ve just had it with a nation run by religious fanatics with little concern with the practical affairs of a modern democratic state. With the demographics favoring the religious and their large families, the trend is not in their favor anyhow.
 
The point is, from the interests of Evangelicals in the fate of Israel, is not that all this is a disaster, but that the prophecies predicted all this would happen. The Pharisee philosophy is built upon strategic deception of the world to con its way to world domination. This is exactly why God said He was going to bring them back to the land, not as a reward for centuries of persecution as they tell themselves, but so that He might expose the closest thing Jesus had as a nemesis to the world for being the fraud it’s turning out to be (Zech 13:3-5).

Israel As The Cat’s Paw of European Colonialism

Israel has never been “up front” and honest with the world about their intentions with “the Zionist project.” From the beginning, they have pursued a covert plan of territorial expansion, seemingly without limits.
 
Pretending to abide by agreements with the United Nations, the Oslo Process and the like has produced an endless stream of suspicion from their victims, which has been regularly dismissed as due to “inherent anti-Semitism” in the world, and not their own devious behavior patterns and lack of sincerity. It is a cynical tactic born partly of their attitude towards the Gentiles,[4] and partly as a cynical tactic of divide and conquer by brow-beating and moral shaming your rivals, playing them off against one another, and other ways of keeping the targets off-balance and fighting each other.
 
To be fair to the Zionists though, this was not just their idea alone. England saw Jewish aspirations for a homeland as an opportunity to use them as their “cat’s paw” in the region, a useful tool to protect their own interests, such as their trade route to India, access to oil (after 1900), and fending off European rivals.[5]
 
England had long been meddling in what they once called “Mesopotamia,” and sought to find a way to break up the Ottoman Empire which had a large Arab population under its umbrella. During World War I, they plotted a way to secure the Palestinian Mandate to protect their access to the Suez, by dividing up the map into areas of British and French influence.
 
Known as the Sykes-Picot agreement, Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot literally carved up the Middle East with straight edges and pencils in a way that deliberately violated any consideration of long-standing ethnic identities and rivalries. Ignoring the Arab world’s desire for democracy and self-determination, it guaranteed that the resulting nations would be doomed to “shotgun marriages” and endless quarrels no one wanted.
 
Since the Zionist movement at the time identified itself as European, the British were happy to put a Jewish Zionist, Herbert Samuel in charge of the first years of the British Mandate, who invariably ruled in favor of recently-immigrated Jews and over the grievances of the local Arab population. In spite of this favoritism, Jewish terrorist organizations still drove the British out in 1948, at which point the Jews murdered thousands of Arabs, stole their properties, and created 750,000 refugees. They have been systematically dispossessing the Palestinians and playing off elements of the Arab world ever since, especially since the rise of the Likud Party in 1977.

The Secret Plan All Along—Greater Israel

Thus, Israel’s problem since they declared their state in 1948, has been at least three-fold:
 
One, they want a purely Jewish ethno state and don’t want to incorporate the native populations into a modern multi-ethnic democracy. Even Arab citizens there are treated to double standards, contempt and daily death threats now.[6]
 
Two, they want to be thought of as a Western-style democracy, “an outpost of civilization in a sea of autocratic darkness” (a complete lie), but it’s been a democracy for Jews only, and a democracy that, like here in the US, has been ready to collapse into a civil war in recent years. Palestinians live under military and not civil law, rarely get justice, and are subjugated to daily, multiple rituals of humiliation. The most egregious crimes committed against them go unpunished, while they are often falsely-accused, railroaded, thrown into prison and subjected to torture, even children.
 
Resentment for all this, Israelis pretend, is neither legitimate, nor understandable. Rather, they justify this as blind, inherent Jew-hatred in Muslims, and use this as an excuse against a one-state democratic solution. Under Netanyahu, the two-state solution has also been systematically undermined ever since Oslo, to the point that the man even bragged during a recent election campaign that he managed to undermine a peace deal and a Palestinian state for 16 years, a rare honest confession. Those observers paying attention around the world, and especially in the Middle East were not surprised. He also seemed to love to intentionally embarrass and humiliate American officials as he is doing now.
 
Their third problem is that Israeli elite planners from their beginning, have been seeking a “Jewish state” that runs from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. This they have done by shamelessly leaning on God’s promise to Abram and his descendants about the extent of their Promised Land inheritance (Gen 15:18), despite the fact that so many of these leaders have been outright atheists.[7] Neither does it account for their loss of authority to do so ever since their rejection of their Messiah (Mt 23:37-39).[8]
 
If you look at a map, the Euphrates River runs through the middle of Iraq and up as high as parts of Turkey![9]

That means that the Israeli plan for “Ersatz (Greater) Israel” means ultimate expansion to these borders described in Genesis 15:18 in God’s promise to Abram regarding his descendants’ ultimate heritage. It was fulfilled only once before during the reigns of David and Solomon, and not again until the reign of the Messiah.[10]
 
This Israelis are now admitting to, after decades of hurling invectives at any and all who suspected such. It is an awareness breaking through to the world while Evangelicals are being told by CBN and other Christian media to go back to sleep. Francesca Albanese for instance, Italian law professor and UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has acknowledged such in a recent interview.

That shoulder patch above is just one more example of Israel’s increasingly-chauvinist boasts as she “goes for broke.” This is why Arab nations of the Middle East have been so perennially suspicious of everything Israel has ever done. Israel has been pursuing a clandestine, ever-evolving plan to ultimately grab all that land, a reality these nations are much more aware of, since they pay attention to Israel day-by-day. Unlike here in America where Israel’s hasbara (propaganda) machine carefully controls the news coverage, the narrative, the boundaries of discussion and the public’s consciousness.

The UN Speech

Netanyahu’s speech at the UN on September 27, 2024 was a wonder of hutzpah to behold, even for his low bar. At the start of that spectacle, about half the General Assembly delegates walked out. By the end, Netanyahu was hurling insults at them like, the UN’s “a house of darkness,” “an anti-Israel flat-earth society,” and “a swamp of anti-Semitic bile.” With style like that, why he didn’t he just show up in an army uniform with a holstered gun on his belt?
 
Nothing like insulting your hosts, especially after the killing extravaganza you’ve put on the past year. But the most amazing part of it was his setting before them a blessing and a curse, as if he were God when the Israelites were about to pass over the Jordan (Deut 11:26). In one hand he held up a map of a blackened-out Iran-Iraq-Syria, in the other green (i.e., approved) nations that would be part of an Israeli Belt and Road trade initiative.
 
Well, at least he’s frank and unapologetic about his supremacist entitlement to just wipe entire populations off the map while proposing massive new “deals” with the wealthy elites ruling over these Arab populations. All this while his own little country is falling apart! To be fair, he’s apparently got the US, Europe, India and the Saudis on board with the idea.[11] But I’m sure the rest of the world is currently not interested in Israel, that psychopathic population, a land of endless moral abominations and degradations (Rev 11:8), to remake the economic map of the world.

The Past Year—Quite A Crime Spree

The October 7 attack, which I and so many others have tried to show, was an attack Netanyahu and the Israeli security community under him were fully aware was coming and wanted to happen.  We also learned with time, that perhaps half the 1200 Israeli casualties were victims of friendly fire by their own government forces operating under the ultra-collectivist[12] Hannibal Directive.
 
We also learned that almost all the lurid stories of rapes, pregnant women being ripped open, children being raped in front of their parents’ eyes, burned in ovens, etc., were part of a cynical, premeditated propaganda operation to whip up hysteria and world sympathy to continue their campaign of painting all their targets as evil beasts worthy of destruction.[13] In America we saw, as usual, the predictable ritual of demanding that we “stand behind our ally Israel” (i.e., give them a blank check of money and bombs to exact their lust for vengeance), and various other ways to genuflect before the “world’s aristocrats.” This apparently is a source of great mirth to people like Netanyahu and kabuki theater for the Israeli public in general. Making the whole world suffer for centuries of “Jew-hatred,” both real and imagined, is “permissible” in Talmudism.
 
We watched as the Israeli government announced intentional war crimes in their response to October 7. They announced the cutting off of all water, food, power, electricity, internet, etc. before a ground invasion, all clear war crimes and acts of genocide according to international laws that the Zionist lobby more than any other, supported in the wake of World War II.  They also began “talking up” a narrative that all Palestinians (and lately, Arabs in general) are animals[14] to justify such measures.
 
We also found out that almost immediately, Hamas had an offer for a prisoner swap on the table to prevent any escalation on Israel’s part. We watched as huge demonstrations by the Israeli public, led by families of the hostages have been ignored by their pretext-politics-soaked[15] government.[16]
 
We watched to see what the Zionist sense of proportionality would be (Mt 23:24), as if we needed to know, given our past experience with these cynical, periodic “beat downs.” Israel dropped 500 to 2000-pound bombs on residences, hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, schools, universities, businesses and markets in a breathtaking, dusty, pulverizing display of blood lust. When protests around the world, led by young Jews with the slogan, “Not in our name!” erupted, Israel responded by trying to get an “anti-Semitism” law passed in Congress that would imprison people for criticizing their policies! This is how desperate they’ve become to suppress all criticism and keep their “Zionist project” alive.
 
Palestinian casualties have now topped 41,000 at a bare minimum, given that the usual process to account for bodies is no longer possible. An American doctor returning from Gaza recently, said that there wasn’t a day in which he didn’t see children brought in, shot in the head, deliberately targeted by snipers. Iran, in contrast, in its two bombing attacks, limited them to Israeli military installations.
 
All this was done in the name of “Israel’s right to self-defense,” and a long list of other bromides and talking points, carefully designed to manipulate public opinion and perception around the world. We’ve seen Israel block the distribution of aid to all the displaced refugees they’ve created, we’ve seen Israel assassinate even top people in other countries and on their own soil, also war crimes and incredibly provocative. And just recently we’ve seen the Israeli government slammed by their own people for (predictably) turning the one-year anniversary of October 7 into a virtual religious ritual, similar to their gaslighting us every year on September 11.

MAGA America’s Comeuppance

The thing I keep asking in light of all the excuses American Christians especially, make for Israel is, “Is this the way Jesus Christ would restore the nation? With all this bloodshed of innocent people? In view of all these outsized ambitions of late, perhaps Mr. Netanyahu should read the back of the Book people like him love to be identified with, yet hate to read, and certainly hate its message. It foretells of a scenario wherein Israel ends up surrounded by a collection of enemies so vast as to be described as “a dark cloud covering the land.”
 
Oh heck, I’ll just let it speak for itself:

² A day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains: a great people and a strong; there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations.
³ A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
-Joel 2:2-3

Yes, that’s Armageddon. You can tell by its apocalyptic context (2:30,31). A “great people and a strong” is going to be the coalition of nations that array themselves against Israel for their own “final solution” (Eze 38, 39). And I can assure you, they won’t be surrounded while they’re occupying all that land to the Euphrates, even with the help of the Antichrist and US soldiers protecting them.

For all their devotion to Israel more than Jesus Christ, MAGA Americans, along with many brainwashed-to-the-end Evangelicals, will get caught in the middle of this Middle East maelstrom, conscripted or manipulated into the US military, to protect our “dear ally” at all costs (Rev 11:2). This is how cults work, and how they, like birds of a feather, are attracted to one another. And though the US and Israel “win” it (Eze 39:2), there will still be some 30 million enemies left to overrun the land (Rev 9:16; Zech 14:2), because God is not mocked (Psa 2:1-6).

Update: October 14, 2024

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports from leaks within high levels of the Israeli military, that the radical settlers who control Netanyahu’s coalition have given up on getting the hostages released, and are focused on settling northern Gaza with Israeli Jews. Two weeks ago, the government starting cutting off all food and water and are planning on pushing homeless Gazans toward the sea as winter approaches.

I don’t have access to a Haaretz subscription, but Cenk Uygur explains so eloquently:

Notes:

[1] And by the “Day of the Lord,” I mean that extended time period of global turmoil that leads up to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, not just that latter event itself.
[2] Two-thirds of the Israeli public including Netanyahu want him in there, and not Kamala Harris. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/opinion/netanyahu-trump-harris.html
[3] 75% of the Israeli public want Netanyahu out of politics after this war is over.
[4] Talmudic and Kabbalistic philosophy argue that since the Jews are the Chosen, the Gentiles are inherently jealous and resentful of the Jew, that such “anti-Semitism” is ineradicable and indeed, built right into their genes. https://donclasenseriousguy.com/racism-the-evil-that-just-wont-die-part-2/#:~:text=It%20also%20in,being%20so%20special. and never due to their own.
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_foreign_policy_in_the_Middle_East#:~:text=British%20foreign%20policy%20in%20the%20Middle%20East%20has,enforcing%20Britain%27s%20naval%20role%20in%20the%20Mediterranean.
[6] A textbook case of Benjamin Netanyahu stirring up anti-Arab rage was seen in 2014 with his exploitation of the kidnapping of three Israeli teens, serving as a pretext to another beat down of Gaza. In spite of centuries of living in relative peace with Arabs and Islamic states (even more so than Christian states), today’s Zionists insist on pushing the slander that all Muslims are terrorists and worthy of death. https://donclasenseriousguy.com/blumenthal-adds-to-teen-kidnapping-update/
[7] Even “the religious” don’t revere the authority of the Scriptures, but rather, the supposed authority of the rabbinic commentaries, based on their cherry-picking the Scriptures as they pleased. In Jewish circles, championing the Scriptures as authoritative is a small group known as the Karaites.
[8] Even those Zionists who have some degree of religious convictions subscribe to Phariseeism, which explicitly sought to replace the Biblical revelation with their own laws and eventually cosmology in the Kabbalah.
[9] Many Israeli maps of “Greater Israel” are often too ambitious. The reference to “the river of Egypt” promised to Abram’s descendants in Genesis 15:18 is usually interpreted as the Wadi Al-Arish, a brook just up the Mediterranean above the Nile, not the Nile itself. https://www.bibleref.com/Genesis/15/Genesis-15-18.html#:~:text=In%20defining%20this%20Promised%20Land,be%20the%20great%20Euphrates%20River.
[10] This promise was previously fulfilled for only a short period of time during the reigns of David and Solomon.
[11] To be fair, the first mention of this idea to counter China’s popular network was by the United States on September 9, 2023. Dubbed IMEC, the India – Middle East – Europe Economic Corridor, it’s still an Israeli initiative as best I can guess, simply because so much of the Western world’s mind has been colonized by the Pharisees than by the mind of Christ. It will cater to the richest people in those parts of the world while their working populations languish in neo-feudalistic loss of input into anything. The initiative is apparently stalled because it depends upon an agreement between the Saudis and the Israelis over the fate of the Palestinians. Not that the Saudis care at all about the Palestinians, but the Saudis know the Zionists’ plan for land expansion includes plans to colonize Mecca and Medina. I kid you not.
[12] What I mean by ultra-collectivist is that when Jewish elites decide that one of theirs must die for the survival of the nation as a whole, that victim has no say in the matter, and is usually unaware that such a decision was made against them. Contrast that with the American military doctrine of leaving no wounded on the battle field.
[13] ZAKA appears to be the Israeli version of the “White Helmets” civil defense/first responder ruse that was caught repeatedly fighting with pro-Western rebel groups trying to topple Assad in Syria. https://mronline.org/2020/12/24/the-white-helmets-fraud-in-syria/
[14] What fundamentalist Phariseeism teaches about all Gentiles anyway.
[15] “Pretext politics” is the term I use to describe a process the Israelis have perfected more than anyone else, the art of creating a hidden pretext (false flag attacks, “intelligence failures,” allowing events to happen, etc.), to serve as a pretext for their agenda of aggression.
[16] Since a lot of the hostages were from more liberal sectors of Israeli society, there is suspicion—there it is again—that the government doesn’t really value them that much anyway. Sort of like how Trump wants to ignore the needs of blue states during natural disasters “because they didn’t vote for me.”
[17] It was generally a story not much covered in American media, since they give so much deference (or are controlled by) Israel’s mesmerizing grip on this country. News from Israel or the rest of the world for that matter, is largely ignored by mainstream media here unless it’s good or flattering to the preferred narrative by whatever powers-that-be. Americans are indeed, almost subjected to a cult-like, boxed in effect wherein they are manipulated to be distracted by or obsessed with, the divisive alternatives that are presented to us.
[18] Iran in contrast, only targeted, and did hit, Israeli military facilities. They had the same measured response to Trump’s execution of Solemani—some rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq. Yet it’s Iran who is always conveniently painted by Zionist slander as evil incarnate.
[19] This argument was made by Israel and its “most moral army in the world,” dragging international standards down into an even deeper “shithole.”
[20] This more aggressive, ambitious Zionism was largely formulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky during World War II (it actually goes back to Moses Hess in the 19^th Century https://donclasenseriousguy.com/moses-hess-and-the-link-between-bolshevism-and-zionism/). Benzion, Netanyahu’s father, was a “big fan” of Jabotinsky, but the latter’s vision was not as much in vogue until the ascendancy to power of the Likud Party in 1977. They have largely dominated Israeli politics ever since, and have been busy training American Christians to sign off on their fanatical agenda.
[21] From p. 174 of my book, American Babylon, American Antichrist”: “As the chairman of the Likud and political opposition leader to Rabin, Netanyahu knew of the plot to assassinate Rabin and did nothing to stop it. Moreover, he had taken part in demonstrations calling for the death of her husband. The slain Prime Minister’s wife said of Bibi: ‘Netanyahu was the one who supplied the inspiration to the group of subversives planning the execution, and to the assassin himself.’”
[22] The word “apocalypse” is Greek for “revelation” and is where we get the name for the book of Revelation. It refers to the revealing of Jesus Christ in His glorious, exalted state now as given to the Apostle John while exiled on Patmos. It does not refer to some kind of end-of-age social upheaval, although the rest of the book does seem to describe such. Thus, in popular consciousness, “apocalypse” has taken on the latter identity, and I’m so using it here.
[23] From p. 174 of my book, American Babylon, American Antichrist”: “As the chairman of the Likud and political opposition leader to Rabin, Netanyahu knew of the plot to assassinate Rabin and did nothing to stop it. Moreover, he had taken part in demonstrations calling for the death of her husband. The slain Prime Minister’s wife said of Bibi: “Netanyahu was the one who supplied the inspiration to the group of subversives planning the execution, and to the assassin himself.”