Since 2016, and especially since the notorious 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, neo-Nazi and extreme-right groups have sought with some success to raise funds in cryptocurrency. These Internet-based forms of money are not backed by national governments, and often come with sophisticated privacy measures, which make them ideal for groups that want to avoid regulation, or that have been banned by credit-card companies and services such as PayPal. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Varsha Koduvayur, and Samuel Hodgson explain the problem:

Some white-supremacist groups accept cryptocurrency donations to support content they produce, such as video streams, podcasts, and radio shows. In these cases, cryptocurrency can help protect the identities of both the content producers and the viewers. . . . In addition to protecting the privacy of donors, cryptocurrency frequently lies beyond the grasp of courts that have imposed financial penalties on extremists. For example, the neo-Nazi publication the Daily Stormer accepts cryptocurrency donations allegedly in part to avoid paying off millions of dollars in civil judgments against its publisher, Andrew Anglin.

Nick Fuentes is the host of America First, an influential podcast that spreads core tenets of the modern white nationalist movement. Fuentes is also a leader of the white-nationalist and anti-Semitic group Groyper Army. . . . He also received a bitcoin donation worth approximately $250,000 in December 2020 from a far-right French donor who was eventually identified as Laurent Bachelier.

Other groups in the white supremacist ecosystem who solicit cryptocurrency donations include The Right Stuff (TRS), a neo-Nazi media network founded and run by Michael “Enoch” Peinovich, who rose to prominence for creating the anti-Semitic “(((echo)))” [symbol], which other far-right figures began to use on social-media platforms to [highlight] Jewish names. TRS hosts the shows Fash the Nation and The Daily Shoah, which promote Holocaust denialism and white supremacy. TRS’s website allows listeners to donate cryptocurrency and accepts Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, and Ethereum.

Gartenstein-Ross, Koduvayur, and Hodgson go on to argue that the U.S. government can and should take various concrete steps to undermine the usefulness of cryptocurrencies for these groups.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.