It is no coincidence that Jennifer Crumbley was found guilty on four counts of “involuntary manslaughter” in Pontiac, Michigan, for the shooting deaths of four students attributed to her son Ethan Crumbley at the very moment that Israel launched into high gear with its planned extermination of the occupants of Gaza and Rafah before the eyes of the world.

The judicial system of the United States has been completely militarized, whether through the outsourcing of its functions to military/security contractors, the promotion of judges by corporate interests invested in private prisons, the normalization of the “tough on crime” criminalization of daily life for ordinary citizens, or the increasing use of classified directives and other forms of secret governance intended to render the justice system as a weapon for the rich and powerful working through private contractors posing as government. 

This process has gone on for a long time, but we have reached a critical point in that for the first time a parent has been convicted for the violent actions of his or her child. This is an American form of collective punishment modeled on Israeli precedents and has no basis in American law and is explicitly in violation of the Constitution. 

This ruling follows directly the sentencing of whistleblower Joshua Schulte to jail for forty years for playing a minor role in the revelation of state crimes by the United States military and intelligence and the death by torture of Kenneth Smith with full state approval in Alabama. 

Together, these three miscarriages of justice are clear indications of the systematic weaponization of the judicial branch in blatant violation of constitutional guarantees. 

These are precedents that will be used to justify the normalization of punishment of opponents of state crimes, torture as accepted government practice, and the use of collective punishment against families and communities. 

The Oakland County, Michigan, Prosecutor Karen McDonald collaborated directly with the corporate media to create an impression among the public that somehow this school shooting was the fault of the parents, of the family as a whole. That is to say that the entire trial was a show trial aimed at altering public perceptions about the role of the police and the court system in society. 

In addition, the trial serves to make it seem as if the promotion of gun culture among Americans by corporations, the power of privatized police and military interests to promote violent and confrontational thinking among the population, and the efforts of consulting firms and other secretive organizations to create conflicts between citizens so as to keep them from unifying in opposition to the rich, were not issues at all. All blame, we are told, can be placed at the feet of certain bad apples, specifically families, for what is wrong in society. 

Although it is entirely possible that the entire incident was created for the sake of the trial, let us assume for the moment that Ethan’s parents did bring him into the cult of gun violence and that this encouraged him to carry out an act of horrific violence. 

The unprecedented decision to file criminal charges against the parents of an under-age school shooter was made instead of filing criminal charges against corporate media for encouraging violence and the use of guns, against the manufacturers of guns who bribe and extort to promote a paranoid culture that helps them to sell their goods, against the social media and search engines designed to target and encourage xenophobic and narcissistic thinking among citizens to keep them from coming together in opposition to the rule of the billionaires, or against the private intelligence contractors who employ Department of Homeland Security budgets to carry out false flag school shootings to sow disorder and confusion in American society. 

We must restore the rule of law and take back the judicial branch so that it is accountable to the citizens in accordance with the Constitution, and not a tool of the rich and powerful who work through various security subcontractors to subvert its function. 

We cannot allow this dangerous concept of collective punishment being developed in Gaza to be surreptitiously imported into the United States.

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