A dog, a deal, and the death of decency

By James J Devine

In 1973, the humorists at National Lampoon published a now-infamous cover. It featured a photograph of a dog, a revolver held to its head, and the caption: “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.”

It was a brutal, shocking piece of satire designed to lampoon the manipulative desperation of advertising.

It was a joke, albeit a profoundly dark one, because the dog was never in any real danger. The entire premise was a cynical performance.

Fifty-two years later, the Trump administration has sent a “ceasefire proposal” to Hamas that operates on the same principle, but with one grotesque difference: the gun is real, the dog is a population of 2.3 million innocent people, and the punchline is a mass grave.

The so-called “Main Proposal” is not a diplomatic document.

It is an ultimatum written in the blood of Palestinians. It demands the unconditional surrender and disarmament of Hamas—the only force, however flawed, that has any negotiating leverage to stop the bombs—in exchange for vague, conditional, and historically worthless promises from an administration that has already proven it will renege on its word.

To call it a “deal” is an insult to the very concept of negotiation. It is a demand for capitulation wrapped in the cellophane of diplomacy, and as the Israeli analyst Amit Segal noted, it is “Made in the USA” only in the way an iPhone is—designed and owned by American power, but manufactured with Israeli parts.

The parallels to the Lampoon ad are nauseatingly clear.

The innocent dog—the civilian population of Gaza, over 600,000 of whom are now dead, the vast majority women and children—is held hostage.

The threat is explicit: accept our non-negotiable terms, or we pull the trigger. President Trump’s social media post—“This is my last warning, there will not be another one!”—is nothing more than the ad copy for a genocide.

The senior Hamas official’s weary response, “What can they do more than what they are already doing?” underscores the absurdity of the threat.

The trigger has been pulled daily for more than 720 days. The magazine has already been burned, and the dog is already dead.

This is not statecraft; it is a snuff film marketed as policy.

The United States, under the banner of a guaranteed negotiation, is merely providing political cover for Netanyahu’s publicly stated goals: the total “destruction” of Gaza, the perpetuation of Israeli “security control,” and the eradication of Hamas—a goal he himself fueled as part of a strategy to divide Palestinians.

The “amnesty” mentioned in the document is a sick joke offered to a movement that has seen its people slaughtered en masse and its leaders assassinated from afar.

To believe a single word of it requires a willful blindness to the last eleven months of broken ceasefires and shattered promises.

The complicity is absolute.

The United States is not an honest broker; it is the armorer, financier, and cheerleader for a Final Solution to the Palestinian problem.

We supply the bombs, we veto the UN resolutions, and we now offer a “deal” so blatantly one-sided that even a senior Hamas official can see it “looks like it was written by the Israelis.”

This is a coordinated performance, a good-cop-bad-cop routine where the U.S. plays the cop who hands the baton to Israel and looks the other way.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously identified the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. That has not changed.

We must stop this. We must stop supplying the tools for this extermination.

The values we claim to hold—life, liberty, justice—are not compatible with bankrolling the annihilation of a people.

The alternative is to accept that we have become the barbarians we claim to oppose, that our civilization is a veneer over a core of unimaginable brutality.

The National Lampoon cover was a joke about moral bankruptcy. Trump’s proposal is moral bankruptcy itself.

The only acceptable response is to reject the ultimatum, demand a real ceasefire, and end our nation’s shameful, murderous complicity.