Trump tried to calm the waters, announcing that Nikki Haley and Mike “Kansas” Pompeo wouldn’t be returning to his team. Smart move, Haley and Kansas, with their cheerleading forever wars and regime change, warmongers and globalist puppets, embody the very swamp Trump claims to drain. But here’s the twist: sitting right beside Trump, grinning like the Cheshire cat, is Peter Thiel, a figure far more insidious than Haley or Pompeo ever were.
Thiel isn’t just another billionaire with influence; he’s a Zionist hawk cloaked in Silicon Valley’s libertarian veneer. For years, his empire, particularly Palantir, has been at the forefront of merging Silicon Valley’s tech prowess with the national security state, feeding both U.S. and Israeli intelligence networks with data-mining capabilities that would make Orwell blush. This isn’t a recent development either, Palantir was designed from its inception as a tool to empower state surveillance, a vision that has seamlessly aligned with the Zionist agenda. In Israel, Thiel’s technology has been used to surveil Palestinian populations, enforcing a brutal occupation under the guise of “security.”
And Thiel’s influence doesn’t stop there. He has deep roots in the U.S. military-industrial complex, aligning closely with the CIA through his early investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. From the beginning, Palantir was woven into the fabric of America’s intelligence infrastructure, sold as a “defense” tool, while it quietly expanded a surveillance apparatus across the world, from the Occupied Territories to inner cities in the United States. The Zionist vision of control and surveillance has found its ultimate tool in Thiel’s empire – a Trojan horse that’s eroding civil liberties under the radar.
Then there’s the paradox – Thiel, publicly a critic of “wokeism,” has quietly funneled money into (woke) initiatives that stir cultural war within the U.S. It’s an ancient imperial strategy: keep the masses distracted with ideological battles while the real agenda, bolstering Israel’s interests and consolidating a digital surveillance state marches on unopposed. By funding divisive causes and watching America tear itself apart, Thiel isn’t just hedging his bets, he’s ensuring that the spotlight never falls on his own agenda.
For Trump to truly align with the idea of American sovereignty, distancing himself from Thiel isn’t a suggestion but a necessity. Thiel doesn’t represent a populist, patriotic agenda; he represents the apex of corporate, Zionist interests, a technocratic elite intent on tightening its grip over policy and control. If Haley and Pompeo were symbols of the neoconservative swamp, Thiel is the lurking shadow, the hidden hand of a corporate-Zionist cabal with a vested interest in manipulating America’s course.
Trump, this is much more than merely draining the swamp, it’s about draining the Zionist infiltration embedded within Silicon Valley and the intelligence community. The art of the deal this time around means ensuring the U.S. doesn’t remain a puppet of Silicon Valley’s Zionist ambitions. If you’re serious about reclaiming sovereignty, you’ll keep Thiel at arm’s length, not in the seat beside you.
Well, it’s over…or is it? Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States backed by a GOP controlled Senate and possibly even a majority in the House of Representatives. And one should not discount the advantage derived from having a largely conservative Supreme Court, but much depends on who Trump appoints to key cabinet positions, a weakness in the first Trump presidency as he tended to select ideologues rather than candidates with relevant knowledge or experience. One hopes, for example, that neither the usual claque of neocons nor establishment characters like Mike Pompeo or Tom Cotton, who have been mentioned as possible candidates for Secretary of Defense, will appear on anyone’s list for high office.
During the lead-up to the presidential campaign, Trump sometimes referred to himself as the most popular politician in Israel, including a conceit that if he were able to run for office in that country he would be able to get elected to the highest offices without any problem. That was, at least in Donald’s mind, an expression of gratitude for how he had done so much for Israel in 2016-2020, including moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, accepting the annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, providing political cover for Israeli actions, and a declaration that the US would not do anything to interfere with military and police actions connected to Israeli settlement expansion on the nominally Palestinian West Bank. Israel also appreciated Trump’s appointment of his lawyer David Friedman as US Ambassador. Friedman proved to be a full time apologist for Israel, not representing or defending American interests. In the recent presidential campaign, Trump spoke frequently to Jewish Republican groups and declared himself to be Israel’s best friend and supporter among US politicians.
The Israeli media has also reported that the present Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu much preferred Trump over Kamala Harris, possibly because the PM has developed what is reported to be a close personal relationship with the Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has apparently served often as a conduit to Donald. Netanyahu in fact was the first foreign head of state to telephone personally to congratulate Trump on his repeat victory at 2 a.m. on Wednesday. Netanyahu declared that Trump’s win was “historic” and said it “offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America. This is a huge victory!”
It is generally believed that Netanyahu also apparently harbors some deep suspicion of the Democratic Party in spite of the Biden Administrations generosity in arms and cash transfers, presumably in part because the Democrats harbor a small but active progressive wing which has been vocal about blocking arms sales to Israel due to its genocide of the Palestinians. The Republicans have no such tendencies apart from a persistent Tom Massie in the House and Rand Paul occasionally saying the right thing from the Senate. And key Republicans like current House speaker Mike Johnson are so in bed with Israel and all its works that he should perhaps consider moving there permanently as the average American gets nothing from the expensive and exceedingly bloody relationship apart from opprobrium from nearly the entire world for complicity in the extermination of the Palestinians. In other words, if one is expecting a return to sanity over what is going on in the Middle East, don’t expect it to come from Donald Trump.
And Netanyahu should be very pleased with the Trump victory for one other important reason, which is how he will be able to deal with an American president. The Wall Street Journal is already reporting from Israeli sources that Netanyahu is definitely expecting a “freer hand” from the new administration to do whatever he wants politically and militarily. Trump’s ego and his personal and spontaneous manner of governing is exactly the kind of relationship Bibi feels most comfortable dealing with. Netanyahu believes he can manipulate Trump and cultivate his personal relationship with the president to include dealing with him directly without worrying about any other players. Netanyahu will be in position to personally flatter, mollify, or confuse Trump even if the president were to surprisingly decide that it would be better if Israel backed off on its aggression. Netanyahu and his allies in the US Congress will be united in convincing Trump that this would be a bad idea.
Bearing in mind that Joe Biden will continue to be president for the next two months and he has demonstrated an infinite capacity to screw things up through his clueless proxies Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin plus the comic interlude provided by State Department spokesman Matt Miller, who cracked a joke and laughed about the clearly demonstrated Israeli attempt to starve the Gazans to death. But possible Biden missteps notwithstanding, Israel should be on balance very pleased with the election result. Trump is, of course, fully supportive of the slaughter of the Palestinians and is quite willing to deal similarly with the Iranians if they should “spill one drop of American blood” by “spilling gallons of theirs.” His advice to the Israeli government has been that they should “finish the job” on dealing with the Pals not for either humane or political reasons but rather because Israel is getting a bad reputation for its openly espoused massacring of civilians, including in excess of 13,000 children. In a phone call with Netanyahu in October, Trump praised escalation of Israeli military actions in Lebanon. Senator Lindsay Graham, who was on the call, described how “He didn’t tell him what to do militarily, but he expressed that he was impressed by the pagers [and] he expressed his awe for their military operations and what they have done. He told them, do what you have to do to defend yourself.”
Trump is also appreciative of the millions of dollars that went his way during the presidential campaign from Israel’s best friends in the US. The reported $100 million that came from a single donor, casino billionaire Israeli Miriam Adelson, was allegedly in exchange for a Trump agreement to permit Israel’s annexation of what remains of the Palestinian West Bank. The multi-ethnic Arab country called Palestine in 1948 would thereby become the Jewish state of Israel de jure as well as de facto. And the expansion and warmaking with Israel’s neighbors as Netanyahu seeks to establish his country’s military dominance over the entire region will go on, with US garrisons illegally based in Syria and Iraq playing supporting roles. Trump could have removed them as well as carrying out a withdrawal from Afghanistan when he was last in office, but for reasons unknown chose not to, possibly due to pressure from the Israelis.
In short, based on the record in 2016-2020 and recent campaign rhetoric, there is no possibility that President Trump will put any pressure on Israel to cease and desist from what it has been doing in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. This is potentially bad news for the Palestinians and Lebanese but it also is not welcomed by the likely majority of Americans who now oppose arming and funding Israeli genocide. It comes on top of Trump’s frequent denunciation of “useless wars” though he most often cites Ukraine in that context, promising to end that conflict “in one day” by virtue of his sheer star power, personal intervention and diplomacy. One hopes that is true, and, of course, Kiev has no powerful domestic lobby apart from the arms industry to object and continue to want to feed the fighting, so it is possible that Russia-Ukraine is actually moving towards some kind of end. Maybe if that fighting ends and sets a good example, someone in Washington will wake up and seek the same type of agreement to calm the Middle East.
On Saturday, an Israeli force of some 100 aircraft attacked Iran from a stand-off position in Iraq, some 70 kilometres outside the Iranian border.
A Wall Street Journal author, Walter Russell Meade, Distinguished Fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote: “Israeli warplanes didn’t only cripple Iran’s air-defence systems and inflict painful blows on its missile-producing facilities. They also sent a message that Israel knows where Tehran’s strategic vulnerabilities are, and it can destroy them any time it wants”.
Russell Mead adduces from this reading his key point: “Military forces that have access to American military technology and intelligence-gathering capabilities can wipe the floor with militaries that rely on Moscow … American technology is the gold standard in the world of defence – even more so for a country such as Israel that has significant intelligence and technological capabilities”.
The western ‘war of imagined, created reality’ thus reaches out beyond Ukraine – to arrive in Iran.
The Narrative – U.S. tech and its Intel as ‘invincible – must be maintained. To heck with the facts. There is too much at stake to forsake it for truthfulness.
A more sober and experienced observer however, notes after four days examination, that, succinctly put:
“The IAF strikes seem to have produced minimal results; it appears however that covert operatives within Iran achieved several [inconsequential] drone hits. The Israelis launched a lot of missiles [some 56] – all from maximum stand-off distance. Iran put up a LOT of air defence missiles. There are no firm reports, nor video evidence (so far) of big ballistic missile strikes on any significant Iranian targets. The Iranians say they intercepted most of the attacking missiles, but admit some got through”.
As usual, the ‘imaginary war narrative’ being broadcast is completely detached from that which can be observed from ground imagery. Russell Meade effectively was demanding the pretence that ‘we not notice’ that Israel’s attack failed – that it did not cripple air defences, nor did it devastate any significant target.
[ . . . ]
So how can we make sense of social change when consequential shifts often arise from chaos? Whilst we search for order and patterns, we perhaps spend less time focused on an obvious but consequential truth:
Unexpected, unexplained events matter. In other words, they have a quality and meaning.
One such event seemingly happened last Saturday, when it appears that the Israeli strike on Iran suffered an unexpected ‘major hitch’ rather early in the SEAD operation (Suppressing Enemy Air Defences) to suppress and destroy Iran’s air defences. Apparently the first wave of attack was intended as the first step – once Iranian airspace had been secured – to pave the way for the subsequent F-35 strike package armed with conventional bombs.
The unexpected event – ‘Israeli media reported that an “unknown air defence system” was used to shoot down targets over Tehran province’. Reportedly, the Israeli operation was scrubbed soon after, and the victory narrative – later to be taken up by the WSJ (among many others) – was loudly proclaimed.
Of course, a victory narrative was too valuable to be foregone. Yet nonetheless, unexplained events matter.
If Israeli (or U.S.) aircraft cannot penetrate secured Iranian airspace – in whole or in part (and no Israel aircraft entered Iranian airspace on Saturday) – the entire paradigm for a U.S. or an Israeli kinetic military attack collapses: Iran has an overwhelming deeply-buried conventional missile arsenal by which to respond.
Similarly, Netanyahu’s ‘Great Victory’ paradigm implodes too – as leading Israeli intelligence commentator Ronen Bergman writes:
“A senior Israeli security official put it this way: ‘Success through failure’. Israel went to war in Gaza to achieve two goals, the release of the hostages and the dismantling of Hamas’ capabilities (not to mention its destruction in absolute and divine victory). After it failed to achieve either of these goals, another goal was added on the northern front – to return the residents safely to their homes. And it is not clear how we will achieve that goal either. Some believe that the southern front can be closed through a victory on the northern front – and now, we are sure that – if only we land a victorious blow on Iran – then it will lead to the closure of the front in the north; and this will close the front in the south, too”.
Iran says it intends to hit Israel a painful blow for last Saturday’s strike. And Israel says that it will try again to strike Iran.
How does Israel continue in this manner? Well, says the senior security official: “Perhaps the answer is “because everything is normalised. What seems to us impossible – that there is no way it will happen – suddenly happens … And everyone gets used to it, [and used] to the lack of strategy. Lack of strategy turns from a bug into a feature … Then no big deal, We’ll try something else””.
We see that Israel has no longer term military strategy, only short term excursions which will drain both its resources and the morale of its frontline soldiers.
While the whole world now waits with bated breath as to the result of the U.S. elections in only a matter of days, many are also waiting to see what are the implications for Israel’s recent strike on Iran. Despite being told by Joe Biden that it could not strike military installations it went against the advice of its chief sponsor and did precisely that. Perhaps there has never been a better example of western diplomacy failing than this incident, given that while Israel lies to its own people and the western world via news outlets more than happy to spin a yarn about the reality of the attacks, Iran now has to look at a number of options in how it will respond. But respond it surely will.
Yet this singular act is probably the most reckless to date from Netanyahu. Never before has the Israeli PM gone so far out on a limb and taken such a gambit which not only pushes the U.S. to the brink of a war with Iran but also throws a spotlight on the existential question of Israel itself. The next strike on Israel’s military infrastructure might be the final blow for Israel to function as a military entity forcing the U.S., or the next president, to intervene with Trump’s critics already pointing out that he owes a number of favours to the Zionists which they will certainly call in.
Netanyahu is desperate to keep wars on all fronts alive simply so he can remain relevant. But what is hardly talked about is the state of Israel itself, with an economy in pieces. Just how far will the next U.S. president go in supporting Israel’s new war with Iran, both in terms of military spending and breathing new life into the economy which has seen 40,000 businesses go under since October 7th 2023 and almost a million Israelis leave the country.
Netanyahu now is like a poker player who has used up all his IOUs at the table and is holding two pairs. How can he even believe he can take on Iran when even in Gaza and in Lebanon he is losing soldiers at a rate which should worry him and his generals. Yes, he has struck Hezbollah and reduced its capabilities but by no stretch of the imagination has he taken out the Iranian proxy which is still sending missiles and drones into Israel making the Israelis run to their air raid shelters even to this day.
The decision to strike Iran was surely out of an act of a gross political dilemma. However, the act itself has backfired on a level that neither he nor his entourage could imagine. Most of the targets were not even significantly damaged with a very low percentage of Israel’s missiles getting through Iran’s air defence which is so efficient that even Israel’s air force were too afraid actually fly into Iran’s airspace. Many in the west will be taken in by the spin from Israel’s lobby and impressive PR machine that it was a great victory and many sites were taken out, regardless of the fact that the IDF can’t provide one single shred of video evidence to back up such ludicrous claims, as it did previously in Gaza and Lebanon.
But the real defeat for Israel under Netanyahu is yet to come. Iran now has all the hard evidence it needs to strategize and hit Israel even harder than before. The erroneous strike on Iran by Netanyahu is not so much measured by the minor harm it did to a couple of weapons sites. It is by how now the myth of Israel’s military strength has been debunked once and for all. For decades Israel claimed superiority to everyone else, including Iran, and this was taken for granted by partisan western journalists who kept the dream alive. Remarkably, the strike on Israel by Iran on October 1st showed even Israelis that their air defence systems were hopelessly inadequate against Iran’s hypersonic missiles. That should have been enough to cool down the hot heads which straddle Netanyahu. At this point, the message he delivered at the UN, that there is “no place in Iran which Israel’s missiles cannot reach” should have been taken at face value and interpreted literally. Reaching Iranians sites is one thing. Actually taking them out is another.
Now, as the dust settles and Israel now waits for Iran’s response, the second myth that Israel’s strike capability was highly effective against Iran’s air defences is also blown. It seems like now Netanyahu’s folded as he has no more bluffs to play at the poker table. Unless of course he is deliberately coaxing his own country into a suicide strategy where Iran will completely desecrate Israel’s military leaving the U.S. little choice but to install itself on a grand scale. This so-called suicide strategy can’t be ruled out but seems hard to believe. The truth is that until Israel struck Iran, it didn’t know whether its own missiles and aircraft had the capability to penetrate Iran’s air defence system, supported heavily by Russia which sent it S-400 systems in August.
For the moment the Israeli press, as an act of desperate patriotism one can only assume, has indulged itself in a flurry of fake news stories about Iran’s air defence systems being destroyed as well as missile factories. But the jubilation will not last long. Oddly, the same media are becoming more pragmatic about Israel’s operations in Lebanon which has gone on for well over a month and in just two days managed to send over 80 body bags back to Israel, spurning a narrative which already is beginning to question the decision to cross the Lebanese border. The Jerusalem Post, in an oped, actually is admitting that the campaign is losing its credibility due to the number of lost lives of IDF soldiers. “The number of soldiers being killed in southern Lebanon also appears to be rising instead of falling over time” it opines. “The strikes against Hezbollah, such as the killing of Radwan commanders in September and the elimination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, should have weakened the group’s command and control”.
The article is a remarkable admission of Israel’s strategy being misconceived and poorly planned, just like the 2006 invasion. But getting IDF soldiers out of southern Lebanon will be much harder than sending them there as Netanyahu has pushed his arm into a hornet’s nest. Israel cannot consider a war of attrition against Hezbollah as even Netanyahu knows he cannot win. His only means to scoring points are assassinations and bombing civilians in southern Beirut, a strategy which many would call terrorism. His team of military goons have not learnt the lesson that aerial bombardment is not a deal breaker in a war against a disciplined guerrilla outfit. It failed in Iraq. It even failed in Vietnam. Again, we see that Israel has no longer term military strategy, only short term excursions which will drain both its resources and the morale of its frontline soldiers.
Israel’s latest incursion into south Lebanon repeats the same tactical missteps of the past, plunging the occupation army into a familiar quagmire and raising the urgent question: How long can the cycle of failure continue before lessons are finally learned?
Once again, history reverberates through the mountains and valleys of south Lebanon.
On 2 October, Israel launched its ‘limited ground incursion’ – a renewed attempt to force Hezbollah behind the Litani River.
But what began with familiar arrogance quickly unraveled into disaster. Three Merkava tanks left smoldering in the dirt, and eight soldiers from the Egoz unit eliminated. Yet, as the sun rose on 13 October, the grim pattern persisted.
Anti-tank fire struck again, wounding 25 Israeli soldiers in separate incidents. Overhead, helicopters cut through the morning sky, ferrying the wounded and the dead from the battlefield to Rambam Hospital in Haifa – each flight a harsh reminder of an offensive spiraling out of control.
Despite its technological edge and attempts at military censorship to hide the extent of the losses, the US-backed Israeli army pushes onward, blind to the lessons carved in its past. Hezbollah’s resistance, precise and unyielding, exposes the same fatal flaws of an aggressor clinging to force.
As this new chapter unfolds, one can’t help but wonder – how many times will the occupation army tread this doomed path before considering Einstein’s warning – that insanity is repeating the same thing over and over, expecting different results.
The Kornet redefined the battlefield
In the days following 8 October, Hezbollah’s battlefield updates have consistently emphasized one key phrase: direct hits – Israeli radar stations obliterated, military convoys shattered by precise strikes, and armored vehicles reduced to smoldering wreckage.
These operations, carried out in support of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, have been so devastatingly effective that Tel Aviv invoked military censorship, desperate to conceal the full extent of its losses, as it has been doing throughout the conflict on the northern front over the past year. But behind the phrase “direct hits” lies a weapon few might recognize – the Kornet missile.
Although not always visible to the viewer, the Kornet’s role is unmistakable. First deployed by Hezbollah in 2006, the Kornet transformed into a battlefield game-changer, proving its worth in ambushes against Israeli Merkava tanks.
On 11 August 2006, 24 Merkava tanks rolled into a deadly trap, as if swallowed by the Bermuda Triangle, vanishing under a barrage of Kornet missile fire. By the end of it, 11 tanks lay in ruin – charred remains of Israel’s once-feared armored division.
This decisive moment showcased Hezbollah’s mastery of asymmetric warfare, where small, mobile units equipped with precision-guided Kornets could dismantle Israel’s armored might.
The Merkava, long regarded as the symbol of Israeli dominance in ground warfare, was designed to excel in direct combat. However, in the unforgiving Lebanese terrain, the Kornet missile revealed a critical vulnerability: the Merkava’s reliance on heavy armor, which, despite its thickness, was helpless against the Kornet’s ability to pierce reactive plating.
The missile’s precision focused on the tank’s soft spots – its engine and lower hull – areas that conventional defenses struggled to protect against long-range, guided strikes. The once-formidable Merkava, crippled in its ability to maneuver through Lebanon’s rugged landscape, became an easy target for well-planned ambushes.
Now, with Israeli convoys once again making daily incursions into Lebanon – repeating the very missteps of 2006 – it’s as if history is whispering its warnings, only to be ignored. Israel’s persistence in retracing these familiar steps shows a refusal to reckon with past lessons, locked in a cycle that leads to the same inevitable failures.
Entrapped in the Resistance’s web
The Kornet missile, first deployed by Hezbollah during the 2006 war, has become a defining force in its tactical operations.
This Russian-made, laser-guided anti-tank missile, capable of penetrating up to 1,200 millimeters of reactive armor from distances of up to 5.5 kilometers, turns Israel’s Merkava tanks into unsuspecting prey caught in carefully planned ambushes.
Hezbollah’s elite Radwan special forces, particularly within the Aziz and Nasr units, utilize this weapon with precision, turning each ambush into a coordinated strike that devastates Israel’s most advanced armored forces.
The Kornet’s range allows Hezbollah fighters to strike from concealed positions and swiftly reposition, ensuring they remain elusive in the heat of battle. These units, operating across the varied terrain of southern Lebanon, have made the Kornet indispensable in their strategy of attrition warfare.
Meanwhile, the Badr unit, stationed north of the Litani River, remains vigilant, holding strategic points and using ambushes to deal significant damage to Israeli forces.
The Kornet’s role has expanded beyond targeting armored vehicles, as Hezbollah has creatively adapted it to strike at military installations, including radar stations, blinding Israel’s northern defenses.
This tactical shift has forced military analysts to reconsider the missile’s potential, showing how even a relatively simple weapon can reshape the dynamics of warfare when wielded with ingenuity and precision.
Lifting the ‘Trophy’
Israeli engineers quickly sought solutions to protect their armored vehicles following the significant vulnerabilities exposed in 2006.
By 2007, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems unveiled the Trophy APS, specifically designed to safeguard Merkava Mark 3 and Mark 4 tanks. Equipped with the Elta EL/M-2133 radar, Trophy provides 360-degree detection and launches explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) to intercept incoming threats.
This system enabled Israel to maintain its technological edge, significantly reducing anti-tank missile threats. However, Trophy’s 1.5-second reload time created a narrow but exploitable window – an opportunity Hezbollah quickly seized.
In response to Israel’s technological advancements, Hezbollah sought a way to exploit this reload time. The solution came with the Tharallah Twin Anti-Tank Guided Missile (ATGM) system, equipped with Dehlavieh missiles, an Iranian variant of the Kornet-E.
Designed by Iran’s Aerospace Industries Organization, the Dehlavieh, introduced in 2012, boasts a range of 10 kilometers and tandem warheads capable of penetrating 1,200 millimeters of reactive armor.
The Tharallah system fires two missiles in rapid succession. The first missile triggers the Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA), while the second penetrates the main armor, exploiting Trophy’s reload time.
Acquired by Hezbollah in 2015, the Tharallah system is mounted on a quad launcher, configured for both day and night precision strikes.
This clever countermeasure reveals the Axis of Resistance’s strategic ingenuity, turning modest resources into powerful, game-changing tactics – much like a master chess player outwitting an opponent with far superior pieces.
While Israel’s war machine thrives on an endless flow of US dollars, it’s not brute force but creative strategy that shifts the balance of power on the battlefield.
Cake from Shipunov to Nasrallah
In a little-known detail, revealed during a 2020 interview on Al-Manar TV, Hezbollah’s political advisor Hussein al-Khalil shared a story that took many by surprise. After the 2006 war, Arkady Shipunov, the renowned Russian designer of the Kornet missile, sent an unexpected gift to the recently-assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – a cake.
It was more than just a gesture of appreciation; it symbolized Shipunov’s pride in how Hezbollah had wielded his creation to devastating effect. The Kornet had proven itself not just as a weapon, but as a game-changer on the battlefield, punctuating Israel’s military vulnerabilities with each direct hit on their once-vaunted Merkava tanks.
This cake, a simple token, carried profound significance as a tribute to the strategic brilliance that turned the Kornet into a symbol of asymmetrical warfare. Shipunov’s pride reflected the growing recognition that the Lebanese resistance had showcased the missile’s superiority in a way few had expected.
Galloway’s echo
As Israel once again finds itself entangled in Lebanon, the echoes of George Galloway’s legendary 2006 Sky News interview with Anna Botting resonate more powerfully than ever. Despite Sky News’ attempts to bottle up the harsh truth of Israel’s military failures, the reality spilled out – undeniable – even as military censorship and media bias worked overtime to obscure it.
Galloway’s biting words, “Look at the other half of the screen” and “Israel is getting a bloody good hiding,” sliced through the carefully-crafted media narrative, exposing Israel’s recurring military blunders for what they truly were.
While Botting clung to the narrative of Israeli success, the live footage painted a different picture – Israeli soldiers being carried away after devastating Kornet missile ambushes. It was irrefutable evidence of a tactical failure that no amount of censorship could hide.
‘Not tank country’
Fast forward to 2024, and the scene is eerily familiar. Israeli helicopters, their rotors slicing through the morning air, shuttle the dead and wounded from the battlefield to Rambam Hospital in Haifa, a stark reminder of an offensive spiraling out of control. And still, the same efforts are underway to cover the mounting damage and losses.
As the late Hezbollah secretary-general warned in July, “If your tanks come to southern Lebanon, you will not suffer a shortage of tanks, because you will have no tanks left.”
One can’t help but wonder – how long will it take for Israel to understand, as Einstein warned, that repeating the same actions and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity?
Today marks the one year anniversary of the remarkably successful Hamas raid on Israel, in which some 1,500 lightly-armed Islamic militants from Gaza so greatly humiliated the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his country’s entire national security establishment. The consequences of these last twelve months have been enormous, not merely for the Jewish State and the rest of the Middle East, but also for America and the entire world.
For many fatal diseases the cause of death is less the result of the infection itself than that of the defensive immune system, whose massive over-reaction destroys vital tissue, killing the entire organism. And I think that the Hamas raid of October 7, 2023 and the Israeli response may eventually be seen in this light.
Some 1,200 Israelis died that day, probably many or most of them killed by their own country’s panic-stricken and trigger-happy IDF forces, whose Apache helicopters were ordered to blast anything that moved. Although such losses were hardly insignificant in a Jewish population of some 7.2 million and the national humiliation was enormous, if the Israeli government had merely been content to launch a few weeks of punitive bombing attacks against Gaza and then grudgingly accept an exchange of prisoners with its Hamas adversaries, I doubt the results would have been too serious.
Israel had long held many thousands of Palestinians without charges or trial and often under brutal conditions, so releasing these in exchange for the 200-odd Israelis that Hamas had carried back to Gaza would have meant a huge loss of face for the Jewish State, but hardly a threat to the country’s survival. The Israelis could have merely fired a few of their complacent and incompetent local military commanders and strengthened their Gaza defenses, and matters would have probably gone on much like before.
Israel had been riding high at that point, on the very verge of accomplishing its decades-long project of fully normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Arab state. Israel’s strong partisans totally dominated the Biden Administration while Donald Trump promised to do even more for that country if he somehow managed to regain the White House. Although Netanyahu was hugely unpopular domestically, Israel had just celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding, and its international strategic position seemed better than it had been in many years, so it could have easily taken its Hamas debacle in stride.
But after the events of the last twelve months, I tend to doubt that the country will survive much longer in anything like its existing form, and its collapse may also take down with it the entire political structure of organized Jewry worldwide, which today so heavily dominates both America and the rest of the West. While Israel may face very serious risks from the major regional war its government seeks to ignite, I think the greatest threat to its existence comes from the massive distribution of devastating information that has taken place during this last year.
If the Israeli government had cut its losses and exchanged prisoners with Hamas in November or December, the country might have been humiliated but Netanyahu would have been utterly destroyed. So partly because of his own desperate political situation, he reacted in very different fashion, unleashing massive, relentless attacks against Gaza’s helpless couple of million civilians, clearly hoping to save his own political skin by using the Hamas raid as an excuse to kill or expel all the Palestinians in that enclave and then afterwards do the same in the West Bank. This would have allowed him to establish his name in history as Israel’s second founding father, finally creating the Greater Israel that all of his predecessors had dreamed of establishing but failed to achieve. This bold project was obviously spurred on by the small extremist parties that his government depended on for its survival since their ideological leadership regarded those territories as their God-given heritage under the fierce version of the religious Judaism that they espoused.
Unfortunately for Netanyahu’s plans and despite all his massive bombing attacks, Gaza’s Palestinians refused to leave, perhaps remembering how their parents or grand-parents had previously been expelled by Zionist militants in 1948 from their homes in Haifa and the other cities of what became Israel. I had discussed that history in a long December article:
Moreover, despite massive financial enticements, over-populated Egypt was adamant that it would not accept a couple of million displaced Gazans, who would likely become a source of social instability and future border clashes with Israel. So with the Gazans refusing to leave and the Egyptians refusing to take them, this left little choice but for the Israelis to keep bombing Gaza in hopes of changing their minds, perhaps further assisted by the pressure of famine as the flow of food supplies into the besieged enclave was blocked by mobs of angry Israelis.
Meanwhile, Hamas and its determined fighters were hidden in their heavily-fortified network of tunnels and during the year that followed IDF troops had little success in rooting them out, instead suffering continuing casualties as they tried, while only freeing a tiny number of the Israelis held prisoner.
Angry, frustrated armies naturally tend to take revenge against the entire civilian population of their enemies. In an August article I’d summarized the unspeakable war crimes that IDF troops have been regularly committing against their helpless Palestinian victims, with some of these incidents finally starting to receive coverage in mainstream American media outlets.
According to American physicians interviewed by Politico Magazineand CBS News Sunday Morning, Israeli military snipers have regularly been executing Palestinian toddlers with precisely aimed shots to the head and the heart; indeed, for many years Israelis have proudly marketed tee-shirts boasting of their success in killing pregnant women and children. An article in the New York Times also reported that IDF forces have seized and tortured to death leading Palestinian surgeons and other medical doctors, with some of the survivors describing the horrific torments they endured at the hands of their brutal Israeli captors.
All of these barbaric atrocities have been justified and encouraged by the sweeping public statements of top Israeli leaders. For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly identified the Palestinians with the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew god commanded must be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Just a few days ago, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that it would be “just and moral” for Israel to totally exterminate all two million Palestinians in Gaza, but he emphasized that world public opinion was currently preventing his government from taking that important step.
Although this officially-stated Israeli goal of eradicating all Palestinian men, women, and children has not yet been achieved, more than ten months of bombs, bullets, and famine have made significant progress in that direction. The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals and a few weeks ago it published a short piece conservatively estimating that relentless Israeli attacks and the complete destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure may be responsible for nearly 200,000 civilian deaths, a figure many times larger than any previous total mentioned in the media.
The massive, ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians together with these widespread, explicit public statements by top Israeli leaders led the esteemed jurists of the International Court of Justice to issue a series of near-unanimous rulings that Israel appeared to be undertaking a campaign of genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians. By late July even the notoriously pro-Israel editors of the English-language Wikipedia had finally endorsed the same conclusion.
In addition to these ongoing massacres, many thousands of Palestinian civilian captives have been seized, none of whom have ever been tried or convicted of anything. But with Israeli prison space overflowing, National Security Minister Itomar Ben-Gvir proposed summarily executing all of them by shooting each one in the head, thereby freeing up their prison space for new waves of captives.
Although the militaries of many countries have occasionally committed massacres or atrocities during wartime, sometimes even with the silent approval of their political leadership, it seems quite unusual to have the latter publicly endorse and advocate such policies, and no similar examples from recent centuries come to mind. I don’t doubt that if television journalists had interviewed Genghis Khan while he was ravaging all of Eurasia with his Mongol hordes, he might have casually made such statements, but I’d always assumed that standards of acceptable international behavior had considerably changed over the last thousand years.
When top leaders regularly issue such wholesale sanguinary declarations, some of their more enthusiastic subordinates may naturally decide to partly implement those same goals on a retail basis. These horrible recent Israeli atrocities merely continued the pattern from earlier this year, which had often been documented on social media by Israelis themselves, eager to emphasize the terrible punishment they were successfully inflicting upon their hated Palestinian foes. As I wrote a few months ago:
Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.
I also suggested that the near-stranglehold that pro-Israel Jews had gradually gained across American society, especially including politics, academia, and media, was having very fateful consequences. For example, Netanyahu’s deliberate slaughter of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians actually prompted his recent invitation to address a joint session of Congress for an unprecedented fourth time, with his bombastic speech interrupted by 58 standing ovations, coming at a rate of more than once each minute.
Meanwhile, American students had been heavily indoctrinated for generations with an absolute horror of genocide, war crimes, Apartheid, and racial oppression. But when they reacted against full American government support for the worst example of these seen anywhere in the world in many decades, their peaceful protests at elite colleges were brutally suppressed by harsh police crackdowns. This problem arose because their moral instructors had failed to properly emphasize that all those sweeping prohibitions actually included the key exclusionary phrase “except when committed by Jews”…
In one of the highest-profile and most grotesque recent incidents, Israeli doctors reported that a Palestinian captive had been severely injured after being brutally gang-raped and sodomized by nine IDF soldiers. Israeli military leaders have been facing the threat of arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, so they decided to demonstrate their adherence to international law by having the soldiers arrested and tried, but a huge, violent mob of Jewish activists invaded the army base to free them, and the government later ordered them released. Israeli TV has widely broadcast footage of Palestinian prisoners being raped and sodomized by IDF soldiers, with claims that these brutal scenes were sometimes even live-streamed for the edification of gleeful Israeli political leaders…
Mike Whitney had summarized much of the shocking early evidence in late July when the story first broke in the Israeli media and a more recent article by journalist Jonathan Cook collected together a great deal of the background information. Cook noted that according to human and legal rights groups, Israeli soldiers and police have a very long history of raping and sexually assaulting Palestinians, including children, and such behavior has been endorsed by the country’s highest religious authorities:
In 2016, for example, the Israeli military appointed Colonel Eyal Karim as its chief rabbi, even after he had declared Palestinians to be “animals” and had approved the rape of Palestinian women in the interest of boosting soldiers’ morale.
I’ve always had a strong interest in the Middle East conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and I’m sure that I’ve followed the issue much more closely than the vast majority of people. But over the last twelve months I’ve probably devoted more attention to that topic than I had during the previous fifty years combined, and I’d expect that the same may be true for all but those who have long specialized in the subject. Billions around the world who had previously remained totally unaware of the Palestinians or had only known of their plight in the vaguest terms have now watched scenes of enormous suffering unfolding hour by hour on their smartphones.
In past decades all of these horrific Israeli crimes might have remained hidden away, kept from the view of the American public and the rest of the world by the staunchly pro-Israel gatekeepers of the Western mainstream media. But the existence of the Internet drastically changed the informational landscape, especially the relatively uncensored social media platforms of TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter, which allowed the rapid dissemination of shocking images. Meanwhile, YouTube channels such as those of Judge Andrew Napolitano gradually brought together a critical mass of highly-credentialed academics, national security experts, and knowledgeable journalists who could share their analysis of events with large audiences around the world.
Two of Napolitano’s regular guests are Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, earnest young Jewish progressives who run the Grayzone, a webzine and YouTube channel of their own. I noted their lengthy discussion of how the pro-Israel donor class had recently crushed any political dissent within the Democratic Party, contrary to the overwhelming views of its voter base.
In that same livestream, Blumenthal and Maté also focused on the methods used to keep American elected officials in line on this issue, noting that a few days ago Zionist billionaires spent an almost unprecedented $8 million to defeat Rep. Cori Bush in her own Democratic primary, angry that the black progressive member of “the squad” had called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Just a few weeks earlier, roughly twice as much money had been spent by similar individuals for very similar reasons to successfully eliminate her close political ally Rep. Jamaal Bowman.
Those two primary races were by far the most expensive in American history, and in their aftermath most members of Congress must surely realize that they only remain in office at the sufferance of AIPAC and its ideological allies. Although leading progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the role of big money in those primary races, she was obviously too fearful of pro-Israel donors to even mention whose big money had been involved. The Grayzone editors were far more candid and accurately characterized the dollars as being deployed by “the foreign agents of an Apartheid state.”
Both Blumenthal and Mate had long focused on the plight of the Palestinians, and a couple of years ago I’d read Goliath, the former’s fine 2013 book reporting his personal experiences during a visit to the region.
But despite their previous coverage of the conflict, I do not think that either of them had ever contemplated the horrors currently being inflicted upon the suffering Palestinians, nor the total slavish support for Israel expressed by the entire Biden Administration. These shocking developments prompted ideological reassessments and in May I’d described some ironic statements they had made in an earlier podcast:
This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.
They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.”Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.
By August, I noticed that they had explicitly used that incendiary term in their most recent podcast:
That particular article of mine proved quite popular so it’s possible that my remarks may have directly or indirectly found their way to those individuals. Whether or not that was the case, in their current podcast they mentioned that although they’d always dismissed “ZOG” as some ridiculously antisemitic expression, recent events had demonstrated its reality, and Americans were obviously now living in “one nation under ZOG.” I think this marked an important step forward in their understanding of our world.
Soon afterward, their Grayzone channel was temporarily banned from YouTube, and when it returned a week later, the two hosts nervously joked about the acronym they must carefully avoid uttering, using several rhyming words to enlighten their audience. I suspect that just like them, many other thoughtful Americans have recently begun entertaining ideas that they would have always previously dismissed as ridiculous.
Nearly all of us, members of the media included, live our lives in the media-bubbles that constitute our understanding of the world. When real-life events puncture such a bubble, we are forced to take stock and reassess our view of reality.
Those two young journalists were deeply concerned about America’s current situation, in which so much of the basic democratic system they had always assumed seemed to have been lost, with political control of our country now being exercised by obvious agents of a ruthless and bloodthirsty foreign power.
Yet oddly enough, although America’s current political predicament would have alarmed some knowledgeable individuals from the first half of the last century, it might not have greatly surprised them. Five or six years ago I read a fascinating book by Prof. Joseph Bendersky, an academic historian specializing in Holocaust Studies and the history of Nazi Germany. As I wrote at the time:
Bendersky devoted ten full years of research to his book, exhaustively mining the archives of American Military Intelligence as well as the personal papers and correspondence of more than 100 senior military figures and intelligence officers. The “Jewish Threat” runs over 500 pages, including some 1350 footnotes, with the listed archival sources alone occupying seven full pages. His subtitle is “Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army” and he makes an extremely compelling case that during the first half of the twentieth century and even afterward, the top ranks of the U.S. military and especially Military Intelligence heavily subscribed to notions that today would be universally dismissed as “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”
Put simply, U.S. military leaders in those decades widely believed that the world faced a direct threat from organized Jewry, which had seized control of Russia and similarly sought to subvert and gain mastery over America and the rest of Western civilization.
In these military circles, there was an overwhelming belief that powerful Jewish elements had financed and led Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, and were organizing similar Communist movements elsewhere aimed at destroying all existing Gentile elites and imposing Jewish supremacy throughout America and the rest of the Western world. While some of these Communist leaders were “idealists,” many of the Jewish participants were cynical opportunists, seeking to use their gullible followers to destroy their ethnic rivals and thereby gain wealth and supreme power. Although Intelligence officers gradually came to doubt that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an authentic document, most believed that the notorious work provided a reasonably accurate description of the strategic plans of the Jewish leadership for subverting America and the rest of the world and establishing Jewish rule.
Although Bendersky’s claims are certainly extraordinary ones, he provides an enormous wealth of compelling evidence to support them, quoting or summarizing thousands of declassified Intelligence files, and further supporting his case by drawing from the personal correspondence of many of the officers involved. He conclusively demonstrates that during the very same years that Henry Ford was publishing his controversial series The International Jew, similar ideas, but with a much sharper edge, were ubiquitous within our own Intelligence community. Indeed, whereas Ford mostly focused upon Jewish dishonesty, malfeasance, and corruption, our Military Intelligence professionals viewed organized Jewry as a deadly threat to American society and Western civilization in general. Hence the title of Bendersky’s book.
Let us take a step back and place Bendersky’s findings in their proper context. We must recognize that during much of the era covered by his research, U.S. Military Intelligence constituted nearly the entirety of America’s national security apparatus—being the equivalent of a combined CIA, NSA, and FBI—and was responsible for both international and domestic security, although the latter portfolio had gradually been assumed by J. Edgar Hoover’s own expanding organization by the end of the 1920s.
Bendersky’s years of diligent research demonstrate that for decades these experienced professionals—and many of their top commanding generals—were firmly convinced that major elements of the organized Jewish community were ruthlessly plotting to seize power in America, destroy all our traditional Constitutional liberties, and ultimately gain mastery over the entire world.
I have never believed in the existence of UFOs as alien spacecraft, always dismissing such notions as ridiculous nonsense. But suppose declassified government documents revealed that for decades nearly all of our top Air Force officers had been absolutely convinced of the reality of UFOs. Could I continue my insouciant refusal to even consider such possibilities? At the very least, those revelations would force me to sharply reassess the likely credibility of other individuals who had made similar claims during that same period.
Israel’s leaders may be confident that they can successfully estimate the risks of their military conflict with Hezbollah or Iran, and such calculations might be correct. But I think that the greater danger they now increasingly face comes from the widening ripples of knowledge that their brutal actions have now spread across much of the American population and the rest of the world.
During the last few months the Israelis have unleashed an unprecedented wave of assassinations against the leaders of their regional adversaries, making absolutely no pretense of respecting national sovereignty, diplomatic immunity, or the basic laws of warfare. In one of the earliest examples, they used a missile-strike to kill the chief Hamas peace negotiator in his Beirut office and later employed similar means to assassinate the Hamas political chief who had replaced him at the negotiating table. That latter assassination took place in Tehran while the victim was attending the inauguration of the new Iranian president, whose own predecessor had died together with Iran’s finance minister in a highly-suspicious helicopter crash. A few months earlier another Israeli missile-strike had destroyed part of Iran’s embassy compound in Syria, killing several important Iranian generals. An apparent Israeli false-flag attack killed a dozen Druze children playing soccer in the occupied Golan Heights, and Netanyahu’s government then used that atrocity as an excuse to assassinate a top Hezbollah military official in Beirut.
In September, this campaign of Israeli assassinations massively escalated, as many thousands of booby-trapped electronic pagers and other devices were used to kill or severely maim enormous numbers of Lebanese civilians who were associated with Hezbollah. This was soon followed by the use of eighty-odd huge bunker-buster bombs to level an entire city block of southern Beirut, successfully assassinating the longtime leader of that organization, whose successor was similarly killed a few days ago under a wave of equally large bombs in that same city. Israeli leaders have regularly declared that they feel free to kill anyone, anywhere in the world whom they consider hostile to their national interests.
The obvious immediate intent of this wave of Israeli assassinations was to provoke Iran into the sort of military retaliation that could pressure a subservient America into destroying that powerful regional rival and Iran’s large retaliatory missile-strike of a few days ago may lead to this result. But whether or not it does, those Israeli assassinations may have other political consequences, perhaps far less beneficial to the future of the Jewish State.
Although the successful killing of those enemy leaders may have enhanced Israel’s reputation for the ruthless effectiveness of its intelligence services and achieved the tactical result of temporarily disrupting their opposing organizations, I think there are great strategic risks in undertaking so many high-profile assassinations in such a short period of time. More and more outside observers have probably now become aware of crucial historical matters, long concealed or de-emphasized by our overwhelmingly pro-Israel mainstream media. The State of Israel and its Zionist predecessor organizations have established a record of bold assassinations perhaps unrivaled in world history. As I originally wrote in 2018:
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchillapparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.
The most comprehensive source for this sort of material is Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman’s highly authoritative 2018 history of Mossad assassinations, which runs 750 pages and although far from complete, served as the starting point for my own very lengthy January 2020 analysis of that same subject.
As I described its contents:
The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Timessuggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s extremely long book.
As a very useful supplement to Bergman’s magisterial work, I would strongly recommend State of Terror, published in 2016 by Thomas Suarez, a book that I only finally read a couple of weeks ago. Most of the author’s material was based upon declassified British government documents as well as the major newspaper archives of the period he covers, and he provided an enormous wealth of information not available elsewhere.
Although his primary focus was Zionist terrorism, political assassinations are a closely related topic, and he discussed many of these as well. As an example, he explained how the Zionists pioneered the technology of deadly letter-bombs, ruthlessly lacing these with cyanide to increase their effectiveness, and employing them to target a very long list of their perceived enemies, notably including all of Britain’s senior political leaders and America’s president, though those latter efforts proved unsuccessful. Suarez demonstrated that all of Israel’s early leaders were supporters of these policies, and these same individuals continued running their country for decades, even into the 1990s.
Suarez’s book is long out of print and used copies on Amazon are exorbitantly priced, but fortunately it is also available on Archive.org, including in PDF and ePub
formats, and I would highly recommend it to those who seek to deepen their understanding of the circumstances surrounding Israel’s creation.
Our word “assassin” comes from the Ismaili sect founded almost a thousand years ago, whose members spent nearly two centuries terrorizing the entire Middle East with their successful killings of so many of its important Muslim and Christian leaders. But with the possible exception of that one non-state organization, I am not aware of any other political entity during the last two thousand years whose record of major political assassinations remotely approaches that of the Israeli state and its Zionist predecessor groups.
For obvious reasons, Bergman’s book had avoided discussing many of the high-profile killings of American or pro-Western leaders that can probably be attributed to Zionist or Israeli forces, notably that of James Forrestal, America’s first secretary of defense and the leading public opponent of Israel’s creation.
American presidents have hardly been immune to such attacks, with Zionists making repeated attempts on the life of President Truman and Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky revealing the 1992 plot to assassinate President George H.W. Bush.
Max Blumenthal grew up in elite Democratic circles in DC, with his father Sydney being a prominent former journalist and influential political operative very close to Hillary Clinton. Presumably based upon the personal knowledge he had picked up in such circles, earlier this year he flatly declared that President Barack Obama was extremely fearful that the Israelis might try to assassinate him for his Middle East peacemaking efforts, something I’d occasionally suspected but had never previously heard stated by any knowledgeable insider.
But by far the highest-profile example would certainly be the case of the Kennedy brothers. Our president and his younger brother had made determined efforts to block Israel’s nuclear weapons development program and break the growing power of the Israel Lobby, and there exists very strong, perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the Israeli Mossad played a central role in their deaths. I’ve discussed that issue at considerable length and would also strongly recommend the 2018 article by French researcher Laurent Guyénot or his more recent short book, which very helpfully summarizes the evidence and can be easily read within just a day or two.
Many patriotic Americans may take in stride the Israeli killing of foreign leaders whom our dishonest pro-Israel media has often falsely portrayed as enemies of the United States. But if those same individuals came to believe that the Israelis have also had a very long record of killing our own American leaders in order to subvert our political system and gain control of our country, their reaction might be far more negative. For decades, such ideas and the supporting evidence have been confined to only the most marginal and isolated portions of the conspiratorial fringe, but there now seem indications that recent events may have propelled those theories into much more mainstream venues.
Consider Anya Parampil, another young journalist who has spent many years focused on Palestinian issues. Married to Max Blumenthal, she works with him at the Grayzone, and in her many video appearances there and on Napolitano’s channel, I’ve never seen any sign of her support for implausible conspiratorial beliefs. Instead, she has always struck me as someone of very mainstream if strongly progressive views on public policy matters.
Yet in a remarkable half-hour interview last week, she explicitly described Israel as America’s “greatest enemy,” expressing outrage that her country seemed to have lost its political sovereignty to the agents of that murderous foreign state. She went on to suggest that the crucial turning point in our national subjugation had probably come with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, whose vigorous efforts to prevent Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons had been suddenly ended by his violent death. She also noted that his brother Robert had led the efforts to severely curtail the power of the Israel Lobby, and he too had soon died by an assassin’s bullet. I think that her very self-confident public statements on such extremely controversial matters may represent a bellwether, indicating that many of those same ideas are now rapidly but quietly circulating within important mainstream segments of the American population.
The JFK Assassination might easily rank as the single most famous incident of the twentieth century and it has been the subject of countless books, articles, and documentaries.
Those Americans who conclude that the Israeli Mossad played a central role in that killing, thereby successfully subverting our entire political system, will naturally consider the implications of that revelation. If a matter of such gigantic importance could have remained almost totally concealed for more than six decades, they may begin to grow very suspicious about the true nature of other major events as well.
The most obvious and important of these would be the 9/11 Attacks, which killed thousands of Americans. Pro-Israel elements within our national government immediately used these as an excuse to launch a series of wars that destroyed most of Israel’s leading regional rivals, wars that cost our country thousands of additional lives and many trillions of dollars, while killing or displacing millions of Muslim civilians.
As I’ve discussed at considerable length, Israel’s record of international terrorism, quite often of the false-flag variety, is just as unmatched as its record of political assassinations, with an Israeli Prime Minister even publicly boasting that he had been the founding father of terrorism across the entire world.
One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew.
The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.
Once the circumstances of those 2001 terrorist attacks are carefully considered, the evidence that the Israeli Mossad once again played the central role seems extremely strong, even stronger than the case for Mossad’s role in the killing of the Kennedys several decades earlier. No other organization around the world possessed anything like the same set of skills and experience in carrying out such a massive operation, and the FBI quickly rounded up some 200 Mossad agents, many of whom had been found behaving in very suspicious ways in the immediate vicinity of the destruction, including five who were caught red-handed, gleefully celebrating the successful attack on the WTC towers.
Although their findings have been almost totally ignored for more than two decades by our fervently pro-Israel mainstream media, numerous diligent 9/11 researchers have amassed an enormous quantity of compelling evidence implicating Israel and its domestic American collaborators in that terrorist attack against our country. Much of that evidence has been summarized in a number of our major articles:
Israel Did 9/11
Wyatt Peterson • The Unz Review • September 12, 2024 • 13,300 Words
9/11 Was an Israeli Job How America was neoconned into World War IV
Laurent Guyénot • The Unz Review • September 10, 2018 • 8,500 Words
9/11 represented the greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world and it was the worst hostile blow our nation has ever endured. As the true facts of what actually happened on that fateful day quietly circulate in the wake of Israel’s very high-profile assaults on other Middle Eastern countries, I think that the existential risks that country faces may become far greater than anything associated with retaliatory strikes from Iranian ballistic or hypersonic missiles.
Two weeks ago, after successful Zionist attacks on Hizbullah’s leadership, I asserted that Hizbullah would be back:
However, Israel can not kill its way to peace.
Hizbullah is a social movement deeply ingrained into the people and society of Lebanon.
Hizbullah has a social society side which takes care for and aliments large parts of its constituency.
It also has a military side which is very well organized, disciplined and which has many hidden assets ready to be activated when needed. Following the Shia creed Hizbullah’s soldiers are ready and willing to die for their cause.
In 1982 Israel assassinated Hizbullah chief Musawi. His replacement, Hassan Nasrallah, proved to be the more formidable enemy who organized resistance movements that span the whole region. Anyone following Nasrallah will also be younger, less risk avers and a more formidable enemy.
The same holds for the replacements of lower level casualties.
The Zionist colonist will rue the consequences of their deeds.
Today Hizbullah’s operation room warned the Zionists in Haifa to empty the city:
Ali Hashem @alihashem_tv – 9:44 UTC · Oct 12, 2024Hezbollah’s operations room statement, warning residents of Haifa and several other northern cities up to Tiberias to evacuate homes near military installations, signals an expansion of the displacement zone for Israel from 5 km to over 30 km.
This could force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to evacuate at least 250,000 people, rather than the initial 100,000. While predicting new rules of engagement is difficult, this could create a new dynamic, where more attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs triggers more Hezbollah rocket strikes deep into northern Israel.
…
Nearly three weeks after the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the party has absorbed the blow and elevated its operations to a new level. Its leadership has gone unseen, likely utilizing alternative communication methods that have enabled a seamless transition. Despite the loss, Hezbollah continues to launch attacks and maintain supply lines to the front, allowing for further escalation, all while seeking a diplomatic solution to the conflict through the Speaker of Parliament.
and
Sina Toossi @SinaToossi – 15:37 UTC · Oct 12, 2024Hezbollah has intensified rocket and missile strikes on northern Israel over the past week.
Today, it called for civilians to evacuate Haifa, Tiberias, & other areas, claiming that Israeli military operations in residential zones make them legitimate targets.
2/ Significantly, Hezbollah’s statement also said, “Northern occupied Palestine will remain empty of settlers until the war against Gaza and Lebanon ends.” This reflects its original position of rejecting a ceasefire with Israel that is not linked to ending the Gaza war.
…
8/ The head of Hezbollah’s media office Mohammad Afif also asserted today:
“To the enemy, I say: You have only seen a fraction of our strikes.
“On the ground, especially on the southern front, the resistance is in good shape.
“It manages its firing fields and the timing of its volleys in accordance with its field assessment and the objective conditions.
“Its strategic reserves are intact.
“Thousands of Karbala-inspired martyrdom fighters are in peak readiness and fully prepared to fight fiercely in revenge for our sacred martyr.
“…The resistance will not engage in static defense but rather a flexible defense that adapts to the requirements of the front and the conditions of each area.
“It will set ambushes, plant explosives, carry out flanking maneuvers, and shift flexibly from defense to offense, inflicting heavy losses, which the enemy has begun to acknowledge gradually, forcing them repeatedly to retreat and reassess the front, contrary to their calculations and estimates.
“…We are not in 1982 when Israeli tanks reached Beirut, altering the political equations and tearing the social fabric of Lebanon. We are more in the early days of the July War, when the same people rushed to declare Hezbollah’s defeat, only to later realize their mistake and return to their senses by the end of the war, with Hezbollah emerging victorious.
“Our absolute priority now is to defeat the enemy and force it to cease its aggression by force.”
That is part of the recent news from which Elijah Magnier, who knows Hizbullah better than any other western journalist, concludes:
I am beginning to think that #Israel is reluctant to invade #Lebanon.Hezbollah has lost 80% of the first line of command, the operations room and the secretary general, yet it has managed to regain control beautifully. No army in the world can withstand the first blow.
Now Hezbollah has regained control, it has replenished its positions, its logistics are in top condition, it has prevented four divisions from entering Lebanon, it has absorbed the displaced persons, it has discovered the source of the leakage, and it is threatening to force more Israeli displaced persons. With every day that passes, Hezbollah shows that it has regained its professionalism in directing the war and taking the initiative.
The Zionists are reluctant to go further than a few meter into Lebanon because their ground forces are taking high losses. A full ground attack would be extremely costly.
The Zionist entity is also reluctant to attack Iran. Its security cabinet could not agree on an appropriate way to hit back for Iran’s recent missile attack with some 180 ballistic missiles. That attack did real damage on two military air ports. It also hit other strategic assets.
Last night the Islamic Republic Iran Boradcasting [IRIB] organization announced:
iranmilitaryvlog @irmilitaryvlog – 9:06 UTC · Oct 12, 2024IRIB yesterday revealed that Iran’s armed forces managed to knock out a transportable Raytheon long-range, very high-altitude X-band radar positioned near the ‘Nevatim’ airbase belonging to the THAAD system without detection before raining down ballistic missiles on their target.
Quote: H. E. Mehr | حمید ابراهیمی مهر @Hemehr … Embedded video
The THAAD AN/TPY-2 transportable radar directs high attitude missile defenses. There is, as far as is known, only one in Israel. Such a radar system, if bought now, costs about $300 million. The one in the Negev desert is under U.S. control.
If, as IRIB claims, that radar was indeed hit, the strike has blown a huge hole into Israel’s missile defenses. This would explain the reluctance in the security cabinet to go for on all out attack on Iran. Any Iranian response, which would come as assured as tomorrow’s sun rise, would hit Israel extremely hard.
Ed. Note: Interesting to listen to Scott Ritter also dismissing Dr. Doctorow’s explanation and see that he was talking literally out of both sides of his mouth in the same sentence. Paraphrase: we know EVERYTHING Israel is doing. 100% we knew in advance of the pagers’ plan, etc., etc. – But we cannot do anything, Israel is acting by itself, outside of our control…
Really? Can’t do anything?! Poor US government, omnipotent and impotent at the same time. Here is what the US could do, out of a dozen other options, if they were against the plan to kill hundreds if not thousands of Lebanese. Tip off one of the Arab proxies, or a whistleblower makes the plan public, or just alert … the Russians. Ha! No, we couldn’t do ANYTHING, and Scott Ritter really believes that. — But his job is to defend the US and its reputation by casting all the blame on the mad, mad Netanyahu.
My latest series of interviews on podcasts and the texts which I set out on these pages to introduce the video links have stirred up a great deal of comment on my web platforms and email letters directly to me. Some viewers/readers support my contention that the United States is using Israel as its proxy in the Middle East and is not just enabling but even directing Israel’s rampage in the region to ‘kick ass’ generally and to reinforce American dominance there in line with American global hegemony. Far from being outraged by the Israeli atrocities, the U.S. government is satisfied to see Israel take revenge for the many humiliations that the United States has suffered in the Middle East, most recently in the disorderly and disgraceful pull-out from Afghanistan but going back, say, 40 years to the hostage taking at the American embassy in Teheran by the new revolutionary Iranian leadership there that overthrew the American backed Shah.
Others in my audience have not hesitated to say that they think I am wrong, and that indeed Prime Minister Netanyahu is leading Joe Biden & Company around by the nose, which just happens to be the consensus view in mainstream media.
Most of this discussion is not visible to the broad public. However, the ‘Judging Freedom’ channel which has 450,000 subscribers and its host, Judge Andrew Napolitano put my proposition on the dog (USA) wagging the tail (Israel) to several of his best-known panelists in the 24 hours following my interview with him. To be sure, my idea seemed so ‘contrarian’ that it demanded a response from the mightiest minds in the alternative media camp. They obliged. With one exception, the mightiest minds were dismissive of my interpretation in more respectful, less respectful ways.
The least polite, least professional dismissal was delivered by Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA official and member in good standing of VIPS, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Before Judge Napolitano could finish setting out my point, Johnson broke into derisive laughter. He then called my analytic framework ‘nonsensical,’ and proceeded to explain that such a sophisticated policy as using Israel in a proxy war on Iran and the greater neighborhood was beyond the abilities of those at the top of the federal government who are utterly incompetent in managing their assistance to Kiev. To be sure, I never expected to hear such across-the-board condemnation of the feds by a fervent patriot, but life does have its surprises.
A more professional but intellectually lazy ‘nyet’ to my analytical tool came from Professor John Mearsheimer. He opined that I was just repeating a rejection of the power of AIPAC over U.S. policy set out more than a decade ago by Noam Chomsky. Perhaps he thought he was doing me a favor by placing me alongside Chomsky, the outstanding dissident, among foreign policy critics going back decades. However much I admire Chomsky’s co-written Manufacturing Consent, my estimation of Chomsky’s other very repetitive and self-plagiarizing books is less positive. See the respective chapter in my 2010 book Great American Post-Cold War Thinkers on International Relations.
No, professor Mearsheimer, what Chomsky said back then has little relevance today when new people at the top of the federal government face new challenges.
It is understandable that Mearsheimer will defend tooth and claw the idea that the Israeli Lobby controls the U.S. Congress and U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East which is totally supportive of Israel’s defensive and offensive actions. The good professor paid dearly in 2007 when he and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard made that case in a book that was heavily criticized by the leaders in the political science world at that time. Their view has since become the general consensus and they are heavily invested in it.
Let us now look at the one guest interviewee on ‘Judging Freedom’, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who agreed with what I am saying about the proxy status of Israel with certain important qualifications that I indeed accept.
Colonel Wilkerson had and obviously still has highly placed contacts in both the military and civilian sides of the federal government. And well he might, given that he is among the Judge’s guests who reached the top levels in the U.S. government as Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Colonel Wilkerson says that the view of Israel as a proxy to be used as required to serve U.S. interests in the region, i.e. to be directed by the United States, does not represent the whole of the U.S. government power structure but of certain elements within it, namely the Neocons, among whom Victoria Nuland is the most visible example. He goes on to say that there are a good number of such Neocons in the government since they were never chased out, never charged or brought to trial for the disasters that befell the countries the United States attacked at their urging and the losses of blood and treasure suffered by the United States itself as a result. No, these Neocons have remained close to the levers of power.
I readily agree with Colonel Wilkerson that the Neocons in the Deep State are not the only ideologues running the show in Washington. As one perspicacious reader wrote to me, there is another big contingent at the federal level consisting of Liberals like Tony Blinken who think only in terms of America’s commitment to Israel’s survival and of its right to self-defense and who overlook the crimes against humanity that Israel is perpetrating using U.S. weapons. No doubt the personal factor of Jewish heritage in the case of Blinken and other fellow thinkers plays its own role, so that the self-destruction of the state of Israel by its pursuit of a faux self-defense does not seem to cross their minds.
Speaking in more general terms about foreign policy, the conflicting concepts and interests between Liberals and Neocons at the top levels of the government with respect to Israel are no different from the division between the loudest representatives of the United States on the world stage who speak only in terms of defending democracy and human rights, that is to say in Wilsonian terms, versus those whose hands are really on the levers of power, the practitioners of Realpolitik and national self-interest.
Before closing this discussion, I am obliged to delve into the elephant in the room kind of issue that presents itself with particular relevance in the Alternative Media community: anti-Semitism. I know that this is a mine field, and I will try my best to cross it without losing a limb or worse. But it begs to be addressed.
Regrettably, ever since the Hamas attack on Israel a year ago, Israeli and many American Jewish leaders have condemned the slightest expressions of sympathy for the civilian victims of Netanyahu’s atrocities in Gaza and now in Lebanon as tantamount to anti-Semitism. Leading American universities, including my own alma maters of Harvard and Columbia, have caved in to the outrageous demands of Jewish donors that they arrest and expel students and faculty who protest the atrocities. In a word, anti-Semitism as a concept is being abused egregiously for the sake of pro-Israeli censorship.
Professor Mearsheimer’s emphasis on the Israeli Lobby as the controlling factor in United States policy towards the Middle East plays very nicely into what are real as opposed to phony anti-Semitic beliefs. His estimation of an all-powerful AIPAC and its destructive impact on U.S. foreign policy is music to the ears of those who say that the Anglo-Zionist gang runs the world and runs the United States in particular.
Now why would this be a special issue in the Alternative Media population? Well, just look at the audience closely and you will understand me.
I have a bit of experience with this issue that goes back well beyond the year long mayhem wrought by Israel in its neighborhood. My relevant experience goes back more than 10 years to when I began republishing essays about U.S.-Russian relations that I wrote on the web platform of La Libre Belgique, where they attracted a couple of hundred readers, onto the Moscow based platform called Russia Insider, where they attracted 40,000 or 50,000 readers each time. Russia Insider was then run by its American born editor Charles Bausman. In those days Russia Insider was the one-of-a-kind place for publishing alternative news about Russia.
In general, about 1% of all readers of material published on the internet send in Comments, if this function is made available. So it was with my articles in Russia Insider. Such people are activists and do not represent all of the other 99% of readers. But they do set the tone for the platform. If what these Comments express are too radical and off-putting, the readership will shrink.
In the case of Russia Insider, too many of the reader comments were by clearly antisocial people who happened to be based in the United States and hated their country. Still more, they hated the Anglo-Zionists whom they believed run the world.
Finally, Russia Insider was consumed by the hatred and anti-social behavior of the minority of readers who set the tone.
Yesterday a massive barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles hit Israel. It came after months of serious Iranian efforts (vid) to achieve better relations with the U.S. had failed. Israel had managed to sabotage those efforts to the detriment of its U.S. ally.
To understand what has happened – and, more importantly, why this attack was launched today – we need to look back.
New elections were held in Iran and, to the astonishment of many, Masoud Pezeshkian, a moderate, won with a decent majority. Pezeshkian is a specialist in cardiac surgery with no experience in foreign policy. He had campaigned on reconnecting with the ‘West’, the lifting of sanctions on Iran and a generally more liberal policy.
Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated along with his personal bodyguard in the Iranian capital Tehran by an apparent Israeli attack. Haniyeh was killed in his accommodation in a military-run guesthouse after attending the inauguration ceremony for Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian.
The assassination of Haniyeh was a major offense against the sovereignty of the the Islamic Republic of Iran. It also was a personal offense against Masoud Pezeshkian’s presidency.
The Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini and the leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) wooed to retaliate for the strike. But the new president still argued to not retaliate but to seek accommodation through negotiations. He, at that time, still hoped that the U.S. would arrange for a ceasefire in Gaza and wanted to avoid that Iran would be blamed for a failure of those negotiations.
President Pezeshkian continued his moderate course. On September 23, during a his participation in the UN General Assembly in New York, he again put out feelerstowards a new accommodation with the U.S. over Iran’s nuclear program:
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Monday emphasized his openness to a new international agreement over his country’s nuclear program — a subject that has fueled global tensions for years, risking potentially catastrophic warfare between Iran and the U.S.
…
Asked about restoring nuclear negotiations, Pezeshkian said through a translator: “I do hope we can … reach an agreement.”
…
He said Iran upheld its end of the nuclear deal unlike the U.S. — an assessment most outside experts share, though there are some long-standing concerns about Iranian compliance — and pointed to American diplomats saying time and again that a cease-fire deal in Gaza that can boost stability across the Middle East is just a week away.
Within Iran the moderated course was seen with suspicion:
The lack of trust specifically affects the calculus of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he continued, in a tacit acknowledgment that the unelected Khamenei has the final say on Iran’s policies.
“His Eminence says, ’They say one thing, do another,” Pezeshkian said. The president promoted engagement with the outside world as he sought votes from Iranians, noting that easing sanctions could boost the economy amid popular unrest in the country, and in August, Khamenei gave him a cautious green light to bargain with the U.S. Another power center in the country — the elite Revolutionary Guard — is extremely leery of such talks.
Four days later Israeli air-strikes killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah and a major architect of the Iran led Axis of Resistance. Several other Hizbullah leaders as well as the deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), General Abbas Nilforoushan, were also killed in the strike.
Pezeshkian noted rather bitterly that the order by the Israeli Prime Minister Natanyahoo to kill Nasrallah had been given from New York:
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says the international community will not forget that the order for Israel’s terrorist act to assassinate Secretary General of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was issued from New York.
…
In a message of condolences on Saturday, Pezeshkian said the United States cannot absolve itself of complicity with the Zionists in the terror attack against the Hezbollah chief.
The assassination of Nasrallah demonstrated that Pezeshkian’s politics of moderation had failed.
President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran says the world should know that the blood of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his companions will continue to boil and turn into a bulwark against tyranny and oppression.
…
Addressing a cabinet session on Sunday, Pezeshkian said it is imperative for Tehran to give a “decisive” response to the criminal Israeli regime.
Iran’s plans for retaliating against Israel required coordination with its allies. On Monday, September 30, Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin happened to be in Tehran for long planned talks about economic cooperation:
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says the implementation of critical projects between Iran and Russia will produce a huge capacity to counter cruel Western sanctions against the two countries.
…
in his remarks, the Iranian president warned that Israel is intensifying tensions with the direct support of the United States in order to prepare the ground for increasing the presence of the United States in the region.This poses a “common threat to the interests of the regional countries and nations,” he said.
…
The Russian premier expressed concern over the escalation of tensions in the region and said the US supports mounting conflicts in different parts of the world with the purpose of securing its own interests.
Therefore, he emphasized, independent countries like Iran and Russia, should accelerate cooperation to counter such measures.
Moscow was thereby likely informed of upcoming strikes against Israel. China was likewise assured and informed:
President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran says the traditional friendship between the Iranian and Chinese nations has evolved into “deep, stable, and strategic” relations.“I express my desire to work alongside Your Excellency to further develop comprehensive relations between Iran and China,” President Pezeshkian stated in his message to President Xi Jinping, written on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
A few hours later, after Mishustin had left, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps launched a volley of some 250 ballistic missiles towards Israel:
Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces:Among our targets were Israel’s 3 main airbases, Mossad’s terror HQ, Radar sites, and gathering sites of armoured vehicles around the Gaza Strip, responsible for the genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense was unable to interdict a significant number of Iran’s missiles.
Elijah J. Magnier @ejmalrai – 17:06 UTC · Oct 1, 2024Over 250 Iranian ballistic hit #Israel. Many buildings in Israel are damaged. The possibility of a regional war is growing. Israelis expected to retaliate and Iran will retaliate to the retaliation. …
Verified videos show dozens of impacts of Iranian missiles against targets in Israel. Several strikes hit near the Mossad headquarter in Tel Aviv. Allegedly a gas platform of the coast of Ashkelon was also hit. Video shows that it is engulfed in fire.
A massive Iranian ballistic missile strike on targets in Israel launched on October 1 has targeted Nevatim Air Base, among other key targets in the country. The facility hosts both of the Israeli Air Force’s F-35 fifth generation fighter squadrons, and was previously intended to host a third squadron of the fighters after they were delivered. Iranian media sources have reported that the facility was “completely destroyed” in the attack. Footage from Israel has confirmed the impact of dozens of ballistic missiles which Israel’s air defence network failed to shoot down, with targets impacted including the headquarters of the intelligence agency Mossad, located in Tel Aviv which was levelled by the attack.
Remarkably there are no reports of any civilian casualties.
Israel and Iran have now issued threats and counter-threats of further escalation.
But most importantly will be the stand the U.S. government is going to take.
Joining Israel an open war against Iran, which Netanyahoo has wanted to achieve for some time, would bog down the U.S. in another unwinnable war in the Middle East that would hurt its interests for years to come.
It would give time to China and Russia to expand their multilateral coalition to the further detriment of U.S. supremacy.
In the history of imperial conquest and rule of the Arabs – that’s Turkish, Italian, British, French, American, Israeli – decapitation of leaders has always been preferable to genocide of peoples because it’s much cheaper.
Slavery, as the Portuguese empire first developed it, was the cost accountant’s solution to making genocide pay for itself – pay lucrative profits in fact.
How profitable the bribery and killing methods of American decapitation of the secular Arab nationalists have been since 1943 is the story told in The Jackals’ Wedding.
The combination of decapitation and genocide now being pursued by the Israelis lacks the usual cost-accounting restrictions. This is because the imperial ideologies have turned into God-dictated duty, Crusader zealotry revived, but this time Judaeo rather than Christian, rabbinical rather than papal.
It is also because the US government is paying the bill.
Faith in the transubstantiation of the Jewish state would wither away much quicker than the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem without US cash, capital, and underwriter guarantees. That kingdom lasted 192 years; Israel is 76 years old; Zionism, 127 years.
In self-defence, popular resistance and national liberation of the Arabs, religious conviction can only be as effective as there is military capacity for the fight. The will to fight without the weapons is doomed; just as the war-fighting capacities of the Arabs are doomed if they are inadequate – sabotaged and betrayed off the battlefield; out-gunned if used in combat; held back without a fight.
For reminder of how long the present long war will be, let’s repeat this from the beginning last October.
The Semites, the Semitic peoples, and speakers of the Semitic languages started as a figment of the German imagination in the late 18th century and early 19th century.
It quickly became a German racial epithet, used in contrast to Aryan. By the time Adolf Hitler came along, this was the pseudo-scientific doctrine in which the Germans lumped both the Jews and the Arabs into a single category – the inferiors of the Aryans.
That is one of the reasons Hitler refused to listen to the advice of his general staff on aiding the Arab nationalist forces in Iraq, Syria and Palestine in the Wehrmacht’s war plans against the British and the Soviet Union. The pseudo-science of Semitism and Aryanism, and the idea of anti-Semitism which the Germans, together with the British and Americans, adopted in the run-up to World War II was spelled out at Harvard University by an anthropologist called Carleton Coon; he cribbed directly from German academics, turning out papers on the Berbers of Morocco and advancing his racial superiority-inferiority ideas between 1925 and 1939. When the war began, Coon joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he demonstrated his keenness for pistol shooting, hare-brained sabotage missions, and homicidal mania. Among his wartime schemes he proposed to remove the Arabs of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) as unfit to rule; replace them with the restoration of the French empire; and kill those French officials whom Coon judged to get his way. He was one of the planners of the assassination of Admiral Francois Darlan, the French military commander, in Algiers on December 24, 1942; Coon’s pistol was the murder weapon.**
American murderers of the Arabs like Coon then — like Israeli murderers of Arabs now — have succeeded in establishing their doctrine of exceptionalism and racial superiority in state policy as the successor to the doctrines of Aryanism and Nazism which were interrupted by Hitler’s suicide in 1945, then the Nuremberg trials concluding in 1946. The crime of racial and cultural genocide became international law in 1948. It was then modified by the new Israeli state doctrine of anti-Semitism: this decriminalised the genocide of the Palestinian people; and outlawed instead media criticism, political opposition, even science for threatening the legitimacy of Israel’s Basic Law of Arab exclusion, and Israeli military operations to enforce it.
In the present war between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas on the Gaza battlefield – “the American project”, as the Russian Foreign Ministry called it in a statement on October 29 *** – the doctrine of anti-Semitism as a race hatred crime is being applied to protect the race hatred crime being perpetrated against the other Semites, the Palestinians.
This doctrine, however, has had a negative impact on the ability of the Israelis and the Americans to wage their war. A fresh Russian analysis of the military intelligence failures exposed by Hamas in its offensive of October 7, illustrates how and why the Israelis failed to anticipate because they underestimated their Arab adversary; and because they regarded him as a racial inferior.
This assessment appeared on October 29 in the Telegram channel of a Russian analyst named Alexander Hoffmann, a senior member of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). Hoffmann sets out in brief the causes of the Israeli intelligence and military failures preceding the start of the Hamas operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7.
It has been immediately republished by Boris Rozhin, editor and writer of the influential Colonel Cassad military blog; and by Yevgeny Krutikov, Moscow security analyst, historian, and former GRU military intelligence staff officer.
Left: Alexander Hoffmann and the name of his Telegram account, @thehegemonist. Right: Yevgeny Krutikov and his Telegram account, Mudraya Ptitsa (“Wise Bird”).
If we abstract from the versions about the eschatological motives of the parties to the conflict and various hypotheses about the scenario of how events developed, the Al-Aqsa Flood operation exposed three vulnerabilities of the Israelis of a military intelligence nature:
— a failure in strategic intelligence regarding the plans and intentions of Hamas. Although, based on the received HUMINT [human intelligence] data, there were warnings from the Egyptian intelligence services. The Israelis position their technical intelligence capabilities as dominant [above their human intelligence].
— the discrepancy between the capabilities of the advanced, expensive Iron Dome missile defense system and the requirements for repelling the direct and asymmetric threats [employed by Hamas].
— strategic miscalculation in the use of a complex, high-tech, expensive security barrier around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip. The construction of the barrier strategically set restrictions on offensive manoeuvre for the IDF and the ability of the Israelis to anticipate. Hamas has gained thereby the operational initiative – the mobility of their forces against the static dispersion of the Israelis. Considering the barrier impenetrable before the operation, the Israelis had relocated most of their regular forces to northern-sector control of the territories near the borders of Lebanon and Syria,and to the West Bank.
Hoffmann illustrates his report (right) with heavy IDF armour in fixed position above ground and below ground Hamas forces on the move.
The “great Israeli wall” has appeared to be almost totally useless. Hamas overcame it in a short time, which allowed it to operate almost unhindered in the adjacent territories. The disabling of [the IDF’s] technological means demonstrated the lack of the human resources to respond. In terms of communications, the dependence of the Israeli forces on wireless data transmission has become a critical vulnerability.
As in the case of Iron Dome, the Israelis relied on technological solutions, methods, and thinking, neglecting the principle of war being waged by people, not by machines (yet). To this is added a doctrinal and strategic discrepancy with the actual conditions of combat. Technological superiority was placed at the forefront, but the complex systems showed vulnerability to a cascade of failures, leading the system to collapse. A regional conflict would make this catastrophic.
[*] The lead cartoons are, left, by Carlos Latuff in Brazil in 2006 and, right, by Mr Fish in the US (Harper’s Magazine) also in 2006. They have been reproduced by Evan Jones in a collection of western media cartoons on the meaning of anti-Semitism as an information warfare weapon in US-Israeli military operations against the Arabs until editorial censorship was imposed in both the UK and US. Click to read.
[**] Read the 80-year old story of the German General Staff plans for the Arab states and Hitler’s failure to implement them, followed by the plans of Coon, the OSS, and the CIA homicidalists against the Arabs, which are still being followed in Washington and Tel Aviv. Click. On Saturday night, October 28, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed his intelligence services and military staff for failing to warn him of the Hamas war plan. Under counter-attack from the services and the military, Netanyahu then apologised and retracted his claims. The Israeli press record of the episode reveals that the entire Israeli political and military leadership shares the same racial superiority doctrine.
[***] In a special session of security officials called to discuss the Makhachkala airport incidents, President Vladimir Putin said: “We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of the peoples of the Middle East and other regions of the world, who organizes deadly chaos, who benefits from it. Today, in my opinion, it has already become obvious and understandable for everyone – customers act openly and brazenly. It is the current ruling elites of the United States and their satellites that are the main beneficiaries of global instability. They extract their bloody rent from it. Their strategy is also obvious. The United States as a global superpower – everyone sees it, u
