Category Archives: Anglozionism

The Insanity of Repetition: Israel’s Return to the Lebanese Quagmire

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?


Photo: Credit: The Cradle)

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?

The Anniversary of October 7th

by Ron Unz via Unz.com

EPub Format

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.

Video Link

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.

Related Reading:

Hizbullah, Iran Take the Initiative Against Israel

via Moon of Alabama

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.

More on Tails Wagging Dogs and Vice Versa

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.

by Gilbert Doctorow

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.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_7prnElVTY

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.

Iran Attacked Israel Only After U.S. Rejected Its Moderate Stance

via Moon of Alabama

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.

On May 20 2024 then President of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, died in a helicopter accident.

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.

On July 30:

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.

After arriving back in Tehran Pezeshkian’s tone had changed:

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.

Other targets were likewise destroyed:

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.

Jewish Anti-Semitism Towards Arabs Was Hamas’s Strategic Opportunity on October 7 — Still is*

by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

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

Riyadh Forms Coalition to Create a Palestinian State

Published: 28.09.2024 via https://muslimpolitic.ru

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan announced the creation of an “international coalition for the creation of a Palestinian state and the implementation of the two-State solution.”

The Saudi minister, speaking at a meeting held on the sidelines of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly, stressed that the war in Gaza has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, in addition to the serious violations committed by the Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank and the threat to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

“Self-defense cannot justify the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, the practice of systematic destruction, forced displacement, the use of hunger as an instrument of war, incitement and dehumanization, and systematic torture in its worst forms, including sexual violence and other crimes documented in UN reports,”the statement said.

Referring to the escalation of the situation in the region, Bin Farhan said: “These days we are witnessing a dangerous regional escalation that now affects the brotherly Republic of Lebanon, leading to the danger of a regional war that threatens the region and the entire world.”

The Foreign Minister demanded the cessation of hostilities, saying: “We demand an immediate end to the ongoing war and all violations of international law, as well as that all those who hinder the peace process be held accountable and not have the opportunity to threaten the security of the region and the entire world.

We wonder what remains of the trust and legitimacy of the global system in the face of our inability to stop the war machine and the insistence by some forces on the selective application of international law, which is a clear violation of the most basic standards of equality, freedoms and human rights. The establishment of an independent Palestinian State is an inalienable right and the foundation of peace, not the end result achieved through an elusive political process.”

The Minister also noted: “We reiterate our appreciation to the countries that have recently recognized Palestine, and call on all States to show the courage to take the same decision, as well as to join the international consensus represented by the 149 countries that recognize Palestine.

Implementing a two-State solution is the perfect solution to break the cycle of conflict and suffering and create a new reality in which the entire region, including Israel, can live in security.”

Bin Farhan concluded his speech by announcing the creation of an international coalition: “Today, on behalf of Arab and Islamic countries and our European partners, we are announcing the creation of the ‘International Coalition for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution’, and we invite you to join this initiative.”

Let’s Force Antony Blinken to Resign

by Philip Girarldi via Unz Review

Some might argue that Antony Blinken is the worst Secretary of State that the United States has ever had to suffer under even though the competition for that accolade is fierce and includes his recent predecessor Hillary Clinton. Clinton, who more than anyone launched the war against Africa’s most developed nation, is remembered fondly for her giggled, grinning response when she was informed how deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had died after having a bayonet inserted in his anus when he was captured by rebels while on the run after being removed from power by the US and its NATO allies. She said “We came, we saw and he died!” All right, so it wasn’t exactly Julius Caesar’s terse description of the outcome of his Second Civil War battle against Pharnaces II of Pontus at Zela (modern-day Zile, Turkey) in 47 BC. Caesar said “Veni, vidi, vici!” (I came, I saw, I conquered) but it was likely the best plagiarism that a Clinton could come up with.

Joe Lauria of Consortium News observes how deep the State Department rot goes as “Barack Obama also let Hillary Clinton, the ‘Queen of Warmongers,’ bring Neocon Queen Victoria Nuland into his administration. Donald Trump let neocons John Bolton and Mike Pompeo into his. And Biden has Blinken (and for a time Nuland too.) Instead of banishing these people, they are allowed to linger and drag the US into evermore perilous failures: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Ukraine, leaving behind a mountain of squandered dollars and an ocean of blood.”

To be sure, the United States has developed a politico/economic system based on corruption by special interests and tribalism that fails to benefit the country and its citizens in almost every respect. Due in part to runaway military spending on unnecessary and avoidable wars, the country is running a deficit so huge that it will inevitably lead to a financial crash that will be devastating to ordinary Americans. The nation’s health care system is both broken and often prohibitively expensive, with the US delivering the worst results in medical services for any developed nation. To pretend that everything is just fine, the politicians lie and lie and lie, so much so that the joke has become current “How do you know that a politician is lying?” Answer: “When his or her lips are moving!”

My favorite recent big lies by a politician have to be President Joe Biden’s assertions crammed into an 11 minute speech on July 24th which included that he had ended his candidacy for reelection as president in order to “save democracy” in the United States. The president is 81 and his failing mental state has been widely observed but in his first White House appearance since he quit the race on July 21st, he felt compelled to say that he felt his record as president “merited a second term” but that “nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy.” Of course, one might well argue that if democracy is failing it must largely be the fault of the president and his cabinet which control the courts and justice department and run both police and intelligence services as well as having the ability to place disinformation to counter criticism in the national media. Who’s driving the car Joe?

Biden also claimed that “I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” even though it is engaged in a military occupation of one quarter of Syria to include combat operations against government forces, bombing Yemen, and conducting counterterrorism operations in Iraq in spite of the fact that the country’s parliament and government have three times asked the US to leave. The US is as well supporting and enabling financially, logistically and with intelligence the large and bloody conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, which did not threaten the US and could have been avoided completely.

Israel is, of course, a special case even given the appalling record exhibited by US foreign policy “experts in place” screwing up the world since 9/11. Before Israel’s likely demolition/destruction of the World Trade Center towers on that day, one would never have imagined the control that the Jewish Lobby has since obtained over the US foreign policy as well as over many domestic policies. This is largely thanks to the alarmingly pro-Israel measures that have been advanced by an ignorant and reckless Donald Trump followed by the totally mindless and heedless Joe Biden. Biden has a majority of Jews occupying senior positions in his administration and it is fair to say that Jews are at the controls for Middle Eastern policy as well as what is playing out in Ukraine. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is little more than a spokesman and advocate for Israel as he made clear when he arrived in Ben Gurion Airport a day after the Hamas October 7th 2023 attack and announced that “I come before you as a Jew…” and followed that up with his family holocaust history, though he failed to mention that his stepfather Samuel Pisar worked as private secretary for Robert Maxwell, a leading Israeli spy. That fact plus the occasional claims that he is an Israeli-American dual national, like Biden’s top Middle East negotiator Amos Hochstein, makes me wonder how Blinken ever got a security clearance in the first place. And let’s not forget about Congress, where pro-Israel fanatics have taken complete control (with the sole exception of Tom Massie) of the Republican Party.

This corruption and control of the federal government is exercised through over-the-top political donations and favorable media coverage dependent on each Congressman’s support for Israel. It also means using prominent Jewish journalists to discredit critics as antisemites and holocaust deniers. And it is all bought with cash on the line. A story is currently circulating indicating that Miriam Adelson, Israel-born heiress to the Sheldon Adelson multi-billion dollar casino fortune, has offered Trump $100 million as a political campaign contribution if he will promise to enable Israeli annexation of all of historic Palestine after he wins the November election. Just watch it happen if he wins.

Blinken is more into the straight-faced lie, particularly when he is on guard to protect Israel from any criticism up to and including a clearly visible genocide that is taking place, and that is where the latest saga involving him has gained momentum. It has picked up speed to such an extent that people who normally are afraid to challenge the Israel Lobby are beginning to take notice and are calling for Blinken’s resignation. I would personally prefer that he be flat out fired as an accessory to war crimes and genocide and imprisoned, with a black mark in perpetuum etched next to his name. But I would regret that either outcome would only free him up to take a salary increase as a front office toady with any one of a number of deep-pockets Israel Lobby components. Somehow folks who betray their loyalty oaths and ignore their allegiance to this country to “help” Israel when taking senior level government jobs always land on their feet when their betrayal becomes too obvious and they have to step down. Note for example the case of Victoria Nudelman who was recently the number two top official at the State Department and was the driving force behind war between Ukraine and Russia.

The most recent bit of over-the-top lying to cover up Israeli crimes has plenty of blood all over it, which is a development that doesn’t seem to bother Mr. Blinken as long as it is nearly all Palestinian. He is now, however, facing calls for his resignation after he had reportedly ignored assessments by two government agencies which concluded that Israel was deliberately and maliciously blocking American humanitarian aid to Gaza. Blinken’s monstrous behavior was recently exposed in an investigation by ProPublica which revealed that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department’s refugee bureau had both communicated their concerns about what was happening to Blinken and other top government officials in April. According to US law, countries that block US humanitarian aid cannot receive arms shipments, but Washington has provided Tel Aviv with billions of dollars in military aid and arms sales with only one short pause throughout the course of the entire Israeli assault on Gaza.

The 17-page USAID report that was presented to Blinken detailed “instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.” Nevertheless, on May 10th, Blinken delivered a State Department report to Congress asserting that Israel had not blocked aid to Gaza despite the findings of the report, which went on to describe the situation in Gaza as “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.” USAID officials also specifically recommended that all arms exports to Israel be paused until the situation is resolved. The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, concurred and recommended that the Foreign Assistance Act be triggered to freeze the $830 million in US aid for arms for Israel that was already in the pipeline. Senior officials in the department concluded that “facts on the ground indicate US humanitarian assistance is being restricted.” One State Department official, Stacy Gilbert, resigned over Blinken’s final report to Congress, saying in a statement following her departure that “there is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid” and that “to deny this is absurd and shameful.”

Israel for its part has not been shy about how it is “security controlling” aid shipments as part of its full siege of the enclave, blocking entry of food, medical equipment and supplies, and even water and electricity. Truck convoys of food have been allowed to rot at checkpoints. At least 34 children have died of malnutrition due to the blockade in 2024 alone and the war crime of deliberate starvation is one of the charges that has been levelled against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s application for arrest warrants in May.

Calls for Blinken to resign from his post have followed from some of the numerous critics of US policy. “Antony Blinken lied to Congress even though he knew Israel was deliberately starving Gaza – all to keep arming the genocide. We demand that @SecBlinken resign and that @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris stop illegally arming Israel NOW!” tweeted Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also called for Blinken to step down. “We’re calling for the resignation of @SecBlinken after @propublica reports revealed he misled Congress about Israel’s deliberate blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza – a violation of US law. The American people deserve leaders who tell the truth. It’s time to hold the Biden administration accountable for its ongoing complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. #ResignBlinken #FreeGaza #EndTheBlockade,” the group wrote on X.

So what will happen next? Probably nothing. One observer opined that Congress was very pleased to be lied to in “defense” of Israel and would have certainly denounced Blinken for speaking the truth. So the fact that Blinken is lying should really surprise no one as he knows he will get away with it. Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone explains it this way: “Israel must be protected because it is the last bastion of freedom and democracy in the middle east, no matter how many journalists it has to assassinate, no matter how many press institutions it needs to shut down, no matter how many protests its supporters need to dismantle, no matter how much free speech it needs to eliminate, no matter how many civil rights it needs to erase, and no matter how many elections its lobbyists need to buy.” Nevertheless, international charitable organizations that aren’t affiliated with any single nation have been waking up to the reality of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, with some also saying repeatedly for months that Israel is blocking humanitarian aid as also independent journalists have been reporting, some of whom, like targeted aid workers, have been killed by Israel while investigating the story. And yet the United States has consistently denied knowledge of these war crimes, with the denials being most particularly verbalized by Tony Blinken. Since Congress and the White House have the power to decide which lies are okay and which lies are not, Blinken will shrug and continue to lie and will probably continue to serve as Secretary of State if Kamala Harris is elected. That has unfortunately become the American way.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform.

On September 10, Israeli Settlers Became Illegal Migrants

by Thierry Meyssan via VoltaireNet

We are used to seeing Israel indulge in exactions under the pretext of its security, and the Anglo-Saxons defending it at the Security Council. As a result, we witness crimes without any judicial consequences. This situation is now over. The International Court of Justice has swept aside Tel Aviv’s reasoning, and the State of Palestine has become a full member of the United Nations. It will therefore no longer be possible to turn a blind eye to the situation of the Palestinians, and they will have the capacity to prosecute their tormentors.

Pursuant to its vote on May 10, 2024, the General Assembly welcomed Palestine as a full member of the United Nations on September 10.

On September 10, 2024, Israeli settlers, who claim to be fulfilling a divine plan by settling in the West Bank (Judea-Samaria, in their words), went from being Israeli citizens living in disputed territories to illegal immigrants in the sovereign state of Palestine.

At the opening of its seventy-ninth session, the United Nations General Assembly implemented its resolution ES-10/23 of May 10 [1]. The State of Palestine has become a full member of the United Nations (UN). No one can now oppose the exercise of its rights as a sovereign state.

If Palestine is a sovereign state, this changes the interpretation of the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (known as the “Oslo II Agreement”). The Palestinian Authority is no longer a transitional administration, but a government in the full sense of the term. The Palestinian Territories are no longer “disputed areas”, but the internationally recognized territory of a sovereign state.

Since the 1967 war (known as the “Six-Day War”), the settler movement has steadily gained ground. There are now over 700,000 settlers in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

On July 19, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – the internal court of the United Nations, consulted by the UN General Assembly – defined the rules of law concerning Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory [2]. This opinion has not been acted upon, as only the Security Council has the power to compel Israel to apply it.

Let’s not forget that international law, unlike criminal law, does not rely on a police force and a penitentiary system. It is simply the obligation of governments to honor the signature of their state. In this case, by joining the UN, Israel signed its charter [3]. Chapter XIV of the Charter commits each member “to abide by the decision of the International Court of Justice in any dispute to which it is a party”.

The International Court of Justice has stated the law. Its decision is binding on all UN member states, including Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom.

The Court ruled (§ 229) that these policies and practices violate the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. According to the Court, de facto, Israel is practicing a form of apartheid (cf. art. 3 of the said Convention). This is exactly what the UN General Assembly proclaimed on November 10, 1975: “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” (resolution 3379) [4]. This text was only repealed to facilitate the Madrid peace conference in 1991 [5]. However, as Israel has not fulfilled its commitments of the time and has intensified its policies and practices, this text should be reinstated.

The Court also observed (§ 263) that “the Oslo Accords do not authorize Israel to annex parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory in order to satisfy its security needs and obligations. Nor do they authorize it to maintain a permanent presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory for the same purpose”. What was true in July is even truer now that Palestine is an internationally recognized sovereign state.

As a result, last week, after this decision and before Palestine entered the General Assembly, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) suddenly evacuated the main West Bank towns they had occupied. On the other hand, the Israeli government told the High Court of Justice on September 12 that there was no reason to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza, since Israel does not control the territory and therefore has no responsibility there..

This being the case, the Court concluded that “Israel is under an obligation to make full reparation for the damage caused by its internationally wrongful acts [occupation and apartheid] to all natural or legal persons concerned” (§ 269). This includes “Israel’s obligation to return all land and other real property, as well as all assets confiscated from any natural or legal person since the beginning of its occupation in 1967, and all cultural property and buildings taken from Palestinians and their institutions, including archives and documents. It also demands that all settlers in existing settlements be evacuated, that those parts of the wall built by Israel which are situated in the Occupied Palestinian Territory be dismantled, and that all Palestinians displaced during the occupation be allowed to return to their original place of residence” (§ 270).

Note that the Court does not order reparations for damage caused before 1967. This was not the question put to it. Moreover, the guns have spoken and the Palestinians have lost several military operations, the consequences of which they must also bear. The wrongs are shared, even if it is clear that both the wrongs and the damage suffered by the Palestinians are out of all proportion to those suffered by the Israelis.

The Court has ruled on the consequences of the occupation since 1967. Its decisions are not retroactive. It notes facts that have continued to worsen since 1967.

Addressing all member states of the United Nations, the Court notified them that they “are under an obligation not to recognize any change in the physical character or demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the territory occupied by Israel on June 5, 1967, including East Jerusalem, other than those agreed upon by the parties through negotiations, and to make a distinction, in their dealings with Israel, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967. The Court considers that the obligation to distinguish, in exchanges with Israel, between that State’s own territory and the Occupied Palestinian Territory includes, in particular, the obligation not to maintain treaty relations with Israel in all cases where the latter purports to act on behalf of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or part thereof in matters concerning the said territory; not to maintain, with regard to the Occupied Palestinian Territory or parts thereof, economic or commercial relations with Israel which would be of such a nature as to strengthen the latter’s illicit presence in that territory; they must refrain, in the establishment and the maintenance of diplomatic missions in Israel, to recognize in any way its illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; and to take measures to prevent trade or investment which helps to maintain the illegal situation created by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” (§ 278).

For Volker Turk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, if words mean anything, the ICJ decision obliges all UN member states not to recognize the Israeli occupying authority over the territory of the sovereign state of Palestine.

This is why, on September 9, Volker Turk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, opening the 57th session of the Human Rights Council, declared: “No State should accept blatant disregard for international law, including the binding decisions of the UN Security Council and the orders of the International Court of Justice, not in this situation [the Israeli occupation of Palestine], nor in any other situation”.

Each and every one of us must be aware that the rules have changed. Israel’s occupation of the State of Palestine is illegal. Since September 10, this state has been internationally recognized, even if several permanent members of the Security Council have not done so in their personal capacity. It now has legal means at its disposal that it previously lacked. The Anglo-Saxon umbrella behind which Tel Aviv sheltered no longer exists in law. We are entering a new period in which Washington and London will have to use force to maintain this system of oppression.

This legal revolution marks the victory of President Mahmoud Abbas’s (89) strategy. Paradoxically, it comes at the end of his life, at a time when his government is discredited for its collaboration with Israel and corruption.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] “Admission of new Members to the United Nations”, Voltaire Network, 10 May 2024.

[2] Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, International Court of Justice, July 19, 2024.

[3] “Charter of the United Nations”, Voltaire Network, 26 June 1945.

[4] « Qualification du sionisme », ONU (Assemblée générale) , Réseau Voltaire, 10 novembre 1975.

[5] « Retrait de la qualification du sionisme », ONU (Assemblée générale) , Réseau Voltaire, 16 décembre 1991.

Netanyahu Seeking to Implement the Greater Israel?

The so-called “Agreement of the Century” signed by Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and sponsored by Donald Trump staged the de facto recognition of Israeli sovereignty over much of the Jewish colonies in the West Bank (including the Jordan Valley, the Golan Heights and virtually the entire holy city of Jerusalem with the exception of two eastern suburbs) and demands that the Palestinian community renounce completely its historical claims and the right to which it is entitled under international law in exchange for a promise of an injection of $50 billion within 10 years, This would in practice result in the loss of Israeli citizenship for 300,000 Arabs and make it impossible to have a Palestinian state.
Such a doctrine would clash with the vision of Theodor Herzl, considered the father of the present-day State of Israel and founder of Zionism in promoting the creation of the WSO (World Zionist Organization), who in his book “The Jewish State: Testing a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question”, proposed the creation of an independent and sovereign Jewish State for all the Jews in the world. In his work “The Old New Earth” (1902), he lays the foundations of the present-day Jewish state as a utopian modern, democratic and prosperous nation, in which the Jewish people were projected into the context of the search for rights for the stateless national minorities of the time, such as the Armenians and the Arabs.

Later, in 1938, the visionary Einstein warned of the dangers of an exclusionary Zionism by stating: “I would like to see a reasonable settlement with the Arabs on the basis of peaceful life in common, which I believe would be preferable to the creation of a Jewish state”.

Towards the Greater Israel

The Greater Israel (Eretz Israel), is an entity that would try to unite the antithetical concepts of the atavism of the Great Israel (Eretz Israel) and which would have as main advocate Isaac Shamir defending that “Judea and Samaria (biblical terms of the present-day West Bank) are an integral part of the land of Israel.

They have not been captured and will not be returned to anyone”, a doctrine on which the current postulates of the Netanyahu-led Likud party that aspires to make Jerusalem the “indivisible capital of the new Israel” would be based after the invasion of its eastern part following the Six-Day War (1967).

Thus, the Netanyahu government would be speeding up the deadlines to implement the endemism of Greater Israel (Eretz Israel), which would drink from the sources of Genesis 15:18, which notes that “4,000 years ago, the title to all land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates River was bequeathed to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham and subsequently transferred to his descendants”.
This would involve the restoration of the Balfour Declaration (1,917), which drew a vast State of Israel with an area of nearly 46,000 square miles and which extended from the Mediterranean to the east of the Euphrates encompassing Syria, Lebanon, northern part of Iraq, northern part of Saudi Arabia , the coastal strip of the Red Sea and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt as well as Jordan, which would be renamed Palesjordan after being forced to host all the Palestinian population of the present West Bank and Gaza forced into a massive diaspora ( new nakba).
Germán Gorraiz López- Political Analyst

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