The NY Times has been a major promoter of US “regime change” operations for decades. Today, while President Trump considers directly involving a US attack on Iran, the NYT is again performing this role despite many readers being skeptical or opposed.
A June 19 NYT news/analysis is titled “An Islamic Republic With Its Back Against the Wall” by Roger Cohen. It seems written to pave the way for yet another US backed or directed “regime change”. The first sentence asserts without providing evidence that the Tehran government is “an umpopular and repressive regime”. An “Iran expert” is quoted saying, “The Islamic Republic is a rotten tooth waiting to be plucked, like the Soviet Union in its latter years.”
When Israel bombed the Iranian TV broadcast station as a female news anchor was reading the news, Cohen writes that “Some Iranians were overjoyed”. Cohen uses Netanyahu’s description that Israel’s attacks on Iran are “pre-emptive” and designed to “stop Iran usings its enriched uranium to race for a bomb.” He does not mention that even the US intelligence agencies agree that Iran does NOT have a nuclear weapon program.
Cohen goes on to quote former Blackrock executive and now German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz: “This mullah regime has brought death and destruction to the world.” Iran has invaded no countries while the US has invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria while Israel has attacked Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and now Iran.
After suggesting some causes for caution, Cohen closes with his core message: the Tehran government may fall like the Berlin Wall. He quotes the “Iran expert” again: “The Islamic Republic is a zombie regime.”
A Persistent War Promoter
Roger Cohen has been an influential participant in NYT distortions and lies. In 2002, he became NYT foreign editor during the crucial run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As stated at his Wikipedia page, “He supported the invasion.” The deceit about the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” was under Cohen’s direction.
Roger Cohen, representative of the Times, consistently finds a few voices of opposition, claims without evidence they represent a large group or the civilian majority, then promotes intervention, violence and “regime change”. He did this with Iraq, then Libya, now Iran.
Many NY Times Readers are Critical
Judging from the most popular reader comments, many NYT readers are critical of this “news analysis”. The most popular comment has 1600 endorsements. Dr. Finn Majlergaard from France says, “What right do you (Americans) think you have to decide who should be in power in sovereign countries when you can’t even deal with your own domestic dictator and the US regime’s gestapo methods against foreigners?”
The second most popular comment is from Florence Massachusetts. The reader asks, “Will it be okay if a truly democratic nation bombs the United States in order to encourage regime change away from our current authoritarian rulers?”
The vast majority of reader comments are critical of the drive to attack and possibly overthrow yet another government. Apparently they have learned from past foreign policy failures while the NY Times and foreign policy establishment have not. Another disaster based on false assumptions and arrogance lays ahead.
As Israeli warplanes continue to pummel Tehran and other parts of the country, President Trump has given mixed messages on whether the U.S. will join Israel’s war on Iran. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered a message on Thursday that Trump will decide on direct U.S. involvement in the next two weeks. Leavitt delivered the message shortly after Trump met with his former advisor Steve Bannon who has publicly warned against war with Iran. The U.S. is reportedly considering dropping “bunker buster” bombs on underground Iranian nuclear facilities. “It’s reminiscent of the beginning of the Iraq War, when they said it’s going to be a cakewalk,” says William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
A U.S.-based Iranian human rights group reports that the Israeli attacks have killed at least 639 people in Iran, while Iran’s retaliatory strikes in Israel have killed an estimated two dozen.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Western politicians and media are tying themselves up in knots trying to spin the impossible: presenting Israel’s unmistakable war of aggression against Iran as some kind of “defensive” move.
This time there was no rationalising pretext, as there was for Israel to inflict a genocide in Gaza following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.
There was not a serious attempt beforehand to concoct a bogus doomsday scenario – as there was in the months leading up to the US and UK’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then we were lied to about Baghdad having “weapons of mass destruction” that could be launched at Europe in 45 minutes.
Rather, Iran was deep in negotiations with the United States on its nuclear enrichment programme when Israel launched its unprovoked attack last Friday.
The West has happily regurgitated claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel was forced to act because Iran was on the cusp of producing a nuclear bomb – an entirely evidence-free claim he has been making since 1992.
None of his dire warnings has ever been borne out by events.
In fact, Israel struck Iran shortly after President Donald Trump had expressed hope of reaching a nuclear agreement with Tehran, and two days before the two countries’ negotiators were due to meet again.
In late March Trump’s head of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had expressly statedas part of the US intelligence community’s annual assessment: “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khameini has not authorised a nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.”
This week four sources said to be familiar with that assessment told CNN that Iran was not trying to build a bomb but, if it changed tack, it would be “up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one [a nuclear warhead] to a target of its choosing”.
Nonetheless, by Tuesday this week Trump appeared to be readying to join Israel’s attack. He publicly rebuked his own intelligence chief’s verdict, sent US warplanes to the Middle East via the UK and Spain, demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender”, and made barely veiled threats to kill Khameini.
‘Samson option’
Israel’s engineering of a pretext to attack Iran – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal in 1945 as the “supreme international crime” – has been many years in the making.
The current talks between the US and Iran were only needed because, under intense Israeli pressure during his first term as president, Trump tore up an existing agreement with Tehran.
That deal, negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, had been intended to quieten Israel’s relentless calls for a strike on Iran. It tightly limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium to far below the level where it could “break out” from its civilian energy programme to build a bomb.
Israel, by contrast, has been allowed to maintain a nuclear arsenal of at least 100 warheads, while refusing – unlike Iran – to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and – again unlike Iran – denying access to monitors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The West’s collusion in the pretence that Israel’s nuclear weapons are secret – a policy formally known in Israel as “ambiguity” – has been necessary only because the US is not allowed to provide military aid to a state with undeclared nuclear weapons.
No one – apart from incorrigible racists – believes Iran would take the suicidal step of firing a nuclear missile at Israel, even if it had one. That is not the real grounds for Israeli or US concern.
Rather, the double standards are enforced to keep Israel as the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East so that it can project unrestrained military power across an oil-rich region the West is determined to control.
Israel’s bomb has left it untouchable and unaccountable, and ready to intimidate its neighbours with the “Samson option” – the threat that Israel will use its nuclear arsenal rather than risk an existential threat.
Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, appeared to imply just such a scenario against Iran this week in a reported comment: “There will be other difficult days ahead, but always remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Bear in mind that Israeli governments count as “existential” any threat to Israel’s current status as a settler-colonial state, one occupying and forcibly uprooting the Palestinian people from their homeland.
Israel’s nuclear weapons ensure it can do as it pleases in the region – including commit genocide in Gaza – without significant fear of reprisals.
War propaganda
The claim that Israel is “defending itself” in attacking Iran – promoted by France, Germany, Britain, the European Union, the G7 and the US – should be understood as a further assault on the foundational principles of international law.
The assertion is premised on the idea that Israel’s attack was “pre-emptive” – potentially justified if Israel could show there was an imminent, credible and severe threat of an attack or invasion by Iran that could not be averted by other means.
And yet, even assuming there is evidence to support Israel’s claim it was in imminent danger – there isn’t – the very fact that Iran was in the midst of talks with the US about its nuclear programme voided that justification.
Rather, Israel’s contention that Iran posed a threat at some point in the future that needed to be neutralised counts as a “preventive” war – and is indisputably illegal under international law.
Note the striking contrast with the West’s reaction to Russia’s so-called “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine just three years ago.
Western capitals and their media were only too clear then that Moscow’s actions were unconscionable – and that severe economic sanctions on Russia, and military support for Ukraine, were the only possible responses.
So much so that early efforts to negotiate a ceasefire deal between Moscow and Kyiv, premised on a Russian withdrawal, were stymied by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, presumably on Washington’s orders. Ukraine was instructed to fight on.
Israel’s attack on Iran is even more flagrantly in violation of international law.
Netanyahu, who is already a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, which wants to try him for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza by starving the population there, is now guilty of the “supreme international crime” too.
Not that one would not know any of this from listening to western politicians or the billionaire-owned media.
There, the narrative is once again of a plucky Israel, forced to act unilaterally; of Israel facing down an existential threat; of Israel being menaced by barbaric terrorists; of the unique suffering – and humanity – of Israel’s population; of Netanyahu as a strong leader rather than an out-and-out war criminal.
It is the same, well-worn script, trotted out on every occasion, whatever the facts or circumstances. Which is clue enough that western audiences are not being informed; they are being subjected to yet more war propaganda.
Regime change
But Israel’s pretexts for its war of aggression are a moving target – hard to grapple with because they keep changing.
If Netanyahu started by touting an implausible claim that Iran’s nuclear programme was an imminent threat, he soon shifted to arguing that Israel’s war of aggression was also justified to remove a supposed threat from Iran’s ballistic missile programme.
In the ultimate example of chutzpah, Israel cited as its evidence the fact that it was being hit by Iranian missiles – missiles fired by Tehran in direct response to Israel’s rain of missiles on Iran.
Israel’s protestations at the rising death toll among Israeli civilians overlooked two inconvenient facts that should have underscored Israel’s hypocrisy, were the western media not working so hard to obscure it.
First, Israel has turned its own civilian population into human shields by placing key military installations – such as its spy agency and its defence ministry – in the centre of densely populated Tel Aviv, as well as firing its interception rockets from inside the city.
Recall that Israel has blamed Hamas for the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 20 months based on the largely unevidenced claim that its fighters have been hiding among the population. Now that same argument can, and should, be turned against Israel.
And second, Israel is all too obviously itself hitting residential areas in Iran – just as, of course, it did earlier by destroying almost all of Gaza’s buildings, including homes, hospitals, schools, universities and bakeries.
Both Netanyahu and Trump have called on Iranians to “evacuate immediately” the city of Tehran – something impossible for most of its 10 million inhabitants to do in the time allowed.
But their demand raises too the question of why, if Israel is trying to stop the development of an Iranian nuclear warhead, it is focusing so many of its attacks on residential areas of Iran’s capital.
More generally, Israel’s argument that Tehran must be stripped of its ballistic missiles assumes that only Israel – and those allied with it – are allowed any kind of military deterrence capability.
It seems not only is Iran not allowed a nuclear arsenal as a counter-weight to Israel’s nukes, but it is not even allowed to strike back when Israel decides to launch its US-supplied missiles at Tehran.
What Israel is effectively demanding is that Iran be turned into a larger equivalent of the Palestinian Authority – a compliant, lightly armed regime completely under Israel’s thumb.
Which gets to the heart of what Israel’s current attack on Iran is really designed to achieve.
It is about instituting regime change in Tehran.
Trained in torture
Again, the western media are assisting with this new narrative.
Extraordinarily, TV politics shows such as the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg invited on as a guest Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Iranian shah ousted by the ayatollahs in 1979 to create an Islamic republic. He used the slot to call on Iranians to “rise up” against their leaders.
The framing – an entirely Israeli confected one – is that Iranian society is desperate to throw off the yoke of Islamic dictatorship and return to the halcyon days of monarchical rule under the Pahlavis.
It is a beyond-absurd analysis of modern Iran.
Asking Pahlavi to discuss how Iran might be freed from clerical rule is the equivalent of inviting Josef Stalin’s grandson into the studio to discuss how he plans to lead a pro-democracy movement in Russia.
In fact, the much-feared Pahlavis were only in power in 1979 – and in a position to be overthrown – because Israel, Britain and the US meddled deeply in Iran to keep them in place for so long.
Within two years, Mossadegh was overthrown in US-led Operation Ajax, and the Shah re-installed as dictator. Israel was drafted in to train Iran’s Savak secret police in torture techniques to use on Iranian dissidents, learnt from torturing Palestinians.
Predictably, the West’s crushing of all efforts to democratically reform Iran opened up a space for resistance to the Shah that was quickly occupied by Islamist parties instead.
In 1979, these revolutionary forces overthrew the western-backed dictator Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris to found the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Crescent of resistance
Notably Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ali Khameini, issued a religious edict in 2003 banning Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. He considered it a violation of Islamic law.
Which is why Iran has been so reluctant to develop a bomb, despite Israel’s endless provocations and claims to the contrary.
What Iran has done instead is two things that are the real trigger for Israel’s war of aggression.
First, it developed the best alternative military strategy it could muster to protect itself from Israeli and western belligerence – a belligerence related to Iran’s refusal to serve as a client of the West, as the Shah once had, rather than the issue of human rights under clerical rule.
Iran’s leaders understood they were a target. Iran has huge reserves of oil and gas, but unlike the neighbouring Gulf regimes it is not a puppet of the West. It can also shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the main gateway for the flow of oil and gas to the West and Asia.
And as a Shia-led state (in contrast to the Sunni Islam that dominates much of the rest of the Middle East), Iran has a series of co-religionist communities across the region – in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere – with which it has developed strong ties.
For example, with Iran’s help, Hezbollah in Lebanon built up a large stockpile of rockets and missiles close to Israel’s border. That was supposed to deter Israel from trying to attack and occupy Lebanon again, as it did for two decades from the early 1980s through to 2000.
But it also meant that any longer-range attack by Israel on Iran would prove risky, exposing it to a barrage of missiles on its northern border.
Ideologues in Washington, known as the neoconservatives, who are keenly supportive of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East, deeply opposed what came to be seen as “the axis of resistance”.
The neocons, seeking a way to crush Iran, quickly exploited the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 as an opportunity to erode Iranian power.
Notably, even though most of the hijackers who crashed planes into the Twin Towers were from Saudi Arabia, the Pentagon’s list of targets centrally featured members of the so-called “Shia crescent”.
All have been attacked since. As Clark noted, the seventh and final state on that list – the hardest to take on – is Iran.
Show of strength
Israel’s other concern was that Iran and its allies, unlike the Arab regimes, had proved steadfast in their support for the Palestinian people against decades of Israeli occupation and oppression.
Iran’s defiance on the Palestinian cause was underscored during Trump’s first presidency, when Arab states began actively normalising with Israel through the US-brokered Abraham accords, even as the plight of the Palestinians worsened under Israeli rule.
Infuriatingly for Israel, Iran and the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasarallah became the main flagbearers of popular support for the Palestinians – among Muslims across the board.
With the Palestinian Authority largely quiescent by the mid-2000s, Iran channelled its assistance to Hamas in besieged Gaza, the main Palestinian group still ready to struggle against Israeli apartheid rule and ethnic cleansing.
The result was a tense stability of sorts, with each side restraining itself in a Middle Eastern version of “mutually assured destruction”. Neither side had an incentive to risk an all-out attack for fear of the severe consequences.
That model came to an abrupt end on 7 October 2023, when Hamas decided its previous calculations needed reassessing.
With the Palestinians feeling increasingly isolated, choked by Israel’s siege and abandoned by the Arab regimes, Hamas staged a show of force, breaking out for one day from the concentration camp of Gaza.
Israel seized the opportunity to complete two related tasks: destroying the Palestinians as a people once and for all, and with it their ambitions for a state in their homeland; and rolling back the Shia crescent, just as the Pentagon had planned more than 20 years earlier.
Israel started by levelling Gaza – slaughtering and starving its people. Then it moved to destroy Hezbollah’s southern heartlands in Lebanon. And with the collapse of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, Israel was able to occupy parts of Syria, smash what remained of its military infastructure, and clear a flight path to Iran.
These were the preconditions for launching the current war of aggression on Iran.
‘Birth pangs’
Back in 2006, as Israel was bombing swaths of Lebanon in an earlier attempt to realise the Pentagon’s plan, Condoleezza Rice, the then US secretary of state, prematurely labelled Israel’s violence as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”.What we have been witnessing over the past 20 months of Israel’s slow rampage towards Iran is precisely a revival of those birth pangs. Israel and the US are jointly remaking the Middle East through extreme violence and the eradication of international law.
Success for Israel can come in one of two ways.
Either it installs a new authoritarian ruler in Tehran, like the Shah’s son, who will do the bidding of Israel and the US. Or Israel leaves the country so wrecked that it devolves into violent factionalism, too taken up with civil war to expend its limited energies on developing a nuclear bomb or organising a “Shia crescent” of resistance.
But ultimately this is about more than redrawing the map of the Middle East. And it is about more than toppling the rulers in Tehran.
Just as Israel needed to take out Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria before it could consider clearing a path to Iran’s destruction, the US and its western allies needs the axis of resistance eradicated, as well as Russia bogged down in an interminable war in Ukraine, before it can consider taking on China.
Or as the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz noted this week, in one of those quiet-part-out-loud moments: “This [the attack on Iran] is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.”
This is a key moment in the Pentagon’s 20-year plan for “global full-spectrum dominance”: a unipolar world in which the US is unconstrained by military rivals or the imposition of international law. A world in which a tiny, unaccountable elite, enriched by wars, dictate terms to the rest of us.
If all this sounds like a sociopath’s approach to foreign relations, that is because it is. Years of impunity for Israel and the US have brought us to this point. Both feel entitled to destroy what remains of an international order that does not let them get precisely what they want.
The current birth pangs will grow. If you believe in human rights, in limits on the power of government, in the use of diplomacy before military aggression, in the freedoms you grew up with, the new world being born is going to horrify you.
In its war on Iran, the US empire seeks to impose hegemony in West Asia (aka the Middle East), destroy the Axis of Resistance, colonize Palestine, destabilize the revolutionary Iranian government, preserve the petrodollar system, prevent de-dollarization, divide BRICS, and break up the Iran-Russia-China partnership.
The United States and Israel are jointly waging war on Iran, but why? What are their real goals?
What the US empire would like to accomplish is the following:
Maintain US hegemony in West Asia (aka the Middle East)
Destroy the anti-colonial Axis of Resistance, making possible the total colonization of Palestine
Prevent Iran from ever developing nuclear capabilities
Overthrow or at least weaken Iran’s independent, revolutionary government
Scare other countries in the region that may seek to move away from the US and the dollar (especially the Gulf monarchies)
The surprise US-Israeli attack on Iran is literally and figuratively designed to unleash centrifugal forces in the Islamic Republic.
Two nuclear powers are currently involved in the bombing of the nuclear facilities of a third state. One of them, the US has — for the moment — limited itself to handling mid-air refuelling, bombs and an array of intelligence.
If successful they will destroy or, more likely, destabilise the uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz and possibly the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, causing them to vibrate and spin uncontrollably, generating centrifugal forces that could rupture containment systems.
Spinning at more than 50,000 rpm it wouldn’t take much of a shockwave from a blast or some other act of sabotage to do this.
There may be about half a tonne of enriched uranium and several tonnes of lower-grade material underground.
If a cascade of bunker-busting bombs like the US GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators got through, the heat generated would be in the hundreds, even thousands, of degrees Celsius. This would destroy the centrifuges, converting the uranium hexafluoride gas into a toxic aerosol, leading to serious radiological contamination over a wide area.
The head of the IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, warned repeatedly of the dangers over the past few days. How many people would be killed, contaminated or forced to evacuate should not have to be calculated — it should be avoided at all cost.
Divided opinions Some people think this attack is a very good idea; some think this is an act of madness by two rogue states.
On June 18, Israeli media were reporting that the US had rushed an aerial armada loaded with bunker busters to Israel while the US continued its sham denials of involvement in the war.
Analysts Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares warned this week of “Israel bringing the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon in pursuit of its illegal and extremist aims”. They point out that for some decades now Netanyahu has warned that Iran is weeks or even days away from having the bomb, begging successive presidents for permission to wage Judeo-Christian jihad.
In Donald Trump — the MAGA Peace Candidate — he finally got his green light.
The centrifugal forces destabilising the Iranian state The other — and possibly more significant — centrifugal force that has been unleashed is a hybrid attack on the Iranian state itself. The Americans, Israelis and their European allies hope to trigger regime change.
There are many Iranians inside and outside the country who would welcome such a development. Other Iranians suggest they should be careful of what they wish for, pointing to the human misery that follows, as night follows day, wherever post 9/11 America’s project to bring “democracy, goodness and niceness” leads. If you can’t quickly think of half a dozen examples, this must be your first visit to Planet Earth.
Iranian news presenter Sahar Emami during the Israeli attack on state television which killed three media workers . . . Killing journalists is both an Israeli speciality and a war crime. Image: AJ screenshot APR
Is regime change in Iran possible? So, are the Americans and Israelis on to something or not? This week prominent anti-regime writer Sohrab Ahmari added a caveat to his long-standing call for an end to the regime. Ahmari, an Iranian, who is the US editor of the geopolitical analysis platform UnHerd said: “The potential nightmare scenarios are as numerous as they are appalling: regime collapse that leads not to the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty and the ascent to the Peacock Throne of its chubby dauphin, Reza, but warlordism and ethno-sectarian warfare that drives millions of refugees into Europe.
“Or a Chinese intervention in favour of a crucial energy partner and anchor of the new Eurasian bloc led by Beijing . . . A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on the Persian Gulf monarchies.”
Despite these risks, there are indeed Iranians who are cheering for Uncle Bibi (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu). Some have little sympathy for the Palestinians because their government poured millions into supporting Hamas and Hezbollah — money that could have eased hardship inside Iran, caused, it must be added, by both the US-imposed sanctions and the regime’s own mismanagement, some say corruption.
As I pointed out in an article The West’s War on Iran shortly after the Israelis launched the war: the regime appears to have a core support base of around 20 percent. This was true in 2018 when I last visited Iran and was still the case in the most recent polling I could find.
I quoted an Iranian contact who shortly after the attack told me they had scanned reactions inside Iran and found people were upset, angry and overwhelmingly supportive of the government at this critical moment. Like many, I suggested Iranians would — as typically happens when countries are attacked — rally round the flag. Shortly after the article was published this statement was challenged by other Iranians who dispute that there will be any “rallying to the flag” — as that is the flag of the Islamic Republic and a great many Iranians are sick to the back teeth of it.
Some others demur:
“The killing of at least 224 Iranians has once again significantly damaged Israel’s claim that it avoids targeting civilians,” Dr Shirin Saeidi, author of Women and the Islamic Republic, an associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas, told The New Arab on June 16. “Israel’s illegal attack on the Iranian people will definitely not result in a popular uprising against the Iranian state. On the contrary, Iranians are coming together behind the Islamic Republic.”
To be honest, I can’t discern who is correct. In the last few of days I have also had contact with people inside Iran (all these contacts must, for obvious reasons, be anonymous). One of them welcomed the attack on the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps). I also got this message relayed to me from someone else in Iran as a response to my article:
“Some Iranians are pro-regime and have condemned Israeli attacks and want the government to respond strongly. Some Iranians are pro-Israel and happy that Israel has attacked and killed some of their murderers and want regime change, [but the] majority of Iranians dislike both sides.
They dislike the regime in Iran, and they are patriotic so they don’t want a foreign country like Israel invading them and killing people. They feel hopeless and defenceless as they know both sides have failed or will fail them.”
Calculating the incalculable: regime survival or collapse? Only a little over half of Iran is Persian. Minorities include Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, Balochis, Turkmen, Armenians and one of the region’s few post-Nakba Jewish congregations outside of Israel today.
Mossad, MI6 and various branches of the US state have poured billions into opposition groups, including various monarchist factions, but from a distance they appear fragmented. The Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) armed opposition group has been an irritant but so far not a major disruptor.
The most effective terrorist attacks inside Iran have been launched by Israel, the US and the British — including the assassination of a string of Iranian peace negotiators, the leader of the political wing of Hamas, nuclear scientists and their families, and various regime figures.
How numerous the active strands of anti-regime elements are is hard to estimate. Equally hard to calculate is how many will move into open confrontation with the regime. Conversely, how unified, durable — or brittle — is the regime? How cohesive is the leadership of the IRGC and the Basij militias? Will they work effectively together in the trying times ahead? In particular, how successful has the CIA, MI6 and Mossad been at penetrating their structures and buying generals?
Both Iran’s nuclear programme and its government — in fact, the whole edifice and foundation of the Islamic Republic — is at the beginning of the greatest stress test of its existence. If the centrifugal forces prove too great, I can’t help but think of the words of William Butler Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Peace and prosperity to all the people of Iran. And let’s never forget the people of Palestine as they endure genocide.
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
An unnoticed undercurrent of the Israel-Iran War is that three Christian nations in Europe — the U.K., France and Germany — have joined the fray with alacrity on the side of Israel.
Strange, isn’t it, that these European countries comprising the so-called E-3 have a well-established exclusive path of dialogue with Iran but are joining Israel’s warpath? It’s a Crusade, stupid!
The three “Crusader nations” share Israel’s obsession to check the rise of a Muslim nation as an emerging power in the Middle East that could radically transform its geopolitical alignments. Simply put, destroying the Islamic regime in Iran is the real objective of Israel’s war — and of the three Christian nations from Europe.
An unnoticed undercurrent of the Israel-Iran War is that three Christian nations in Europe — the U.K., France and Germany — have joined the fray with alacrity on the side of Israel.
Strange, isn’t it, that these European countries comprising the so-called E-3 have a well-established exclusive path of dialogue with Iran but are joining Israel’s warpath? It’s a Crusade, stupid!
The three “Crusader nations” share Israel’s obsession to check the rise of a Muslim nation as an emerging power in the Middle East that could radically transform its geopolitical alignments. Simply put, destroying the Islamic regime in Iran is the real objective of Israel’s war — and of the three Christian nations from Europe.
US Colonel Nathan McCormack, the head of the Levant and Egypt branch at the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J5 planning directorate, was removed from his position this week after he criticized Washington’s unwavering support for Israel on social media.
“Our worst ‘ally.’ We get literally nothing out of the ‘partnership’ other than the enmity of millions of people in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia,” McCormack said in one of several posts discovered by the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) on a semi-anonymous X account allegedly linked to him.
“The US has not been an honest broker. We have overwhelmingly enabled Israel’s bad behavior,” he adds.
Israel’s shock’n awe on Iran—straight from the trademark US playbook—essentially failed, despite the initial combination of speed, meticulous military planning and the element of surprise, including hacking the Iranian electronic communications within the military grid; decapitation of the vertical IRGC nomenklatura; the spiderweb drone attack playbook; and bombing—ultimately ineffectual—of key nodes of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.
It took hours for top Iranian technicians to get their grid back. And once that happened, the tide began to turn, to the point that after surgical missile volleys deep in the night on Sunday, the IRGC announced its capability to seriously disrupt Israel’s command and control systems using “enhanced intelligence,” thus breaching Iron—or Paper—Dome.
Overnight, the zionist entity of Israel escalated its war of aggression against Iran by launching unprovoked attacks on the Islamic Republic. The notion that a rogue ethnostate that is currently carrying out a genocide believes that it possesses the right to determine which countries can and cannot develop a nuclear weapon is both bizarre and egregious as well as brazenly hypocritical, and further demonstrates that the State of Israel operates firmly within the structures of white “supremacy” ideology, colonialism, and imperialism. Iran, like all sovereign nations, has the right to defend itself from aggression and uphold its security in the face of repeated threats and acts of war.
We call on all peoples of conscience throughout the world to take to the streets on June 28, 2025 and march against the expansion of the Zionist-US aggression from Palestine through Lebanon, Syria and Yemen to Iran. For 20 months the people of Palestine have been steadfast against the collective west’s genocide of their people and theft of their land. In the face of a firm resistance, the US and the Zionists had no choice but to expand the war into Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and now Iran.
Iran has supported the regional resistance in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Syria for decades and is under attack because of its support for regional liberation from the clutches of US imperialist domination and Zionist colonialism.
Venezuela and Iran hold the largest and third-largest petroleum reserves in the world, respectively. Both have also been targeted for regime change by Washington. The two commonalities are not unrelated.
Of course, the world’s hegemon would like to get its hands on all their oil. But it would be simplistic to think that would be only for narrow economic reasons. Control over energy flows – especially from countries with large reserves – is central to maintaining global influence. Washington requires control of strategic resources to maintain its position as the global hegemon, guided by its official policy of “full spectrum dominance.”
A number of observant commentators have raised questions about Peoples’ China’s Belt and Road Initiative and more broadly, the foreign policy of the PRC.
Reliable left observers like Ann Garrison, writing in Black Agenda Report, have voiced concerns about Chinese investments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, based on Siddharth Kara’s book, Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. Kara contends that Chinese are engaged in a brutal competition to acquire a raw material essential to battery manufacturing, participating in the highly exploitative practice of artisanal cobalt mining.
More recently, Razan Shawamreh has challenged the PRC’s economic engagement with Israel. Writing in Middle East Eye. Shawamreh cites three different Chinese state-owned companies heavily invested in Israeli firms servicing or operating in illegal settlements — ChemChina, Bright Foods, Fosum Group — that own or have a majority stake in an Israeli corporation. She charges Peoples’ China of hypocritically publicly denouncing Israeli policies while quietly aiding the cause of Israeli settlers.
On May 22, Kim Petersen posted a thoughtful, well reasoned piece on Dissident Voice, entitled “Palestine and the Conscience of China.” Petersen persuasively lauds the many achievements of Peoples’ China. It is easy to forget the century of humiliation that this once proud, advanced society suffered at the hands of European imperialism. After 12 years of fighting Japanese invaders and enduring a bloody civil war costing tens of millions of casualties, China’s advance since — under the leadership of the Communist Party of China — has been truly remarkable.
As Peoples’ China celebrates meeting its goal of becoming a “moderately prosperous” society, it is important to see how far it has come from 1949. When Western apologists for the market economy brag of the aggregate economic gains that global markets have brought to the developing world, they are largely talking about China (and, more recently, Vietnam and India).
By any measure of citizen satisfaction with their government by international surveys, the PRC consistently ranks at or near the top.
At the same time, Petersen raises questions about the seeming inconsistency of the Chinese government’s vocal criticism of Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza and Peoples’ China’s continuing economic engagement with Israel. The PRC accounts for over 20% of Israeli imports.
Petersen quotes Professor T.P. Wilkinson: “Non-interference is China’s top principle — business comes first. If there is any morality it only applies in China.” And it is precisely China’s moral conscience that Petersen finds wanting.
However, not everyone is trying — or even pretending — to distance themselves from Tel Aviv right now. The People’s Republic of China, for example, is actually seeking to strengthen its ties with Israel.
After initially siding with Palestine (and Hamas) following October 7, Beijing is now looking to rebuild ties with Israel. Just four days ago, as Israel’s Defence Forces were unleashing coordinated attacks on aid depots, China’s ambassador to Israel Xiao Junzheng discussed “deepening China-Israel economic and trade cooperation” with Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry, Nir Barkat.
Still others ask why Peoples’ China, a self-described socialist country, has failed to replace the Soviet Union in guaranteeing the economic vitality of tiny socialist Cuba– a country starved by a US blockade and harsh sanctions upon anyone defying that blockade. It is difficult to reconcile the PRC’s modest economic aid to Cuba with China’s $19 billion dollars of annual exports to proscribed Israel.
China’s Foreign Policy in Retrospect
China’s foreign policy is a direct reflection of the political line of the Communist Party of China, a line changing often in the Party’s history. At the 10th National Congress (August, 1973) — the last before Mao’s death — Zhou Enlai delivered the main report. He affirmed that:
In the last fifty years our Party has gone through ten major struggles between the two lines… In the future, even after classes have disappeared… there will still be two-line struggles between the advanced and the backward and between the correct and the erroneous… there is the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road, there is the danger of capitalist restoration… The Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Documents), p. 16 [my emphasis]
Zhou explains that the opposition in the last two Congresses — led by Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao — advocated that the main contradiction facing the party was “not the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but that ‘between the advanced socialist system and the backward productive forces of society’”. In short, the two lines continually challenging the Party, as explained at the tenth congress, were that of the “productionists” — those giving priority to the development of the productive forces — and that of the class warriors — those giving priority to political struggle.
The CPC’s failure to simultaneously advance the productive forces and, at the same time, carry out a consistent, comprehensive class line accounts for its often inconsistent foreign policy.
Since the “opening” — the Deng reforms, beginning in 1978 — the productionist line has held sway in the Communist Party of China.
From the time of the rebuilding of the Party based on the rural peasantry after the destruction of its urban working-class base in 1927, Mao had sided with the class warriors.
Even in the era of the united front against Japanese aggression, Mao wrote in On New Democracy (1940) of the necessity of a cultural revolution, a focus on political and cultural struggle over other forms:
A cultural revolution is the ideological reflection of the political and economic revolution and is in their service. In China there is a united front in the cultural as in the political revolution… and the cultural campaign resulted in the outbreak of the December 8th Movement of the revolutionary youth in 1935. And the common result of both was the awakening of the people of the whole country… The most amazing thing of all was that the Kuomintang’s cultural “encirclement and suppression” campaign failed completely in the Kuomintang areas as well, although the Communist Party was in an utterly defenceless position in all the cultural and educational institutions there. Why did this happen? Does it not give food for prolonged and deep thought? It was in the very midst of such campaigns of “encirclement and suppression” that Lu Hsun, who believed in communism, became the giant of China’s cultural revolution… New-democratic culture is national. It opposes imperialist oppression and upholds the dignity and independence of the Chinese nation. It belongs to our own nation and bears our own national characteristics… [my emphasis]
The centrality of cultural revolution likely comes from the class base shaping the trajectory of Chinese Communism. Because the Kuomintang wiped out the CPC’s urban working-class centers in 1927, the Party became based in the rural peasantry, as Mao freely concedes in On New Democracy:
This means that the Chinese revolution is essentially a peasant revolution…. Essentially, mass culture means raising the cultural level of the peasants… And essentially it is the peasants who provide everything that sustains the resistance to Japan and keeps us going. By “essentially” we mean basically, not ignoring the other sections of the people, as Stalin himself has explained. As every schoolboy knows, 80 per cent of China’s population are peasants. So the peasant problem becomes the basic problem of the Chinese revolution and the strength of the peasants is the main strength of the Chinese revolution. In the Chinese population the workers rank second to the peasants in number…
On New Democracy suggests that Mao places primacy of place in the struggle for the support of the peasantry, a struggle that is cultural in form and national in scope. While Mao locates the Party’s battles within the world revolutionary process, he doesn’t see it as an immediate fight for socialism, but apart from it, for China’s national liberation:
This is a time … when the proletariat of the capitalist countries is preparing to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, and when the proletariat, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and other sections of the petty bourgeoisie in China have become a mighty independent political force under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Situated as we are in this day and age, should we not make the appraisal that the Chinese revolution has taken on still greater world significance? I think we should. The Chinese revolution has become a very important part of the world revolution… [my emphasis]
The separation between the proletariat’s role in the capitalist countries and the Party’s “independent” role in shaping a multi-class force could not be clearer.
Absent from the 1940 statement of Mao’s vision is any endorsement of the Communist International’s broad principles of solidarity. Instead, the Party operated under the Three Principles of the People, the CPC’s revision of Sun-Yat Sen’s original Three Principles. On New Democracy defines them as:
Three Great Policies of alliance with Russia, co-operation with the Communist Party and assistance to the peasants and workers. Without each and every one of these Three Great Policies, the Three People’s Principles become either false or incomplete in the new period…
Thus, “alliance with Russia” (USSR) became central to China’s foreign policy and expanded to alliance with other socialist countries. After liberation in 1949, the PRC practiced that line by aiding the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, especially in repelling the US and its allies as they invaded DPRK territory. The PRC military fought in the DPRK until the armistice of 1953. Over 183,000 Chinese died resisting the invasion of the North.
The CPC established ties with various liberation movements after the Korean War, with Peoples’ China offering military aid and training to many movements in Asia and Africa. At the same time, the PRC adopted Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence to lead foreign relations: respect for territory and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and cooperation for common benefit, and peaceful coexistence.
The Five Principles were strikingly similar to the natural-law doctrines adopted by the early mercantilist theorists of bourgeois international relations; they constituted an even less robust version of the eight points of the 1941 Atlantic Charter crafted by Roosevelt and Churchill. Nonetheless, they were enshrined in the constitution of Peoples’ China:
China pursues an independent foreign policy, observes the five principles of mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual nonaggression, mutual noninterference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence, keeps to a path of peaceful development, follows a mutually beneficial strategy of opening up, works to develop diplomatic relations and economic and cultural exchanges with other countries, and promotes the building of a human community with a shared future. [my emphasis]
By the end of the 1950s, The CPC had rejected the first of the “three great policies”: the “alliance with Russia”. The PRC had embarked on a period of bitter conflict with the USSR, culminating with a split in the unity of the World Communist Movement. It is source of great irony that many of the charges the CPC made against the Soviets in the Mao era were and are features of China today that have drawn the same charges from some on the left: The Chinese attacked the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence with the US, taunting the US as a paper tiger; they accused the Soviets of being “social-imperialist” intent on global hegemony; they claimed a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union; they accused the Soviet Party of revising Marxism-Leninism. All charges that resonate for some in current policies of Peoples’ China.
It is difficult to reconcile the Five Principles with the PRC support for the US proxies in the former Portuguese African colonies. For over a decade, the PRC sided with South Africa, Israel, the US, and bogus liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, delivering weapons, training, and material support to surrogates fighting the internationally recognized freedom fighters. It was left for thousands of Cuban internationalists to give their lives to finally close the door on this ugly chapter and open the door to the fall of Apartheid.
It is difficult to reconcile the Five Principles with the PRC 1979 invasion of Vietnam, ostensibly in response to Democratic Vietnam’s overthrow of the Khmer Rouge — an intervention, if principally motivated, that cannot be squared with the PRC’s vocal denunciation of the Warsaw alliance’s engagement in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
It is difficult to reconcile the twists and turns of Peoples’ China’s foreign policies with its once radical denouncement of Soviet foreign policy as “social-imperialist.” The late, estimable Al Szymanski– a scrupulous researcher– met those charges in great detail (“Soviet Socialism and Proletarian Internationalism” in The Soviet Union: Socialist or Social-Imperialist?, 1983), showing that Soviet “export of capital” outside of the socialist community was minimal, largely limited to establishing enterprises that expedited trade. Soviet assistance was limited almost entirely to countries outside of or escaping the tyranny of global markets. Soviet trade was minimal — Szymanski argued that it was the world’s most self-sufficient system (no doubt often through forced isolation). Its importing of raw material was minimal: “In short the Soviet economy, unlike those of all Western imperialist countries… has no… need to subordinate less developed countries to obtain raw materials.”
Also, the Soviet Union frequently paid higher prices for imported goods than market prices. Citing Asha Datar, “[O]f the 12 leading export commodities studied…, six were consistently purchased by the USSR at higher than their world prices, three usually purchased at prices higher than those paid by the capitalist countries, and two purchased on a year to year basis sometimes above and sometimes below the world market price.”
Suffice it to say, the Soviet Union substantially subsidized trade with fraternal countries, especially within the socialist community (CMEA), Cuba receiving especially generous terms of exchange.
It would be interesting to compare the PRC’s current foreign policy with the internationalist standards set by the former Soviet Union.
Nonetheless, Peoples’ China — since the victory of the productionist line under Deng’s leadership — has largely been a force for stability in international relations. Over the last thirty or so years, the PRC has sought to maintain a peaceful stage for its trade-based economic expansion while the US and its capitalist allies have engaged in one bloody, imperialist adventure after another. Entry into the global market and acceptance into its market-based institutions has been well served by its Five Principles foreign policy.
But it has been naive to expect capitalist great powers to respect the high-minded, Enlightenment values of the Five Principles and simply stand by while the PRC rises to challenge their dominance of the world economy. Since Engels’ early writings, Marxists have understood that competition is the motor of the commodity-based economy. And since Lenin, Marxists have understood that competition between monopoly capitals and their hosts have spawned aggression and war.
It is equally naive — or disingenuous — to equate the Five Principles with the proletarian internationalism, class solidarity that has been embraced by the international Communist movement throughout the twentieth century. From Comintern activity, to the internationalist sacrifices made for democratic Spain, to the generous support for liberation movements, and the aid to the people of Vietnam, militant, principled internationalism differs fundamentally from the neutrality embodied in the Five Principles. The Five Principles serve a world with no injustice, a world without class struggle, a world without aggression and war.
Indeed, the solidarity advocated in the PRC constitution — “China consistently opposes imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism, works to strengthen its solidarity with the people of all other countries, supports oppressed peoples and other developing countries in their just struggles to win and safeguard their independence and develop their economies, and strives to safeguard world peace and promote the cause of human progress” — is inconsistent with the neutrality and non-intervention of the Five Principles, in any realistic sense.
Where neutrality may have borne few negative consequences during the PRC’s isolation from global markets, China’s profound economic relations with virtually every country in the twenty-first century, do have consequences, consequences of enormous moral impact.
Like other countries that engage economically or refrain from engaging economically (sanctions, tariffs, boycotts, blockades, etc.), the PRC must be judged by that engagement.
With the daily slaughter of Gazan civilians, the brutal actions of Israel cannot be separated from its trading partners: China, the US, Germany, Italy, Turkiye, Russia, France, South Korea, India, and Spain, in descending order of dollar volume of exports to Israel.
And now with the brazen, unprovoked Israeli attack on its putative “friend” Iran, the neutrality of the Five Principles is even less defensible. The “win-win” strategy of many CPC leaders and their allies is a utopian dream that social justice cannot afford.
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
— Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh
There is a good chance that very shortly the United States will overtly join its proxy Israel in attacking Iran. Only a fool would be surprised. Plausible deniability only goes so far. Pipe dreams perdure as the nuclear war that could never happen gets closer to happening.
That Donald Trump is a diabolic liar and his administration is composed of depraved war criminals is a fact.
That those who bought his no foreign wars bullshit were deluded is a fact.
That Trump fully supports the genocidal lunatic Netanyahu is a fact.
That the U.S.A. is already supporting Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran is a fact.
That the American electorate is always fooled by the linguistic mind control of its presidents is a fact.
“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” George W. Bush said at a staged pseudo-event on October 7, 2002 as he set Americans up for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It was all predictable, blatant deception. And the media played along with such an absurdity. Iraq obviously had no nuclear weapons or the slightest capability to deliver even a firecracker on the U.S. The same is true for Iran today.
Trump is, after all, a United States President. The job’s requirements insist that he be a war criminal at the head of a terrorist state, and that he support the apartheid state of Israel’s killing regime, as the United States has done since its founding – actually long before.
The CIA and its ilk provide the shifting propaganda narratives that take many forms: smooth, blustery, halting, etc., but they are all aimed at creating two minds in the American population by sending mixed messages (a Trump specialty), creating mental double-binds, and using various techniques to mystify people’s experience of reality and truth. The CIA always liked to attract literary types to its propaganda efforts. Their objective is to create through verbal contradictory word usage a sense of schizoid confusion in the population. To provide pipe dreams for those who feel that their politician will set things right next time around. Or to provide ex post facto justifications for the last president’s innocence.
Think of the bullshit media headlines such as “Trump is weighing his options” or “Trump weighing Involvement” about attacking Iran. As I wrote about Trump and Iran in June 2019 – “The War Hoax Redux – in a repeat of what I wrote about Bush and Iraq in February 2003 by simply substituting names:
As in 1991 and 2003 concerning Iraq, the MSM play along with Trump, who repeatedly says, or has his spokespeople say, that the decision hasn’t been made [to attack Iran] and that the U.S. wants peace. Within a few hours this is contradicted and confusion and uncertainty reign, as planned. Chaos is the name of the game. But everyone in the know knows the decision to attack has been made at some level, especially once the propaganda dummies are all in place. But they pretend, while the media wait with baited breath as they anticipate their countdown to the dramatic moment when they report the incident that will “compel” the U.S. to attack.
Now that Biden has made sure a terrorist runs Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon is rendered weak, allowing Israel full control over their air spaces, and Gaza pulverized and genocide well underway, the pieces are in place for Trump to bomb Iran.
Commentators often blame the actions – like Trump’s vis-à-vis Iran – on pressure from the so-called “deep state.” Excuses abound. But there is no deep state. The official American government is the “deep state.” The use of the term is a prime example of the efficacy of linguistic mind control. The use of words that have contradictory meanings – contronyms – to create untenable double-binds that result in mental checkmate. Create false opposites to frame the mind control.
Innocence – give a sardonic laugh! These are the men who have waged endless wars, overt and covert, for decade upon decade, have dispatched special forces and CIA death squads throughout the world, and support genocide in Gaza and the destruction of Russia as their bosses require. Those who seek the office know this. Only those who are known to pledge allegiance to American imperialism and the love of war are allowed anywhere near the U.S. presidency. The present war on Iran has been long in the making, as has the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Russia, China, etc.
These bloodthirsty hyenas with polished faces come in all varieties, from Slick Willy to Dumb Georgie to Smiling Barack to Gross Don to Malarkey Joe and around and around we go again and again. Each is cast to perform the script – to speak the lingo – appropriate to his actor’s ability and his looks (let’s not forget this), but to serve the same ends. If it were not so, the U.S. would have stopped waging non-stop wars long ago. It’s simple to understand if one retains a smidgeon of logic.
If you think otherwise, you are deluded. I will not waste much time explaining why. The historical facts confirm it.
The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that. Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse. It is an economy based on fantasy and fake money with a national debt over 36 trillion dollars that will never be repaid. That’s another illusion. But I am speaking of pipe dreams, am I not?
And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their indifference and ignorance of its ramifications throughout the society and more importantly, its effects in death and destruction on the rest of the world. But that’s how it goes as their focus is on the masked faces that face each other on the electoral stage of the masquerade ball every four years. Liars all.
But they all speak the double-speak that creates pipe-dreams on the road to nuclear war.
Will we ever stop believing them before it is too late?
Israel’s attack on Iran opens a huge danger of escalation in the Middle East. Israel has a long history of attacking Iran — including bombing Iranian facilities, assassinating Iranian leaders and scientists, launching cyberattacks, and more. Iran has on occasion struck back, including launching strikes on Tel Aviv in this latest back and forth. But this latest assault is more dangerous…
Now, Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran has sparked retaliations unlike what resistance from Gaza or Lebanon could offer. And an Israeli hospital next to a military site has just received some damage as a result. But unsurprisingly, the genocidal crybully‘s selective outrage is failing to land.
Worries of ‘another Gaza’ as Israeli attacks create ‘bloodbath’ in Iran
So far, Israel’s assault on Iran has killed about 639 people, while Iran’s retaliation has killed around 24. Iran says the Israeli hospital probably received damage as a result of a blast wave from the impact on the nearby military site. No one received injuries, according to one Israeli soldier. But Israel’s war-criminal ‘defence’ minister Israel Katz responded by saying Iranian leader Ali Khamenei “should no longer exist”.
A long context of devastating US sanctions on Iran had already left the country’s health system in dire straits. But some health workers now suggest it is close to collapsing as a result of Israel’s assault. One nurse implored:
doctors and nurses everywhere to put themselves in our shoes and speak out, so Israel cannot bring the same disaster it brought upon Gaza’s medical staff to us here in Iran
wants to turn us into another Beirut, another Gaza
An Iranian doctor, meanwhile, asserted that health workers are witnessing “a bloodbath”. They said:
The injuries are terrifying and it looks like we are working in a makeshift hospital on a battlefield.
Most casualties are reportedly civilians.
Israel’s systematic destruction of healthcare infrastructure
In January 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that Israel had attacked “hospitals and other vital medical infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank” around 600 times. Six hundred times.
A UN report on the months between October 2023 and June 2024, meanwhile, said Israeli attacks had blasted Gaza’s healthcare system:
to the brink of total collapse
UN official Volker Turk called hospitals “a death trap”.
Such collective punishment is a war crime. Some have suggested using the term “medelacide“.
Israel’s “pattern” of attacking Gaza’s hospitals, the UN insisted, showed a “blatant disregard for international humanitarian and human rights law”.
Campaigners believe Israel has murdered at least 1,400 healthcare workers in Gaza. And currently, the WHO says, Gaza’s health system is “at breaking point“. Only around half of the occupied territory’s hospitals are still operational, but:
At least 94% of all hospitals in the Gaza Strip are damaged or destroyed
Lebanon didn’t escape Israel’s medelacidal campaign either. The settler-colonial power reportedly “attacked 67 hospitals, 56 primary health care centres, and 238 emergency medical teams, killing at least 222 medical and emergency relief workers” from October 2023 to November 2024.
Attacking hospitals is bad. Medelacide is pure evil.
Attacks on schools and hospitals during conflict is one of the six grave violations identified and condemned by the UN Security Council.
It adds:
Under international humanitarian law, both schools and hospitals are protected civilian objects, and therefore benefit from the humanitarian principles of distinction and proportionality.
For 20 months, we have regularly seen Israel’s horrific, intentionaldestruction of Gaza’s healthcare system. We have been witnessing the evil of medelacide perhaps more clearly than ever before. And we will continue to see it as long as Western governments and their propagandists allow Israel to act with impunity.
What we need to be doing now is to mobilise collectively to force those who remain complicit in Israel’s genocide to act to bring about an immediate end to this barbarity
Had Israel not launched its unprovoked attack on Iran on Friday night, in direct violation of the UN Charter, Iran would now be taking part in the sixth round of negotiations concerning the future of its nuclear programme, meeting with representatives from the United States in Muscat, the capital of Oman.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed he acted to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, saying Iran had the capacity to build nine nuclear weapons. Israel provided no evidence to back up its claims.
On 25 March 2025, Trump’s own National Director of Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said:
“The IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003. The IC is monitoring if Tehran decides to reauthorise its nuclear weapons programme”
Even if Iran had the capability to build a bomb, it is quite another thing to have the will to do so.
Any such bomb would need to be tested first, and any such test would be quickly detected by a series of satellites on the lookout for nuclear detonations anywhere on the planet.
It is more likely that Israel launched its attack to stop US and Iranian negotiators from meeting on Sunday.
Only a month ago, Iran’s lead negotiator in the nuclear talks, Ali Shamkhani, told US television that Iran was ready to do a deal. NBC journalist Richard Engel reports:
“Shamkhani said Iran is willing to commit to never having a nuclear weapon, to get rid of its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, to only enrich to a level needed for civilian use and to allow inspectors in to oversee it all, in exchange for lifting all sanctions immediately. He said Iran would accept that deal tonight.”
Inside Iran as Trump presses for nuclear deal. Video: NBC News
Shamkhani died on Saturday, following injuries he suffered during Israel’s attack on Friday night. It appears that Israel not only opposed a diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear impasse: Israel killed it directly.
A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baghaei, told a news conference in Tehran the talks would be suspended until Israel halts its attacks:
“It is obvious that in such circumstances and until the Zionist regime’s aggression against the Iranian nation stops, it would be meaningless to participate with the party that is the biggest supporter and accomplice of the aggressor.”
On 1 April 2024, Israel launched an airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria, killing 16 people, including a woman and her son. The attack violated international norms regarding the protection of diplomatic premises under the Vienna Convention.
It is worth noting how the TheNew York Times described the occupation of the US Embassy in November 1979:
“But it is the Ayatollah himself who is doing the devil’s work by inciting and condoning the student invasion of the American and British Embassies in Tehran. This is not just a diplomatic affront; it is a declaration of war on diplomacy itself, on usages and traditions honoured by all nations, however old and new, whatever belief.
“The immunities given a ruler’s emissaries were respected by the kings of Persia during wars with Greece and by the Ayatollah’s spiritual ancestors during the Crusades.”
Now it is Israel conducting a “war on diplomacy itself”, first with the attack on the embassy, followed by Friday’s surprise attack on Iran. Scuppering a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear issue appears to be the aim. To make matters worse, Israel’s recklessness could yet cause a major war.
Trump: Inconsistent and ineffective In an interview with Time magazine on 22 April 2025, Trump denied he had stopped Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear sites.
“No, it’s not right. I didn’t stop them. But I didn’t make it comfortable for them, because I think we can make a deal without the attack. I hope we can. It’s possible we’ll have to attack because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.
“But I didn’t make it comfortable for them, but I didn’t say no. Ultimately I was going to leave that choice to them, but I said I would much prefer a deal than bombs being dropped.”
— US President Donald Trump
In the same interview Trump boasted “I think we’re going to make a deal with Iran. Nobody else could do that.” Except, someone else had already done that — only for Trump to abandon the deal in his first term as president.
In July 2015 Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) alongside the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and the European Union. Iran pledged to curb its nuclear programme for 10-15 years in exchange for the removal of some economic sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also gained access and verification powers.
Iran also agreed to limit uranium enrichment to 3.67 per cent U-235, allowing it to maintain its nuclear power reactors.
Despite clear signs the nuclear deal was working, Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and reinstated sanctions on Iran in November 2018. Despite the unilateral American action, Iran kept to the deal for a time, but in January 2020 Iran declared it would no longer abide by the limitations included in JCPOA but would continue to work with the IAEA.
By pulling out of the deal and reinstating sanctions, the US and Israel effectively created a strong incentive for Iran to resume enriching uranium to higher levels, not for the sake of making a bomb, but as the most obvious means of creating leverage to remove the sanctions.
As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Iran is allowed to enrich uranium for civilian fuel programmes.
Iran’s nuclear programme began in the 1960s with US assistance. Prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran was ruled by the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahavi.
American corporations saw Iran as a potential market for expansion. During the 1970s the US suggested to the Shah he needed not one but several nuclear reactors to meet Iran’s future electricity needs. In June 1974, the Shah declared that Iran would have nuclear weapons, “without a doubt and sooner than one would think”.
In 2007, I wrote an article for Peace Researcher where I examined US claims that Iran does not need nuclear power because it is sitting on one of the largest gas supplies in the world. One of the most interesting things I discovered while researching the article was the relevance of air pollution, a critical public health concern in Iran.
In 2024, health officials estimated that air pollution is responsible for 40,000 deaths a year in Iran. Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisi said the “majority of these deaths were due to cardiovascular diseases, strokes, respiratory issues, and cancers”.
Sahimi describes levels of air pollution in Tehran and other major Iranian cities as “catastrophic”, with elementary schools having to close on some days as a result. There was little media coverage of the air pollution issue in relation to Iran’s energy mix then, and I have seen hardly any since.
An energy research project, Advanced Energy Technologies provides a useful summary of electricity production in Iran as it stood in 2023.
Iranian electricity production in 2023. Source: Advanced Energy Technologies
With around 94.6 percent of electricity generation dependent on fossil fuels, there are serious environmental reasons why Iran should not be encouraged to depend on oil and gas for its electricity needs — not to mention the prospect of climate change.
One could also question the safety of nuclear power in one of the most seismically active countries in the world, however it would be fair to ask the same question of countries like Japan, which aims to increase its use of nuclear power to about 20 percent of the country’s total electricity generation by 2040, despite the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated that Iran’s uranium enrichment programme “must continue”, but the “scope and level may change”. Prior to the talks in Oman, Araghchi highlighted the “constant change” in US positions as a problem.
Trump’s rhetoric on uranium enrichment has shifted repeatedly.
He told Meet the Press on May 4 that “total dismantlement” of the nuclear program is “all I would accept.” He suggested that Iran does not need nuclear energy because of its oil reserves. But on May 7, when asked specifically about allowing Iran to retain a limited enrichment program, Trump said “we haven’t made that decision yet.”
Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a May 14 interview with NBC that Iran is ready to sign a deal with the United States and reiterated that Iran is willing to limit uranium enrichment to low levels. He previously suggested in a May 7 post on X that any deal should include a “recognition of Iran’s right to industrial enrichment.”
That recognition, plus the removal of U.S. and international sanctions, “can guarantee a deal,” Shamkhani said.
So with Iran seemingly willing to accept reasonable conditions, why was a deal not reached last month? It appears the US changed its position, and demanded Iran cease all enrichment of uranium, including what Iran needs for its power stations.
One wonders if Zionist lobby groups like AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) influenced this decision. One could recall what happened during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first stint as Israel’s Prime Minister (1996-1999) to illustrate the point.
In April 1995 AIPAC published a report titled ‘Comprehensive US Sanctions Against Iran: A Plan for Action’. In 1997 Mohammad Khatami was elected as President of Iran. The following year Khatami expressed regret for the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 and denounced terrorism against Israelis, while noting that “supporting peoples who fight for their liberation of their land is not, in my opinion, supporting terrorism”.
The threat of improved relations between Iran and the US sent the Israeli government led by Netanyahu into a panic. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that “Israel has expressed concern to Washington of an impending change of policy by the United States towards Iran” adding that Netanyahu “asked AIPAC . . . to act vigorously in Congress to prevent such a policy shift.”
Twenty years ago the Israeli lobby were claiming an Iranian nuclear bomb was imminent. It didn’t happen.
Netanyahu’s Iran nuclear warnings. Video: Al Jazeera
The misguided efforts of Israel and the United States to contain Iran’s use of nuclear technology are not only counterproductive — they risk being a catastrophic failure. If one was going to design a policy to convince Iran nuclear weapons may be needed for its own defence, it is hard to imagine a policy more effective than the one Israel has pursued for the past 30 years.My 2007 Peace Researcher article asked a simple question: ‘Why does Iran want nuclear weapons?’ My introduction could have been written yesterday.
“With all the talk about Iran and the intentions of its nuclear programme it is a shame the West continues to undermine its own position with selective morality and obvious hypocrisy. It seems amazing there can be so much written about this issue, yet so little addresses the obvious question – ‘for what reasons could Iran want nuclear weapons?’.
“As Simon Jenkins (2006) points out, the answer is as simple as looking at a map. ‘I would sleep happier if there were no Iranian bomb but a swamp of hypocrisy separates me from overly protesting it. Iran is a proud country that sits between nuclear Pakistan and India to its east, a nuclear Russia to its north and a nuclear Israel to its west. Adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq are occupied at will by a nuclear America, which backed Saddam Hussein in his 1980 invasion of Iran. How can we say such a country has no right’ to nuclear defence?’”
This week the German Foreign Office reached new heights in hypocrisy with this absurd tweet.
Iran has no nuclear weapons. Israel does. Iran is a signatory to the NPT. Israel is not. Iran allows IAEA inspections. Israel does not.
Starting another war will not make us forget, nor forgive what Israel is doing in Gaza.
From the river to the sea, credibility requires consistency.
I write about New Zealand and international politics, with particular interests in political economy, history, philosophy, transport, and workers’ rights. I don’t like war very much.
Joe Hendren writes about New Zealand and international politics, with particular interests in political economy, history, philosophy, transport, and workers’ rights. Republished with his permission. Read this original article on his Substack account with full references.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Saige England in Ōtautahi and Ava Mulla in Cairo
Hope for freedom for Palestinians remains high among a group of trauma-struck New Zealanders in Cairo.
In spite of extensive planning, the Global March To Gaza (GMTG) delegation of about 4000 international aid volunteers was thwarted in its mission to walk from Cairo to Gaza to lend support.
The land of oranges and pyramids became the land of autocracy last week as peace aid volunteers — young, middle-aged, and elderly — were herded like cattle and cordoned behind fences.
Their passports were initially seized — and later returned. Several New Zealanders were among those dragged and beaten.
While ordinary Egyptians showed “huge support” for the GMTG, the militant Egyptian regime showed its hand in supporting Israel rather than Palestine.
A member of the delegation, Natasha*, said she and other members pursued every available diplomatic channel to ensure that the peaceful, humanitarian, march would reach Gaza.
Moved by love, they were met with hate.
Violently attacked
“When I stepped toward the crowd’s edge and began instinctually with heart break to chant, ‘Free Palestine,’ I was violently attacked by five plainclothes men.
“They screamed, grabbed, shoved, and even spat on me,” she said.
Tackled, she was dragged to an unmarked van. She did not resist, posed no threat, yet the violence escalated instantly.
“I saw hatred in their eyes.”
Egyptian state security forces and embedded provocateurs were intent on dismantling and discrediting the Global March activists. Image: GMTG screenshot APR
Another GMTG member, a woman who tried to intervene was also “viciously assaulted”. She witnessed at least three other women and two men being attacked.
The peacemakers escaped from the unmarked van the aggressors were distracted, seemingly confused about their destination, she said.
It is now clear that from the beginning Egyptian State forces and embedded provocateurs were intent on dismantling and discrediting the GMTG.
Authorities as provocateurs
The peace participants witnessed plainclothed authorities act as provacateurs, “shoving people, stepping on them, throwing objects” to create a false image for media.
New Zealand actor Will Alexander . . . “This is only a fraction of what Palestinians experience every day.” GMTG
New Zealand actor Will Alexander said the experience had inflated rather than deflated his passion for human rights, and compassion for Palestinians.
“This is only a fraction of what Palestinians experience everyday. Palestinians pushed into smaller and smaller areas are murdered for wanting to stand on their own land,” he said.
“The reason that ordinary New Zealanders like us need to put our bodies on the line is because our government has failed to uphold its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
“Israel has blatantly breached international law for decades with total impunity.”
While the New Zealanders are all safe, a small number of people in the wider movement had been forcibly ‘disappeared’,” said GMTG New Zealand member Sam Leason.
Their whereabouts was still unknown, he said.
Arab members targeted
“It must be emphasised that it is primarily — and possibly strictly — Arab members of the March who are the targets of the most dramatic and violent excesses committed by the Egyptian authorities, including all forced disappearances.”
Global March to Gaza activists being attacked . . . the genocide cannot be sustained when people from around the world push against the Israeli regime and support the people on the ground with food and healthcare. Image: GMTG screenshot APR
This did, however, continuously add to the mounting sense of stress, tension, anxiety and fear, felt by the contingent, he said.
“Especially given the Egyptian authorities’ disregard to their own legal system, which leaves us blindsided and in a thick fog of uncertainty.”
Moving swiftly through the streets of Cairo in the pitch of night, from hotel to hotel and safehouse to safehouse, was a “surreal and dystopian” experience for the New Zealanders and other GMTG members.
The group says that the genocide cannot be sustained when people from around the world push against the Israeli regime and support the people on the ground with food and healthcare.
“For 20 months our hearts have raced and our eyes have filled in unison with the elderly, men, women, and children, and the babies in Palestine,” said Billie*, a participant who preferred, for safety reasons, not to reveal their surname.
“If we do not react to the carnage, suffering and complete injustice and recognise our shared need for sane governance and a liveable planet what is the point?”
Experienced despair
Aqua*, another New Zealand GMTG member, had experienced despair seeing the suffering of Palestinians, but she said it was important to nurture hope, as that was the only way to stop the genocide.
“We cling to every glimmer of hope that presents itself. Like an oasis in a desert devoid of human emotion we chase any potential igniter of the flame of change.”
Activist Eva Mulla . . . inspired by the courage of the Palestinians. Image: GMTG screenshot APR
Ava Mulla, said from Cairo, that the group was inspired by the courage of the Palestinians.
“They’ve been fighting for freedom and justice for decades against the world’s strongest powers. They are courageous and steadfast.”
Mulla referred to the “We Were Seeds” saying inspired by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos.
“We are millions of seeds. Every act of injustice fuels our growth,” she said.
Helplessness an illusion
The GMTG members agreed that “impotence and helplessness was an illusion” that led to inaction but such inaction allowed “unspeakable atrocities” to take place.
“This is the holocaust of our age,” said Sam Leason.
“We need the world to leave the rhetorical and symbolic field of discourse and move promptly towards the camp of concrete action to protect the people of Palestine from a clear campaign of extermination.”
Saige England is an Aotearoa New Zealand journalist, author, and poet, member of the Palestinian Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA), and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
*Several protesters quoted in this article requested that their family names not be reported for security reasons. Ava Mulla was born in Germany and lives in Aotearoa with her partner, actor Will Alexander. She studied industrial engineering and is passionate about innovative housing solutions for developing countries. She is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).
New Zealand and other activists with Tino Rangatiratanga and Palestine flags taking part in the Global March To Gaza. Will Alexander (far left) is in the back row and Ava Mulla (pink tee shirt) is in the front row. Image: GMTG screenshot APR
With tensions escalating in the Iran-Israel conflict, which has claimed many civilian lives since it began on June 13, a video of an Israeli soldier in tears, begging for mercy, has gone viral. In the video, the soldier looks at the camera and urges the Iranian army to stop the destruction, while injured soldiers are seen lying in the rubble of destroyed buildings in the background. “Iran, we beg you. Please stop the attacks. Half of Israel is gone. We surrender. Just stop this destruction,” he says.
The conflict between the two, which is threatening to turn into an all-out war, started with Israel attacking nuclear and military sites in Iran on June 13. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attack ‘Operation Rising Lion‘ – supposedly launched to disconcert Iran’s nuclear program. However, the strikes resulted in the deaths of many ordinary citizens, after which Iran, too, resorted to retaliatory missile strikes.
X user (@Skylar_Soul_) posted the viral video on June 16. When this article was written, the post had accumulated more than 100,000 views and was reshared over 1,000 times. (Archive)
A reverse image search on one of the key frames from the clip led us to the same video on YouTube posted around the same time, but with better resolution.
We noticed that the YouTube version had a clear watermark ‘Veo’ on the bottom right corner. The same watermark can be seen in the viral video as well, but owing to lower resolution, it is faint and not very apparent.
Veo is an artificial intelligence-based video generation tool, launched by Google this year. It allows users to create 8-second-long realistic videos without anatomical abnormalities.
Note that the viral video is precisely 8 seconds long. Moreover, what makes Veo stand out from other video generation models is its ability to integrate audio and dialogue without distortions, which is evident in the viral video.
To be sure, we also ran the video through HIVE’s AI detection tool. According to this, there is an 88% likelihood that the viral video was AI-generated.
Based on these findings, we were able to conclude that the viral video showing an Israeli soldier crying and pleading with Iran to stop the retaliatory strikes against Israel is artificially generated through Google Veo, and not real.
With tensions escalating in the Iran-Israel conflict, which has claimed many civilian lives since it began on June 13, a video of an Israeli soldier in tears, begging for mercy, has gone viral. In the video, the soldier looks at the camera and urges the Iranian army to stop the destruction, while injured soldiers are seen lying in the rubble of destroyed buildings in the background. “Iran, we beg you. Please stop the attacks. Half of Israel is gone. We surrender. Just stop this destruction,” he says.
The conflict between the two, which is threatening to turn into an all-out war, started with Israel attacking nuclear and military sites in Iran on June 13. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attack ‘Operation Rising Lion‘ – supposedly launched to disconcert Iran’s nuclear program. However, the strikes resulted in the deaths of many ordinary citizens, after which Iran, too, resorted to retaliatory missile strikes.
X user (@Skylar_Soul_) posted the viral video on June 16. When this article was written, the post had accumulated more than 100,000 views and was reshared over 1,000 times. (Archive)
A reverse image search on one of the key frames from the clip led us to the same video on YouTube posted around the same time, but with better resolution.
We noticed that the YouTube version had a clear watermark ‘Veo’ on the bottom right corner. The same watermark can be seen in the viral video as well, but owing to lower resolution, it is faint and not very apparent.
Veo is an artificial intelligence-based video generation tool, launched by Google this year. It allows users to create 8-second-long realistic videos without anatomical abnormalities.
Note that the viral video is precisely 8 seconds long. Moreover, what makes Veo stand out from other video generation models is its ability to integrate audio and dialogue without distortions, which is evident in the viral video.
To be sure, we also ran the video through HIVE’s AI detection tool. According to this, there is an 88% likelihood that the viral video was AI-generated.
Based on these findings, we were able to conclude that the viral video showing an Israeli soldier crying and pleading with Iran to stop the retaliatory strikes against Israel is artificially generated through Google Veo, and not real.
With tensions escalating in the Iran-Israel conflict, which has claimed many civilian lives since it began on June 13, a video of an Israeli soldier in tears, begging for mercy, has gone viral. In the video, the soldier looks at the camera and urges the Iranian army to stop the destruction, while injured soldiers are seen lying in the rubble of destroyed buildings in the background. “Iran, we beg you. Please stop the attacks. Half of Israel is gone. We surrender. Just stop this destruction,” he says.
The conflict between the two, which is threatening to turn into an all-out war, started with Israel attacking nuclear and military sites in Iran on June 13. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attack ‘Operation Rising Lion‘ – supposedly launched to disconcert Iran’s nuclear program. However, the strikes resulted in the deaths of many ordinary citizens, after which Iran, too, resorted to retaliatory missile strikes.
X user (@Skylar_Soul_) posted the viral video on June 16. When this article was written, the post had accumulated more than 100,000 views and was reshared over 1,000 times. (Archive)
A reverse image search on one of the key frames from the clip led us to the same video on YouTube posted around the same time, but with better resolution.
We noticed that the YouTube version had a clear watermark ‘Veo’ on the bottom right corner. The same watermark can be seen in the viral video as well, but owing to lower resolution, it is faint and not very apparent.
Veo is an artificial intelligence-based video generation tool, launched by Google this year. It allows users to create 8-second-long realistic videos without anatomical abnormalities.
Note that the viral video is precisely 8 seconds long. Moreover, what makes Veo stand out from other video generation models is its ability to integrate audio and dialogue without distortions, which is evident in the viral video.
To be sure, we also ran the video through HIVE’s AI detection tool. According to this, there is an 88% likelihood that the viral video was AI-generated.
Based on these findings, we were able to conclude that the viral video showing an Israeli soldier crying and pleading with Iran to stop the retaliatory strikes against Israel is artificially generated through Google Veo, and not real.
The Israeli attack on Iran continues. Since Friday, IDF jets and missiles have hit sites across the country, carrying out targeted assassinations of key leaders and hitting buildings and other civilian infrastructure. Iran has retaliated in kind, firing missiles into Israel.
The Trump administration, which knew about the secret Israeli attack from the beginning, appears to be on the brink of fully entering the war on Israel’s side. Thus, the question arises: Are we on the verge of a major new war? And what does all this mean for the rest of the world?
Joining MintCast to discuss this is Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran.
In response to Donald Trump’s recent declaration that the U.S. could become involved in Israel’s attacks on Iran, U.S. lawmakers are pushing efforts to curb the President’s war powers.
Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY.) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) are introducing a bipartisan bill that would force Trump to obtain congressional approval to enter the war.
“This is not our war,” tweeted Massie. “But if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution. I’m introducing a bipartisan War Powers Resolution tomorrow to prohibit our involvement. I invite all members of Congress to cosponsor this resolution.”
Israel’s attack on Iran last week has opened a stark danger — a predictable pattern of escalation ushering in a new phase of the long-standing crises roiling the Middle East region. Certainly Israel has a long history of attacking Iran — including bombing raids; assassinations of political and military leaders as well as nuclear scientists; cyberattacks; assaults on Iranian allies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and beyond — and Iran has on occasion struck back. But while it is too soon to know exactly how this latest assault will fully play out, it now holds the prospect of full-scale war between the two strongest military forces in the region, one of them backed by the strongest military power in the world.
As Donald Trump considers a U.S. war with Iran and the Pentagon builds up military forces in the Middle East, I find myself returning, oddly, to a question posed by Leo Tolstoy: “How many men are necessary to change a crime into a virtue?” He wondered this in his 1894 treatise on Christian nonviolence, The Kingdom of God is Within You, paraphrasing a pamphlet by Christian anarchist and…
The head of the leading intergovernmental watchdog for nuclear energy and atomic weapons has confirmed that the agency has not found “any proof” of an effort to obtain a nuclear weapon by Iran, lending yet more evidence contradicting Israel’s “self-defense” narrative for its war on the country. In an interview this week, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi…
Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”
Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.
‘Preemptive strike’
AP‘s headline (6/18/25) highlights that Israel struck “Iran’s nuclear sites and kills top generals”; the article doesn’t note that Iran says the “overwhelming majority” of the 78 people killed at that point by Israel were civilians (Times of Israel, 6/14/25).
From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)
On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Pressreported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.
Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:
Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.
That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.
In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.
‘Potential salvation’
A Washington Post article (6/16/25) manages to blame the Iranian officials for not keeping their people safe from Israeli missiles.
Its profile of the young poet Abbasi notwithstanding, the Washington Post has been particularly aggressive in toeing the Israeli line. Following Netanyahu’s English-language appeal to Iranians to “stand up” against the “common enemy: the murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you”—a pretty rich accusation, coming from the man currently presiding over mass murder and all manner of other oppression—Post reporter Yeganeh Torbati (6/14/25) undertook to detail how some Iranians “see potential salvation in Israel’s attack despite risk of a wider war.”
In her dispatch, Torbati explained that in spite of reports of civilian deaths, “ordinary Iranians” had “expressed satisfaction” at Israel’s attacks on Iran’s “oppressive government.” As usual, there was no room for any potentially relevant historical details regarding “oppressive” governance in Iran—like, say, the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup d’état against the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, which paved the way for the extended rule-by-terror of the torture-happy Iranian shah, whose oppression was aided by manic acquisition of US weaponry.
On Monday, Torbati was back with another report on how, amid Israel’s attacks on Iran, the Iranian population had “lamented the lack of adequate safety instructions and evacuation orders” from its government, “turning to social media for answers.” The article quotes a Tehran resident named Alireza as complaining that “we have nothing, not even a government that would bother giving safety suggestions to people”—although it’s anyone’s guess as to what sort of suggestions the government is supposed to offer given the circumstances. Try not to be sleeping in your apartment when Israel decides to bomb it?
We thus end up with an entire article in a top US newspaper suggesting that the issue at hand is not that Israel is conducting illegal and unprovoked attacks on Iran, but rather that the Iranian government has not publicized proper safety recommendations for dealing with said attacks. At one point, Torbati concedes that “the government did provide some broad safety instructions,” and that “a government spokeswoman, Fatemeh Mohajerani, recommended that Iranians take shelter in metros, mosques and schools.”
Refusing to leave it at that, Torbati goes on to object that “it was unclear why mosques and schools would be safer than other buildings, given that Israel had already targeted residential and other civilian structures”—which again magically transforms the issue into a critique of the Iranian government for lack of clarity, as opposed to a critique of Israel for, you know, committing war crimes.
‘It’s all targeted’
To the New York Times (6/15/25), mass assassination of Iranian leaders is a “playbook” and “following the script.”
Which brings us to the New York Times, never one to miss a chance to cheerlead on behalf of Israeli atrocities—like that time in 2009 that the paper’s resident foreign affairs columnist literally advocated for targeting civilians in Gaza (FAIR.org, 1/30/25), invoking Israel’s targeting of civilians in Lebanon in 2006 as a positive precedent. Now, a Times article (6/15/25) headlined “Israel’s Attack in Iran Echoes Its Strategy Against Hezbollah” wonders if another Lebanese precedent might prove successful: “Israel decimated the group’s leadership last fall and degraded its military capabilities. Can the same strategy work against a far more powerful foe?”
After reminiscing about “repeated Israeli attacks on apartment buildings, bunkers and speeding vehicles” in Lebanon in 2024—which produced “more than 15 senior Hezbollah military commanders eliminated in total”—the piece speculates that Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran and assassinations of top Iranian officers seem “to be following the script from last fall” in Lebanon. Swift confirmation comes from Randa Slim at the Middle East Institute in Washington: “It’s all targeted, the assassination of their senior officials in their homes.”
Never mind that Israel’s activity in Lebanon last fall amounted to straight-up terrorism—or that somehow these “targeted assassinations” managed to kill some 4,000 people in Lebanon between October 2023 and November 2024 alone. In unceasingly providing a platform to justify Israeli aggression and mass civilian slaughter throughout the region, the US corporate media at least appears to be following its own script to a T.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was caught stumbling to answer basic questions about Iran and the U.S.’s role in Israel’s war in an eye-opening interview airing Wednesday, despite his full-throated support for overthrowing the Iranian government and deeper U.S. involvement in the fighting. In clips of the interview with far right provocateur Tucker Carlson posted on social media on Tuesday…
