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Category: Middle East

  • July 1, 2025

    Iran, Zionism, and the Limits of US Control: An Interview with Faramarz Farbod

    The post Iran, Zionism, and the Limits of US Control: An Interview with Faramarz Farbod first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • June 28, 2025

    Why manufacturing consent for war with Iran failed this time

    COMMENTARY: By Ahmad Ibsais

    On June 22, American warplanes crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped 14 massive bombs.

    The attack was not in response to a provocation; it came on the heels of illegal Israeli aggression that took the lives of more than 600 Iranians.

    This was a return to something familiar and well-practised: an empire bombing innocents across the orientalist abstraction called “the Middle East”.

    • READ MORE: Eugene Doyle: Why Asia-Pacific should be cheering for Iran and not US bomb-based statecraft
    • Other Israeli war on Middle East reports

    That night, US President Donald Trump, flanked by his vice-president and two state secretaries, told the world: “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace”.

    There is something chilling about how bombs are baptised with the language of diplomacy and how destruction is dressed in the garments of stability. To call that peace is not merely a misnomer; it is a criminal distortion.

    But what is peace in this world, if not submission to the West? And what is diplomacy, if not the insistence that the attacked plead with their attackers?

    In the 12 days that Israel’s illegal assault on Iran lasted, images of Iranian children pulled from the wreckage remained absent from the front pages of Western media. In their place were lengthy features about Israelis hiding in fortified bunkers.

    Victimhood serving narrative
    Western media, fluent in the language of erasure, broadcasts only the victimhood that serves the war narrative.

    And that is not just in its coverage of Iran. For 20 months now, the people of Gaza have been starved and incinerated. By the official count, more than 55,000 lives have been taken; realistic estimates put the number at hundreds of thousands.

    Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed. Most schools have been attacked and destroyed.

    Leading human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have already declared that Israel is committing genocide, and yet, most Western media would not utter that word and would add elaborate caveats when someone does dare say it live on TV.

    Presenters and editors would do anything but recognise Israel’s unending violence in an active voice.

    Despite detailed evidence of war crimes, the Israeli military has faced no media censure, no criticism or scrutiny. Its generals hold war meetings near civilian buildings, and yet, there are no media cries of Israelis being used as “human shields”.

    Israeli army and government officials are regularly caught lying or making genocidal statements, and yet, their words are still reported as “the truth”.

    Bias over Palestinian deaths
    A recent study found that on the BBC, Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths, despite Palestinians dying at a rate of 34 to 1 compared with Israelis. Such bias is no exception, it is the rule for Western media.

    Like Palestine, Iran is described in carefully chosen language. Iran is never framed as a nation, only as a regime. Iran is not a government, but a threat — not a people, but a problem.

    The word “Islamic” is affixed to it like a slur in every report. This is instrumental in quietly signalling that Muslim resistance to Western domination must be extinguished.

    Iran does not possess nuclear weapons; Israel and the United States do. And yet only Iran is cast as an existential threat to world order.

    Because the problem is not what Iran holds, but what it refuses to surrender. It has survived coups, sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It has outlived every attempt to starve, coerce, or isolate it into submission.

    It is a state that, despite the violence hurled at it, has not yet been broken.

    And so the myth of the threat of weapons of mass destruction becomes indispensable. It is the same myth that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. For three decades, American headlines have whispered that Iran is just “weeks away” from the bomb, three decades of deadlines that never arrive, of predictions that never materialise.

    Fear over false ‘nuclear threat’
    But fear, even when unfounded, is useful. If you can keep people afraid, you can keep them quiet. Say “nuclear threat” often enough, and no one will think to ask about the children killed in the name of “keeping the world safe”.

    This is the modus operandi of Western media: a media architecture not built to illuminate truth, but to manufacture permission for violence, to dress state aggression in technical language and animated graphics, to anaesthetise the public with euphemisms.

    Time Magazine does not write about the crushed bones of innocents under the rubble in Tehran or Rafah, it writes about “The New Middle East” with a cover strikingly similar to the one it used to propagandise regime change in Iraq 22 years ago.

    But this is not 2003. After decades of war, and livestreamed genocide, most Americans no longer buy into the old slogans and distortions. When Israel attacked Iran, a poll showed that only 16 percent of US respondents supported the US joining the war.

    After Trump ordered the air strikes, another poll confirmed this resistance to manufactured consent: only 36 percent of respondents supported the move, and only 32 percent supported continuing the bombardment

    The failure to manufacture consent for war with Iran reveals a profound shift in the American consciousness. Americans remember the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that left hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis dead and an entire region in flames. They remember the lies about weapons of mass destruction and democracy and the result: the thousands of American soldiers dead and the tens of thousands maimed.

    They remember the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of war and the never-ending bloody entanglement in Iraq.

    Low social justice spending
    At home, Americans are told there is no money for housing, healthcare, or education, but there is always money for bombs, for foreign occupations, for further militarisation. More than 700,000 Americans are homeless, more than 40 million live under the official poverty line and more than 27 million have no health insurance.

    And yet, the US government maintains by far the highest defence budget in the world.

    Americans know the precarity they face at home, but they are also increasingly aware of the impact US imperial adventurism has abroad. For 20 months now, they have watched a US-sponsored genocide broadcast live.

    They have seen countless times on their phones bloodied Palestinian children pulled from rubble while mainstream media insists, this is Israeli “self-defence”.

    The old alchemy of dehumanising victims to excuse their murder has lost its power. The digital age has shattered the monopoly on narrative that once made distant wars feel abstract and necessary. Americans are now increasingly refusing to be moved by the familiar war drumbeat.

    The growing fractures in public consent have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Trump, ever the opportunist, understands that the American public has no appetite for another war.

    ‘Don’t drop bombs’
    And so, on June 24, he took to social media to announce, “the ceasefire is in effect”, telling Israel to “DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” after the Israeli army continued to attack Iran.

    Trump, like so many in the US and Israeli political elites, wants to call himself a peacemaker while waging war. To leaders like him, peace has come to mean something altogether different: the unimpeded freedom to commit genocide and other atrocities while the world watches on.

    But they have failed to manufacture our consent. We know what peace is, and it does not come dressed in war. It is not dropped from the sky.

    Peace can only be achieved where there is freedom. And no matter how many times they strike, the people remain, from Palestine to Iran — unbroken, unbought, and unwilling to kneel to terror.

    Ahmad Ibsais is a first-generation Palestinian American and law student who writes the newsletter State of Siege.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 26, 2025

    Why most Pacific governments stand with Israel in spite of UN votes

    By Kaya Selby, RNZ Pacific journalist

    Amid uncertainty in the Middle East, one thing remains clear — most Pacific governments continue to align themselves with Israel.

    Dr Steven Ratuva, distinguished professor of Pacific Studies at Canterbury University, told RNZ that island leaders are likely to try and keep their distance, but only officially speaking.

    “They’d probably feel safer that way, rather than publicly taking sides. But I think quite a few of them would probably be siding with Israel.”

    • READ MORE: Iran accuses US over ‘torpedoed diplomacy’ – passes bill to halt UN nuclear watchdog cooperation
    • Israel kills more than 80 in Gaza; 3 killed in attack by Israeli settlers
    • Other Middle East crisis reports

    With Iran and Israel waging a 12-day war earlier this month, Dr Ratuva said that was translating into deeper divisions along religious and political lines in Pacific nations.

    “People may not want to admit it, but it’s manifesting itself in different ways.”

    Pacific support for Israel runs deep

    The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on 13 June calling for “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in the war in Gaza”, passing with 142 votes, or a 73 percent majority.

    Among the 12 nations that voted against the resolution, alongside Israel and the United States, were Fiji, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tuvalu.

    Israel and Iran two folded flags together 3D rendering
    The flags of Iran – a strong supporter of Palestine, along with a 73 percent support for a ceasefire at the United Nations – and Israel, backed by the United States. Image: 123rf/RNZ Pacific

    Pacific support for Israel runs deep
    The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on June 13 calling for “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in the war in Gaza”, passing with 142 votes, or a 73 percent majority.

    Among the 12 nations that voted against the resolution, alongside Israel and the United States, were Fiji, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tuvalu.

    Among the regional community, only Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands voted for the resolution, while others abstained or were absent.

    Last week, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, in an interview with The Australian, defended Israel’s actions in Iran as an “act of survival”.

    “They cannot survive if there is a big threat capability within range of Israel. Whatever [Israel] are doing now can be seen as preemptive, knocking it out before it’s fired on you.”

    In February, Fiji also committed to an embassy in Jerusalem — a recognition of Israel’s claimed right to call the city their capital — mirroring Papua New Guinea in 2023.

    Dr Ratuva said that deep, longstanding, religious and political ties with the West are what formed the region’s ties with Israel.

    “Most of the Pacific Island states have been aligned with the US since the Cold War and beyond, so the Western sphere of influence is seen as, for many of them, the place to be.”

    He noted the rise in Christian evangelism, which is aligned with Zionism and the global push for a Jewish homeland, in pockets throughout the Pacific, particularly in Fiji.

    “Small religious organisations which have links with or model selves along the lines of the United States evangelical movement, which has been supportive of Trump, tend to militate towards supporting Israel for religious reasons,” Dr Ratuva said.

    “And of course, religion and politics, when you mix them together, become very powerful in terms of one’s positioning [in the world].”

    Anti-war protest at Parliament on Israel-Iran conflict.
    An anti-war protest at Parliament over Israel-Iran conflict. Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii

    Politics or religion?
    In Fijian society, Dr Ratuva said that the war in Gaza has stoked tensions between the Christian majority and the Muslim minority.

    According to the CIA World Factbook, roughly 64.5 percent of Fijians are Christian, compared to a Muslim population of 6.3 percent.

    “It’s coming out very clearly, in terms of the way in which those belonging to the fundamentalist political orientation tend to make statements which are against non-Christians” Dr Ratuva said.

    “People begin to take sides . . . that in some ways deepens the religious divide, particularly in Fiji which is multiethnic and multireligious, and where the Islamic community is relatively significant.”

    A statement from the Melanesian Spearhead Group Secretariat, released on Wednesday, said that the Pacific wished to be an “ocean of peace”.

    “Leaders also reaffirmed their commitment to the “Friends to All, Enemy to None” foreign policy to guide the MSG members’ relationship with countries and development partners.”

    It bookends a summit that brought together leaders from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and other Melanesian nations, where the Middle East was discussed, according to local media.

    But the Pacific region had been used in a deceptive strategy as the US prepared for the strikes on Iran. On this issue, Melanesian leaders did not respond to requests for comment.

    The BBC reported on Monday that B-2 planes flew to Guam from Missouri as a decoy to distract from top-secret flights headed over the Atlantic to Iran.

    This sparked outrage from civil society leaders throughout the region, including the head of the Pacific Conference of Churches, Reverend James Bhagwan.

    “This use of Pacific airspace and territory for military strikes violates the spirit of the Treaty of Rarotonga, our region’s declaration for being a nuclear, free peace committed zone,” he said.

    “Our region has a memory of nuclear testing, occupation and trauma . . .  we don’t forget that when we talk about these issues.”

    Reverend Bhagwan told RNZ that there was no popular support in the Pacific for Israel’s most recent actions.

    “This is because we have international law . . .  this includes, of course, the US strikes on Iran and perhaps, also, Israel’s actions in Gaza.”

    “It is not about religion, it is about people.”

    Reverend Bhagwan, whose organisation represents 27 member churches across 17 Pacific nations, refused to say whether he believed there was a link between Christian fundamentalism and Pacific support for Israel.

    “We can say that there is a religious contingency within the Pacific that does support Israel . . .  it does not necessarily mean it’s the majority view, but it is one that is seriously considered by those in power.

    “It depends on how those [politicians] consider that support they get from those particular aspects of the community.”

    Pacific Islanders in the region
    For some, the religious commitment runs so deep that they venture to Israel in a kind of pilgrimage.

    Dr Ratuva told RNZ that there was a significant population of islanders in the region, many of whom may now be trapped before a ceasefire is finalised.

    “There was a time when the Gaza situation began to unfold, when a number of people from Fiji, Tonga and Samoa were there for pilgrimage purposes.”

    “At that time there were significant numbers, and Fiji was able to fly over there to evauate them. So this time, I’m not sure whether that might happen.”

    Reverend Bhagwan said that the religious ties ran deep.

    “They go to Jerusalem, to Bethlehem, to the Mount of Olives, to the Golan Heights, where the transfiguration took place. Fiji also is stationed in the Golan Heights as peacekeepers,” he said.

    “So there is a correlation, particularly for Pacific or for Fijian communities, on that relationship as peacekeepers in that region.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 25, 2025

    Mohsen Mahdawi Fought ICE and Won His Freedom. For Now.

    In April, Palestinian student activist Mohsen Mahdawi walked into an immigration office to obtain US citizenship. He left in handcuffs. The Columbia University student was detained by ICE and accused by the Trump administration of jeopardizing US foreign policy through his involvement in protests following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. On this week’s More to The Story, Mohsen talks to host Al Letson about his arrest by ICE, his role in campus protests, and his childhood growing up in a West Bank refugee camp. 

    Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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    Read: Mohsen Mahdawi Has Been Released From Federal Custody (Mother Jones)
    Listen: Gaza: A War of Weapons and Words (Reveal)
    Read: Mahmoud Khalil, Finally Free, Speaks Out (Mother Jones)

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • June 24, 2025

    Melanesian Spearhead Group leaders discuss Middle East conflict before ceasefire

    RNZ Pacific

    Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape says the Middle East conflict was one of the discussions of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) in Suva this week — and Pacific leaders “took note of what is happening”.

    The Post-Courier reports Marape saying the “12 Day War” between Israel and Iran was based on high technology and using missiles sent from great distances.

    “In the context of MSG, the leaders want peace always. And the Pacific remains friends to all, enemies to none,” he said.

    • READ MORE: Fiji advocacy group slams Indonesian role in MSG as a ‘disgrace’
    • New era for MSG as Fiji assumes leadership role
    • Pro-independence advocates urge MSG to elevate West Papua membership
    • Other West Papua reports

    He said an effect on PNG would be the inflation in prices of oil and gas.

    Yesterday morning, US President Donald Trump declared a ceasefire had been agreed  between Israel and Iran, and so far it has been holding in spite of tensions.

    Australia had stepped in to help Papua New Guinea diplomats and citizens caught in the Middle East.

    Foreign Affairs Minister Justin Tkatchenko confirmed last week that a group was to be evacuated through Jordan.

    There had been six diplomats in lockdown at the PNG embassy in Jerusalem awaiting extraction.

    Meanwhile, a repatriation flight for Australians stuck in Israel had been cancelled.

    ABC News reported that it was the second day repatriation plans were scrapped at the last minute because of rocket fire. A bus meant to take people across the border into Jordan was cancelled the previous day.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 24, 2025

    Israel’s Rivalry With Iran Isn’t About Nukes, It’s About Regional Domination

    President Donald Trump is touting a ceasefire deal between Israel and Iran, despite what he said were violations of the deal by both sides shortly after he announced it. Trump said he was especially angry with Israel and urged the country to stand down as he faces mounting criticism over the prospect of another U.S. war in the Middle East. “Part of the reason why Trump also was quite eager to…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • June 24, 2025

    Ramzy Baroud: The fallout – winners and losers from the Israeli war on Iran

    COMMENTARY: By Ramzy Baroud, editor of The Palestinian Chronicle

    The conflict between Israel and Iran over the past 12 days has redefined the regional chessboard. Here is a look at their key takeaways:

    Israel:
    Pulled in the US: Israel successfully drew the United States into a direct military confrontation with Iran, setting a significant precedent for future direct (not just indirect) intervention.

    Boosted political capital: This move generated substantial political leverage, allowing Israel to frame US intervention as a major strategic success.

    • READ MORE: Israel orders attack on Iran after claiming Tehran violated ceasefire
    • Israel’s attack on Iran — the violent new world being born is going to horrify you — Jonathan Cook
    • Other Middle East crisis reports

    Iran:
    Forged a new deterrence: Iran has firmly established a new equation of deterrence, emerging as a powerful regional force capable of directly challenging Israel, the US, and their Western allies.

    Demonstrated independence: Crucially, Iran achieved this without relying on its traditional regional allies, showcasing its self-reliance and strategic depth.

    Defeated regime change efforts: This confrontation effectively thwarted any perceived Israeli strategy aimed at regime change, solidifying the current Iranian government’s position.

    Achieved national unity: In the face of external pressure, Iran saw a notable surge in domestic unity, bridging the gap between reformers and conservatives in a new social and political contract.

    Asserted direct regional role: Iran has definitively cemented its status as a direct and undeniable player in the ongoing regional struggle against Israeli hegemony.

    Sent a global message: It delivered a strong message to non-Western global powers like China and Russia, proving itself a reliable regional force capable of challenging and reshaping the existing balance of power.

    Exposed regional dynamics: The events sharply exposed Arab and Muslim countries that openly or tacitly support the US-Israeli regional project of dominance, highlighting underlying regional alignments.

    Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London). He has a PhD in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter (2015) and was a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page.

    In the final strike before the ceasefire, Iranian missiles caused extensive destruction, killing and injuring several Israelis in the city of Beersheba. pic.twitter.com/b25fHPw2yD

    — The Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) June 24, 2025

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 23, 2025

    NZ Greens call on state to condemn US over ‘dangerous’ attack on Iran

    Asia Pacific Report

    New Zealand’s opposition Green Party has called on the government to condemn the United States for its illegal bombing of Iran and inflaming tensions across the Middle East.

    “The actions of the United States pose a fundamental threat to world peace,” said Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson in a statement.

    “The rest of the world — including New Zealand– must take a stand and make it clear that this dangerous escalation is unacceptable.

    • READ MORE: Iranian missiles slam into Israel as huge explosions rock Tehran
    • Leaders in US-affiliated Pacific react to surprise strikes on Iran
    • US strikes: Ignore the propaganda, 10 forces will shape the Iran-Israel war
    • Other Middle East crisis reports

    “We are calling on the New Zealand government to condemn the United States for its attack on Iran. This attack is a blatant breach of international law and yet another unjustified assault on the Middle East from the US.”

    Davidson said the country had seen this with the US war on Iraq in 2003, and it was happening again with Sunday’s attack on Iran.

    “We are at risk of a violent history repeating itself,” she said.

    “[Prime Minister] Christopher Luxon needs to condemn this escalation from the US and rule out any participation in this conflict, or any of the elements of the AUKUS pact.

    Independent foreign policy
    “New Zealand must maintain its independent foreign policy position and keep its distance from countries that are actively fanning the flames of war.”

    Davidson said New Zealand had a long and proud history of standing up for human rights on the world stage.

    “When we stand strong and with other countries in calling for peace, we can make a difference. We cannot afford to be a bystander to the atrocities unfolding in front of our eyes.”

    It was time for the New Zealand government to step up.

    “It has failed to sanction Israel for its illegal and violent occupation of Palestine, and we risk burning all international credibility by failing to speak out against what the United States has just done.”

    Meanwhile, Prime Minister Luxon said New Zealand wanted to see a peaceful stable and secure Middle East, but more military action was not the answer, reports RNZ News.

    The UN Security Council met in emergency session today to discuss the US attack on the three key nuclear facilities.

    UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the US bombing marked a “perilous turn” in a region already reeling.

    Iran called on the 15-member body to condemn what it called a “blatant and unlawful act of aggression”.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 23, 2025

    The Only Weapons Of Mass Destruction In The Middle East Are Zionism, Israel’s Nukes And US/Western Imperialism

    The zionist ethnostate has been spoiling for a war with Iran for decades. Who can forget the comedic, cartoonish, yet dark presentation of Benjamin Netanyahu to the United Nations in 2012 when he suggested that Iran was on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon. Netanyahu and other neocons have been peddling the false narrative about Iran’s nuclear timeline for decades, but this time is much different because it was acted upon, which has resulted in more death, more illegal acts that are egregious violations of international law and more global instability at the hands of the zionist ethnostate and its willing collaborators in the U.S. and the West.

    The post The Only Weapons Of Mass Destruction In The Middle East Are Zionism, Israel’s Nukes And US/Western Imperialism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • June 23, 2025

    Defence Force to send plane to assist New Zealanders stranded in Iran and Israel

    By Giles Dexter, RNZ News political reporter

    The Defence Force is sending a plane to the Middle East to assist any New Zealanders stranded in Iran or Israel.

    The C-130J Hercules, along with government personnel, will leave Auckland on Monday.

    Airspace is still closed in the region, but Defence Minister Judith Collins said the deployment was part of New Zealand’s contingency plans.

    • READ MORE:  Leaders in US-affiliated Pacific react to surprise strikes on Iran
    • NZ group slams Israeli ‘hoodwinking’ of US over nuclear strikes — Peters calls for talks
    • US bombs Iranian nuclear sites – Iran fires missiles at Israel
    • US strikes: Ignore the propaganda, 10 forces will shape the Iran-Israel war
    • Other Middle East crisis reports

    “Airspace in Israel and Iran remains heavily restricted, which means getting people out by aircraft is not yet possible, but by positioning an aircraft, and defence and foreign affairs personnel in the region, we may be able to do more when airspace reopens,” she said.

    The government was also in discussions with commercial airlines to see what they could do to assist, although it was uncertain when airspace would reopen.

    Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said New Zealanders should do everything they could to leave now, if they could find a safe route.

    “We know it will not be safe for everyone to leave Iran or Israel, and many people may not have access to transport or fuel supplies,” he said.

    ‘Stay in touch’
    “If you are in this situation, you should shelter in place, follow appropriate advice from local authorities and stay in touch with family and friends where possible.”

    Peters reiterated New Zealand’s call for diplomacy and dialogue.

    “Ongoing military action in the Middle East is extremely worrying and it is critical further escalation is avoided,” he said. “New Zealand strongly supports efforts towards diplomacy.

    “We urge all parties to return to talks. Diplomacy will deliver a more enduring resolution than further military action.”

    Winston Peters & Judith Collins at the announcement that the Defence Force was sending a plane to the Middle East
    NZ’s Defence Minister Judith Collins and Foreign Minister Winston Peters address the media . . . “Look, this is a danger zone . . . Get out if you possibly can.” Image: RNZ/Calvin Samuel

    It will take a few days for the Hercules to reach the region.

    New Zealanders in Iran and Israel needing urgent consular assistance should call the Ministry’s Emergency Consular Call Centre on +64 99 20 20 20.

    New Zealand hoped the aircraft and personnel would not be needed, and diplomatic efforts would prevail, Collins re-iterated.

    The ministers would not say where exactly the plane and personnel would be based, for security reasons.

    Registered number in Iran jumps
    Peters told reporters the number of New Zealanders registered in Iran had jumped since the escalation of the crisis.

    How the New Zealand Herald, the country's largest newspaper, reported the US strike on Iran
    How the New Zealand Herald, the country’s largest newspaper, reported the US strike on Iran today. Image: APR

    “We thought, at a certain time, we had them all counted out at 46,” he said. “It’s far more closer to 80 now, because they’re coming out of the woodwork, despite the fact that, for months, we said, ‘Look, this is a danger zone’, and for a number of days we’ve said, ‘Get out if you possibly can’.”

    There were 101 New Zealanders registered in Israel. Again, Peters said the figure had risen recently.

    He indicated people from other nations could be assisted, similar to when the NZDF assisted in repatriations from New Caledonia last year.

    Labour defence spokesperson Peeni Henare supported the move.

    “I acknowledge the news that the New Zealand Defence Force will soon begin a repatriation mission to the Middle East, and thank the crew and officials on this mission for their ongoing work to bring New Zealanders home safely,” he said.

    While he agreed with the government that the attacks were a dangerous escalation of the conflict and supported the government’s calls for dialogue, he said the US bombing of Iran was a breach of international law and the government should be saying it.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • June 22, 2025

    US strikes: Ignore the propaganda, 10 forces will shape the Iran-Israel war

    The US-Israeli attack against Iran will intensify the forces that are already destroying international law legacies and the UN system in the Middle East and most of the world, writes Rami Khouri.

    ANALYSIS: By Rami G. Khouri

    Israel’s attacks on military, civilian, and infrastructural sites throughout Iran and the repeated Iranian retaliatory attacks against targets across Israel have rattled the existing power balance across the Middle East — but the grave consequences of this new war for the region and the world’s energy supplies and economies will only be clarified in the weeks ahead.

    It is already clear that Israel’s surprise attack did not achieve a knock-out blow to Iran’s nuclear sector, its military assets, or its ruling regime, while Iran’s consecutive days of rocket and drone attacks suggest that this war could go on for weeks or longer.

    The media and public political sphere are overloaded now with propaganda and wishful thinking from both sides, which makes it difficult to discern the war’s outcomes and impacts.

    • READ MORE: Trump says US has bombed Iran’s Fordow, Isfahan, Natanz nuclear sites – and warns against retaliation
    • Other Middle East reports

    For now, we can only expect the fighting to persist for weeks or more, and for key installations in both countries to be attacked, like Israel’s Defence Ministry and Weitzman Institute were a few days ago, along with nuclear facilities, airports, military assets, and oil production facilities in Iran.

    So, interested observers should remain humble and patient, as unfolding events factually clarify critical dimensions of this conflict that have long been dominated by propaganda, wishful thinking, muscle-flexing, strategic deception, and supra-nationalist ideological fantasies.

    This is especially relevant because of the nature of the war that has already been revealed by the attacks of the past week, alongside military and political actions for and against the US-Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing aims in Palestine.

    This round of US-Israel and Iran fighting has triggered global reactions that show this to be yet another battle between Western imperial/colonial powers and those in the Middle East and the Global South that resist this centuries-old onslaught of control, subjugation, and mayhem.

    Identifying critical dimensions
    We cannot know today what this war will lead to, but we can identify some critical dimensions that we should closely monitor as the battles unfold. Here are the ones that strike me as the most significant.

    First off, the ongoing attacks by Iran and Israel will clarify their respective offensive and defensive capabilities, especially in terms of missiles, drones, and the available defences against them.

    Iran has anticipated such an Israeli attack for at least a decade, so we should assume it has also planned many counterattacks, while fortifying its key military and nuclear research facilities and duplicating the most important ones that might be destroyed or damaged.

    Second, we will quickly discover the real US role in this war, though it is fair already to see Israel’s attack as a joint US-Israeli effort.

    This is because of Washington’s almost total responsibility to fund, equip, maintain, resupply, and protect the Israeli armed forces; how it protects Israel at the UN, ICC, and other fora; and both countries’ shared political goals to bring down the Islamic Republic and replace it with a puppet regime that is subservient to Israeli-US priorities.

    Trump claims this is not his war, but Israel’s attacks against Iran, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon can only happen because of the US commitment by law to Israeli military superiority in the Middle East. The entire Middle East and much of the world see this as a war between the US, Israel, and Iran.

    And then today the US strikes on the three Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

    Al Jazeera's web report of the US attacks on Iran today
    Al Jazeera’s web report of the US attacks on Iran today. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    Unconventional warfare attacks
    We will also soon learn what non-military weapons each side can use to weaken the other. Missiles and drones are a start, but we should expect unconventional warfare attacks against civilian, infrastructural, digital, and financial sector targets that make life difficult for all.

    An important factor that will only become clear with time is how this conflict impacts domestic politics in both countries; Iran and Israel each suffer deep internal fissures and some discontent with their regimes. How the war evolves could fragment and weaken either country, or unite their home citizenries.

    Also important will be how Arab leaders react to events, especially those who chose to develop much closer financial, commercial, and defence ties with the US, as we saw during Trump’s Gulf visit last month. Some Arab leaders have also sought closer, good neighbourly relations with Iran in the last three years, while a few moved closer to Israel at the same time.

    Arab leaders and governments that choose the US and Israel as their primary allies, especially in the security realm, while the attacks on Gaza and Iran go on, will generate anger and opposition by many of their people; this will require the governments to become more autocratic, which will only worsen the legacy of modern Arab autocrats who ignore their people’s rights and wellbeing.

    Arab governments mostly rolled over and played dead during the US-Israeli Gaza genocide, but in this case, they might not have the same opportunity to remain fickle in the face of another aggressive moral depravity and emerge unscathed when it is over.

    If Washington gets more directly involved in defending Israel, we are likely to see a response from voters in the US, especially among Trump supporters who don’t want the US to get into more forever wars.

    Support for Israel is already steadily declining in the US, and might drop even faster with Washington now engaging directly in fighting Iran, because the Israeli-US attack is already based on a lie about Iran’s nuclear weapons, and American popular opinion is increasingly critical of Israel’s Gaza genocide.

    Iran’s allies tested
    The extent and capabilities of Iran’s allies across the Middle East will, too, be tested in the coming weeks, especially Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq. They have all been weakened recently by Israeli-American attacks, and both their will and ability to support Iran are unclear.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees this attack as the last step in his strategy to reorganise and re-engineer the Middle East, to make all states dependent on Israeli approval of their strategic policies. A few already are.

    Netanyahu has been planning this regional project for over a decade, including removing Saddam Hussein, weakening Hezbollah and Hamas, hitting Yemen, and controlling trends inside Syria now that Bashar al-Assad is gone.

    We will find out in due course if this strategy will rearrange Arab-Middle East dynamics, or internal Israeli-American ones.

    The cost of this war to Israeli citizens is a big unknown, but a critical one. Israelis now know what it feels like in Southern Lebanon or Gaza. Millions of Israelis have been displaced, emigrated, or are sheltering in bunkers and safe rooms.

    This is not why the State of Israel was created, according to Zionist views, which sought a place where Jews could escape the racism and pogroms they suffered in Europe and North America from the 19th Century onwards.

    Most dangerous place
    Instead, Israel is the most dangerous place for Jews in the world today.

    This follows two decades in which all the Arabs, including Palestinians and Hamas, have expressed their willingness to coexist in peace with Israel, if Israel accepts the Palestinians’ right to national self-determination and pertinent UN resolutions that seek to guarantee the security and legitimacy of both Israeli and Palestinian states.

    The US-Israeli attack against Iran will intensify the forces that are already destroying international law legacies and the UN system in the Middle East and most of the world. The US-Israel pursue this centuries-old Western colonial-imperial action to deny indigenous people their national rights at a time when they have already ignored the global anti-genocide convention by destroying life and systems that allow life to exist in Gaza.

    Rami G Khouri is a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut and a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington. He is a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East. Dr Khouri can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri This article was first published by The New Arab before the US strikes on Iran.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 21, 2025

    Another Iraq? Military expert warns US has no real plan if it joins Israel’s war on Iran

    Democracy Now!

    Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, held talks with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom yesterday in Geneva as Israel’s attacks on Iran entered a second week.

    A US-based Iranian human rights group reports the Israeli attacks have killed at least 639 people. Israeli war planes have repeatedly pummeled Tehran and other parts of Iran. Iran is responded by continuing to launch missile strikes into Israel.

    Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have protested in Iran against Israel. Meanwhile, President Trump continues to give mixed messages on whether the US will join Israel’s attack on Iran.

    On Wednesday, Trump told reporters, “I may do it, I may not do it”. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered a new statement from the President.

    KAROLINE LEAVITT: “Regarding the ongoing situation in Iran, I know there has been a lot of speculation among all of you in the media regarding the president’s decision-making and whether or not the United States will be directly involved.

    “In light of that news, I have a message directly from the president. And I quote, ‘Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.’”

    AMY GOODMAN, The War and Peace Report: President Trump has repeatedly used that term, “two weeks,” when being questioned about decisions in this term and his first term as president. Leavitt delivered the message shortly after President Trump met with his former adviser, Steve Bannon, who has publicly warned against war with Iran.

    Bannon recently said, “We can’t do this again. We’ll tear the country apart. We can’t have another Iraq,” Bannon said.

    This comes as Trump’s reportedly sidelined National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard from key discussions on Iran. In March, Gabbard told lawmakers the intelligence community, “Continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”

    But on Tuesday, Trump dismissed her statement, saying, “I don’t care what she said.”

    Earlier Thursday, an Iranian missile hit the main hospital in Southern Israel in Beersheba. After the strike, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei, saying Iran’s supreme leader, “Cannot continue to exist.”

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the hospital and likened Iran’s attack to the London Blitz. Netanyahu stunned many in Israel by saying, “Each of us bears a personal cost. My family has not been exempt. This is the second time my son Avner has cancelled a wedding due to missile threats.”

    We’re joined now by William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new article for The National Interest is headlined, “Don’t Get Dragged Into a War with Iran.”

    Can you talk about what’s going on right now, Bill, the whole question of whether the U.S. is going to use a bunker-buster bomb that has to be delivered by a B-2 bomber, which only the US has?


    Another Iraq: Military expert warns US has no real plan    Video: Democracy Now!

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah. This is a case of undue trust in technology. The US is always getting in trouble when they think there’s this miracle solution. A lot of experts aren’t sure this would even work, or if it did, it would take multiple bombings.

    And of course, Iran’s not going to sit on its hands. They’ll respond possibly by killing US troops in the region, then we’ll have escalation from there. It’s reminiscent of the beginning of the Iraq War, when they said, “It’s going to be a cakewalk. It’s not going to cost anything.”

    Couple of trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of casualties, many US veterans coming home with PTSD, a regime that was sectarian that paved the way for ISIS, it couldn’t have gone worse.

    And so, this is a different beginning, but the end is uncertain, and I don’t think we want to go there.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about the GBU-57, the bunker-buster bomb, and how is it that this discussion going on within the White House about the use of the bomb — and of course, the US has gone back and forth — I should say President Trump has gone back and forth whether he’s fully involved with this war.

    At first he was saying they knew about it, but Israel was doing it, then saying, “We have total control of the skies over Tehran,” saying we, not Israel, and what exactly it would mean if the US dropped this bomb and the fleet that the US is moving in?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, well, the notion is, it’s heavy steel, it’s more explosive power than any conventional bomb. But it only goes so deep, and they don’t actually know how deep this facility is buried. And if it’s going in a straight line, and it’s to one side, it’s just not clear that it’s going to work.

    And of course, if it does, Iran is going to rebuild, they’re going to go straight for a nuclear weapon. They’re not going to trust negotiations anymore.

    So, apparently, the two weeks is partly because Trump’s getting conflicting reports from his own people about this. Now, if he had actual independent military folks, like Mark Milley in the first term, I think we’d be less likely to go in.

    But they made sure to have loyalists. Pete Hegseth is not a profile in courage. He’s not going to stand up to Trump on this. He might not even know the consequences. So, a lot of the press coverage is about this bomb, not about the consequences of an active war.

    AMY GOODMAN: Right, about using it. In your recent piece, you wrote, “Israeli officials suggested their attacks may result in regime change in Iran, despite the devastating destabilising impact such efforts in the region would have.”

    Can you talk about the significance of Israel putting forward and then Trump going back and forth on whether or not Ali Khamenei will be targeted?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah, I think my colleague Trita Parsi put it well. There’s been no example of regime change in the region that has come out with a better result. They don’t know what kind of regime would come in.

    Could be to the right of the current one. Could just be chaos that would fuel terrorism, who knows what else.

    So, they’re just talking — they’re winging it. They have no idea what they’re getting into. And I think Trump, he doesn’t want to seem like Netanyahu’s pulling him by the nose, so when he gets out in front of Trump, Trump says, “Oh, that was my idea.”

    But it’s almost as if Benjamin Netanyahu is running US foreign policy, and Trump is kind of following along.

    AMY GOODMAN: You have Netanyahu back in 2002 saying, “Iran is imminently going to have a nuclear bomb.” That was more than two decades ago.

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Exactly. That’s just a cover for wanting to take out the regime. And he spoke to the US Congress, he’s made presentations all over the world, and his intelligence has been proven wrong over, and over, and over.

    And when we had the Iran deal, he had European allies, he had China, he had Russia. There hadn’t been a deal like that where all these countries were on the same page in living memory, and it was working.

    And Trump trashed it and now has to start over.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the War Powers Act. The Virginia Senator Kaine has said that — has just put forward a bill around saying it must be — Congress that must vote on this. Where is [Senator] Chuck Schumer [Senate minority leader]? Where is [Hakeem] Jeffries [Congress minoroity leader] on this, the Democratic House and Senate leaders?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, a lot of the so-called leaders are not leading. When is the moment that you should step forward if we’re possibly going to get into another disastrous war? But I think they’re concerned about being viewed as critical of Israel.

    They don’t want to go out on a limb. So, you’ve got a progressive group that’s saying, “This has to be authorised by Congress.” You’ve got Republicans who are doubtful, but they don’t want to stand up to Trump because they don’t want to lose their jobs.

    “Risk your job. This is a huge thing. Don’t just sort of be a time-server.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, according to a report from IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, released in May, Iran has accumulated roughly 120 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, which is 30 percent away from weapons-grade level of 90 percent. You have Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA, saying this week that they do not have evidence that Iran has the system for a nuclear bomb.

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, well, a lot of the discussion points out — they don’t talk about, when you’ve got the uranium, you have to build the weapon, you have to make it work on a missile.

    It’s not you get the uranium, you have a weapon overnight, so there’s time to deal with that should they go forward through negotiations. And we had a deal that was working, which Trump threw aside in his first term.

    AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the foreign minister of Iran, Araghchi, in Geneva now speaking with his counterparts from Britain, France, the EU.

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I don’t think US allies in Europe want to go along with this, and I think he’s looking for some leverage over Trump. And of course, Trump is very hard to read, but even his own base, the majority of Trump supporters, don’t want to go to war.

    You’ve got people like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon saying it would be a disaster. But ultimately, it comes down to Trump. He’s unpredictable, he’s transactional, he’ll calculate what he thinks it’ll mean for him.

    AMY GOODMAN: And what impact does protests have around the country, as we wrap up?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think taking the stand is infectious. So many institutions were caving in to Trump. And the more people stand up, 2000 demonstrations around the country, the more the folks sitting on the fence, the millions of people who, they’re against Trump, but they don’t know what to do, the more of us that get involved, the better chance we have of turning this thing around.

    So, we should not let them discourage us. We need to build power to push back against all these horrible things.

    AMY GOODMAN: Finally, if the US were to bomb the nuclear site that it would require the bunker-buster bomb to hit below ground, underground. Are we talking about nuclear fallout here?

    WILLIAM HARTUNG: I think there would certainly be radiation that would of course affect the Iranian people. They’ve already had many civilian deaths. It’s not this kind of precise thing that’s only hitting military targets.

    And that, too, has to affect Iran’s view of this. They were shortly away from another negotiation, and now their country’s being devastated, so can they trust us?

    AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung is senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new piece for The National Interest is headlined, “Don’t Get Dragged Into a War with Iran.”

    Republished from Democracy Now! under Creative Commons.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 21, 2025

    Analyst dismisses ‘lie by rogue’ Netanyahu over Iran’s nuclear programme

    Asia Pacific Report

    A leading Middle East analyst has pushed back against US President Donald Trump’s dismissal of the conclusion of his own national intelligence chief, who said in April that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.

    Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, said in an interview that Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence, who issued the determination on Iran, “does not speak for herself” or her team alone.

    “She speaks for all the intelligence agencies combined,” Bishara said.

    • READ MORE:  Iran fires more ballistic missiles, Israel vows to continue attacks
    • Egyptian crackdown on Gaza blockade busters but Kiwi activists vow to ‘defeat genocide’
    • 15 months after ‘flour massacre’ shock, Israel commits daily Gaza food aid killings
    • Other Middle East reports

    “This intelligence is supposed to be sound. This is not just one person or one team saying something. It’s the entire intelligence community in the United States. He [Trump] would dismiss them? For what?

    “For a lie by a rogue element called Benjamin Netanyahu, who has lied all his life, a con artist who is indicted for his crimes in Gaza? It’s just astounding.”

    US senators slam Netanyahu
    Two US senators have also condemned Netanyahu while Israel continues to bomb and starve Gaza

    Chris Van Hollen and Elizabeth Warren, two Democrats in the US Senate, have urged the world to pay attention to what Israel continues to do in Gaza amid its conflict with Iran.

    “Don’t look away,” Van Hollen wrote on X. “Since the start of the Israel-Iran war 7 days ago, over 400 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, many shot while seeking food.

    “It’s unconscionable that Netanyahu has not allowed international orgs to resume food delivery.”

    Warren said the Israeli prime minister “may think no one will notice what he’s doing in Gaza while he bombs Iran”.

    “People face starvation. 55,000 killed. Aid workers and doctors turned away at the border. Shooting at innocent people desperate for food. The world sees you, Benjamin Netanyahu,” she wrote.

    Israel’s Prime Minister may think no one will notice what he’s doing in Gaza while he bombs Iran.

    People face starvation. 55,000 killed. Aid workers and doctors turned away at the border. Shooting at innocent people desperate for food.

    The world sees you, Benjamin Netanyahu.

    — Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) June 20, 2025

    ‘A trust gap’
    The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, appealed for an end to the fighting between Israel and Iran, saying that Teheran had repeatedly stated that it was not seeking nuclear weapons.

    “Let’s recognise there is a trust gap,” he said.

    “The only way to bridge that gap is through diplomacy to establish a credible, comprehensive and verifiable solution — including full access to inspectors of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], as the United Nations technical agency in this field.

    “For all of that to be possible, I appeal for an end to the fighting and the return to serious negotiations.”

    UN Secretary-General António Guterres
    UN Secretary-General António Guterres . . . “I appeal for an end to the fighting and the return to serious negotiations.” Image: UNweb screenshot APR

    Meanwhile, in New Zealand hope for freedom for Palestinians remained high among a group of trauma-struck activists 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.

    Asia Pacific Report special correspondents report on the saga.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 20, 2025

    Chris Hedges: War Deja Vu

    There are few differences between the lies told to ignite the war with Iraq and the lies told to ignite a war with Iran. The assessments of our intelligence agencies and international bodies are, as they were during the calls to invade Iraq, airily dismissed for hallucinations.

    All the old tropes have been resurrected to entice us into another military fiasco. A country that poses no threat to us, or to its neighbors, is on the verge of acquiring a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that imperils our existence. The country and its leaders embody pure evil. Freedom and democracy are at stake.

    The post Chris Hedges: War Deja Vu appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • June 19, 2025

    The Middle East Is On Fire; Israeli And US Imperialism Lit The Match

    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.

    The post The Middle East Is On Fire; Israeli And US Imperialism Lit The Match appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • June 19, 2025

    Attacks on Iran Show How US Support for Israel Fuels Regional Instability

    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…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • June 18, 2025

    Israel-Iran war ‘more dangerous than we imagine’, says Middle East Eye editor

    Pacific Media Watch

    The Big Picture Podcast host, New Zealand-Egyptian journalist and author Mohamed Hassan, interviews Middle East Eye editor-in-chief David Hearst about the rapidly unfolding war between Israel and Iran, why the West supports it, and what it threatens to unleash on the global order.

    What does Israel really want to achieve, what options does Iran have to deescalate, and will the United States stop the war, or join it as is being hinted?

    Hearst says the war is “more dangerous than we imagine” and notes that while most Western leadership still backs Israel, there has been a strong shift in world public opinion against Tel Aviv.

    • READ MORE: Israel-Iran attacks continue; Trump demands unconditional surrender
    • Iran war: from the Middle East to America, history shows you cannot assassinate your way to peace
    • Attack on Iran’s state media – Israel bombs IRIB building in new war crime
    • Why Israel’s ‘humane’ propaganda is such a sinister facade
    • Other Israeli war on Iran reports

    He says Israel has lost most of the world’s support, most of the Global South, most African states, Brazil, South Africa, China and Russia.

    Hearst says the world is witnessing the “cynical tailend of the colonial era” among Western states.


    The era of peace is over.             Video: Middle East Eye

    Iran ‘unlikely to surrender’
    Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, says Iran is unlikely to “surrender to American terms” and that there is a risk the war on Iran could “bring the entire region down”.

    Vaez told Al Jazeera in an interview that US President Donald Trump “provided the green light for Israel to attack Iran” just two days before the president’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, was due to meet with the Iranians in the Oman capital of Muscat.

    Imagine viewing, from the Iranian perspective, Trump giving the go-ahead for the attack while at the same time saying that diplomacy with Tehran was still ongoing, Vaez said.

    Now Trump “is asking for Iranian surrender” on his Truth Social platform, he said.

    “I think the only thing that is more dangerous than suffering from Israeli and American bombs is actually surrendering to American terms,” Vaez said.

    “Because if Iran surrenders on the nuclear issue and on the demands of President Trump, there is no end to the slippery slope, which would eventually result in regime collapse and capitulation anyway.”

    pic.twitter.com/QcySkOWWGN

    — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 17, 2025

    Most Americans oppose US involvement
    Meanwhile, a new survey has reported that most Americans oppose US military involvement in the conflict.

    The survey by YouGov showed that some 60 percent of Americans surveyed thought the US military should not get involved in the ongoing hostilities between Israel and Iran.

    Only 16 percent favoured US involvement, while 24 percent said they were not sure.

    Among the Democrats, those who opposed US intervention were at 65 percent, and among the Republicans, it was 53 percent. Some 61 percent of independents opposed the move.

    The survey also showed that half of Americans viewed Iran as an enemy of the US, while 25 percent said it was “unfriendly”.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 17, 2025

    Solomon Islanders safe but unable to leave Israel amid war on Iran

    RNZ Pacific

    The Solomon Islands Foreign Ministry says five people who completed agriculture training in Israel are safe but unable to come home amid the ongoing war between Israel and Iran.

    The ministry said in a statement that the Solomon Islands Embassy in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, was closely monitoring the situation and maintaining regular contact with the students.

    Ambassador Cornelius Walegerea said that given the volatile nature of the current situation, the safety of their citizens in Israel — particularly the students — remained their top priority.

    • READ MORE: Iran fires missiles at Israel; Trump claims ‘total control of Iran skies’
    • RNZ Pacific updates on the conflict

    “Once the airport reopens and it is deemed safe for them to travel, the students will be able to return home.”

    The five Solomon Islands students have undertaken agricultural training at the Arava International Centre for Agriculture in Israel since September 2024.

    The students completed their training on June 5 and were scheduled to return home on June 17.

    The students have been advised to strictly follow instructions issued by local authorities and to continue observing all precautionary safety measures.

    Ministry updates
    The ministry will continue to provide updates as the situation develops.

    Its travel advisory, issued the day Israel attacked Iran last Friday, said the ministry “wishes to advise all citizens not to travel to Israel and the region”.

    Citizens studying in Israel were told they “should now make every effort to leave Israel”.

    Meanwhile, a friend of a New Zealander stuck in Iran said the NZ government needed to help provide safe passage, and that the advice so far had been “vague and lacking any substance whatsover”.

    The woman told RNZ the advice from MFAT until yesterday had been to “stay put”, before an evacuation notice was issued.

    MFAT declined interview
    MFAT declined an interview, but told RNZ it had heard from a small number of New Zealanders seeking advice about how to depart from Iran and Israel.

    It would not provide any further detail regarding those individuals.

    MFAT said the airspace was currently closed over both countries, which would likely continue.

    The agency understood departure via land border crossings had been taking place, but that carried risks and New Zealanders “should only do so if they feel it is safe”.

    Meanwhile, the NZ government said visitors from war zones in the Middle East could stay in New Zealand until it was safe for them to return home.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 16, 2025

    Israelis ‘now realise’ what Palestinians and Lebanese have been suffering, says analyst

    Asia Pacific Report

    A Paris-based military and political analyst, Elijah Magnier, says he believes the hostilities between Israel and Iran will only get worse, but that Israeli support for the war may wane if the destruction continues.

    “I think it’s going to continue escalating because we are just in the first days of the war that Israel declared on Iran,” he told Al Jazeera in an interview.

    “And also the Israeli officials, the prime minister and the army, have all warned Israeli society that this war is going to be heavy and . . .  the price is going to be extremely high.

    • READ MORE: Eight killed, dozens wounded in Israel after Iran fires new missile barrage

    “But the society that stands behind [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and supports the war on Iran did not expect this level of destruction because, since 1973, Israel has not waged a war on a country and never been attacked on this scale, right in the heart of Tel Aviv,” Magnier said.

    “So now they are realising what the Palestinians have been suffering, what the Lebanese have been suffering, and they see the destruction in front of them — buildings in Tel Aviv, in Haifa destroyed, fire everywhere.

    “The properties no longer exist. Eight people killed, 250 wounded in one day.

    “That’s unheard of since a very long time in Israel. So, all that is not something that the Israeli society has been ready for,” added Magnier, veteran war correspondent and political analyst with more than 35 years of experience covering decades of war in the Middle East and North Africa.

    Peters criticised over ‘craven’ statement
    Meanwhile, in Auckland, the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) criticised New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters for “refusing to condemn Israel for its egregious war crimes of industrial-scale killing and mass starvation of civilians in Gaza”.

    It also said that Peters had “outdone himself with the most craven of tweets on Israel’s massive attack on Iran”.


    Iran missiles strikes on Israel for third day in retaliation to the surprise attack. Video: Al Jazeera

    Co-chair Maher Nazzal said in a statement that minister Peters had said he was “gravely concerned by the escalation in tensions between Israel and Iran” and that “all actors” must “prioritise de-escalation”.

    But there was no mention of Israel as the aggressor and no condemnation of Israel’s attack launched in the middle of negotiations between Iran and the US on Iran’s nuclear programme, said Maher.

    “It’s Mr Peters’ most obsequious tweet yet which leaves a cloud of shame hanging over the country.

    “Appeasement of this rogue state, as our government and other Western countries have done over 20 months, have led Israel to believe it can attack any country it likes with absolute impunity.”

    New Zealand is gravely concerned by the escalation in tensions between Israel and Iran. Any further retaliatory action significantly increases the risk of a regional war. This would have catastrophic consequences in the Middle East.

    It is critical that all actors prioritise…

    — Winston Peters (@NewZealandMFA) June 13, 2025

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • June 15, 2025

    Is genocide the new normal? Could Israel and the US destroy Iran?

    COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

    “Just do it, before it is too late,” US President Donald Trump said.

    The Western media described Trump’s and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threats after the first wave of attacks on Iran as “warnings”. They were, in fact, expressions of genocidal intent.

    “The United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come.

    “And they know how to use it. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire … JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”

    • READ MORE: Eugene Doyle: Team Genocide and the West’s war on Iran
    • Iran fires missiles at Israel, kills 8, after attacks on oil sites
    • Other Israeli war on Iran reports

    FROM PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP:

    “I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal…” pic.twitter.com/lsCQHkyT2f

    — The White House (@WhiteHouse) June 13, 2025

    As Pascal Lottaz and a number of other analysts pointed out on Friday, preemptive war or just war theory requires imminent threats not conceptual ones. As I also pointed out on Friday, the United States’ own intelligence agencies have consistently determined that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons programme and there has been no change to the regime’s position since the Grand Ayatollah issued a fatwa against such weapons in 2003.

    Israel and the US may now have forced a change in that theology or calculus.

    What we are witnessing is a war of aggression designed to trigger regime change and destroy Iran — to reduce it to the kind of chaos that Israel and the US have inflicted on Iraq, Libya, Lebanon and many other countries.

    This is only possible because of the collusion of the Collective West. At the core of this project of endless violence towards non-white people is racism: contempt for people who are not like us.

    Nearly half of Israelis support army killing all Palestinians in Gaza, poll finds.
    Today an overwhelming majority of Israelis want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians — one of the very definitions of genocide — not just from Gaza but from Israel itself. Nearly half of Israelis support the army killing all Palestinians in Gaza, a recent US Penn State University poll finds.

    Genocide has been normalised in Israel. Yet our political leaders and much of our media tell us we share values with these people.

    One of the sickest, most profoundly tragic ironies of history is that the long suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of Western racism has culminated in a triumphalist Jewish State doing to the Palestinians what the Plantagenets and the Popes, the Medicis and the Russian boyars, the Italian Fascists and the Nazis did to the Jews.

    Europeans perpetrated the Holocaust not the Palestinians or the Iranians. Israel, dominated as it is by Ashkenazi Jews, has now been incorporated into the Western project to maintain global hegemony.

    They are today’s uber Aryans lording it over the untermenschen. It is the grim fulfillment of what the Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned back in the 1980s was Israel’s incipient slide into what he termed “Judeo Nazism”.

    ‘We, the Israelis, are the victims’
    Isn’t it time we woke from our deep slumber? Generations of people in Western countries were lied to for generations about the Zionist project. We were bombarded with propaganda that the Israelis were the victims, the plucky battlers; the Palestinians were somehow a nation of terrorists in their own land.

    So too, the propaganda goes, are pretty much all of Israel’s neighbours, particularly Iran.

    The propaganda shredded our minds, particularly people of my generation. It made most of our populations and all of our governments totally indifferent to the constant killing, repression and land thieving by generations of Israelis.

    “We, the Israelis, are the victims.” They weep for themselves as they rape Palestinian prisoners — and call themselves heroes for doing so. In researching stories like this I had the unpleasant experience of watching videos of both the rape of Palestinians prisoners at Sde Temein (gloatingly shared by the perpetrators) and the repellent sight of Benjamin Netanyahu’s rabbi blessing one of these rapists and praising him for his work.

    We are repeatedly told we share values with these people. I believe our governments really do share those values. I do not.

    ‘Hath not a Palestinian eyes? If you prick an Iranian do they not bleed?’
    I’m a student of Shakespeare and have spent hours every month reading, watching and studying his plays. The Merchant of Venice, a complex play with highly contested interpretations, can be viewed as a masterful exploration of a dominant society enforcing its own double standards on a Hated Other.

    The last time I watched it was a Royal Shakespeare Company performance with Palestinian actor Makram Khoury in the role of Shylock (the Jew).

    Over the centuries Shylock had morphed from a pantomime villain, to an arch-villain to, in the 19th Century, a figure of pathos, dignity and loss, through to 20th Century interpretations of him as a powerful, albeit highly flawed, figure of resistance in the face of a supremacist society.

    Palestinian Makram Khoury’s performance capped this transition and was an eloquent plea to see our common humanity whether we be Jewish, Muslim, Christian or any other slice of humanity.

    “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

    How would our reading of this passage change if we changed “Jew” to “Palestinian” or “Iranian”?

    Only an utterly incoherent and damaged mind can continue to believe the propaganda coming out of the White House, the Pentagon, and out of the mouths of psychotic madmen like Netanyahu, Smotrich and the rest of Team Genocide.

    It’s time to wake up. If not, we ourselves become victims. Only a hollowed-out heart and mind could content themselves with turning a blind eye to genocide, to turn a blind eye to the war of aggression just launched against Iran.

    How will this end?

    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.

  • June 14, 2025

    There are Only Jewish-Inspired Warsaw Ghetto Pogroms for Palestinians

    Note: In polite company or in public arenas or in schools and conferences, what have you, what is it to be anti-semitic according to the Israel Occupation Forces legions of facilitators like the ADL, AIPAC, and a list of tens of thousands of Jewish controlled non-profits and foundations?

    Pro-Israeli circles often try to invent an anti-Semitic element behind every legitimate criticism of Israel.

    But this is a cheap and increasingly exposed exploitation and manipulation of true anti-Semitism a morbid form of racism that ought to be denounced.

    However the behaviors of the shipyard dogs of Zionism would have us believe that true anti-Semites are no longer those who hate Jews for being Jewish but rather those Zionist fanatics criticize for criticizing Israel for being criminal murderous and evil.

    Well we are supposed to be living in a moral universe where no people should have more rights than the rest of mankind.

    Proceeding from this timeless basic logic if criticizing Israel including questioning the moral legitimacy of Israel’s very existence amounts to anti-Semitism then humanity has a moral obligation to be anti-Semitic.

    Opponents of Israel it must be proclaimed loudly don’t hate Israel because Israel is Jewish; they hate Israel because Israel happens to be a gigantic crime against humanity a virulent practitioner of ethnic cleansing and apartheid which is committed to the national destruction of another people the Palestinian people.

    Yes anti-Judaism is wrong and should be rejected. However if Judaism especially Jewishness can not maintain a decent and peaceful existence outside the realm of racism apartheid and genocidal supremacy then people will have second thoughts about Judaism. — effing 2012 Op-Ed, The absurdity of equating opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism

    No lover of ANY POTUS, especially Truman, but, that broken white psychosis can get it right once in a blue moon:

    In 1948 President Harry Truman was infuriated by Jewish terrorism which was nothing in comparison to Israel’s terror these days angrily wrote in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt: “I fear very much that the Jews are being like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath.” (Eleanor and Harry: The Correspondence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman Eleanor Roosevelt, [Scribner/Drew, 2002] p.187.)

    No fan of Stanley, as he calls the American University the most Jewish of institutions; however,

    Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor who recently decided to leave Yale to go teach in Canada, recently explained on PBS’ Amanpour & Company why he thinks the Trump administration’s efforts are actually boosting antisemitic tropes:

    This is reinforcing antisemitic tropes all across the political spectrum. … What are the most toxic antisemitic tropes? Well, “Jews control the institutions.” This is absolutely reinforcing this. Any young American is going to think: Remember what happened when they took down the world’s greatest university system on behalf of Jewish safety? And this will go down in history books — the history of this era will say that Jewish people were the sledgehammer for fascism. So if we don’t speak out, if we American Jews do not speak out against this, this will be a grim chapter in our history as Americans. It’s the first time in my life as an American that I have been fearful of our status as equal Americans — not because of the protests on campus, which, as I said, had a lot of Jewish students in them. But because we are suddenly at the center of U.S. politics. It’s never good to be in the crosshairs for us. And we are being used to destroy democracy.

    So, this following little doozy would be put on the targets for IOF and others loving the Jewish Raping Murdering Starving Displacing Poisoning Polluting Occupied State of “Israel”/Palestine.

    Over an effing billion of these Goy-ionists?

    Days later, India launched Operation Sindoor, a wave of air strikes, describing them as “non-escalatory” in nature. Yes, that is the face of Judaism in that part of the world, where Benzion Mileikowsky works wonders on the Jewish Population where 84 percent plus want all Palestinians wiped from lower Greater Israel.

    Many of the drones used in the operation were Israeli-made.

    Among the systems deployed was the Harop, a “suicide drone” developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). Designed to hover above a target area before diving for impact, the Harop carries a 10-kilogram warhead and can remain airborne for nearly six hours.

    Since acquiring the Harop, India has increasingly relied on it.

    Oshrit Birvadker, a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told The Times of Israel that India’s use of Harop drones reflects “Israel’s growing footprint in Indian defense.”

    That’s fourth globally in arms sales, Jewish State of Murdering Maiming Raping Starving Poisoning Polluting Displacing Israel (sic).

    Marching to get into the Katz’s and Benzion Mileikowsky’s heads? For fuck’s sake!

    Chris Hedges: This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated.  Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

    In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.

    Some bulwarks across international community would stop this. Fuck, it is a Jewish project across all DNA-lines.

    Given Britain’s continued support for Israel, from refusing to implement a full arms embargo to continuing to send RAF spy flights over Gaza from the British base at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, Ahmed questions whether efforts have indeed been enough.

    Israeli drones sprayed the Madleen with a white substance and an Israeli boat rammed the aid vessel before commandos boarded it, all because it contained things like baby food, medicine and prosthetics. Israel must defend itself from those things, apparently.

    Is this a certain brand of Jewish Inspired, Supported, Financed death and murder cult? Is the question antisemitic?

    Dirty dirty Sweden:

    The Temporary Protection Directive (2001/55/EC) (commonly referred to as collective temporary protection) was activated in March 2022, granting Ukrainians seeking refuge temporary protection in EU countries, including Sweden. This directive provides residence permits, access to work, education, and limited social benefits without requiring individuals to go through the standard asylum process.

    However, the practicalities of the Directive’s use differed significantly between countries. Sweden, despite its, until recent, reputation of being relatively liberal in its migration policies, has at times, lagged behind its Scandinavian neighbors in supporting Ukrainian displaced people. To illustrate this, it is useful to compare the Swedish approach to that of other Nordic states, as well as Poland.

    Bizarrely, Israel’s act of piracy was described by the BBC as “diverting” the Madleen. In what universe was this a diversion? When you capture people in international waters who have committed no crime, you have not diverted them, you have kidnapped them. The crew of the Madleen are hostages, and not only that, Israel is already bragging about how it plans to abuse them.

    The crew of 12, who the media describe as “activists”, comprised of journalists, politicians, and a doctor. They are to be taken to the port of Ashdod where they will be psychologically tortured by the IDF/IOF.

    Israel Katz says he has given the order to make the crew watch footage of October 7th to show them “exactly who the terrorist organization they came to support and for whom they work is”. Presumably, they will only watch the killings carried out by Hamas and not the enactment of the Hannibal Directive killing hundreds of Jews by Jews.

    Pointing out the non-Jews and Jews involved, is that antisemitic?

    Remember this Jewish guy?

    1992 document published by the US Department of Defense, known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine (because it was co-written by Paul Wolfowitz, who then served as US undersecretary of defense for policy, before later returning as Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush).

    The Pentagon’s Wolfowitz Doctrine stated (emphasis added):

    Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

    The Trump administration’s foreign policy is still consistent with much of the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Although Trump has de-prioritized Western Europe and the territory of the former USSR, he has dedicated significant resources to US military operations in East Asia and Southwest Asia (also known as the Middle East).

    Yep, even CIA-drenched Wikipedia advances Ratner’s Judaism:

    Ely Ratner, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs in Biden’s Pentagon, wrote approvingly on X/Twitter, “Rhetoric aside, on actual defense policy Secretary Hegseth’s speech was near total continuity with the previous administration”.

    “That’s good, but we’ll need heightened urgency, attention, and resources to address the China challenge”, Ratner added.

    This fellow for years advanced his Jewishness for sure Zyklon or Final Solution Blinken:

    Biden’s neoconservative Secretary of State Antony Blinken had also maintained a hardline anti-China position.

    In a speech in 2022, Blinken announced what was essentially a containment policy targeting China.

    “We cannot rely on Beijing to change its trajectory. So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing”, he said.

    Blinken added, “The scale and the scope of the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China will test American diplomacy like nothing we’ve seen before”.

    Tucker Carlson has posted an extraordinary article on X that could potentially stop a war with Iran. As everyone knows, Carlson’s political views are admired by President Donald Trump who sees the former Fox commentator as a blunt, but fair-minded analyst who sees the world in similar terms as himself. And while there’s no evidence that the two men communicate regularly, a number of pundits believe that Carlson has influenced Trump’s thinking, particularly on matters related to foreign policy. That said, it is entirely possible that Trump will read Carlson’s June 4 post on Iran, and see that—once again—influential neocons are making every effort to drag the US into another bloody conflict in the Middle East to achieve Israel’s ambition of becoming the preeminent power in the region. Here’s Carlson:

    Mark Levin was at the White House today, lobbying for war with Iran. To be clear, Levin has no plans to fight in this or any other war. He’s demanding that American troops do it. We need to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons, he and like-minded ideologues in Washington are now arguing. They’re just weeks away.

    If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same people have been making the same claim since at least the 1990s. It’s a lie. In fact, there is zero credible intelligence that suggests Iran is anywhere near building a bomb or has plans to. None. Anyone who claims otherwise is ignorant or dishonest. If the US government knew Iran was weeks from possessing a nuclear weapon, we’d be at war already.

    Iran knows this, which is why they aren’t building one. Iran also knows it’s unwise to give up its weapons program entirely. Muammar Gaddafi tried that and wound up sodomized with a bayonet. As soon as Gaddafi disarmed, NATO killed him. Iran’s leaders saw that happen. They learned the obvious lesson.

    So why is Mark Levin once again hyperventilating about weapons of mass destruction? To distract you from the real goal, which is regime change — young Americans heading back to the Middle East to topple yet another government. Virtually no one will say this out loud. America’s record of overthrowing foreign leaders is so embarrassingly counterproductive that regime change has become a synonym for disaster. Officially, no one supports it. So instead of telling the truth about their motives, they manufacture hysteria: “A country like Iran can never have the bomb! They’ll nuke Los Angeles! We have to act now!” Tucker Carlson (tuckercarlsonliveshowpodcast)

    *****

    Back to the death spiral of the Jewish Controlled Palestine:

    In his book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad writes:

    Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.

    You can see his interview with El Akkad here.

    You cannot decimate a people, carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for centuries and not expect blowback. The genocide will end. The response to the reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are only the start.

    Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.

    “It’s not a decision,” Engel explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went. I went with the man in the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”

    Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilization, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them?

    What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South?

    It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth.

    “To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:

    To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

    There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs. They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.

    At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.

    The post There are Only Jewish-Inspired Warsaw Ghetto Pogroms for Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • June 13, 2025

    Fijian in Abu Dhabi worried about Pacific communities in Middle East

    By Susana Suisuiki, Presenter/producer of RNZ Pacific Waves

    Fiji’s Embassy in Abu Dhabi says it is closely monitoring the situation in Iran and Israel as tensions remain high.

    Israel carried out a dozen strikes against Iranian military and nuclear sites on Friday, claiming it acted out of “self-defence”, saying Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon.

    Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Israel that “severe punishment” would follow and two waves of missiles were fired at Israel.

    • READ MORE: Iran hits Israel with retaliatory missiles after nuclear site attacks

    Fiji’s Embassy in Abu Dhabi is urging the Fijian community there to remain calm, stay informed, and reach out to the Embassy should they have any concerns or require assistance during this period of heightened regional tensions.

    A Fiji national in Abu Dhabi said he had yet to hear how other Pacific communities in the Middle East were coping amid the Israel-Iran conflict.

    Speaking to RNZ Pacific Waves from Abu Dhabi, Fiji media specialist Kelepi Abariga said the situation was “freaky and risky”.

    Abariga has lived in Abu Dhabi for more than a decade and while he was far from the danger zones, he was concerned for his “fellow Pacific people”.

    ‘I hope they are safe’
    “I just hope they are safe as of now, this is probably the first time Israel has attacked Iran directly,” he said.

    “Everybody thinks that Iran has a huge nuclear deposit with them, that they could use it against any country in the world.

    “But you know, that is yet to be seen.

    “So right now, you know we from the Pacific, we’re right in the middle of everything and I think you know, our safety is paramount.”

    Abariga was not aware of any Pacific people in Tehran but said if they were, they were most likely to be working for an NGO or the United Nations.

    However, Abariga said there were Fiji nationals working at the International Christian embassy in Jerusalem and Solomon Island students in the south of Israel.

    He also said that Fijian troops were stationed at Golan Heights occupied by Israel.

    While Abariga described Abu Dhabi as the safest country in the Middle East, he said the politics in the region were volatile.

    “It’s been intense like that for all this time, and I think when you mention Iran in this country [UAE], they have all the differences so it’s probably something that has started a long way before.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • May 29, 2025

    A Short Guide on How to Starve a Population to Death

    A short guide on how to engineer a genocide by starvation and ethnic cleansing:

    1. Choose your moment. Ok, you’ve been ethnically cleansing, occupying, oppressing, and killing your neighbours for decades. The international courts have ruled your actions illegal. But none of that will matter the moment your neighbours retaliate by attacking you. Don’t worry. The Western media can be relied on to help out here. They will be only too ready to pretend that history began on the day you were attacked.

    2. Declare, in response, your intention to starve your neighbours, treating them as “human animals”, by blocking all food, water, and power. You will be surprised by how many Western politicians are ready to support this as your “right to defend yourself”. The media will echo them. It is important not to just talk about blocking aid. You must actually do it. There will be no serious pushback for many, many months.

    3. Start relatively slowly. Time is on your side. Let a little bit of aid in. But be sure to relentlessly smear the well-functioning, decades-old aid distribution system run by the international community, one that is transparent, accountable, and widely integrated into the communities it serves. Say it is infiltrated by “terrorists”.

    4. Use that claim – evidence isn’t really necessary, the western media never ask for it – as the pretext to bomb the aid system’s warehouses, distribution centres, and community kitchens. Oh, and don’t forget to bomb all the private bakeries, destroy all the farmland, shoot all the animals, and kill anyone who tries to use a fishing boat, so that there are no other sources of food. You are now in control of the trickle of aid reaching what is rapidly becoming a severely malnourished population.

    5. Time to move into higher gear. Stop the international community’s aid from getting in altogether. You will need a humanitarian cover story for this bit. The danger, particularly in an age of social media, is that images of starving babies will make you look very bad. Hold firm. You can get through this. Claim – again, evidence isn’t really necessary, the western media won’t ask for it – that the “terrorists” are stealing the aid. You will be surprised how willing the media is to talk about babies going “hungry”, ignoring the fact that you are starving them to death, or speak of a “famine”, as though from drought and crop failure, not from your carefully laid plans.

    6. Don’t lose sight of the bigger story. You are blocking aid to “eradicate the terrorists”. After all, what is the worth of a baby, of a child – all one million of them – in the fight to eliminate a rag-tag army of lightly armed “terrorists” who have never waged their struggle outside of their historic homeland?

    7. Now that the population is entirely at your disposal, you can roll out a “humanitarian” alternative to the existing system you have been vilifying and wrecking. Probably best to have been working on this part of the plan behind the scenes from early on, and to have regularly consulted with the Americans on how to develop it. You may even find they are willing to fund it. They usually are. You can obscure their role by using the term “private contractors”.

    8. It’s time for implementation. Obviously, the point is not to really distribute aid. It is all about providing a cover story so that the starvation and ethnic cleansing can continue. Ensure that you provide only a tiny amount of aid and make it available only at a few distribution points you have set up with these “private contractors”. This has two advantages.

    9. It forces the population to come to the areas you want them in, like luring mice into a trap. Get them to the very edge of the territory, because from there you will be best positioned at some point to drive them over the border and get rid of them for good.

    10. Your system will lead to chaos, as desperate, starving people fight for food. That’s great for you. It makes them look like a swarming mass of those “human animals” you were talking about from the start. Don’t they deserve their fate? And it means that young, fit men – especially those from large, often armed, criminal families – will end up with most of the food. The stuff they can’t grab at the distribution points, they will ambush later as people try to return home laden with their heavy aid packages. That may seem counter-productive, given that you’re claiming to want to eliminate the “terrorists”. Won’t these fit, young men, as conditions degenerate further, provide a future source of recruits to the “terrorists”? But remember, the real goal here is to starve the population as quickly as possible. The young, the elderly, the sick, and the vulnerable are the ones who will die first. The more of them who start dying, the faster the pressure builds on everyone else to flee the territory to save themselves.

    You are nearly there. True, faced with the emaciated bodies of your victims, Western politicians will start making harsh pronouncements. But they have already given you a massive head start of 20 months. Be grateful for that. You don’t need much longer. While they dither, you can get on with the job of extermination. Leave it to the history books to judge what really happened.

    The post A Short Guide on How to Starve a Population to Death first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • May 28, 2025

    Why Are Veterans and Allies Fasting for Gaza?

    Last Thursday, May 22, a coalition named Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza kicked off a 40-day fast outside the United Nations in Manhattan in protest against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. Military veterans and allies pledged to fast for 40 days on only 250 calories per day, the amount recently reported as what the residents of Gaza are enduring.

    The fasters are demanding:

    1) Full humanitarian aid to Gaza under UN authority, and

    2) No more U.S. weapons to Israel.

    Seven people are fasting from May 22 to June 30 outside the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where they are present from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. Many others are fasting around the U.S. and beyond for as many days as they can. The fast is organized by Veterans For Peace along with over 40 co-sponsoring organizations.

    Remarkably, over 600 people have registered to join the fast. Friends of Sabeel, NA, is maintaining the list of fasters.

    Who will stop the genocide in Palestine, if not us? That is the question that the fasters and many others are asking. The U.S. government is shamelessly complicit in Israel’s genocide, and to a lesser extent, the same is true for the European governments.  The silence and inaction of most Middle Eastern countries is resounding. Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran, the only countries to come to Palestine’s aid, have been bombed by Israel and the U.S., with the threat of more to come. Syria, another country that stood with Palestine, has been “regime changed” and handed over to former al-Qaeda/ISIS extremists.

    On the positive side, some governments are making their voices heard. South Africa and Nicaragua have taken Israel and Germany, respectively, to the International Court of Justice – Israel for its genocide, and Germany for providing weapons to Israel.  And millions of regular people around the globe have protested loudly and continue to do so.

    Here in the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace has provided crucial leadership, pushing back against the phony charges of “anti-semitism” that are thrown at the student protesters whose courageous resistance has spoken for so many.  University administrators have been all too quick to crack down on the students, violating their right to freedom of speech, but even these universities have come under attack from the repressive, anti-democratic Trump administration.

    Peace-loving people are frustrated and angry. Some are worried they will be detained or deported. And many of us are suffering from Moral Injury, concerned about our own complicity. How are we supposed to act as we watch U.S. bombs obliterate Gaza’s hospitals, mosques, churches, and universities?  What are we supposed to do when we see Palestinian children being starved to death, systematically and live-streamed?

    Because our movement is nonviolent, we do not want to follow the example of the young man who shot and killed two employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. However, we understand his frustration and the driving force behind his forceful action. We take courage from the supreme sacrifice of U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy, asking, “What would you do?”

    Student protesters at several universities around the country have initiated “hunger strikes,” a protest tactic often considered a last resort. Now they have been joined by military veterans.

    “Watching hundreds of people maimed, burned, and killed every day just tears at my insides,” said Mike Ferner, former Executive Director of Veterans For Peace and one of the fasters.  “Too much like when I nursed hundreds of wounded from our war in Vietnam,” said the former Navy corpsman. “This madness will only stop when enough Americans demand it stops.”

    Rev. Addie Domske, National Field Organizer for Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), said, “This month I celebrated my third Mother’s Day with a renewed commitment to parent my kid toward a free Palestine. As a mother, I am responsible for feeding my child. I also believe, as a mother, I must be responsive when other children are starving.

    Kathy Kelly, board president of World BEYOND War, also in NY for the fast, said, “Irish Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire, at age 81, recently fasted for forty days, saying ‘As the children of Gaza are hungry and injured with bombs by official Israeli policy, I have decided that I, too, must go hungry with them, as I in good conscience can do no other.’ Now, Israel intensifies its efforts to eradicate Gaza through bombing, forcible displacement, and siege. We must follow Mairead’s lead, hungering acutely for an end to all weapon shipments to Israel. We must ask, ‘who are the criminals?’ as war crimes multiply and political leaders fail to stop them.”

    Another faster is Joy Metzler: 23, Cocoa, FL., a 2023 graduate of the Air Force Academy who became a Conscientious Objector and left the Air Force, citing US aggression in the Middle East and the continued ethnic cleansing in all of Palestine. Joy is now a member of Veterans For Peace and a co-founder of Servicemembers For Ceasefire.

    “I am watching as our government unconditionally supports the very violations of international law that the Air Force trained me to recognize,” said Joy Metzler. “I was trained to uphold the values of justice, and that is why I am speaking out and condemning our government’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

    I spoke with VFP leader Mike Ferner on Day 7 of his Fast. The NYPD had just told him and the other fasters that they could no longer sit down in front of the US Mission to the UN on the little stools they had brought. But Mike Ferner was not complaining. He said:

    “We go home every night to a safe bed, and we can drink clean water. We are not watching our children starve to death before us. Our sacrifice is a small one. We are taking a stand for humanity, and we encourage others to do what they can.  Demand full humanitarian relief in Gaza under UN authority, and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. This is how we can stop the genocide.”

    More information about how you can participate or support the fasters is available at
    Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza.

    To arrange interviews with the fasters, contact Mike Ferner at 314-940-2316.

    The post Why Are Veterans and Allies Fasting for Gaza? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • May 26, 2025

    Young Syrian human rights defenders working for truth and justice express cautious hope

    “Removing a dictator is not enough; real change requires a shift in governance, security, justice.”

    Syrians gather in celebration days after the fall of Bashar Assad’s government at Umayyad Square in Damascus on Dec. 12, 2024. | Leo Correa/AP

    On 19 May 2025 Bassam Alahmad, Noah Abbas, and Simav Hasan wrote in Global Citizen an interesting piece on how Syrian human rights defenders feel about the changes in their country:

    In a previously published Global Citizen In My Own Words article, human rights defender Bassam Alahmad detailed his experiences of being a stateless citizen residing in Syria who stands for justice. In this article, following the fall of Al-Assad, Bassam Alahmad is joined by colleagues from Syrians For Truth and Justice, Simav Hasan, and Noah Abbas, as they share their reflections on what the regime change in the country means for them personally and for their hopes for a democratic Syria.

    How would you describe your relationship with Syria and how has the decades-long conflict impacted you?

    Bassam Alahmad: I think ‘complicated’ or ‘complex’ is the best way to describe my relationship with Syria. Being born stateless means having no rights, but we love our country because we were born there. We know the people and communities and we belong to the land but I didn’t feel as though I belonged politically. I didn’t feel as though I had full citizenship in the country. I like my country but unfortunately, the way in which the Kurdish people were treated for decades made it so we didn’t feel like we were equal parts of this country.  

    Noah Abbas: As a Kurdish Syrian national, the long-standing conflict in Syria has profoundly influenced both my personal and professional life. It has not only shaped my views on war and peace, but has also deepened my understanding of resilience and the value of community. Witnessing the enduring struggles of friends, family, and the broader Syrian community has motivated me to advocate for humanitarian causes and pursue solutions that aim to bring lasting peace to the region. The impact of this conflict extends into my academic pursuits as well; I am currently engaged in postgraduate studies in military intelligence and security.

    This academic path was chosen with a clear purpose: to shift the perspective on the role of intelligence in Syria. Under Al-Assad’s governance, intelligence agencies were often viewed as instruments of fear, particularly against opponents of the regime. As a human rights activist, I believe it is our duty to transform this perception and demonstrate how intelligence can serve as a cornerstone for justice and societal safety. Joining the efforts of Syrians for Truth and Justice has been crucial in my journey.

    Simav Hasan: I am a Kurd from Qamishli, and so my existence here has always been shaped by layers of oppression, resistance, and hope. The decades-long conflict has left scars on my community and on me personally. I’ve witnessed forced displacement, the suffering of victims, and the destruction of lives and history. But more than that, I’ve felt the weight of injustice firsthand — whether through the fight for accountability, the struggle for basic rights, or the ongoing humanitarian crises. Despite everything, I refuse to detach myself from this reality. My work as a journalist and human rights activist is my way of pushing back against the violence, ensuring that the voices of the victims are heard, and trying to carve out a future where justice isn’t just a distant dream. The war has taken much, but it has also strengthened my resolve. Even in the darkest moments, I believe in the power of truth, memory, and resistance.

    ………

    In 2024 the Al-Assad government fell, how did this make you feel? 

    Alahmad: To be honest, while part of me is very happy that there is no longer the Assad regime, part of me also thinks that there is a big obstacle in the road to democracy, open civic society, and citizenship. As people working in human rights we must not be naive because we know the history and we know that there are human rights violations committed. The main issue is there is a huge gap betweenwhat they say to the west — to the EU, to the US, to the UN — and what they ultimately decide. For example, the national dialogue was kind of a missed opportunity, where instead of having a good version of national dialogue in Damascus and to be more inclusive, they excluded a huge part of Syria, including Kurds and other minorities.

    It was a missed opportunity. The same is true with the constitutional declaration adopted in March 2025. They didn’t recognize the Kurdish people or the Kurdish language. They did not recognize diversity. Most of the authority was in the hands of the president. Our main problem is that Syria without the Assad regime is good, but there is no guarantee that we are going towards democracy. The recent Human Rights Watch report on the constitutional declaration clearly states that this constitutional declaration is not a road to a democratic country. This should be very clear for our partners in the US, the EU, and the international community. The most serious thing that happened in the coastal area in Latakia and Tartus is that hundreds of Alawite people were killed based on their identity, because they are from this minority group. A lot of violations happened by the groups linked to the government. 

    Abbas: The fall of the Al-Assad government, as welcomed by human rights organizations, provoked a complex mix of emotions within me. On one hand, I felt a profound sense of relief and happiness that the brutal regime, known for its relentless human rights violations and oppressive rule, had come to an end. The release of prisoners of conscience and the acknowledgment of the sacrifices made by countless human rights defenders brought a wave of hope for a future where justice and accountability could finally be addressed. However, as a Kurdish-Syrian national, this transition also brought with it significant fears and concerns. The potential for ethnic conflicts or even ethnic cleansing within the new power structures (such as the factions that committed violations in Efrin city, my home town, and other Kurdish cities across the country) was alarming, especially given the historical challenges faced by Kurdish communities in asserting their rights and safety within Syria.

    Despite these fears, the fall of the regime marked a critical moment for Syria — an opportunity to rebuild and redefine the nation on the principles of freedom, justice, and human dignity. It was a moment to champion the efforts of Syrians for Truth and Justice and engage more actively in the civil society space dedicated to transitional justice and documenting human rights violations. 

    Hasan: With the fall of the Assad government, I felt a sense of cautious optimism. It marked the end of a regime responsible for decades of repression, war crimes, and mass atrocities — a moment many victims and survivors had long awaited. There was hope that this could be the beginning of rebuilding Syria on principles of justice, accountability, and human rights. However, I remained wary. The fall of a regime does not automatically guarantee freedom or stability. Power vacuums in Syria have often led to new forms of repression and external interference. Many armed actors still operate with impunity, and the path to true justice remains uncertain. While this moment was significant, real change depended on what came next. Would justice be pursued? Would the voices of victims and marginalized communities — especially Kurds and other oppressed groups — be heard? The fall of Assad was a turning point, but Syria’s future was still being written.

    https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/syria-justice-human-rights-after-al-assad/

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • May 25, 2025

    A New Generation of Palestinian Activists Uses Art as Nonviolent Resistance

    “Sumūd, the process of steadfastness, of survivance, is not just a project of survival, but also one of remembrance, record-keeping, and revitalization,” write Malu Halasa and Jordan Elgrably in the introduction to Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader (Seven Stories Press). The world has now witnessed sumūd at its most tenacious, as Palestinians hold on to life, dignity and a centuries-old culture…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • May 16, 2025

    Committees of Correspondence

    Early in life, I learned of the deliberate manner by which Zionists confuse the public and frame the Middle East conflicts to favor them. Commentators have gone to great length to explain the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States, treating it as a unique affair, in which both benefit. This slogan is a hoax, which originated during World War II as a description of the relationship between embattled Great Britain and a still neutral United States. Somehow and somewhere, a clever someone adapted the World War II slogan to Israel and managed to insert the relationship into the everyday activities of several western nations.

    I witnessed Israeli immigrants inviting fellow workers to their homes and lecturing them on why they should support Israel. I know of them going to synagogues and urging the Rabbis to place the Israeli flag next to the American flag, which is now de rigeur. Contracts are given to Israeli organizations and company secrets are funneled to Israeli organizations.

    In public schools, efforts are made to gain support for Israel by emphasis on the World War II Holocaust (nothing on the Nakba), and with events organized to attack Israel’s adversaries. I saw students brought to a school library for them to choose general biographies to read, seven out of ten were of personalities from the World War II Holocaust. One librarian, and behaving nervously, showed her ignorance of the topic by referring to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg as a Nazi officer who helped the Jews. The World War II Holocaust has a vital place in history, but treating it as a purposeful commodity demeans the lost lives. The Free Darfur movement, accused of alliance with Israeli interests due to Israel’s enmity toward Sudan at that time, organized public school demonstrations against Sudan for purported genocide. Local synagogues advertised the action.

    I knew of everyday U.S. citizens acting as research centers for Israel, accumulating social, political and economic statistics on American industrial and commercial life and sending it to Israel ─ unregistered foreign agents whose activities are illegal. Students and visiting professors from Israel arrive with more concerns than learning. I have noticed them at university conferences countering Palestinian expressions of grievances with statements such as, “The West Bank roads that Israel is building are meant to serve Palestinians one day,” and then congregate after the meeting to discuss what they can do to counter the remarks made at the meeting. A visiting professor to St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, who was denied using his grant to teach Holocaust studies, sued the university for anti-Semitism and won his case. St. Cloud now has a Jewish Studies and Resources Center but no courses, only a document center.

    Georgetown, and many other universities, has a Center for Jewish Civilization (what is Jewish civilization?) that has one principal core course: INAF-1990: Introduction to Jewish Civilization. “This course provides a foundation for the study of Jewish civilization,” which can be taught in five seconds — no known unique contributions to civilization by a Jewish community, maybe by individuals, but not as a community. This Center for Jewish Civilization has periodic meetings, open to the public whose topics have nothing to do with any Jewish civilization and have much to do with Israel ─ real reason for its existence. Most talks are on the World War II Holocaust, Jewish Israel, and the almost non-existent anti-Semitism. No talks on Maimonides and other Jewish philosophers. No talks on past Jewish life in Spain, Tunisia, Iraq, and Europe.

    Political, “think tank,” peace, and cultural organizations in Washington, D.C. are unusually populated with Israelis and Israel supporters. One route that I have noticed is where a person obtains credentials from an Israeli institute, is awarded a grant to visit the United states by a sketchy organization, eventually receives an invitation (by a friend) to lecture at a university and becomes recognized as an expert on the Middle East. This leads to a recommendation for a fellowship at a Middle East “think tank,” more recognition, and soon we have an artificially prepared “Middle East expert” who ingratiates with peace groups and tries to steer everyone, including those at the institutions and universities, to lessen aggressive attitudes toward Israel. Nothing too extreme, only a neutralization of activity.

    Repetitions of the biblical David and Goliath story, the mythical Exodus, the fictional novel and Hollywood fabricated film called Exodus, and the moribund Kibbutzim presentations, with their Airbnb rental agents posing as sturdy farmers, make it difficult to ascertain if Israel is a country or a public relations stunt. The many organizations that perpetuate the myths and influence parliamentary bodies to favor Israel have no equivalents in the international scene. They have enabled Israel’s oppression and diabolical nature ─ the daily killings of Palestinians, land seizures, and heartless evictions. Number one on the agenda of those who recognize and oppose Israel’s nefarious activities is combating the deception, infiltration, and the global army of pro-Israel groups. This has gained momentum but has not changed the trajectory ─ extermination of the Palestinian people.

    Too few know much; too many know little. A coordinated and bludgeoning effort, which shoves the truth into the corner pocket of each person’s billiard mind, which rouses the intellect against those who promote the genocide, and provokes people to act, is a beckoning enterprise. A central source that disburses “talking points,” that distributes knowledge, that provides access to information and rebuttals to disinformation will fill a gap. Knowing where to go and learning what to say are vital factors for combatting the deceptions that Israel’s supporters offer. The Palestinian movement needs committees of correspondence.

    The original committees of correspondence “were a collection of American political organizations that sought to coordinate opposition to British Parliament and, later, support for American independence during the American Revolution. The brainchild of Samuel Adams, the committees sought to establish, through the writing of letters, an underground network of communication among Patriot leaders in the Thirteen Colonies.”

    Working above ground, in every available space of planet Earth, in every hallway of parliamentary governments, and in every airspace that allows breaths and sounds, a new network of committees of correspondence will distribute reliable and decisive information that answers questions and proves Israel is a criminal activity, is engaged in the genocide of the Palestinian people, engages supporters who are partners to crimes, and bribes legislative supporters who are traitors to their peoples. The organizations will convey specific information and provoke constant talks — in homes, at scheduled meetings, at online forums, in schools, churches, libraries, in every inch of public space. Daily demonstrations and protests throughout the universe will accompany the mass distribution of information.

    Too much to chew on for the moment. Part II of this excursion into freeing the world of the Zionist menace will detail the method of organization and the contents of the information. Details will shortly appear.

    The post Committees of Correspondence first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • May 14, 2025

    As Trump basks in Gulf Arab applause, Israel massacres children in Gaza

    Nakba Day today marks 15 May 1948 — the day after the declaration of the State of Israel — when the Palestinian society and homeland was destroyed and more than 750,000 people forced to leave and become refugees.  The day is known as the “Palestinian Catastrophe”. 

    By Soumaya Ghannoushi

    US President Donald Trump’s tour of Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha is not diplomacy. It is theatre — staged in gold, fuelled by greed, and underwritten by betrayal.

    A US president openly arming a genocide is welcomed with red carpets, handshakes and blank cheques. Trillions are pledged; personal gifts are exchanged. And Gaza continues to burn.

    Gulf regimes have power and wealth. They have Trump’s ear. Yet they use none of it — not to halt the slaughter, ease the siege or demand dignity.

    • READ MORE: Patients flee Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital after Israel forces displacement
    • Key takeaways from day two of Donald Trump’s Middle East tour in Qatar
    • Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports

    In return for their riches and deference, Trump grants Israel bombs and sets it loose upon the region.

    This is the real story. At the heart of Trump’s return lies a project he initiated during his first presidency: the erasure of Palestine, the elevation of autocracy, and the redrawing of the Middle East in Israel’s image.

    “See this pen? This wonderful pen on my desk is the Middle East, and the top of the pen — that’s Israel. That’s not good,” he once told reporters, lamenting Israel’s size compared to its neighbours.

    To Trump, the Middle East is not a region of history or humanity. It is a marketplace, a weapons depot, a geopolitical ATM.

    His worldview is forged in evangelical zeal and transactional instinct. In his rhetoric, Arabs are chaos incarnate: irrational, violent, in need of control. Israel alone is framed as civilised, democratic, divinely chosen. That binary is not accidental. It is ideology.

    Obedience for survival
    Trump calls the region “a rough neighbourhood” — code for endless militarism that casts the people of the Middle East not as lives to protect, but as threats to contain.

    His $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia in 2017 was marketed as peace through prosperity. Now, he wants trillions more in Gulf capital. As reported by The New York Times, Trump is demanding that Saudi Arabia invest its entire annual GDP — $1 trillion — into the US economy.

    Riyadh has already offered $600 billion. Trump wants it all. Economists call it absurd; Trump calls it a deal.

    This is not negotiation. It is tribute.

    And the pace is accelerating. After a recent meeting with Trump, the UAE announced a 10-year, $1.4 trillion investment framework with the US.

    This is not realpolitik. It is a grotesque spectacle of decadence, delusion and disgrace

    Across the Gulf, a race is underway — not to end the genocide in Gaza, but to outspend one another for Trump’s favour, showering him with wealth in return for nothing.

    The Gulf is no longer treated as a region. It is a vault. Sovereign wealth funds are the new ballot boxes. Sovereignty — just another asset to be traded.

    Trump’s offer is blunt: obedience for survival. For regimes still haunted by the Arab Spring, Western blessing is their last shield. And they will pay any price: wealth, independence, even dignity.

    To them, the true threat is not Israel, nor even Iran. It is their own people, restless, yearning, ungovernable.

    Democracy is danger; self-determination, the ticking bomb. So they make a pact with the devil.

    Doctrine of immunity
    That devil brings flags, frameworks, photo ops and deals. The new order demands normalisation with Israel, submission to its supremacy, and silence on Palestine.

    Once-defiant slogans are replaced by fintech expos and staged smiles beside Israeli ministers.

    In return, Trump offers impunity: political cover and arms. It is a doctrine of immunity, bought with gold and soaked in Arab blood.

    They bend. They hand him deals, honours, trillions. They believe submission buys respect. But Trump respects only power — and he makes that clear.

    He praises Russian President Vladimir Putin: “Is Putin smart? Yes . . .  that’s a hell of a way to negotiate.” He calls Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “a guy I like [and] respect”. Like them or not, they defend their nations. And Trump, ever the transactional mind, respects power.

    Arab rulers offer no such strength. They offer deference, not defiance. They don’t push; they pay.

    And Trump mocks them openly. King Salman “might not be there for two weeks without us”, he brags. They give him billions; he demands trillions.

    It is not just the US Treasury profiting. Gulf billions do not merely fuel policy; they enrich a family empire. Since returning to office, Trump and his sons have chased deals across the Gulf, cashing in on the loyalty they have cultivated.

    A hotel in Dubai, a tower in Jeddah, a golf resort in Qatar, crypto ventures in the US, a private club in Washington for Gulf elites — these are not strategic projects, but rather revenue streams for the Trump family.

    Reward for ethnic cleansing
    The precedent was set early. Former presidential adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, secured $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund shortly after leaving office, despite internal objections.

    The message was clear: access to the Trumps has a price, and Gulf rulers are eager to pay.

    Now, Trump is receiving a private jet from Qatar’s ruling family — a palace in the sky worth $400 million.

    This is not diplomacy. It is plunder.

    And how does Trump respond? With insult: “It was a great gesture,” he said of the jet, before adding: “We keep them safe. If it wasn’t for us, they probably wouldn’t exist right now.”

    That was his thank you to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar; lavish gifts answered with debasement.

    And what are they rewarding him for? For genocide. For 100,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on Gaza. For backing ethnic cleansing in plain sight. For empowering far-right Israeli politicians, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as they call for Gaza’s depopulation.

    For presiding over the most fanatically Zionist, most unapologetically Islamophobic administration in US history.

    Still, they ask nothing, while offering everything. They could have used their leverage. They did not.

    The Yemen precedent proves they can act. Trump halted the bombing under Saudi pressure, to Netanyahu’s visible dismay. When they wanted a deal, they struck one with the Houthis.

    And when they sought to bring Syria in from the cold, Trump complied. He agreed to meet former rebel leader turned President Ahmed al-Sharaa — a last-minute addition to his Riyadh schedule — and even spoke of lifting sanctions, once again at Saudi Arabia’s request, to “give them a chance of greatness”.

    No US president is beyond pressure. But for Gaza? Silence.

    Price of silence
    While Trump was being feted in Riyadh, Israel rained American-made bombs on two hospitals in Gaza. In Khan Younis, the European Hospital was reportedly struck by nine bunker-busting bombs, killing more than two dozen people and injuring scores more.

    Earlier that day, an air strike on Nasser Hospital killed journalist Hassan Islih as he lay wounded in treatment.

    As Trump basked in applause, Israel massacred children in Jabalia, where around 50 Palestinians were killed in just a few hours.

    This is the bloody price of Arab silence, buried beneath the roar of applause and the glitter of tributes.

    This week marks the anniversary of the Nakba — and here it is again, replayed not through tanks alone, but through Arab complicity.

    With every cheque signed, Arab rulers do not secure history’s respect. They seal their place in its sordid footnotes of shame

    The bombs fall. The Gaza Strip turns to dust. Two million people endure starvation. UN food is gone.

    Hospitals overflow with skeletal infants. Mothers collapse from hunger. Tens of thousands of children are severely malnourished, with more than 3500 on the edge of death.

    Meanwhile, Smotrich speaks of “third countries” for Gaza’s people. Netanyahu promises their removal.

    And Trump — the man enabling the annihilation? He is not condemned, but celebrated by Arab rulers. They eagerly kiss the hand that sends the bombs, grovel before the architect of their undoing, and drape him in splendour and finery.

    While much of the world stands firm — China, Europe, Canada, Mexico, even Greenland – refusing to bow to Trump’s bullying, Arab rulers kneel. They open wallets, bend spines, empty hands — still mistaking humiliation for diplomacy.

    They still believe that if they bow low enough, Trump might toss them a bone. Instead, he tosses them a bill.

    This is not realpolitik. It is a grotesque spectacle of decadence, delusion and disgrace.

    With every cheque signed, every jet offered, every photo op beside the butcher of a people, Arab rulers do not secure history’s respect. They seal their place in its sordid footnotes of shame.

    Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer and expert in Middle East politics. Her journalistic work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Corriere della Sera, aljazeera.net and Al Quds. This article was first published by the Middle East Eye. A selection of her writings may be found at: soumayaghannoushi.com and she tweets @SMGhannoushi.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • May 13, 2025

    Trump Says He’s Ending US Sanctions on Syria as He Cozies Up to Saudi Arabia

    President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he is ordering the “cessation” of U.S. sanctions on Syria, seemingly bringing an end to the U.S.’s decades-long economic suppression of the country as he cozies up to Saudi Arabian leaders. “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump said in a speech at an investment forum in…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • May 3, 2025

    In Fallujah, We Destroyed Parts of Ourselves

    It’s been just over 20 years since the Battle of Fallujah, a bloody campaign in a destructive Iraq War that we now know was based on a lie. 

    But back then, in the wake of 9/11, the battlefield was filled with troops who believed in serving and defending the country against terrorism. 

    “Going to Fallujah was the most horrific experience of our lives,” said Mike Ergo, a team leader for the US Marines Alpha Company, 1st Battalion. “And it was also, for myself, the most alive I’ve ever felt.”

    This week on Reveal, we’re partnering with the nonprofit newsroom The War Horse to join Ergo’s unit as they reunite and try to make sense of what they did and what was done to them. Together, they remember Bradley Faircloth, the 20-year-old lance corporal from their unit who lost his life, and unpack the mental and emotional battles that continue for them today.

    This episode originally aired in January 2025.

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

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