THE AMERICAN REGIME’S ALLEGATION THAT IRAN TRIED TO KILL TRUMP IS VERY DUBIOUS

The Public Deserves To See All The Evidence For The Consequential Claim. Of Course, All Of That Evidence Is Probably Totally Fabrication With Media Cooperation.

Twenty-four years ago, on September 12^th, 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu came to Congress to pressure American politicians to authorize the use of military force against Israel’s enemies, namely Iraq and Iran, governments which had been marked for regime change since the neocons’ Clean Break Report authored in the 1990s. Though Israel quickly achieved its first goal of having the American military topple Saddam Hussein, it was not until last weekend that an American president made the military commitment toward fulfilling Israel’s long-held war aims against Iran, with President Donald Trump bombing Iran and announcing via a video posted on Truth Social his intent to topple its government.

“The lives of American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties,” warned Trump as the Iranian military responded to joint American–Israeli bombing with airstrikes of its own against multiple American bases in the region. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has never seen a new war he did not instantly want to send other people’s children to go fight in (he does not have children of his own to send to war), echoed the president’s grim assessment, telling The Wall Street Journal, “If there are deaths or injuries in this operation, I can say without hesitation that they sacrificed for a noble cause…”

The administration has barely attempted to explain to the American people what that cause is, perhaps because they understand how transparent the true motivation for toppling the Iranian government is to most Americans, who can easily spot the Israeli fingerprints smeared all over this operation. Indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio effectively acknowledged as much on Monday when he said,

“The president made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

With open admissions from senior government officials that the United States is fighting—and Americans are dying and unprotected in the Gulf States—on behalf of Israel, and with the absence of a rational and clear casus belli to affirm to their audiences and voters, a chorus of Trump loyalists have emerged from Congress and corporate media to spread a series of highly propagandistic lies meant to boost morale and provide retroactive justification for an unpopular war that Congress never authorized.

One of the most influential of those lies is that the government of Iran attempted to assassinate Trump, an allegation that seems to be taken seriously and considered legitimate by senior administration officials including the president himself. On Monday, Trump told ABC “I got [Khameinei] before he got me. They tried twice … I got him first.” Two days later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth affirmed that narrative, telling reporters at a press conference that “Iran tried to kill President Trump and President Trump got the last laugh.”

Yet reporting by journalist Ken Silva suggests there is scant credible evidence tying Tehran to an actual assassination plot. The case centers on Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national who was arrested in July 2024 and whom prosecutors accuse of attempting to hire hitmen on Iran’s behalf. But as Silva has documented, the operation was a tightly controlled FBI sting, executed in a manner that is highly dubious.

Department of Justice prosecutors allege that Merchant conceived of the plot himself and was acting at the direction of, or in coordination with, Iranian contacts. In the government’s account, Merchant initiated the plan, disclosed it to a friend, and then attempted to hire what he believed were real hitmen, who were in fact undercover FBI agents.

But pretrial proceedings revealed that Merchant had been under FBI surveillance before he even entered the United States, and that the “friend” he allegedly confided in was already a government informant. That would make the federal government not only the architect of the sting operation, but the sole witness to Merchant’s purported expression of criminal intent.

Merchant also allegedly struggled to assemble even a $5,000 down payment for the supposed hit, obtaining funds from an associate via the FBI informant and transferring the money to other undercover agents. The Deputy Attorney General reported that Merchant had no known associates in the United States, including no known Iranian co-conspirators domestically. Disturbingly, prosecutors have signaled their intent to invoke the state secrets privilege to block the public and defense teams from having access to evidence that is potentially exculpatory.

In other words, there is no evidence publicly available that Merchant formed any plot on his own or that the Iranian government ever sponsored it.

Among the few questioning the narrative that Iran tried to kill Trump is the MAGA luminary Tucker Carlson, who said that the intelligence that supposedly proves the Iranian plot existed “came from Israel.” To his point, it was revealed in a letter from an American attorney assigned to the case that the FBI used Israeli spyware Cellebrite to access the alleged assassin’s phone. Certainly Netanyahu has boosted the narrative of an Iranian plot to kill the American president. And as Carlson helpfully reminded his audience, “this country has certainly been manipulated a lot by Israeli intelligence.”

If the attempted assassination allegation truly is a predicate for war, it is one of the thinnest ones in American history, built on a sting operation the government manufactured and on evidence prosecutors are actively shielding from scrutiny.

WHY IS THE AMERICAN REGIME STILL ADDICTED TO WAR?

Why Does Every American President End Up In A Major Military Campaign? No Matter What They Say, American Presidents Find It Impossible Not To Go To War.

Back in 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency by saying “it’s the economy, stupid,” and declaring the era of power politics to be over. Once in office, however, he found himself ordering missile strikes in several countries, maintaining no-fly zones over Iraq (and sometimes bombing it), and waging a long aerial campaign against Serbia in 1999.

In 2000, George W. Bush captured the White House by criticizing Clinton’s overactive foreign policy and promising voters a foreign policy that was strong but “humble.” We all know how that turned out. Eight years later, a young senator named Barack Obama became president in good part because he was one of the few Democrats who had opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Within a year of assuming office, he had a Nobel Peace Prize he had done nothing to earn, simply because people believed he’d be a committed peacemaker. Obama did try on several issues and eventually reached an agreement scaling back Iran’s nuclear program, but he also ordered a pointless “surge” in Afghanistan, helped topple the Libyan regime in 2011, and grew increasingly comfortable ordering signature strikes and other targeted killings against an array of targets. As his second term ended, the American regime was still fighting in Afghanistan and no closer to victory.

Then a mediocre businessman and reality TV star named Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, openly condemning the “forever wars,” denouncing the foreign-policy establishment, and vowing to put “America First.” After an unexpected electoral victory, he, too, announced a temporary troop surge in Afghanistan, kept the global war on terror going full-speed, ordered the assassination by missile of a top Iranian official, and presided over steady increases in the military budget. Trump didn’t start any new wars during his first term, but he didn’t end any, either.

Joe Biden did end a war when he pulled the plug on America’s futile American campaign in Afghanistan, and he got pummeled for recognizing the reality his predecessors had ignored. Biden did orchestrate a vigorous Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but most observers ignored how his earlier efforts to bring Ukraine within the Western orbit had made war more likely. Having ignored the Palestinian issue during his first two years as president, Biden provided the billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and diplomatic protection for Israel’s genocidal response to Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023.

Biden’s errors (and his stubborn insistence on trying to win a second term) helped Trump to return to the Oval Office, once again pledging to be a peace president and to end the incessant interventionism that has cost Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. But instead of making a sharp break with the past, Trump 2.0 turned out to be even more trigger-happy than the presidents he used to mock. The United States has bombed at least seven countries in his first year back in office, is energetically killing boat crews in the Caribbean and Pacific on the mere suspicion that they might be shipping drugs, has kidnapped the leader of Venezuela in order to take control of the country’s oil (while leaving the country in the hands of a new dictator), and has now launched his second war against Iran in less than a year. Having told the world that Iran’s nuclear infrastructure had been “obliterated” last summer, he now says the American regime had to bomb it to stop “imminent threats.”

What’s going on here? Since 1992, a series of presidents representing both parties have run for office vowing to be peacemakers and to avoid their predecessors’ excesses and mistakes, yet once in office they cannot resist the urge to blow stuff up in faraway lands. Once again, we must ask ourselves the question: Is the United States addicted to war?

Until Trump’s second term, one might explain this pattern by examining the hubristic mindset of the bipartisan foreign-policy “Blob,” which saw military force as a useful tool for advancing a global liberal order. But that explanation has trouble explaining Trump’s actions during his second term. Trump still loathes the establishment (aka, the “deep state”), blames it for the failures of his first term, has gutted the national security bureaucracy, and appointed a lot of loyal lackeys who will do his bidding to key positions. This latest war can’t be blamed on the Blob.

Defenders of these policies might argue that the United States has unique global responsibilities, and although presidents may come into office with a lot of idealistic notions about using force less often, they soon get schooled in the need to use American power all over the world. The problem with this explanation is that blowing things up with such frequency rarely solves the underlying political problems, doesn’t make America safer, and certainly isn’t good for most of the countries it has been pummeling. Even a country as slow to learn as the United States should have learned this by now. So the puzzle remains: Why does Washington keep doing these things, even under a president who would dearly love to win a real peace prize (and not just the phony one he got from FIFA)?

One obvious reason is the long-term consolidation of executive power that has been underway since the early Cold War and expanded even more during the war on terror. Presidents have been granted enormous latitude over decisions for war and peace, the conduct of diplomacy, the activities of a vast intelligence apparatus and covert action capability, and tolerated a degree of secrecy that makes it easier for the executive branch to lie when it needs to. Presidents from both parties have been all too happy to accept this freedom of action and rarely welcomed efforts to trim their powers. The consolidation of executive power has been aided and abetted by Congress, which has become decreasingly willing to exercise any meaningful oversight over decisions to use force. Thus, when the Obama administration actively sought a new authorization to use force (to replace the outdated resolutions that had authorized the war on terror and invasion of Iraq), Congress refused to provide one because its members didn’t want to go on the record. And now they complain that the Trump administration didn’t ask their permission before it decided to start another pointless war on Iran.

Second, as Sarah Kreps and Rosella Zielinski have both shown, American presidents are free to go to war because they have learned not to ask the American people to pay for it in real time. Korea was the last war that we directly raised taxes to pay for; since then, presidents have just borrowed the money, let the deficit grow some more, and stuck future generations with the bill. The result is that most Americans don’t feel the economic consequences of even long and costly campaigns like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost at least $5 trillion.

The all-volunteer force also facilitates decisions for war, because the people sent into harm’s way all signed up for this possibility and are less likely to complain than random draftees might be. It also allows elites like Trump (and his children) to evade service entirely, thereby reducing the extent to which the wealthy and politically connected feel personally affected by these decisions and gradually turning the professional military into a separate caste that is less connected to the broader society it is supposed to defend. But don’t blame the military for these recurring decisions to use force; it is the civilians who are driving this train.

You can, however, blame the military-industrial complex. Please note: we are not saying Lockheed Martin or Boeing lobbied for war with anyone, but when you are in the business of selling weapons, you are also in the business of selling insecurity. And that means portraying a world that is brimming with threats, where diplomacy is devalued, and kinetic solutions are oversold. It is no accident that defense firms are prominent supporters of many foreign-policy think tanks, which often work to convince Americans that threats are lurking everywhere, that the United States might have to take military action against them no matter where on the planet they are occurring, and that bigger defense budgets are the obvious remedy. Once you’ve bought all those capabilities, it can be hard to resist the temptation to use them. There will also be special interest groups like AIPAC and the hawkish parts of the Israel lobby that will sometimes succeed in persuading presidents to go along and convince vulnerable congressional leaders not to object.

There’s a final reason American presidents have become addicted to war: The use of force has become too easy and seemingly risk-free. Cruise missiles, stealthy aircraft, precision-guided bombs, and drones have made it possible for the United States (and a few other countries) to wage massive air campaigns without having to put boots on the ground and without worrying very much about direct retaliation (at least initially). Iran may hit back at the United States or its allies in various ways, but it cannot hope to inflict the same level of damage on American soil that Washington can inflict on it. When facing a vexing foreign-policy challenge, therefore, or when looking for a way to distract citizens from domestic problems or scandals (Jeffrey Epstein, anyone?), it can be immensely tempting to reach for the military option. Or as Sen. Richard Russell—who was no dove—put it back in the 1960s, “There is reason to think that if it is easy for us to go anywhere and do anything, we will always be going somewhere and doing something.”

You should think of this as the problem of the “big red button.” It is as if every president has a big red button on his desk, and when foreign-policy troubles arise (or when a distraction is needed), his aides come to the Oval Office and describe the problem. They point out that pushing the button will show resolve and that he’s doing something, and might produce a positive result. If they are honest, they may acknowledge that there’s no absolute necessity to push the button and that doing so might make things worse. But the risks are small, they will remind him, the costs are affordable, and if you don’t push the button, the problem could almost certainly get worse, and you will look indecisive. They close the briefing by intoning solemnly: “It’s your choice, Mr. President.” It would take leaders with better judgment than most recent presidents to resist such blandishments consistently.

To be clear, this latest orgy of violence is the least necessary shedding of blood by the American military since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But what it says about America’s addiction to war is at least as important as what it tells us about America’s current president.

Wasn’t the bone spurs thing a way to get out of being drafted? Trump himself wouldn’t apply to the all-volunteer force aspect, then, right?

THEY THINK YOU’RE STUPID CONCERNING THEIR WAR ON IRAN

This President And Members Of This Congress Are Openly And Brazenly Insulting The Intelligence Of The American People Concerning The American Regime’s War On Iran.

After he announced in a video that “a short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran” to “defend the American people” by eliminating “imminent threats” to Americans at home and abroad, the president then listed some of his reasons for taking America to war.

Presumably, he would tell us about this threat and just how imminent it was.

Trump said, “For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops and the innocent people in many, many countries.”

Okay, but 47 years? Pro-Palestinian protesters in America chant things that are perceived as meaning death to Israel, but no one in either country considers that rhetoric an act of war by America.

What was the president talking about, exactly?

Trump went to the 1979 hostage crisis under President Jimmy Carter. He talked about the 1983 bombing by Iranian proxies of a American marine barracks that killed 241 American servicemen. That was a tragedy dealt with by President Ronald Reagan, who chose to bring American soldiers home. Trump said Iran “knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole” that happened 26 years ago in 2000, when Bill Clinton was president.

Trump went on to other events including Iranian support for the October 7^th, 2023 terror attack on Israel by Hamas that took over 1,000 lives and many hostages, including Americans. That happened under President Joe Biden.

But through all his attempted rationalizations at no point did Trump provide a solid, pinpoint—and perhaps most importantly, new—reason for why it was necessary for the American regime to begin a regime change war at this very moment, something other American presidents did not do when dealing with the Iranian attacks he cited.

Trump’s many “reasons” amounted to really no reason at all. Any intellectually honest observer was left fairly clueless.

Enter Congress. More specifically the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which shared a post on X congratulating the president on “ending” Iran’s “forever war” with America.

This has not been made up.

“President Trump is ending the forever war that Iran has waged against America for the last 47 years,” the committee’s X account shared, adding “Thank You POTUS.”

So according to this bipartisan committee, a war has been going on between Iran and America for nearly half a century and Trump’s actions over the weekend were merely a decisive and strong president finally putting an end to it. The guts of these these evil people!

Almost every major poll showed that Americans overwhelmingly did not want America to go to war with Iran prior to the attacks. Americans were not asked, hypothetically, “Do you want Trump to end the current America–Iran war?” because few to no Americans perceived their country as being in a war with that country.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken Saturday after the American strikes and published Sunday found that, “Only one in four Americans approves of the American strikes that killed Iran’s leader on Saturday, while about half — including one in four Republicans — believe President Donald Trump is too willing to use military force…”

The survey added, “Some 27% of respondents said they approved of the strikes, while 43% disapproved and 29% were not sure.”

These are not favorable numbers for this administration. Furthermore, if their narrative is that Team Trump and the American regime didn’t start a war, and in fact are simply ending an ongoing 47-year-long one, that’s classic adding insult to injury.

By this metric, realists and restrainers can argue that America began this supposed ongoing war by pursuing Iranian regime change way back in 1953.

No, Trump just started a war with Iran in which there will be life-and-death and political consequences to which little thought seems to have been given.

But make no mistake: This is a new regime-change war of choice, which most Americans didn’t want, was started by Donald Trump, and will end only God knows how.

Americans aren’t as stupid as Washington apparently hopes, and no amount of spin is going to save them from whatever fallout may come.

THE WARMONGER IN CHIEF IS DONALD TRUMP

America Is Attacking Iran Because Donald Trump Was Determined To Drag Us Into War No Matter What — And Despite Repeatedly Insisting He Would Do The Exact Opposite.

So they finally did it. Of all the dumb, pointless wars the United States has waged in the Middle East, the one it launched today against Iran may go down as the dumbest and most pointless. This is a war that didn’t need to happen; even the man waging it doesn’t seem to know why he launched it.

Of course it was Trump who launched this war. Trump, the “peacemaker.” Trump, the “dealmaker in chief.” Trump, whose political ascent was built on attacking George W. Bush’s destructive war on Iraq; who warned incessantly his political opponent would start a war with Iran.

Trump’s entire MO this term has been to do the exact opposite of what he promised people he would do, whether trampling free speech and escalating internet censorship or gutting Medicaid and Social Security and making people’s lives more expensive. Now he can add embroiling America in yet another bloody Middle East war to that list, the latest middle finger to the voters who may not have liked everything the president said or stood for but earnestly thought he would at least keep this one promise.

Let’s be very clear about this: the United States is in this war because Trump was determined to drag the country into it no matter what. Mere hours before Trump launched his attacks, the foreign minister of Oman, which was mediating the last-ditch talks on a nuclear deal that took place yesterday, revealed the enormous concessions the Iranians had made in negotiations: not just agreeing to not stockpile uranium, making it impossible to build a bomb, but diluting the uranium it currently holds and agreeing to full verification by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. These concessions would have gone well beyond what Barack Obama had extracted in his Iran deal, and they came paired with an explicit vow that Iran would never have a nuclear weapon — something that its leaders have constantly said over the decades, and repeatedly so over the past week.

Didn’t matter. Trump spent the week lying that the Iranians were refusing to make that promise, and in one of his last public statements before launching the war, lamented how they had supposedly failed to move far enough in negotiations. Trump had a deal if he wanted it, and one he could have spent the rest of his life bragging was better than Obama’s. But he didn’t want it.

There is no universe where this war serves the interests of the United States. The lives of thousands of American troops are now at risk, while a number of American bases in neighboring Gulf states have already been attacked in retaliation by Iranian drones and missiles, as the war has dramatically escalated and swept up neighboring states in less than half a day. There are signs that Iran plans to make good on its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes, and which at best would spike consumer costs and worsen the American affordability crisis Trump is already ignoring, and at worst would trigger a global recession.

And for what? The encircled, isolated, and faraway Iran poses no serious threat to Americans, who live oceans away and are protected by a military that is funded roughly forty times the sum that Iran recently spent on its own armed forces. In fact, now that the war is finally happening, war hawks are quite happy to admit that Iran is militarily way outmatched by the United States. This is precisely why the United States and Israel have gotten away with unprovoked attack after unprovoked attack on the country over the past decade, and faced only theatrical retaliation that, until last year, was carefully calibrated and telegraphed to let the regime save face while avoiding a war it did not want to fight.

Iran has no way of seriously attacking the American mainland, no matter how many times Trump and his lackeys lie that it does, nor does it have any of the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that, just like with George W. Bush’s fraudulent war in Iraq, are now being lazily invoked to justify this war. In fact, Iran is just the latest in a series of relatively weak, WMD-less states that have come into Washington’s regime-change crosshairs in the twenty-first century, which include Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and, more recently, Venezuela and Cuba — all while the armed-to-the-teeth North Koreans remain safe from American attack and Trump writes love letters to its leader. Like these other countries, Iran is not being attacked because it is a threat to the United States; it’s being attacked precisely because it isn’t one.

This is why Trump and every other neocon baying for this war have cycled through one rationale after another to justify war with the country this year. Remember in January, when Trump told us that the Iranian government needed to be toppled to protect the brave Iranian civilians being killed by their government? Now, the logic is flipped: the American military must kill these same Iranian civilians in order to topple their government.

And why does the Iranian regime need to be toppled? Last year, it was its nuclear enrichment program, which Trump claimed he had destroyed the first time he started a war with the country last June. Last month, it was Iran’s nonnuclear weapons, its stockpile of ballistic missiles. For the past week, Trump went back to banging the drum about nuclear enrichment, until this morning, when he decided that he was actually trying to bring democracy to Iranians — a task he swiftly got to by bombing an elementary school and killing nearly a hundred little girls.

The reason doesn’t matter, and Trump and the rest of the warmonger gang can barely even bother pretending it does. Reportedly, in a high-level national security meeting two weeks ago, Trump asked his CIA director and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for their take on the broader American strategy in Iran, apparently forgetting that it is the president who sets the strategy and the military brass that simply put it into motion. Trump, in other words, has no idea what he is actually trying to achieve here, as we can already see from his shifting rationales, schizophrenic approach to negotiations, and that he’s already talking about “off-ramps.”

So whose interest does this serve? The obvious answer is a war-hungry Israeli leadership increasingly under the sway of a deranged, neo-Biblical fantasy of using the United States to burn the Middle East to the ground and annex whatever’s left. As CNN reported, the war has been launched on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Purim, which revolves around a Biblical story of a threat from modern-day Iran, which Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made heavy reference to in his statement on the attacks.

Israeli officials told Reuters that not only has Israel been involved in planning for this war for months, but that this highly symbolic date of the war had been picked weeks ago (a line since mysteriously scrubbed from the report with no explanation). If true, it suggests that not only has the past week of American diplomacy been a sham, but that this really is an Israeli war, outsourced to Americans to fight and die for. Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to get the United States into this war for more than thirty years, including repeatedly when the feeble, ailing Joe Biden was in power. Yet it was only once Trump took office that he got his wish, proving to be an even bigger doormat for the Israelis to wipe their shoes on.

With reports of the deaths of Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials, Trump will likely try to claim a quick victory here — maybe even use it as a way to extricate himself from the war he started. That might be easier said than done. Every other American-created power vacuum in the Middle East has devolved into civil war and lawless anarchy, and even the CIA predicted that what would follow Khamenei would be an even harder-line regime run by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Another possibility, total Iranian government collapse, could make for Libya-style lawless chaos on an even bigger scale, where the country becomes a breeding ground and safe haven for militants. In either case, Trump and all of Washington would face the choice of either involving the United States further and risking quagmire to ensure a transition that favors American interests, or simply withdrawing and letting what happens happen, which could mean future threats to American bases and Israel — potentially drawing the United States back in anyway. Trump launched this war based on the success of his abduction of Nicolás Maduro, but this is a very different operation against a very different country.

We don’t know what is coming next, and neither does Trump, as much as he hopes he can make a quick and clean exit from the events he has set in motion. We can say one thing for sure, though. Trump is far from the scourge of the neocons, as his most ardent fans had hoped and believed. Trump is the neocon-in-chief.

THE WAR WITH IRAN IS A SUICIDAL FOLLY

Trump’s Appalling Ignorance Of World Affairs And Megalomania, Seem Set To Have Pushed America Into Yet Another Debacle In The Middle East, One The Congress Has Not Approved, And The Public Does Not Want.

The demands imposed on Iran by the Trump White House were no more acceptable to the regime in Tehran than those imposed on Hamas in Gaza under Trump’s sham peace plan.

Trump’s demanded that Iran shut down its nuclear program and give up its missile capabilities in return for no new sanctions is as tone deaf as calling on Hamas to disarm in Gaza. But since we have long dispensed with diplomats, who are linguistically, politically and culturally literate, who can step into the shoes of their adversaries, we are being led to another war in the Middle East by our newest coterie of buffoons. America and Israel foolishly believed they can bomb their way to decapitating the Iranian government and installing a client regime. That this non-reality-based belief system failed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya eludes them.

The promise of no new sanctions will not incentivize Iran to broker an agreement. Iran is already crippled by onerous sanctions that have gutted its economy. That would have done nothing to break the economic stranglehold. Iran will not give up its nuclear program, which has the potential to be weaponized, or its ballistic missile program, which Israel already said it would target in an air attack. Israel’s reputed nuclear arsenal of some 300 warheads is a powerful incentive for Iran to retain the capacity to build a nuclear arsenal of its own. Iran, like Hamas, is never going to render itself defenseless against those seeking its annihilation.

The aerial attack on Iran will not be like the 12-day assault last June against Iran’s nuclear facilities and state and security facilities. Then Iran calibrated its response with symbolic strikes on Al Udeid air base in Qatar in the hopes that it would not lead to a wider, protracted conflict. Since the aerial assault was launched, Iran has nothing to lose. It will understand that appeasing its adversaries is impossible.

Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe. It has a population of almost 90 million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.

Despite Iran’s relative military weakness, when set against the combined forces of Americ and Israel, it can inflict a lot of damage. It is doing this as swiftly as possible. Hundreds of American troops will likely be killed. Iran will certainly shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint that facilitates the passage of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. This will double or triple the price of oil and devastate the global economy. It will target oil installations along with American ships and military bases in the region.

Mounting losses and a huge spike in oil prices will provide the fodder for Trump, and his vile counterpart in Israel, to ignite a sustained regional war.

This is the cost of being governed by imbeciles. God help us.

WE’RE ON THE BRINK OF A GENERATIONAL CATASTROPHE AS TRUMP ATTACKS IRAN

An American War With Iran Is Illegal, Immoral, And Dangerous. We Can Still Stop It If You Are Willing To Work For Peace.

Wielding a golden gavel and a playlist featuring the Beach Boys, Donald Trump ushered in a new era of international humiliation at the inaugural meeting of the American-led Board of Peace. The new body, while established by Trump, has been tasked by a UN Security Council resolution to administer Gaza’s reconstruction efforts. But Trump has also suggested his ambitions for the board go far beyond Gaza, saying it would “almost be looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly.”

Trump has demanded that world leaders pony up $1 billion for a permanent seat on the ostensible peacekeeping body, even as he defunds the actual peacekeeping mission of the United Nations, which he has suggested his new institution will supplant. Altogether, the February 19^th inaugural meeting was a perfect distillation of Trump’s preferred method of extortion masked as diplomacy.

Meanwhile Trump has initiated a huge military buildup near Iran including multiple aircraft carriers and warships. The buildup is so massive it has drawn parallels to the buildup preceding the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The buildup comes on the heels of the American June 2025 aggression against Iran, when America bombed multiple Iranian nuclear sites during negotiations over the same nuclear program that the American regime claims to be negotiating over today. That attack came during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran, which was conducted with American arms and logistical support and funded with the help of American taxpayers. During that war, more than 1,000 Iranians were killed. Trump has now said that Iran has “10 to 15 days” to make a deal. Following the charade of last year’s negotiations, analysts expect an American attack on Iran to now come at any moment. New reporting has suggested that American strikes could even target individual Iranian leaders, with the aim of bringing about regime change in the country.

A war between America and Iran would be undeniably disastrous. American allies across the region have spent weeks urging restraint. Even the U.K., in an uncharacteristically defiant move, has reportedly told Trump it would not allow the American military to use Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean island that the two countries ethnically cleansed in order to build a military base, to bomb Iran, for fear of violating international law.

The majority of people in America are also against such an attack. Multiple American polls from recent weeks have shown broad resistance to the use of military force in Iran, and a strong desire for Trump to seek congressional approval before launching an attack against another country.

So how did we arrive in this position, where, despite widespread domestic and international opposition, Trump’s murderous impulses are treated as inevitable? Over and over, pundits have framed this as a war that the American regime is falling into, or one that it is sleepwalking toward. But there is not some gravitational force pulling America and Iran toward major military catastrophe. This is a war of choice by the American regime, and we must remember that it could be stopped in an instant.

We’ve been on a slow march toward this outcome, both over the decades that the powers that be in America and Israel have worked to manufacture consent for military action against Iran, and more deeply since they broke the dam on such an attack last June. There has been no accountability for that illegal attack, just as there has been no accountability for the American kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro — neither move was met with articles of impeachment for Trump nor for the cabinet members who orchestrated the attack. And there has been no accountability for the American regime’s backing of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, even when some of those backers acknowledge themselves that American support for the Israeli military went against domestic law.

And even before these last years, there has been no real accountability for the invasion of Iraq, to which a war with Iran has long been compared. Many of the architects of that war have proceeded to build storied careers in government and media without seeing so much as a single consequence for their devastating actions. In a grim twist of irony, even former Bush speechwriter David Frum — the same man who labeled Iran a member of the “axis of evil” — is now wringing his hands about the lack of consent from Congress or the American public for a regime change war in the Middle East, writing: “We are poised days away from a major regime-change war in the Middle East, and not only has Congress not been consulted, but probably not 1 American in 10 has any idea that such a war is imminent.”

Trump is getting away with this because, for decades, we have let warmongers unleash their worst with little to no repercussions. But when it comes to Congress, part of the lack of opposition is because, at some level, there actually is a lack of opposition: Coercing other countries, especially Iran, has long been a bipartisan pastime.

During the Obama administration, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) bucked his own party to come out against the landmark nuclear deal with Iran, which is widely considered to have been one of the most successful tools keeping escalations like this from happening. After Trump’s prior attack against Iran in June, Schumer hit him from the right, accusing the president of folding too early and letting Iran “get away with everything.” Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) has been largely silent about Trump’s saber-rattling, save for a singular reference to Congress’s authority to declare war.

While some lawmakers have been more vocal in their opposition to Trump’s buildup, the only halfway meaningful response from Congress to the Trump administration has come from Reps. Ro Khanna (D-California) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who are moving to force a war powers vote next week, to bring Congress on the record about whether Trump should be forced to terminate his military plans against Iran. But while these kinds of votes are necessary — anything that could potentially stop such a disaster is necessary — real opposition to Trump’s warmaking would require more than these process-oriented critiques.

A war with Iran is wrong because it’s morally wrong — not only because it’s illegal under the Constitution, or under international law. Laws can be useful tools for stopping military action — indeed, it appears the U.K.’s concerns about running afoul of international law could in fact materially affect Trump’s plans for military action. But we must be honest about the limitations of such laws as we hear the drumbeats for war, illegal or not, grow louder. We need real, principled opposition that will put fear of accountability into the hearts of the architects and defenders of this aggression, whether that comes from the streets or the ballot box or legal avenues or the halls of Congress.

Inherent in some of the critiques of Trump’s buildup is the idea that a war with Iran could be conducted a “right” way — with congressional permission, with actual strategic objectives, or as a more limited air war compared to a 2003-style invasion with boots on the ground. But there is no right way to conduct this war; no matter what happens, no matter who approves it, it will be deadly and dangerous and lead to further terror across the entirety of the region.

THE OPPOSITE OF ‘REALISM’ IS A WAR ON IRAN

No One Knows What Goes On Inside The Mind Of President Donald Trump. But The Significant, American Military Buildup In The Middle East, Means One Can Make A Guess: He Thinks A Big War With Iran Is A Good Idea.

If that’s the case, he’s wrong—dangerously so—and he needs a dose of realism.

This administration already claims to be guided by a “flexible realism” in foreign policy. But no variant of realism, however flexible, recommends an American war on the Islamic Republic at this juncture.

Realism holds that geography and the relative distribution of military power among states determine national interests. Iran, being a middling power on the other side of the world, does not pose a military threat to America, the world’s leading superpower.

An implication of realism’s emphasis on power and geography is that realists don’t focus much on what kind of regime a state has. The Islamic Republic is a theocracy with a bad human rights record, but that’s nigh irrelevant from a realist perspective. The purpose of American foreign policy is to promote the safety and prosperity of Americans, not to turn faraway states into liberal democracies, which it’s not good at doing anyway.

America does have an interest in preventing states from developing nuclear weapons, but that’s not necessarily an interest worth going to war over. Tehran’s previous compliance with the defunct 2015 Iran nuclear deal and its present willingness to negotiate shows that, in the case of Iran, this interest can be achieved diplomatically.

From a realist perspective, an American war with Iran seems not merely unnecessary, but obviously foolish. Realists believe that America should—and does—intervene abroad when necessary to prevent the rise of a “regional hegemon.” We don’t want any foreign state to dominate its neighborhood and project power into other neighborhoods, especially ours.

So, what’s all this got to do with Iran? Really: What the hell does this have to do with Iran?

In other words, the American regime appears poised to create a regional hegemon, not prevent one, in the Middle East. That wouldn’t be a good example of “realism,” flexible or otherwise.

Some American officials have argued that taking out the Islamic Republic would enable Washington to retrench from the Middle East, since it would no longer need to check Iran. A realist would advise something like the opposite: Washington should withdraw American forces and assets from the region to allow a natural equilibrium to emerge. Iran, Turkey, and Arab states have grown sufficiently concerned about Israel’s regional designs that they may set their differences aside and collectively balance against it. That’s the best-case scenario from the realist American perspective.

Unfortunately, we’re instead careering toward a big war that, if it “succeeds,” will harm America’s geopolitical interests. And if the war is a failure, things might get very ugly indeed.

In other words, the American regime appears poised to create a regional hegemon, not prevent one, in the Middle East. That wouldn’t be a good example of “realism,” flexible or otherwise.

Analysts have warned that Iran intends to launch a ferocious retaliation if the American regime strikes, to restore deterrence. The Trump administration appears to have taken those warnings seriously—but that doesn’t mean it’s backing off. Quite the contrary. In my assessment, the American regime is preparing a massive attack meant to overwhelm Iran’s defenses and decapitate its leadership to prevent the kind of retaliation envisioned by nervous analysts.

After last year’s American strikes on key Iranian nuclear facilities, Iran hawks mocked antiwar conservatives for predicting a catastrophic war involving mass casualties.

But a limited engagement is more difficult to imagine now. The American is planning a huge strike, and Iran is planning a huge retaliation; consequently, a huge war seems very much worth worrying about. Plus, it’s not clear what targeted strikes would look like this time around, because it’s not clear which targets it makes sense for Trump to strike.

And we shouldn’t let the Iran hawks intimidate us into declining to warn about worst-case scenarios. If Iran shuts down the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for global trade, an oil crisis could set off global economic contraction.

Nor is that the absolute worst case. Iran might manage to strike an American warship, perhaps even bombard an aircraft carrier, jeopardizing fighter jets in the process. Even worse, Iranian ballistic missiles could kill American troops, who are sitting ducks in the region. Iran’s supreme leader has threatened an all-out regional war.

There’s no telling how Trump would react to the loss of American troops, and you should prefer not to find out.

Nuclear escalation isn’t out of the question, even if the American regime itself is unlikely to push the big red button. Iran might choose to direct its ferocious retaliation against Israel, raining ballistic missiles down on the small country. In such a scenario, Israel could conceivably launch a nuclear attack out of desperation.

America simply has no interests at stake that justify courting such risks. And even if America’s military buildup in the Middle East is intended to enhance its bargaining position in negotiations with Iran, it raises the chances of war. The American regime got dragged into war with Iran by Israel last June, and to avoid a repeat, Trump needs to convey to Israel that he wouldn’t provide backup this time around. But sending a third of America’s navy to the region sends the opposite signal.

Contemplating a war with Iran should cause you a nauseating dread. President Trump must be urged to listen to reason, and to realism.

WHEN WILL WESTERN LEADERS ACCEPT THAT THEY HAVE FAILED IN UKRAINE?

Since The War Started, Voices In The Alternative Media Have Said That Ukraine Cannot Win A War Against Russia. Indeed, John Mearsheimer Has Been Saying This Since 2014.

Four years into this devastating war, those voices feel at one and the same time both vindicated and unheard. Ukraine is losing yet western leaders in Europe appear bent on continuing the fight.

Nothing is illustrative of this more than Kaja Kallas’ ridiculous comment on February 10^th that Russia should agree to pre-conditions to end the war, which included future restrictions on the size of Russia’s army.

Comments such as this suggest western figures like Kallas still believe in the prospect of a strategic victory against Russia, such that Russia would have to settle for peace as the defeated party. Or they are in denial, and/or they are lying to their citizens. One should argue that it is a mixture of the second and third.

Russia’s territorial gains over the winter period have been slow and marginal. Indeed, western commentators often point to this as a sign that, given its size advantage, Russia is in fact losing the war, because if it really was powerful, it would have defeated Ukraine long ago.

And on the surface, it might be easy to understand why some European citizens accept this line, not least as they are bombarded with it by western mainstream media on a constant basis.

However, most people also, at the same time, agree that drone warfare has made rapid territorial gains costly in terms of lost men and materiel. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that since the second part of 2023, after Ukraine’s failed summer counter-offensive, Russia has attacked in small unit formations to infiltrate and encircle positions.

Having taken heavy losses at the start of the war using tactics that might have been conventional twenty years ago, Russia’s armed forces had to adapt and did so quickly. Likewise, Russia’s military industrial complex has also been quicker to shift production into newer types of low cost, easy build military technology, like drones and glide bombs, together with standard munitions that western providers have been unable to match in terms of scale.

And despite the regular propaganda about Russian military losses in the tens of thousands each month, the data from the periodic body swaps between both sides suggest that Ukraine has been losing far more men in the fight than Russia. At a ratio far greater than ten to one.

Some western pundits claim that, well, Russia is advancing so it is collecting its dead as it moves forward. But those same pundits are the ones who also claim that Russia is barely moving forward at all. In a different breath, you might also hear them claim that Russia is about to invade Estonia at any moment.

Of course, the propaganda war works in both directions, from the western media and, of course, from Russian. You should take the view that discussion of the microscopic daily shifts in control along the line of contact is a huge distraction.

The reality of who is winning, or not winning, this war is in any case not about a slowly changing front line. Wars are won by economies not armies.

Those western pundits who also tell you that Russia will run out of money tomorrow – it really won’t – never talk about the fact that Ukraine is functionally bankrupt and totally dependent on financial gifts which the EU itself has to borrow, in order to provide. War fighting for Ukraine has become a lucrative pyramid scheme, with Zelensky promising people like Von der Leyen that it is a sold investment that will eventually deliver a return, until the day the war ends, when EU citizens will ask whether all their tax money disappeared to.

Russia’s debt stands at 16% of its GDP, its reserves over $730 billion, its yearly trade surplus still healthy, even if it has narrowed over the past year.

Russia can afford to carry on the fight for a lot longer.

Ukraine cannot.

And Europe cannot.

And that is the point.

The Europeans know they can’t afford the war. Ukraine absolutely cannot afford the war, even if Zelensky is happy to see the money keep flowing in. Putin knows the Europeans and Ukraine can’t afford the war. In these circumstances, Russia can insist that Ukraine withdraws from the remainder of Donetsk unilaterally without having to fight for it, on the basis that the alternative is simply to continue fighting.

He can afford to maintain a low attritional fight along the length of the frontline, which minimises Russian casualties and maximises Ukraine’s expenditure of armaments that Europe has to pay for.

That constant financial drain of war fighting is sowing increasing political discord across Europe, from Germany, to France, Britain and, of course, Central Europe.

Putin gets two benefits for the price of one. Europe causing itself economic self-harm while at the same time going into political meltdown.

That is why western leaders cannot admit that they have lost the war because they have been telling their voters from the very beginning that Ukraine would definitely win.

At the start of the war, had NATO decided to back up its effort by force, to facilitate Ukrainian accession against Russia’s expressed objection, then the war might have ended very differently.

NATO would simply not have been able to mobilise a ground operation of sufficient size quickly enough to force Russia back from the initial territorial advances that it had made in February and March of 2022. That means, the skirmishes at least for the first month would have largely been in the form of air and sea assets, including the use of missiles.

There is nothing in NATO doctrine to suggest that the west would have taken the fight to Russia, given the obvious risk of nuclear catastrophe.

While it is pointless to speculate now, our view is that a short, hot war between NATO and Russia would have led to short-term losses of lives and materiel on both sides that forced a negotiated quick settlement.

Europe avoided that route because of the risk of nuclear escalation and the great shame of the war is that our leaders were nonetheless willing to encourage Zelensky to fight to the last Ukrainian, wrecking their prosperity in the process.

Who will want to vote for Merz, Macron, Tusk, Starmer and all these other tinpot statesmen when it becomes clear that they have royally screwed the people of Europe for a stupid proxy war in Ukraine that was unwinnable?

What will Kaja Kallas do for a job when everyone in Europe can see that she’s a dangerous warmonger who did absolutely nothing for the right reason, and who failed at everything?

Zelensky is wondering where he can flee to when his number’s up, my bet would be Miami.

So if you are watching the front line every day you need to step back from the canvas.

There is still a chance that European pressure on Russia will prevail, which makes this whole endeavour a massive gamble with poor odds.

More likely, when the war ends, Putin will reengage with Europe but from a position of power not weakness.

That is the real battle going on here.

IT IS A WAR CRIME FOR ISRAEL’S WEAPONS TO “OBLITERATE” PALESTINIANS

Thermobaric And Incendiary Weapons Lead To Incineration And Fragmentation Of Bodies, Which Constitutes A War Crime Under The Principles Of Distinction And Proportionality.

Thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza have simply vanished into thin air. No remains to identify, no bodies to bury. Nothing remains but blood spattered on the walls and fragments of tissue of those killed.

A major investigation on Wednesday documented at least 2,842 such cases since October 2023, drawing from records kept by Civil Defence teams about people inside a building when it was hit and subsequent body counts.

They look for blood patterns, tissue, anything that might tell them what happened. When the numbers don’t match, when they’ve searched everywhere and come up empty, they mark those victims as “evaporated.”

Yasmin Mahani, a Palestinian woman whose child was targeted in an Israeli strike on al Tabin school in August 2024, went back to the building. It had been sheltering families who’d fled their homes. She found scattered flesh. She found blood. She didn’t find her son. “Not even a body to bury,” she said.

Experts say this happens when people are exposed to extreme heat, with many cases attributed to thermobaric and incendiary weapons.

Thermobaric weapons are designed to create a powerful explosion by using oxygen from the surrounding air to intensify their blast, according to Dr. Arthur van Coller, Professor of International Humanitarian Law at the STADIO Higher Education.

“They function by releasing a fuel in the form of gas, aerosol, or fine powder into the air. This fuel cloud mixes with atmospheric oxygen and is subsequently ignited,” van Coller said.

“The ‘blast’ generates intense heat and massive pressure waves that last longer than those of conventional explosives, creating a vacuum effect that can cause severe injuries that are difficult to treat.”

Van Coller, who has special expertise on the legality of the use of thermobaric weapons, adds that such weapons are particularly devastating in buildings and underground structures, where reflected pressure waves multiply their force, making it difficult to confine damage to military targets and increasing the risk to civilians.

These bombs work differently from regular explosives. They release clouds of combustible particles first, then ignite them. The result is a pressure wave and a fireball that can reach 2,500 to 3,000 degrees Celsius.

When used against humans, thermobaric weapons can cause multiple complex and severe injuries due to primary blast effects, including barotrauma to the lungs and other organs, according to van Coller.

“They can also inflict secondary injuries from shrapnel and debris, tertiary injuries such as blunt trauma from being thrown by the blast, and quaternary injuries, including burns from intense heat and the inhalation of toxic fumes,” he adds.

According to reports, Israel has used several weapons that fit this description, including the MK-84 bomb, the BLU-109 bunker buster and the GBU-39 glide bomb. That last one was used in the al Tabin strike, and it’s basically designed to keep buildings standing while destroying everything inside through heat and pressure.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor flagged similar cases back in 2023 and 2024. The investigators documented victims who appeared to have melted or turned to ash after residential buildings were bombed.

“In confined spaces, the heat and pressure can thus cause severe burns, crush injuries, and disintegration of soft tissues. Bodies may be incinerated, fragmented, or rendered unrecognisable, and in some cases, only small remains or traces are found,” says Van Coller.

“However, ‘vaporisation’ is not an entirely accurate term to describe the effects of thermobaric explosions on the human body, as this term implies that the tissue is converted entirely into gas, leaving no physical remains.”

“The more appropriate term from forensic and medical literature is ‘incineration’, ‘fragmentation’, or ‘obliteration,’” he adds.

Incendiary weapons are another category that’s been documented in Gaza.

“These munitions are designed primarily to set fire to objects or cause burn injuries to people through the action of flame, heat, or both, produced by a chemical reaction,” van Coller says.

“Common examples include napalm, thermite, and white phosphorus. These weapons contain chemicals that ignite and burn at extremely high temperatures for a prolonged period when deployed, thereby possibly causing secondary fires that spread to surrounding areas.”

“International humanitarian law places strict restrictions on the use of incendiary weapons, especially in populated areas, to protect civilians from their devastating effects.”

These restrictions emanate from Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), which prohibits making civilians or civilian objects the target of attack using incendiary weapons in all circumstances.

Verified video footage and eyewitness accounts indicate that Israeli forces used white phosphorus during their genocide in Gaza and attacks on southern Lebanon in 2023.

The material showed repeated airbursts of artillery fired white phosphorus over the Gaza City port and rural areas near the Israel-Lebanon border, dispersing burning particles across wide areas.

When it comes into contact with skin, it causes severe burns that are difficult to treat and can continue burning deep into tissue. Survivors often face long-term medical complications.

Thermobaric weapons aren’t banned entirely. But that doesn’t mean using them is legal.

“Thermobaric weapons are not per se prohibited under international law,” Van Coller says.

“However, their use must be evaluated against the principles of proportionality and distinction. This means assessing whether the attack is directed at a legitimate military target and whether the expected civilian harm is excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage.”

But here’s the critical point that cannot be overstated: those principles about proportionality and unnecessary suffering only apply when you’re targeting combatants.

Civilians should never be intentionally targeted at all. Van Coller emphasises that the legal framework for assessing “unnecessary suffering” assumes you’re fighting other fighters, not bombing families in their homes.

When Israel drops these weapons on densely populated neighbourhoods where it knows families are sheltering, it’s not a question of proportionality or distinction. It’s deliberate harm against civilians.

That’s a war crime, and part of Israel’s ongoing genocide.

In theory, one could use thermobaric weapons legally against clear military targets if one can take precautions to protect civilians. In practice, it’s nearly impossible to comply with those principles when you’re dropping these bombs in densely populated cities.

Israel’s killing of more than 72,000 Palestinians, wounding of over 171,000 others, and widespread destruction of 90 percent of civilian infrastructure are already clear evidence that the principle of proportionality isn’t being followed.

Thousands of people are still missing, either buried under debris or reduced to traces so minimal they can’t be identified.

These findings come despite the International Court of Justice ordering provisional measures and despite an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court against Israel’s prime minister.

The disappearance of bodies creates another problem for accountability. These weapons destroy physical evidence so completely that identifying victims, confirming how they died, and collecting proof of unlawful use becomes extremely difficult.

Van Coller poses what he describes as “the ultimate question” on the issue: “whether one method of harming humans with the use of a particular weapon, such as a thermobaric weapon, is inherently more inhumane and thus unacceptable, as opposed to the harm caused by another weapon, such as a conventional explosive weapon.”

IT’S A GOOD THING TO CRITICIZE GOVERNMENTS IN SPITE OF WHAT ZIONISTS SAY

In A Revealing Exchange On Anti-Semitism And Freedom Of Religion, Commission Member Carrie Prejean Boller Sought A Clear Answer To The Question “Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?”

The answer, according to pro-Israel activist Yitzchok Frankel, and according to Rabbi Ari Berman, is “yes.” Frankel, when asked if anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism stated flatly “yes.” Rabbi Ari Berman further stated: “Undoubtedly anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

In other words, one must support the existence and the policies of a man-made state known as the State of Israel, or one is anti-Semitic.

Frankel, borrowing a metric from Natan Sharanky (head of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy), states that there are three types of things one is not allowed to say about the state or Israel—and if you do so you are an anti-Semite: you “shouldn’t delegitimize [the State of Israel], you shouldn’t demonize it, and you shouldn’t abide by a double standard.”

In other words, the only way one can be safe from charges of anti-Semitism is to never say anything that questions the legitimacy of the government of Israel, and one cannot criticize it either. And let’s not kid ourselves that “moderate” criticism of the Israeli state will be termed as anything other than “demonizing” Israel. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that virtually any criticism of the Israeli state is classified by Zionists as “demonizing” Israel.

On this final point, it must be noted that it is clearly not necessary to employ any double standards to oppose the existence of the state or Israel. The fact is the Israeli state has not more a “right” to exist than any other state. There is no “right to exist” for the states we now call “The United Kingdom” the “Arab Republic of Egypt” or “The United States of America.” These are all countries, inhabited by groups of people who have rights. But the corporations we call “states” do not have rights of any kind. No double standard is ever necessary.

This fact was emphasized in a 2024 exchange between Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur in Palestine, and pro-Israel Canadian reporter Bryan Passifiume. Albanese provided some clarification:

Passifiume: Does Israel have a right to exist?

Albanese: Israel does exist. Israel is a recognized member of the United Nations. Besides this, there is not such a thing in international law like “the right of a state to exist.” Does Italy have a right to exist? Italy exists. Now, if tomorrow, Italy and France want to merge and become Ita-France, fine, this is not up to us. What is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist. So, the state of Israel is there, it is protected as a member of the United Nations. Does this justify the erasure of another people? Hell no. Not 75 years ago. Not 57 years ago. Surely not today. Where is the protection of the Palestinian people from erasure, from annexation, from illegal annexation, from apartheid?

In spite of the religious claims made by some Zionists, no state on earth was created by God, and there is no moral principle or natural law that mandates support for any state. Nor is there any moral principle or natural law that prohibits delegitimizing any state. States are simply organizations, created by human beings, that carry out the agenda of the governing elite in each state. There is no mandate from heaven. There isn’t even any such thing as “the will of the people.”

In this, the State of Israel is no different from any other state. States come and go, and are formed and are dissolved in regular intervals. The state of Israel is just one among many of these temporary organizations. Even the oldest states on earth are relatively young, and this is clear when we don’t confuse states with the subject populations that states rule over. For example, the English, as a people, are clearly very old. But the current English state was founded no earlier than 1688 with the Parliamentary coup that put William and Mary on the throne. Most other states are much younger. The current French republic was founded in 1958. The French state is not the same thing as the French. The state that rules over the subject population in the United States is one of the older ones. It too will some day join the other extinct states in the ash heap of history. As Thomas Jefferson contended throughout his life, states can be dissolved and dismembered in accordance with what the subject populations are willing to tolerate. This is why, throughout his life, and forty years after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson always supported the principle of secession. States are just things. They are not to be confused with nations or peoples.

Zionists militantly ignore all of this and claim that the Israeli state exempt from history. The Zionists claim their favorite state is synonymous with global Judaism while stating that all criticism of the State of Israel is hate speech.

Thanks in part to Prejean, it is clear that many Zionists are a threat to freedom of speech in America when they claim that criticism of a foreign state (Israel) is hate speech. (Hate speech, by the way, isn’t real.) This is only one small half-step away from claiming that criticism of the State of Israel is not protected by the First Amendment. And from there it’s on to censorship, speech codes, and a return and a revival of the covid-era war on “disinformation.”