A South African-born New Zealand critic of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing today delivered a strong defence of his home country’s genocide case filed with the International Court of Justice.

Israel is currently on trial on allegations of genocide with the ICJ in The Hague and South Africa has been joined by at least 15 other countries as accusers — but New Zealand is not among them.

Noting how global iconic leader Nelson Mandela spoke out in his lifetime in support of Palestinian rights, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) campaigner Achmat Esau said South Africa was not speaking out of convenience, “but out of principle”.

Speaking at the combined Banners of Humanity and Banners of Palestine exhibition and concert at the Corbans Art Centre, Esau paraphrased the Irish poet and essayist W B Yeats’ famous 2019 poem “The Second Coming”:

“In a time when the world feels like it is unravelling, we must choose to be that centre — to hold the line for justice, dignity and humanity.”

A veteran activist of the Bastion Point and the 1981 Springbok tour anti-apartheid protests, he told the audience he was speaking about “camaraderie — a spirit of shared struggle, trust and solidarity” and how it shaped South Africa’s decision to take legal action against Israel at the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

On 29 December 2023, South Africa filed a case against Israel at the ICJ, alleging violations of the Genocide Convention in the besieged Gaza Strip.

By January 2024, the court found these genocide allegations “plausible” and ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocide, a legal order Tel Aviv has since ignored.

Support for South Africa
“Since then, multiple countries have joined the lawsuit action, and South Africa has submitted extensive to support its case,” Esau said.

Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Iceland, Ireland, Libya, Maldives, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Palestine, The Netherlands, and Türkiye are among countries joining the lawsuit.

The ICC has also issued arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders (all since assassinated).

“in response, South Africa has faced intense pressure — particularly from the United States — through political threats, legal opposition and public condemnation,” said Esau.

“So why does South Africa persist? The answer lies in our history.

“Under apartheid, our struggle for freedom was sustained by international solidarity — by comrades who stood with us in our darkest hours.

“That solidarity shaped who we are.

“Countries such as Cuba, Palestine, Libya and Iran actively supported our liberation.”

Mandela’s message
On Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island jail after being imprisoned for 27 years, he “honoured them, calling them brothers, comrades and leaders , because they stood with South Africa when it mattered most”.

Esau also cited Mandela’s famous pledge, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Many other speakers, singers and musicans took part at the Banners for Humanity event, which was a fundraiser for the global medical charity MSF — Doctors Without Borders.

The performers included Simon Frost and his daughters; PSNA’s co-chair Maher Nazzal; Taipua Kipa and Delta Johns, Waitakere College rangatahi; Lebanese singer Eva Maria Chasson; Mama Lema Shamaba, of the Democratic Republic of Congo; West Papuan Dr Mary Joku Ponifasio; Fatima Sanussi of Sudan; and Bibi Amina, speaking about Iran.

Masses of protest banners on display included “End genocidal capitalism — Palestine forever”, “IDF = Murder Machine — your silence is complicit with murder”, “Luxon! Sanction Netanyahu now: End U$rael Illegal War$”, and “The more you oppress — the more we will resist”.

Earlier in the day, Achmat Esau had also spoken at a PSNA rally in downtown Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square to mark the Red Ribbon Global Action to stop Israel’s plan to execute Palestinian hostages on the 132nd consecutive week of Gaza protests.

‘Prisoners’ in street theatre
A street theatre performance led by the Artists for Sumud Ensemble and Under the Same Moon featured hooded prisoners (the protesters) and most of the crowd. The group was led by singers Acacia O’Connor and Eva Maria, and Uruguayan artist-filmmaker Eloiza Montaña.

Speakers included Maya Swaid from the Palestinian community and social justice engineer Syed Iqbal, chair of Support Beyond Boards.

Israel is currently holding more than 9600 political prisoners hostage — an 83 percent increase since before the genocide began in October 2023.

Swaid related how many prisoners were arbitraily “taken from their homes, prosecuted and then incarcerated” in prisons notorious for torture under a military court system where they had no rights.

“There are also many women housed in these prisons and more than 3500 people who are not charged with any crime at all,” she said.

“No charge, no trial, no conviction. They are jailed under ‘administrative’ detention based on ‘secret evidence’ that they are not allowed to see in a system where they cannot defend themselves.

United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s latest report has warned that Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent” and that “torture has effectively become state policy” since October 2023, reports Democracy Now!

Earlier this month, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) passed a law enabling mandatory executions of Palestinian prisoners by a 62-48 vote that has stirred global protests and condemnation by human rights groups.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Vietnam survived Nixon’s madman theory and the world survived the era of mutually assured destruction. Now we face the moment of two super-empowered shitheads. There is nothing nicer to call them.

Who will stop two self-obsessed, very old men, already dedicated to tearing down humanity? Today Trump openly declares his intention to destroy a civilisation. They are apparently only able to see war personally, Netanyahu as the climax of 40 years of dreaming, and Trump as his arbitrary prerogative.

In lockstep they destroyed Gaza’s homes, places of learning and culture, health and modernity. They murdered civilians with abandon and drew pictures of capitalist castles on the beach — and still they failed, just as their over-armed predecessors have failed from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

People still live, in great need of our action.

The scorched-earth vision of Trump and Netanyahu rolls onward. Now in Iran and again in Lebanon, they make war on civilian homes and infrastructure. They destroy families and livelihoods, places of beauty and culture, the bridges that connect us, the industries that rebuild and the energy that lights the darkness.

They desecrate all of our religions. The list of their crimes grows daily.

These two evil despots are content to erode the world’s supplies of power, fertiliser, manufacturing components. They are oblivious to the lives they imperil in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine — and countless other people who they will kill around the world by hunger and hardship.

Anything to rule, even over a landscape of bones and dust. They will fail but they must not be allowed to play this out.

We are beyond disgust. We are witnessing the end of an order indeed: America’s empire is flailing in its death throes. How many people will Trump take down with it?

Weighed down with dread, we have no words but these: someone, everyone, stop them!

Republished from Sh’ma Koleinu — Alternative Jewish Voices.

Trump may have backed down for now, but he’s shown how unhinged he is by threatening the death of a “whole civilization.”

I’m heading back to DC to try and get answers for the American people. Congress needs to return to the Capitol immediately and vote to end this war. https://t.co/vZLXb0anhq

— Senator Andy Kim (@SenatorAndyKim) April 8, 2026

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Two men are mainly responsible for the war on Iran. And then there are those — such as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — who wilfully acquiesce to their murderous whims.

It’s the men. Not their press releases. Not their carefully managed public personas. Not the language their communications teams have stress tested for maximum palatability.

It’s the men themselves.

Their records. Their legal jeopardy. And the extraordinary, historically unprecedented fact that the two primary architects of a war now costing ordinary Australians their livelihoods are both, in their own ways, running from accountability while simultaneously running the world.

Benjamin Netanyahu
Netanyahu is not merely a controversial leader prosecuting a controversial war. He is a criminal defendant. An accused man.

A person who, under the laws of his own country, not the laws of his enemies, not the laws of international tribunals, he can dismiss as biased, stands charged with fraud, breach of trust, and bribery.

His trial has been grinding through Israel’s courts since 2020. It has not concluded. And critics, serious critics, within Israel’s own legal and political establishment, have made the case, with mounting evidence, that the prolongation of this war serves Netanyahu’s personal legal interests at least as much as it serves Israel’s security ones.

Think about what that means.

A man facing prison. A man whose political survival depends on remaining in power. A man for whom a ceasefire, a negotiated peace, a return to normalcy could mean the resumption of court proceedings that his wartime emergency has conveniently disrupted. A man whose far-right coalition partners have made clear they will collapse the government the moment the guns fall silent.

This man, this specific man, in this specific legal and political predicament, has been handed a blank cheque by Washington. Unlimited weapons. Diplomatic cover.

A US veto at the Security Council every time the international community tries to intervene.

And Anthony Albanese calls the objectives of his war appropriate.

ICC arrest warrant
The International Criminal Court did not call them appropriate. It issued an arrest warrant.

A warrant that sits unrequited and unenforced as Western governments, including Australia’s, conduct business as usual with a man the court has found reasonable grounds to prosecute for war crimes. This is not a technicality. This is not a diplomatic inconvenience. It is the most fundamental possible test of whether the rules-based international order that Australia constantly invokes as a guiding principle means anything whatsoever.

And Australia is failing that test, quietly, daily,

with a smile and a press release about shared values.

This is the casus belli we are never allowed to examine. Not the security rationale. Not the stated military objectives. The actual human being in whose name and for whose benefit this catastrophe is being prosecuted. And what that human being is running from.

Donald Trump
Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 carrying more legal and personal baggage than any president in American history.

A convicted felon. Civil judgments in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And something else, something the mainstream press, particularly in America and Australia, has handled with a caution so extraordinary it constitutes institutional cowardice — the Epstein files.

Jeffrey Epstein was not a lone predator. He was the centre of a network. A procurement and blackmail operation, almost certainly intelligence connected, that ran for decades across the highest levels of American, British, and Israeli power.

The files released in dribs and drabs, fought over in courts, partially suppressed and heavily redacted, point toward a system of leverage that compromised some of the most powerful men on earth.

Trump’s name appears in those files thousands of times. His association with Epstein was long, documented, and by his own prior admission, enthusiastic. In a 2002 interview, he described Epstein as terrific fun, noting approvingly that he liked beautiful women, many of them on the younger side.

That statement was made publicly. It has not been retracted.

It has simply been absorbed into the general noise of a political culture that has lost the capacity for appropriate disgust.

But the Epstein connection is not merely a personal scandal. It is a geopolitical one.

Epstein’s operation did not exist in a vacuum. Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, convicted and imprisoned, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, the media baron confirmed after his death to have been a Mossad asset.

The intelligence dimensions of the Epstein network have been reported by journalists of unimpeachable seriousness across multiple continents. The suggestion that a blackmail operation of this scale, running through the power centres of American political and financial life for decades, had no connection to the intelligence services that specialise precisely in this kind of leverage is not a serious position.

It is wilful blindness.

The Mossad connection
Mossad is Israel’s foreign intelligence service and one of the most operationally aggressive intelligence agencies on the planet. It has assassinated scientists in foreign countries. It has conducted sabotage operations across the Middle East. It has run networks of influence, surveillance, and covert pressure in Western capitals for decades.

This is not conspiracy. This is its known, partially acknowledged, historically documented record.

What the Epstein network, the Mossad connection, the Maxwell lineage, and the drip feed of suppressed files collectively describe, if you follow the thread honestly and without flinching, is a Western political order in which deference to Israeli policy is not entirely or even primarily explained by shared democratic values and strategic alignment.

Some of it is explained by fear.

Some of it is explained by leverage.

Some of it is explained by the quiet, unspoken, never to be uttered in polite company reality that powerful men in Washington, London, and Canberra have made themselves vulnerable. To networks of kompromat, to relationships they cannot fully disclose, to the specific kind of coercive power that intelligence operations specialising in the exploitation of human weakness have deployed for as long as intelligence operations have existed.

This is why the charge of antisemitism is deployed so rapidly against anyone who raises these questions.

Not because the questions are antisemitic.

They manifestly are not, being questions about the conduct of specific governments, specific intelligence agencies, and specific individuals, not about Jewish people as a whole.

But because the charge works. It silences. It ends careers. It redirects the conversation. And the people with the most to lose from honest answers have every incentive to ensure the conversation never reaches those answers.

The International Criminal Court has issued its warrant. The Epstein files are dripping into the public domain. The Maxwell Mossad connection is confirmed historical record.

The leverage that may explain a generation of Western politicians who cannot bring themselves to say a single word of meaningful criticism of Israeli state conduct is no longer the province of conspiracy forums. It is the subject of serious investigative journalism on three continents.

And Australia’s answer, apparently, is to look away.

Anthony Albanese will not be the one to look squarely at any of this. He has already told us where he stands. On national television, he endorsed the war. He called it constructive. He offered the American justification back to an Australian audience as though it were Australia’s own sovereign conclusion.

It was not. It was obedience dressed as policy. And the men who benefit most from that obedience, a defendant in Tel Aviv and a felon in Washington, are laughing all the way to the next airstrike while ordinary Australians pay the bill, while journalists are prosecuted.

• Tomorrow: How the Murdoch press is running cover for a war and pointing your anger at the wrong man entirely.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Global oil and natural gas prices are soaring after Israel bombed a massive natural gas reserve in Iran, the largest in the world. Iran retaliated by twice attacking the world’s largest liquid natural gas production facility, located in Qatar.

Iran also attacked key energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. At one point, the price of oil reached US$118 a barrel, a 60 percent jump since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran.

In a post online, Trump threatened to blow up the entire South Pars gas field if Iran continued to target the Qatari facility. Trump also claimed the US, “knew nothing” about the Israeli attack on the South Pars gas field, but The Wall Street Journal reports Trump approved the strike to pressure Iran to open up the critical Strait of Hormuz.

AMY GOODMAN: About 20 percent of the world’s oil exports flows through the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump has asked other countries to send warships to help force open the strait, but many nations are rejecting the request.

We’re joined now by Laleh Khalili, professor of Gulf studies at University of Exeter and the author of several books, including her latest, Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy. She also wrote Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula.

Professor Khalili, thanks so much for being with us. Can you start off by talking about the state of the Strait of Hormuz right now, its closure; President Trump, according to Reuters, perhaps sending in thousands of troops, what exactly this means; and the Israeli bombing of the South Pars gas field, the largest in the world?

President Trump said, in a rare rebuke, the US didn’t know. Most people are saying that is highly unlikely, that is probably untrue.

The end of the petrodollar?             Video: Democracy Now!

Transcript:

LALEH KHALILI: So, the Strait of Hormuz is one of the most important choke points for oil — a choke point being an area during which, if it’s closed down, you end up getting a major disruption in the flow of global trade.

So, the Strait of Hormuz is one. The Suez Canal is another one. The Panama Canal is another one.

And there are a number of these different choke points all around the world. Now, what’s specific about Hormuz and what’s distinctive about it is that it is the choke point where the quantity of oil that goes through is higher than any other commodity that actually flows across the strait.

As you just mentioned, about 30 percent of the global oil flows through that. And part of the reason for that is, of course, that the world’s biggest oil producers — some of the biggest oil producers are all sitting around the Persian/Arabian Gulf, so Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Abu Dhabi, which all are huge producers of oil in the first place, and then natural gas in the case of Qatar and Iran in second place.

Now, what has been fascinating is that anybody who has one of these apps that you can put on your phone, like MarineTraffic or VesselFinder, you can actually take a look at the flow of traffic, the flow of vessel traffic, flow of ship traffic, through these different seas in the world.

And if you zoom in on the Strait of Hormuz, what you’ll find is that instead of seeing actually a steady traffic of little usually pink or green arrows going through, which indicate tankers, what you end up seeing are major clusters of ships that are bunched up very near ports where oil is produced and usually put on ships.

What that indicates is that, basically, for a number of different reasons — and I’m going to go into that in a minute — the flow of ships, the flow of ship traffic, has basically come to a halt.

Now, the reasons behind this are multifold. Of course, there is, number one, that Iran is attacking a number of the ships that are going through, and the way that it’s attacking them is through the use of very cheap either drones or sea mines, and that means that it’s basically almost impossible to deal with this particular threat, because the drones are produced so extensively in terms of number and they’re so inexpensive that they can basically be replenished even if they are destroyed.

Also being smaller, they’re much harder to target, etc. So, there has been a number of drone attacks against ships carrying oil through the channel, and so, of course, that scares a lot of carriers, a lot of tankers.

The second reason, which I actually think is perhaps even more significant, in part because it is actually not something that either the US or Iran can control, is that the moment something like this happens, the moment that there is a threat against ships, what you end up having is that insurance brokers, primarily situated in London, but there are, of course, some also in the US, China and in Europe, but really the centre for provision of maritime insurance is London, at Lloyd’s, and the ship brokers end up putting a specific war risk premium on ships.

And that means that going from something like 1 percent of the cost of the hull, meaning the ship’s body, or the cargo, meaning what it’s carrying, goes to something like 5 percent, or it goes from one fraction of 1 percent to, say, 5 percent. So that means that suddenly, instead of paying in the hundreds of thousands for insurance for a super tanker, what you’re looking at is millions in insurance, which, of course, increases the cost of the oil that is traveling. So, that’s the second reason.

The third reason is something that the Houthis noticed when they were blockading the Red Sea in support of the Palestinians when Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians. And that is that sometimes the threat alone suffices in getting the ships to stop going through or, indeed, to make declarations that allows for them a degree of protection.

So, the Houthis, when they had blockaded the sea, had asked that any ships that claimed that they were not touching Israel, meaning they were not delivering to or picking up from Israel, could be allowed to go through the canal.

And so, it happened that this automatic identification system that a lot of ships — well, all ships carry — it’s called the AIS system, and the AIS system indicates what ship is in the vicinity of the system, what it’s carrying and what flag it has, meaning which authorities it responds to.

So, now what we’re seeing is that apparently Iran has mentioned that any ship, for example, that is going to China will be let through, or any ship that is not coming from one of these allied states to the US will be allowed through. Of course, there is a lot of variation in what kind of thing they have requested or what is being reported, so it’s a lot harder to see what exactly the AIS systems are being on these ships.

As I said, we are mostly seeing them clustering and waiting in these locations, one of the main ones being the Port of Fujairah, which is actually not in the Persian Gulf. It is in the Gulf of Oman.

And oil from Abu Dhabi, which is on the Persian Gulf side, is shipped to Fujaira through a pipeline. So we’re seeing a cluster of ships near Fujaira.

Iran, of course, also attacked Fujaira port. And then we’re seeing a cluster of ships near Ras Laffan, which is the main gas production and gas lifting port in Qatar. The third is, of course, around the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, a little bit further up the Persian Gulf. And so, these clusters of ships are waiting there and hoping to be able to at some point pick up oil to be carried out.

But we’re not seeing much of that flow anywhere at all.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Khalili, you mentioned that there are — they are looking for, the Iranians, to see which vessels in the Strait of Hormuz — to what countries they’re affiliated, looking at their flags. Chinese vessels have reportedly been permitted to pass through the strait. China imports about 40 percent of its oil from the Middle East and has been one of the largest buyers of Iranian oil. There are also reports that the Iranians are suggesting they’d consider allowing a small number of oil tankers to pass through the strait if the oil cargo is traded in Chinese yuan rather than —

LALEH KHALILI: Yes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — US dollars. If you could comment on that?

LALEH KHALILI: This is really fascinating, because, of course, we know that the fundamental basis of the US imperial order since the end of the Second World War has been, on the one hand, petroleum and, on the other hand, the US dollar. The globe’s production and finance worlds are dependent on the petroleum that the US has guaranteed the flow of since the end of the Second World War, and which, until the nationalisation of oil in the 1970s and 1980s, basically controlled something like 60 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

After nationalisation, that percentage dropped dramatically, but the US dollar continues to be, and the financial channels that the US has crafted, continue to be a very significant bolster for the empire.

So, the fact that Iran is actually looking for alternatives to the dollar in order to challenge the petrodollar regime, which is, you know, as I said, one of the fundamentals of the US empire, is a really interesting and quite clever indication of how the Iranians are hoping to influence the crafting of a world post this war, or a new world order post this war, where there’s a multipolar financial system, where, for example, the dollar is no longer a single currency that rules the world and the US is the only channel that controls — or, the only power that controls financial channels, because, of course, the US has used this inordinate power to strong-arm various states, to institute sanctions, to make it difficult for its enemies, for example, to purchase oil.

And, of course, it has used it to coerce a lot of countries, as we see, for example, in the case of Cuba or Iran, or indeed Russia, to do its bidding. So, the fact that Iran is calling for petroyuans to become an alternative to petrodollars is actually quite significant also in indicating that the Iranians are well aware of how extensively the US has used its coercive sanction capabilities, through its control of the financial channels and through its mastery of the petrodollar, and are trying to erode that power.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Khalili, you know, the US is now the world’s largest oil producer, but because oil is a globally priced commodity, the price goes up in the US if the world market price goes up. But —

LALEH KHALILI: That’s right.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — how important do you think this might be in Trump’s calculation? Because another consideration, another aspect of this, may be that as oil supplies diminish from the Middle East, the US could benefit, because it is the world’s largest oil producer, and the price of its oil will go up, and the demand for its oil.

LALEH KHALILI: Absolutely. What a fantastic question, because, in fact, we have seen that when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began and the Nord Stream gas, natural gas, pipelines to Europe were sabotaged, we now — there are now indications that this may have been done at the behest of the US.and its Ukrainian allies. But nevertheless, when that sabotage happened, it actually translated into massive gains for US natural gas production.

The thing is that there are a number of reasons why oil is not — why the US cannot become the sole oil producer for the whole of the world. One is the question of proximity, for example. The second is the question of capacity that the US has in order to actually replace, for example, the oil that is produced by Saudi Arabia or by Iran or, indeed, by Russia.

But the third factor — and I think that this is the one that I think we should look out for — is that in the last 10 or 15 years, China has actually begun generating an alternative set of fuels, sustainable fuels, and developing technologies, particularly of electric and battery technologies, that will allow for, for example, solar or wind energy to displace fossil fuels.

And the more that the price of oil goes up, which, of course, we’ve seen that happen, as you mentioned earlier — and, in fact, this also translates into major windfalls for US oil companies. This oil prices going up benefits Chevron. It benefits Exxon. It doesn’t benefit the average US citizen at the petrol stations, at the gas stations, but it does benefit the oil companies.

So, it definitely does — that does happen. But the higher the price of oil goes up, the relatively cheaper it becomes to actually have sustainable alternatives, which, of course, that means that it benefits China in a major way, since China is way ahead of the rest of the world in producing these technologies and in producing them cheaply.

The solar panels that are being produced in China are a fraction of the price of solar panels that were being produced something like 15 or 20 years ago. And I think this shift is actually a major long-term concern for the oil companies.

In the short term, they’re taking all the windfall that they can get. But this, again, is — the kind of a postwar order that will likely also have major implications for the kind of energy people are paying to use or people are willing to use, actually.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 20 seconds. But the effect of the bombing of the South Pars facility, the largest gas facility in the world, what it means for Iran, what it means for the world, and President Trump denying the US had anything to do with, which most do not believe?

LALEH KHALILI: No, absolutely not. There is no way that Israel would have actually done this without coordination with the United States. And, in fact, the channels that deny, for example, that the US coordinated, or report Trump’s denials, are the channels that are often used to feed us the kinds of lies that the administration tells us.

But what is quite significant about South Pars — and I know it’s a very short time left, so I’m going to be very quick about it — is that the South Pars field is actually shared between Iran and Qatar.

The North Dome, which is on the south part of the Persian Gulf, is Qatar’s share of this major field, and Iran’s bit is in the northern part of the Persian Gulf.

And so, the destruction of the infrastructure there will not only have an effect on Iranians’ ability to produce electricity and fuel their various kinds of industries and/or homes, but it will also have an effect on the infrastructures that are used by the Qataris and which the Iranians and Qataris have been using in an extraordinary degree — to an extraordinary degree of coordination since the fields have been used. So, this actually also affects Qatar.

The bombing itself also affects Qatar. And I don’t think that this is a calculation that the rather know-nothing Trump administration has taken into account.

AMY GOODMAN: Laleh Khalili, we want to thank you so much for being with us, professor of Gulf studies at University of Exeter, author of several books, including her latest, Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy. Thanks so much for being there.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Israel’s war on Iran is a direct result of a political culture that depends for survival upon a permanent state of war, says Israeli academic and left-wing activist Idan Landau in the interview that follows.

He observes that Israeli society on the whole has embraced a fascist mindset, “reflecting extreme paranoia and anxiety,” and thus intolerance for dissent.

Subsequently, peace is a taboo and there is total indifference to genocidal acts and human casualties. Moreover, there is very little hope for a different trajectory, argues Landau, “as long as the US and Europe continue to insulate Israel from the moral consequences of its actions.”

Landau is professor of linguistics and head of the department of linguistics at Tel Aviv University. He writes a political blog (in Hebrew) on Israeli affairs and has been imprisoned on several occasions for his refusal to serve in the Israel Defense Forces reserve.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Since the Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel, the Netanyahu government embarked on a genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, expanded Jewish settlements in occupied West Bank and thus encouraged settlers to escalate West Bank terrorist attacks, exchanged fire with Hezbollah and the Houtis, then attacked Iran in what has been dubbed as the 12-Day War, and finally persuaded US President Donald Trump to go to war with Iran.

What is Israel’s endgame in terrorising the Middle East, and how has permanent war impacted Israeli society and the Israeli psyche?

IDAN LANDAU: I think the whole point of permanent war — I agree this is the most appropriate concept to use here — is that there is no endgame. Permanent war, with ever growing economic, emotional and political costs, is exactly what keeps the Israeli right-wing in power; it feeds on anxiety, paranoia and visions of imminent destruction (interestingly, our own and our enemies’ destruction, equally vivid).

Not being able to concentrate on and fully understand what’s going on is also crucial; the Israeli public is extremely underinformed about key issues, like the fraudulent nuclear talks in Geneva, the far-reaching proposals by the Lebanese government, etc. The media — always complicit, these days criminal — bombards us with caricatures of our surrounding countries.

That said, I think there is one constant, never-changing endgame lurking behind all the upheavals: The expansionist project in the West Bank. Not just Smotrich but a dedicated section within the Likkud, of right-wing religious settlers, are working tirelessly on this project, actually from the first week after October 7.

Plans for resettlement of Gaza combined with increased settlement in the West Bank (specifically, the northern Samaria, surrounding Jenin and Tulkarem) were immediately aired and pushed forward by the settlers’ lobby together with their MK partners.

The surge we now see in ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank is inherent to the overall vision of this government, and it was stated as such even before October 7 — that only gave it a huge impetus.

The impact on Israeli society is perhaps the most depressing aspect of it all. Political discourse has been reduced to hollow slogans. Every single issue in foreign affairs in framed as either “existential threat” or “unavoidable use of military force.” There’s absolutely no room for talk about non-violent paths (“peace” is a taboo even on the left).

The Enemy is an undifferentiated mass of Hamas/Iran/Hezbollah/Houthis, in short, different guises of Amalek. Much of that, as I noted, is fueled by the deliberate absence of facts and evidence for rational conduct on the part of our enemies.

Israelis live in a peculiar state of mind: total disbelief in the possibility of normal life, clinging on to the very ideology that perpetuates this state of mind.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Israel has actual and perceived enemies. But is Benjamin Netanyahu alone the actual problem behind Israel’s permanent state of war? I mean, even most of Israeli opposition supported the genocide in Gaza and it’s doing the same thing now with the war against Iran.

IDAN LANDAU: Netanyahu is the most able consolidator of all the dark impulses of Israeli society, but of course he didn’t make up anything on his own. If you go back to Begin’s speeches in the 1970s-1980s, they also constantly invoked the Holocaust as the ultimate justification for whatever Israel does.

The Messianic drive to settle the greater Israel predates Netanyahu, as well as the overall brutal, racist degradation of Palestinians inside and outside Israel. You can go on and on — nothing is new here. At most, as you note, it is the subservience of the “opposition”; I don’t recall anything like it in the past.

If you look at the governments that went to wars in 1973 and 1982, they faced considerable opposition, within the Knesset and outside of it, on the very issue of whether the war was justified (in 1973, it was clearly preventable; in 1982, it was pure imperial vanity). None of that is left today.

Which is why the temptation of permanent war is so strong: You’re guaranteed to make the willful silence of the opposition also permanent.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: In Lebanon, the Israeli armed forces are using Gaza tactics, attacking hospitals and killing medical staff, while in Iran they have engaged in what has been rightly described as chemical warfare on account of strikes on fuel depots. Isn’t the country concerned at all about its blatant assault on international law and that it has turned into a pariah state in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of the people across the globe? What happened to Israel’s labor party which combined socialism with nation-building?

IDAN LANDAU: As to the Labour Party, I always say that one should not speak ill of the dead. A handful of members of Knesset (MKs) that are obsessed with displays of liberal values and with welfare legislation when genocide is in full force and Apartheid shifts from de facto to de jure.

The other “opposition” parties are either led by generals (Golan, Eizenkot) who offer zero alternatives to military dominance, or by right-wing neoliberals (Bennet, Lapid). The only representatives of left values in the Knesset are the Arab MKs.

As to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), my impression is that Israelis are unconcerned insofar as Uncle Sam is, and it sure looks like he is, thoroughly unconcerned. The Trump administration vindictively sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) judges presiding over the Israeli case, and quite explicitly stated that IHL does not apply to the US and its allies.

There’s a lot of duplicity in Israeli discourse regarding the so-called “Principle of Complementarity”; the official response to the ICC described the “independent and robust judicial system” of Israel, which investigates any suspicions for wrongdoings. Most Israelis simply think that the rules don’t apply to us since they don’t apply to Hamas (they do apply to both parties; I already said that Israelis are shrouded in disinformation).

But even the liberals that appeal to our own “independent and robust judicial system” look ridiculous in face of the massive cover-up we witness from the beginning of the genocide; the dropping of charges against the five torturers/rapists in Sde-Teiman is but the latest instance.

Hundreds of heinous crimes did not even yield any charges.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Courageous voices against war and violence can be heard here and there across Israeli society and peace activists have organised scores of demonstrations in cities like Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem to express their opposition to the war in Iran.

Are anti-war demonstrations really seen as a threat to national security by the Netanyahu government and even segments of the Israeli citizenry?

IDAN LANDAU: These things happen and they do lift our spirit. In honesty, I don’t think anyone views them as “a threat to national security,” that’s fascist talk. The public atmosphere is just incredibly intolerant, with or without the presence of the police, with or without any legal process.

Just try to voice your opposition to the war — any war, pick your favourite — out in the street, and you’re sure to be harassed and probably beaten by random pedestrians within 15-20 minutes. So I think it is a typical fascist all-embracing violent climate, reflecting extreme paranoia and anxiety.

The mere verbal expression of “sacrilegious” opinions is seen as a personal threat to our carefully maintained peace of mind; so tenuous and feeble, that it cannot even stand to face dissent.

Point it out to Israelis and urge them to make out what it means for their confidence in what their state is doing that they must violently banish any expression of doubt and criticism (this is now the position of many journalists as well!) — well, see if you get an answer.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Israel censored reporting on the genocide in Gaza. Is the same thing happening now with the war in Iran?

IDAN LANDAU: Luckily, the IDF doesn’t control the entrance and exit to Iran. So we don’t have the brute force censorship, instead it’s the good old “filter and distort and leave out the context” censorship.

They would report civilian casualties only if forced (because it’s getting too much international media), and you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the “human shield” trick is now applied reflexively, before any facts are even known.

In this sense, as all human right organisations pointed out, the Gaza genocide has set a shocking new standard of indifference to civilian casualties: All targets are criminalised by association to your favourite Amalek (currently the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC), and we stopped bothering about substantiating this association with actual facts; declaring it so makes it so.

In this context, one can watch civilian suffering in Iran with a level of detachment and blame it all on the IRGC. We should remember, though, that the Iranian regime is no more scrupulous in its choice of targets in Israel — the war crimes are on both sides.

Yet I cannot say that Israeli media covers the wider civilian effects of the war on Iranian citizens in any serious way. Pretty much 95 percent of what we get are silly, heroic odes to our courageous pilots and genius cyber fighters.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: In your view, is there a pathway towards peace in Israel? Is permanent peace even possible for Israel?

IDAN LANDAU: Ultimately there can’t be any other solution; wars eventually end, consuming nations. I just don’t think it will be “Israel” as we now know it that will see the fruits of peace.

It will be a totally different entity, somehow letting Jews and Arabs live together as equals. That’s not possible within the current regime. Sadly, the shift to non-violence only occurs after the level of death and suffering is insurmountable to both sides.

No one knows when that will be. As long as the US and Europe continue to insulate Israel from the moral consequences of its policies, it won’t change trajectory.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centres in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).

Idan Landau is an Israeli social justice activist and professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A peace advocate urged people in New Zealand today to get behind a “Stop Wars Aotearoa” campaign to oppose the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran and expand beyond solidarity with Palestine.

In the 127th week of protest against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and occupied West Bank, socialist trade union organiser Joe Carolan called on protesters to redouble their efforts.

Speaking in Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square, he praised a public meeting in Mt Eden this week that heralded the start of a rolling peace movement that echoed the efforts in a bid to halt the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq — “a war based on a lie” about non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Carolan drew comparisons between his native Ireland and the colonisation of New Zealand.

Apart from Christianity, the colonisers “needed another pretext to civilise great unwashed”. Militarism.

He paid tribute to “anyone who ran the gauntlet outside the public meeting on Wednesday that we held at the Mt Eden War Memorial Hall where we remember the price of wars — in fact working class lives — both here and abroad”.

“And we should remember the dead and not go to war again — that’s the whole point of a war memorial hall.

‘Ran the gauntlet’
“But those of us who ran the gauntlet of the people waving Israeli flags and lecturing us about human rights, waving the American flags and lecturing us about women’s rights when the place is run by rapists and pedophiles obviously – know it’s Operation Epstein Fury now.

“An operation so [US President Donald] Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu can both avoid what is coming to them which is a long time in prison until they die.”

Netanyahu is wanted on an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and Israel is on trial for genocide with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case brought by South Africa and 14 other countries.

“Many people didn’t show shock at all in the West, and condemn the murder of 170 school students — young women — that you guys purport that you want to liberate.

“You killed them. You liberated them from their lives and their blood is on the hands of those [US and Israeli] forces.

“And also Iran is a gigantic country of 90 to 100 million people. Of course, it’s not a monolithic country, there are people with many different views.

“I’ll give you two words in Irish, you might have heard them before, about who should determine Iran’s future, and that’s Sinn Féin — ‘Ourselves Alone’.

‘Run own revolution’
“Nobody has the right to determine the future of any nation, except the people who live in that nation themselves, including whether how they run their own revolution or how they run their own democracy.”

Sinn Féin is also an Irish republican political party, founded in 1905, striving for self-determination and ending British rule in Northern Ireland.

Tomorrow Te Komititanga Square is hosting an Irish cultural festival to mark the lead up to St Patrick’s Day on March 17.

Tayyaba Khan of Palestine Solidarity Network (PSNA) spoke about the mosque massacre in Christchurch on 15 March 2019 when a lone Australian gunman murdered 51 Muslims at Friday prayers in New Zealand’s worst case of terrorism. The gunman is serving a life sentence for his crimes.

Khan also remembered the survivors and their struggle to rebuild their lives.

Other speakers today highlighted how the rally was reminding the New Zealand government and the public that many in the country were totally opposed to the continuing genocide in Palestine.

“There is no ceasefire in Gaza and the US and Israeli Zionists continue to drive the Palestinian people out of their ancestral homes and land to colonise the region,” said a protest flyer.

“To everyone in the square today we invite you to join with us and the many peoples around the world in condemning the unlawful US and Israeli military assault on Iran.”

According to the Al Jazeera death toll live tracker, 1444 people have been killed in Iran, at least 15 in Israel, 11 US soldiers and 19 dead in Gulf states.

“We stand in solidarity with all the people of Iran and across the Middle East, particularly Palestine, including Gaza and Lebanon,” said rally MC Leeann Wahanui-Peters.

Al-Quds Day marked
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people around the world marked Al-Quds Day yesterday. This is marked annually to show support for Palestine and oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.

Reporting from the huge Tehran rally, Al Jazeera’s Tohid Asadi said Iranians hoped to both show their support for Palestinians and express “defiance and resilience” amid the US-Israeli attacks.

“They think that by killing us, we will be afraid, that by dropping bombs on our heads, we will be afraid. No, we stand by our country,” a woman demonstrator told Al Jazeera.

Another protester said Iranians had shown in their confrontation with the US and Israel that “the wall of oppression can be broken”.

“Today, with their presence in different squares, the people showed that it is possible to overcome injustice and break the wall of oppression,” he told Al Jazeera.

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian was also seen at the rally in the Iranian capital — shaking hands with people and posing for selfies — along with other Iranian officials, including Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

AMY GOODMAN: The US-Israeli war on Iran has entered its 11th day. Its impact is being increasingly felt across the globe. Al Jazeera is reporting residents of Tehran overnight experienced “some of the most intense bombardment” of the war.

At least 40 people were reportedly killed near the city’s Risalat Square.

In Lebanon, the death toll from Israel’s attacks are nearing 500. About 700,000 residents have been displaced.

Earlier today [March 10], Iran reportedly fired drones toward Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates, where a large fire broke out in an industrial area home to petrochemical plants. A suspected Iranian missile also hit a residential building in the capital of Bahrain, killing one person and injuring eight others.

On Monday, the Pentagon posted online a photo of a missile with the words “No Mercy” superimposed on it. An accompanying message read, “We have Only Just Begun to Fight.”

But soon after, Trump told CBS News, “I think the war is very complete, pretty ​much,” he said. Trump’s CBS interview led oil prices to drop and for global stocks to quickly rise.

But after the Wall Street markets closed, Trump told Republicans in Florida the US hasn’t “won enough.” At a news conference on Monday, ABC News reporter Selina Wang questioned Trump about the conflicting messages.

SELINA WANG: Mr. President, you’ve said the war is, quote, “very complete,” but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning. So, which is it? And how long should Americans be prepared for this war to last for?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I think you could say both. It’s the beginning. It’s the beginning of building a new country. But they certainly — they have no navy. They have no air force. They have no anti-aircraft equipment. It’s all been blown up.

“They have no radar. They have no telecommunications. And they have no leadership. It’s all gone.

“So, you know, you could look at that statement. We could — we could call it a tremendous success right now. As we leave here, I could call it, or we could go further.

“And we’re going to go further. But the big risk on that war has been over for three days. We wiped them out the first — in the first two days.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, President Trump said he had a good call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who reportedly proposed a, “quick political and diplomatic end to the Iranian conflict”.

We begin today’s show with retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell during the run-up and early years of the US war on Iraq. He’s taught national security affairs at both George Washington University and the College of William and Mary.

Colonel Wilkerson, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you respond to what has taken place over this last 11 days, starting with the diplomatic talks in Geneva between Iran and the United States? And as those talks were just wrapping up, US and Israel attacked Iran and killed the supreme leader there. Your response?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yes, and, Amy, for the second time, we violated international law in that respect, and just common human decency. And your comments at the opening of the show were spot-on, but not nearly broad and deep enough.

I come from an administration of George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney that committed war crimes, war crimes that Colin Powell and his lawyer Will Taft and I agonised over in trying to present some message to the American people about them. This administration has committed more war crimes in the last few days than I think any country since Adolf Hitler committed. And that is an incredible condemnation of this entire process.

We have bombed civilians relentlessly. We have bombed a school. We have bombed a hospital. We have struck facilities in the nature of Iran’s oil capacity that is now putting black poison all over 10-plus million people.

And we are essentially not bombing ballistic missile sites and bombing war materiel. We’re bombing people. We took a lesson from the IDF, if you will. We are bombing people, as, incidentally, they are still doing in Gaza and doing now in Lebanon.

These are all war crimes. And one wishes with fond hope that someday we might be called before the bar of justice and have to account for these war crimes. And what you just talked about is a crime also in the eyes of international relations and people who want to keep decent international relations ongoing in the world. We’re destroying that.

And on top of all of that — and this is the real serious problem here for America — Trump and Hegseth and Rubio and the other entourage of their national security complex have completely misjudged the nature of this war, as has, to a certain extent, Bibi Netanyahu.

This is a country as big as Western Europe, with 93 million people, probably 90 million of whom will fight us to the bitter death, who live in terrain that almost killed Alexander the Great. It is entirely inhospitable to military operations.

And Trump is talking about — actually talking about putting ground forces there. And the only way he will be able to claim any nature of victory is to do that. Only that will be the end of the empire’s presence in the Levant and the Middle East in general, because we will not be able to sustain that economically, physically.

We do not have the soldiers or Marines to do that. But that’s what he’s talking about. This is pure nonsense.

There was a column in Haaretz yesterday, and the title of the column, essentially, was “Trump will chicken out in this war, too.” I’m sorry, he’s not going to chicken out necessarily. That might be the tone and tint he puts to it. He’s going to be defeated, as are we.

“End of the Trump Presidency” – retired colonel slams war in Iran      Video: Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Colonel, I wanted to ask you — we played that clip with Trump talking about all the damage that Iran has sustained, but there’s been very little acknowledgment by the US military or the White House to the enormous damage that has occurred to the US military footprint in the Middle East for decades. All of these bases and radar, multibillion-dollar radar, were established throughout the region. And what’s your understanding of the nature of the damage that has occurred to all of these bases, not just among the Gulf states, but also even in Iraq and other places of the Middle East?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yeah, that damage is enormous. And I think what you’re witnessing right now is the initial steps of the empire, the American empire’s retreat from the Levant and the Middle East in general.

I don’t think we’re going to be able to sustain our presence there after what’s going to happen here, particularly if we stay at this for a long time and really do take significant casualties. We’re already taking more casualties than people know about, because the media is not being apprised of it.

Yes, we had the ceremony at Dover, but there are people getting ready at Landstuhl, our throughput hospital in Germany, right now to accept multiple casualties coming in. They’ve stopped their civilian service and so forth at that hospital. And other things are being geared up, too, like Walter Reed.

I don’t think they have even a modicum of appreciation of what kind of casualties are going to result, though, especially if we put ground forces into Iran. And that is the only way, unless he just lies completely about it, that Trump is going to be able to assert any kind of real force with regard to this population.

And to your point, in Bahrain, they have taken out billions of dollars’ worth of US radar and equipment, including the vertical missile loading cranes, so now ships have to go all the way to Diego Garcia to load these weapons.

They have essentially obliterated our capacity to carry out combat actions from a number of places in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Al Udeid is actually under under threat now, too.

And this is all part of the warp and woof of our ability to carry out combat operations in the region. I’m not even sure our biggest facility for passing on troops, throughput facility, that we used in both Iraq wars — is in Kuwait. I’m not even sure that that’s up now and able to do anything.

So, how would you even get Marines or soldiers, God forbid, into Iran? That’s a huge problem. They will sink the ships that are coming to deposit those troops wherever they’re coming.

We have not really damaged their ballistic missile capability. And the media blackout on Israel is keeping the American people from seeing the enormous degree of destruction to Israel, the latest component of which was a riposte to Israel’s having struck their oil facilities, on Haifa, their oil facility port.

And Haifa is being taken down much the way Eilat was taken down by the Houthis, the Allah Ansar, in the Red Sea, when we failed to be able to reopen the Red Sea. And that’s the next step.

The Bab al-Mandeb will be closed once the Houthis have gotten into action full time again. And 60 percent of the world’s commerce passes through the Red Sea. It’s not oil and gas exclusively. It’s all manner of things — foodstuffs, commodities and such.

So, this is a war with long legs. Trump has completely misinterpreted it. The only one who’s interpreted it correctly is Bibi Netanyahu, and I think he’s ready to use a nuclear weapon, should it become as bad as it looks like it might right now, because Iran has not even began to shoot its most sophisticated missiles.

And now the second and third class of those missiles is getting through almost without opposition. Imagine what these Mach 3, Mach 4 missiles, with huge warheads that have maybe a hundred different other warheads they display all across an area, are going to do to Israel once they’re fired.

They’re still there, and they’re still ready to fire.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Colonel, I wanted to actually — you mentioned the media coverage of what is going on in Israel. It has been amazing to me that all of the major US media are based in Israel, in Tel Aviv, yet we are seeing the least amount of coverage of what is going on within Israel.

I want to quote from a piece, an online piece, that CNN reporter Oren Liebermann posted earlier this week. And he wrote — and I’m quoting — “Every reporter in Israel — and every member of the public — is subject to a military censor. On national security grounds, the regulation authorises the censor to prohibit reporting or broadcasting any material that could reveal sensitive information or pose a threat to the country’s security interests.”

And he goes on to say, “This is particularly sensitive during wartime, where the military censor has made clear that broadcasting any images that reveal the location of interceptor missiles or military sites hit by enemy projectiles is forbidden, especially in live broadcasts.”

Now, they say this on their website, but they never mention this on air. And none of the networks are mentioning on air that they are strictly prohibited from showing any actual, real damage. I’m wondering your sense of the responsibility of the US media, especially since they’re always showing us the results of the plumes rising in Abu Dhabi or in Saudi Arabia or even in Iran, but not the direct hits that are occurring within Israel.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I’ll tell you what I told the senior editor to The Washington Post recently. I think it’s abominable, the lies that the American mainstream media, both video and print, is telling the American people. And they’re putting us in jeopardy in a real substantive sense, because the American people have no way of judging just how foolhardy, how stupid, how unwise, how violative of international dictum and rule this war is.

And when it gets to the point — I think this is the end of the Trump presidency, actually, because when it gets to the point where the pressure is so great and some of this has to come out and casualties are manifest, then the American people are going to ask really important questions: Why did you lie to us? Why did you tell us what you were telling us? Why did you start this war of choice?

Iran was no threat to the United States of America whatsoever. Did you go to war for Israel? We have heard you went to war for Israel. These are questions that are finally going to get out there in the hustings and going to have to be answered by someone, probably your local congressman, the supine body that has done nothing to check this president, particularly in the war power.

And we haven’t even talked about that.

This is a complete violation of the Constitution of the United States. Just as Kofi Annan said about the 2003 Iraq War, it’s an illegal war. And he went on to say it was a violation of our own Constitution. And he was absolutely right.

But this pales — or, that pales in comparison with what Trump is doing right now, and what he is going to probably have to do in order to seem to correct his errors.

And I’m truly worried that this destruction of Israel is going to reach a point — I listened to Netanyahu recently speaking in Hebrew to his clan, to his group — Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and others like that.

At the end of his remarks in Hebrew, which was translated for me very reliably, I think, he essentially said that if it went south, if it went bad, he was prepared to show the Iranians something they had never seen before.

I think he meant a nuclear weapon. And I go back to 1973 when Golda Meir told a BBC reporter — you can check, it was printed in London the next day on the front page — that she would use a nuclear weapon, in response to his question, “Would you use a nuclear weapon?”

Because at that time, they were pretty hard-pressed in the 1973 war. And she said, “Yes,” without equivocation. I think we’re back at that point again, and for probably a far more dangerous situation.

AMY GOODMAN: I know you have to go, Colonel Wilkerson, but I just want to point out you were the former chief of staff of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who dragged his feet on supporting the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, but ultimately gave that speech, that he would call a stain on his career, at the UN.

It was critical for Bush, President Bush, that it was Colin Powell who gave this speech, because he was seen as the reluctant warrior. And he gave that speech saying there was evidence of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. Can you make a parallel to what we’re seeing today?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I can, but I think this is far greater a travesty and a tragedy. That was bad enough. And torture was the thing that broke my back, and ultimately it sort of broke Colin Powell’s back, too, because we realised that we had signed up not only to a war that was not necessary, we had signed up to a president of the United States for the first time in the nation’s history making public policy torture.

Other human beings being tortured was made presidential public policy. This is far worse, I think, and it’s been building for some time. It’s been building all since Trump was elected, and actually since his first administration. And I think it makes what we did — not to discount it, but it makes it pale by comparison, and it makes me deeply concerned about the future of this republic.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Army colonel, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by democracynow.org on 10 March 2026.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Right now, the United States and Israel are continuing their bombardment of Iran.

As the confirmed death toll climbs past 1330 and hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods are hit daily, the media apparatus that sold you the Iraq war and denied Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians for the last two years is now running the same playbook.

The Atlantic is laundering Netanyahu’s reputation as a “conflict-averse” leader while he tells the world this war lets him do what he’s “yearned for” for 40 years.

Bari Weiss is tweeting fire emojis at pro-war clips, falsely suggesting Iran has nuclear weapons, and devoting journalistic resources to tracking the Instagram likes of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife.

CNN is giving unchallenged airtime to International Criminal Court (ICC)-indicted Israeli officials claiming American soldiers have an “obligation” to die for Israel.

And that’s before the cable news network is taken over by Paramount, the Weiss operation run by the nepo-son of Larry Ellison, the single largest donor to Friends of the IDF.

The BBC, meanwhile, leads with nine dead in Israel while relegating some 180 children killed by the U.S. in a girls’ school in Minab to a footnote.

This is what the legacy media machine looks like in wartime. It has always looked like this.

And it is exactly why we launched Drop Site less than two years ago.

While Weiss and CBS were manufacturing consent for this war, Drop Site has had reporters on the ground reporting the facts.

In just the last week:

• Reza Sayah reported from Tehran on a double-tap bombing that killed over 20 people at a popular square during Ramadan, connecting the tactic to US strikes in Afghanistan, and Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza.
• Drop Site correspondent reported from Minab, where a missile struck a girls’ elementary school and killed 180 children, and from Lamerd, where a sports hall full of teenage girls was bombed during practice.
• We were among the first outlets on the ground verifying the strike in Minab as US and Israeli propagandists sought to deny and deflect.
• We have consistently obtained exclusive information from senior Iranian officials who have contradicted claims by Trump, claims that have just as consistently fallen apart under scrutiny.
• We exposed the fabricated CIA narrative about “tracking Khamenei for months” to his “secret location” — his secret location was his office, and he had refused to relocate.

Republished from Drop Site News.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Funny . . . back when Russia invaded Ukraine, New Zealand didn’t wait for Vladimir Putin to tell us whether his acts of aggression were legal under international law. Instead, we immediately decided the invasion was illegal, and forthrightly condemned Russia’s actions at the time, and ever since.

Different story when it comes to the Americans. Apparently, we’re on Team USA when it comes to international law, which forbids aggression against a sovereign state in the absence of an imminent threat to the aggressor.

Repeatedly though, Christopher Luxon told RNZ this morning that it is up to the US and Israel to tell us whether their attacks on Iran are in breach of international law.

Given that diplomatic negotiations were still under way in Geneva to find a peaceful compromise — a process supported by all of Iran’s immediate neighbours — there is no credible case that Iran was posing an imminent threat.

For 20 years, Israel has been claiming that Iran is on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon, but this threat has never materialised.

Last June, the US claimed to have “obliterated” Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon. (Israel, btw, has a large stockpile of them.)

Unfortunately, the babbling doofus we have in place of a Prime Minister seems to be intent on remaining in denial about such matters.

Luxon appears determined to exempt his friends — the US and Israel — from compliance with the rules of international law that apply to everyone else. So much for us being honest brokers on the world stage.

In reality, letting our traditional allies break international law whenever they see fit, is the surest way of undermining the entire system.

Regime change – how?
US President Donald Trump says he aims to bring about regime change in Iran. If so, that can’t be brought about entirely from the air, no matter how intensive the bombing campaign may be.

Decapitation strikes against the top tiers of Iranian leadership will also not, in themselves, bring about regime change. Others will surely replace the fallen.

Besides, the US and Israel can hardly urge Iran to negotiate a peace, while continuing to kill everyone with the authority to make a credible deal.

In all likelihood, it will take tens of thousands of foreign troops on the ground to (a) topple the regime and (b) protect from guerrilla action whatever regime the US puts in its place.

The last 20 years of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein should have taught the Americans just how long, bloody, costly and unpredictable that aftermath is likely to be.

Yet here we go again. As veteran political analyst Fred Kaplan put it on Slate:

“It is worth recalling that, in 2003, President George W. Bush sent 150,000 troops to depose Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, yet even they were unable to impose order but instead incited an insurgency and a civil war that lasted nearly a decade and destabilised the entire region.

“It is not clear how Trump’s stab at regime change without any ground support — in a country three times the size of Iraq — will be any smoother . . . [even] assuming the war succeeds in its strategic aim of regime change, the likeliest outcome will be a new dictatorship, a civil war among various armed factions, or utter anarchy and chaos, reminiscent of Libya after the killing of Muammar Gaddafi.”

Do we care about the outcome? Or are we waiting for the US to tell us not to worry out little heads about such matters?

Bombing is the easy part
Before launching this offensive, Trump made no attempt to enlist allied countries — in Europe or elsewhere — in this campaign. At present, this is solely a US/Israeli joint operation, with the indirect help of those states in the region that have American bases on their soil.

So far — cross fingers — Iran has chosen not to sabotage the Straits of Hormuz, a key transit route for oil and gas exports from the region, and a waterway on which global commerce depends.

At this point, Trump is talking of waging a bombing campaign lasting for days, or a week, after which . . . what? Trump has also called on the Iranian people to rebel. (That seems unlikely for a variety of reasons, including the ferocity of the suppression of Iran’s recent “cost of living” protests.)

The mullahs appear to be planning on a longer conflict. Reportedly, Iran has been limiting its initial missile responses in order to conserve its estimated 3000 missile stockpile for attacks on Israel and regional US bases in the weeks and months ahead.

From this distance, and given the internet blackout, it is impossible to gauge where the balance of public opinion currently lies in Iran.

No doubt, there will be elation in some quarters that the leaders of a hated regime are dead or suffering, and that the regime’s survival is now in question. “Anything but the status quo” is likely to be a common response.

Millions of other Iranians however resist the attacks, and have been out on the streets mourning the Supreme Leader. If the regime falls, its true believers will still regard it as their sacred duty to continue to resist, by all means possible.

Even the current elation is likely to be tempered by the knowledge that Iran’s “liberators” — the US, Israel, the Gulf states — do not have the wellbeing of the Iranian people in mind.

Meaning: the last democratically elected government in Iran was the Mosaddegh government. This was overthrown in 1953 by the Americans, who bankrolled a coup and then installed the Shah on the Peacock Throne.

The coup gave American oil companies continued access to Iran’s vast oil supplies, until the Islamic revolution occurred in 1979. In the 1980s, the West also backed Saddam Hussein in his war of aggression against Iran, a conflict that turned into a grinding deadlock estimated to have cost a million lives.

America has earned the hostility of Iran, over decades.

Iran, at a crossroad
Iran has a proud history, and a rich national culture. Normally, the mullahs could have relied on that fierce national pride to unite the country against foreign forces. In addition, Shia Islam has a strong tradition of sacrifice and martyrdom, commemorated annually in the day of Ashura.

That said, the recent slaughter of tens of thousands of people protesting the country’s economic conditions (caused by global sanctions) has put a question mark over how many Iranians will be willing to bury their differences, and fight back against foreign domination.

To repeat: the US had no credible reason for starting this war, and has no credible end game for it.

Over the weekend, Trump has desperately — and absurdly — delved back into history to paint Iran as posing an existential threat to the United States and the region, in order to justify this war to his MAGA sceptics.

Let’s be clear. Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. Furthermore, its ability to intervene in the affairs of the Middle East has been sharply reduced over the past 18 months.

This hasn’t stopped the US from distorting the relevant history. For example: Trump and his minions have cited the deaths of 241 US Marines in Lebanon in 1983, and laid the blame at Iran’s door.

For the record, those 241 Marines — and 58 French troops — were killed by suicide bombers, in attacks claimed by Islamic Jihad, a Sunni extremist group only later linked to the Lebanese Hezbollah militia.

These attacks came in the wake of (a) the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and (b) the return of a multinational peacekeeping force to Beirut after (c) hundreds of Palestinians living in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps had been massacred by Christian gunmen, egged on by the Israeli commander, Ariel Sharon.

To paint this terrible episode as being caused solely by Iran is a travesty. Undaunted, Trump has also blamed Iran for the attack in 2000 on the American warship the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors in the port of Aden.

Even the US intelligence agencies have attributed the USS Cole attack to Al Qaeda. Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda are Sunni Islamic extremist groups, and were long time opponents of the Shia theocracy in Iran.

I’m not trying to defend the regime in Tehran. The point is to emphasise that there was no credible justification for the US offensive and New Zealand should be backing up UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in his criticism of the US aggression.

(Not) going nuclear
As for the nuclear weapons “threat” that Iran allegedly posed . . . In 2015, Iran signed a deal with the US via which Iran promised to forego the development of nuclear weapons in return for the US (and Europe) lifting trade sanctions.

This was a victory for the Iranian moderates within the regime.

Iran also agreed to allow in UN inspectors, who regularly confirmed that Iran was in full compliance with the terms of that deal. However, Trump tore up the deal as soon as he was elected, thereby boosting the hardliners in Tehran who had claimed all along that the US could not be trusted to keep its word.

Since then, Trump has engaged in indirect talks with Iran to re-negotiate a new version of the 2015 pact, and twice Israel and the US have bombed Iran and killed its leaders while those negotiations were still being held.

To the US and the Israelis, diplomacy seems to be merely a trick to lure out into the open the people that they have been planning to assassinate, all along.

Footnote: In Venezuela, the US has taken military action to secure control of that country’s oil reserves. It may well have oil wealth in mind in Iran, too.

If the US can install another puppet in Tehran as obedient as the Shah, Iran’s refineries will once again be at the mercy of US oil companies. No doubt, access to oil will be at heart of any further “negotiations” over a ceasefire.

Republished with permission from Gordon Campbell’s column in partnership with Scoop.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

For decades, the United States and Israel have stuck closely to their respective, scripted roles in the Middle East: the job of good cop and bad cop.

The charade has continued despite Washington’s active participation in Israel’s 25-month slaughter of Gaza’s people — and a dawning realisation among ever-larger sections of Western publics that they have been duped.

Here is my first prediction of 2026: this law enforcement role-playing is going to continue even after the Trump administration’s outrageously illegal abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, at the weekend, and Trump’s admission that the US attack was about grabbing the country’s oil.

The path to Caracas — and potentially next to Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland and Canada, other targets of Donald Trump’s greed — was paved in Gaza.

It is worth standing back, as one year ends and another begins, to consider how we got here, and what lies ahead.

The central conceit of the good cop, bad cop narrative is that both the US and Israel are the ones upholding the law and fighting the criminals.

Unlike the Hollywood version, neither of these real-world cops is in any way good. But there is a further difference: the spectacle is not intended for those the pair confront. After all, the Palestinians know only too well that they have been suffering for decades under the boot of a lawless, joint US-Israeli criminal enterprise.

No, the intended audience are the onlookers: Western publics.

Ban on aid groups
The US “honest broker” myth should have perished long ago. But somehow it persists, despite the evidence endlessly discrediting it. And that is because Western capitals and Western media keep propping the myth up, treating it as a plausible description of events it simply cannot explain.

Nothing has disrupted the official “policing” storyline in Gaza, supposedly against Hamas “law-breaking”.

It is now echoed in Trump’s outlandish claim that his self-declared oil grab in Venezuela is really about bringing Maduro to justice for supposed drug trafficking — or “narco-terrorism” as the administration prefers to call it.

Why has Gaza dropped off the front pages? Only because the “good cop” declares it has brought hostilities from the “bad cop” to an end.

Last week, Trump publicly applauded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, for sticking to the president’s so-called “peace plan”. “Israel has lived up to the plan, 100 percent,” Trump declared.

The reality, however, is that Israel violated the “ceasefire” nearly 1000 times in the first two months after it was supposed to go into effect, in mid-October. Israel continues to kill and starve the people of Gaza, if at a slower rate.

Last week, Israel announced it was banning 37 humanitarian organisations from Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders, which supports one in five emergency hospitals beds in the strip. The group noted that Israel was “cutting off life-saving medical assistance for hundreds of thousands of people”.

The ceasefire is just the latest storyline in a two-year piece of theatre.

Horrifying dream
While Western capitals and the media stubbornly adhere to the good cop, bad cop narrative, Western publics have started waking from it, as if from a bad dream.

The mass demonstrations of two years ago may have gradually shrunk in numbers, but only after western politicians and media waged an aggressive war of attrition and campaign of vilification against them. Public exhaustion has set in.

The cause of the disbelief and anger that spurred millions to take to the streets, and to campuses, remains unaddressed. Western powers are still colluding deeply in Israel’s crimes. The public’s initial outrage has slowly hardened into a burning resentment and disdain towards their own political and media establishments.

That mood intensifies each time western officials, unable to win the argument, resort to force.

Britain illustrates especially starkly the authoritarian, repressive trends visible across the West.

There, protests against genocide have been designated “hate marches”. Slogans in solidarity with the Palestinians are now grounds for arrest for antisemitism. Journalists critical of the government have been arrested or their homes raided.

Support for practical action to stop the genocide, by targeting the weapons factories supplying Israel with killer drones, is now classed as terrorism.

The government is flaunting its indifference – again backed by the media – as anti-genocide activists risk death to protest the outlawing of Palestine Action and their abusive treatment by prison authorities, in the biggest UK hunger strike since the IRA’s nearly half a century ago.

To no effect, a group of United Nations legal experts – called special rapporteurs –expressed grave concern last month at the UK’s flouting of international law in its treatment of the hunger-strikers, who face prolonged detention on remand in violation of British law.

Just before Christmas, the world’s most famous environmental campaigner, Greta Thunberg, was arrested in London by the Metropolitan Police for holding a sign drawing attention to the plight of those prisoners.

This has been a process of escalation, of upping the stakes. First, opposition to Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians was conflated with antisemitism. Now opposition to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians is conflated with terrorism.

Scrapping jury trials
The task of Western establishments — and their media — has been to shore up a patently duplicitous narrative to excuse their complicity in the Gaza genocide: that the more vocal the criticism of Israel, the more evident the antisemitism.

The implication is clear. The correct response to that genocide is silence.

Ultimately, domestic courts in the UK — led by a judiciary highly unrepresentative of wider British society — are unlikely to hold the line against this all-out assault on law, morality and basic logic.

The test will be a ruling by the High Court, expected soon, on the legality of the British government’s decision to outlaw Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation — the first time a direct-action group has been proscribed in British history.

Worryingly, the judge hearing the case — who, in approving the judicial review, had indicated a degree of scepticism about proscription — was removed from the hearing at the last minute and without explanation. He was replaced by a new panel of three judges who have a track record of demonstrating more deference to the British state.

Ousting the review judge in the appeal against Palestine Action’s proscription, and replacing him with three new judges, is a desperate attempt to create a veneer of judicial authority in support of the actions of Starmer’s outlaw government.

My latest: https://t.co/r84WPOfAT4 pic.twitter.com/ace8CbDIZv

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 26, 2025

The lacuna in this growing domestic architecture of authoritarianism is the right to trial by jury. Unsurprisingly, juries have a tendency to take a far more critical view of the British establishment’s behaviour than the establishment does itself.

For centuries, juries have been a central component of fair trials, and viewed as a fundamental to a justice system capable of limiting state power and governmental overreach.

Now the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced plans to scrap many jury trials — citing the need to address a record backlog of cases, a backlog it is failing to address by properly funding the court system.

Once the principle is conceded, it is surely only a matter of time before all jury trials are eradicated.

Bank accounts frozen
Already, under government direction, judges in political trials — notably in climate protest cases — have been denying defendants the chance to explain their motivations and reasoning to juries.

That is because too often, when presented with information the media has withheld from them, those juries acquit.

Starmer’s government understands that efforts to crush the Palestinian solidarity movement, and chill speech critical of UK complicity in genocide, depend on securing convictions. Juries are an obstacle.

Even so, the government has up its sleeve other punishments — outside the scope of judicial scrutiny — that can be used to penalise pro-Palestinian activism, whether it be efforts to stop Israel’s genocide or to simply ameliorate the suffering of its victims.

Last month it emerged that the National Crime Agency, a body answerable to government ministers, was likely behind efforts to economically intimidate and vilify the wider Palestinian solidarity movement.

The bank accounts of solidarity groups in Manchester and Scotland have been frozen, as part of investigations into Palestine Action, despite neither having an affiliation with the direct-action group.

These underhand, extrajudicial moves by the government hamper efforts to raise or donate money to charities that help feed Palestinians in Gaza, treat the wounded and house those without shelter in the winter.

It is hard to get one’s head round the depravity of these decisions.

Declared non-person
This is far from just a British problem. Other Western states are following suit in a bid not only to rehabilitate the genocidal state of Israel but to erase any perception of their own participation in its crimes.

And the template is being rolled out not just domestically but at the international level too.

While Western states bully their publics into silence on Gaza, international humanitarian institutions have done their best to hold their nerve.

United Nations special rapporteurs — independent legal experts — have issued a series of damning reports on Israel’s genocide and Western complicity.

The US responded last week by slashing $15 billion from its funding of UN humanitarian agencies.

Most visible among the rapporteurs has been the UN’s expert on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese. Washington’s response to her has been illuminating.

In July she was placed on a US Treasury sanctions list normally reserved for those accused of terrorism, drug trafficking or money laundering. Her listing came a few days after she published her report on the collusion of Western corporations in Israel’s genocide.

The US sanctions violate the diplomatic immunity she enjoys as a UN official and make it impossible for her to attend meetings at UN headquarters in New York.

With the US effectively exercising a stranglehold on the international financial system, the sanctions also mean no banks or credit cards will allow her to use their services. She cannot be paid by employers. She cannot book a flight or hotel.

Universities, human rights institutions and charities have cut her adrift for fear of facing reprisals themselves if they continue to have dealings with her.

Her assets in the US have been frozen, including her bank account and an apartment. It is unlikely her new book on Palestine can be distributed in the US.

Effectively, Albanese has been turned into a “non-person”, with the silent consent of Western politicians and media.

ICC sanctioned
The State Department justified the sanctions on the grounds Albanese had recommended that the International Criminal Court (ICC) issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

In fact, ICC judges approved the arrest warrants in November 2024 after the court’s prosecutors amassed evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Netanyahu and Gallant, chiefly over their imposition of an aid blockade to starve Gaza’s population.

It was no surprise, therefore, that the Trump administration has issued similar sanctions against eight judges at the Hague war crimes court, either for approving those arrest warrants or for authorising an investigation into crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan.

In an executive order announcing the sanctions in February, Trump declared a “national emergency”, saying the court represented an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”.

You might imagine that this lawless move against some of the most renowned jurists in the world would have provoked considerable pushback in Europe. You would be wrong. The all-out assault on one of the main pillars of international law has been barely mentioned.

Le Monde broke ranks in November to interview French judge Nicolas Guillou. He detailed the impact since he was sanctioned in August: “All my accounts with American companies, such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others, have been closed . . .  Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s.”

European banks, fearful of the US Treasury, also closed his accounts, and European companies refuse to provide him with services.

He concluded: “Putting someone under sanctions creates a state of permanent anxiety and powerlessness, with the intent of discouragement.”

Washington has sanctioned too the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, and two of his deputies.

In fact, Khan, a British lawyer, has found himself embroiled in a protracted legal and reputational struggle ever since he submitted the applications in May 2024.

That included threats, reported by Middle East Eye, from the then UK foreign secretary David Cameron that Britain would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute that founded the ICC if Khan did not back down.

‘Might is right’ politics
Clearly, Israel and the US are eager to intimidate the court, and ready to destroy it rather than be judged by international law standards and held accountable for their crimes.

But the sanctions have an additional audience: the International Court of Justice (ICJ), sometimes referred to as the World Court.

Its panel of 15 judges have issued a series of rulings over the past two years against Israel.

Most explosively, the ICJ ruled in January 2024 that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. As a result, the ICJ is currently investigating Israel for this, the ultimate crime.

The wheels of justice turn slowly at the World Court. But its judges are undoubtedly watching the treatment of Albanese and the ICC with alarm.

Like gangsters, Israel and the US are sending a very direct message to each of the ICJ judges: you will be punished too, if you dare to find us guilty.

ICC judge Nicholas Gillou notes that Europe could show solidarity with the victims of these sanctions by invoking what is known as “a blocking statute” – a mechanism that protects EU citizens and companies from the effects of sanctions imposed by third countries.

But any hope that Europe will break ranks with the US and Israel over this naked attack on the two main courts upholding international law — bulwarks against a return to “might is right” global politics — is almost certainly forlorn.

Last month, drawing on the Trump playbook, the European Union imposed economic sanctions on a dozen of its own critics.

Notable was the inclusion of Jacques Baud, a former colonel in the Swiss army. His distinguished military career includes leading peacekeeping missions for the UN, including in Rwanda and Sudan, and serving as a Nato senior strategic analyst.

Reputational assassination
Baud was accused of no crime. His offence is being deeply critical of European officials and the strategic coherence of their support for war in Ukraine. Given his military expertise, his analyses are embarrassing European establishments.

The draconian sanctions mean he is effectively imprisoned in Belgium, where he lives. He cannot leave to return to Switzerland. His assets are frozen. He cannot use a bank account and cannot have any kind of economic relations with other citizens of the EU.

Baud cannot appeal the decision or subject it to judicial review. Like Albanese he has been turned into a non-person.

A precedent has thereby been set that means anyone who challenges Western leaders — whether judges, journalists, lawyers, or human rights groups — could similarly end up destitute.

What the US and the EU are rolling out are extrajudicial reputational assassinations and economic incarcerations, as a way to silence critics and watchdogs, that cannot be appealed.

This is a model Israel and its lobbyists in the West have been trialling for years.

The US doxing website Canary Mission, for example, seeks to destroy the careers and livelihoods of students and academics critical of Israel.

Meanwhile, the lawfare group UK Lawyers for Israel is currently under investigation for threatening individuals and groups with vexatious legal actions to pressure them into retracting their solidarity with Palestinians.

Criminals in charge
Washington — the gangster-in-chief posing as global policeman — refuses to accept any limitations on its actions. If legal authorities, whether domestic or international, try to stand in its way, they are either punished or pushed aside.

In this topsy-turvy world, Trump’s naked exercise of colonial violence is feted as peace-making. As he was massing troops off Venezuela’s coast last month, Fifa, the international football federation, awarded him its inaugural “peace prize” — an honour created specifically to stroke his ego.

Though the Nobel Committee could not bring itself to hand the peace prize directly to Trump, its judges did the next best thing. They awarded it to Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuela opposition leader who has publicly called on the US to invade her country and seize its resources.

The complete abandonment of long-standing international legal safeguards puts everyone in jeopardy — all the more so when technological developments mean states have near-absolute control over their citizens’ lives, and superpowers can use ever more sophisticated weapons to wreck countries at little cost to themselves in blood or treasure.

But paradoxically, the very act of dismantling the global system of international law is still being dressed up in the garb of law enforcement.

Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza is supposedly needed to defeat Hamas’ “illegitimate” rule. The abduction of Maduro from Caracas is sold as the enforcement of drug-trafficking laws.

European leaders’ response to Trump’s crime of aggression against Venezuela signals where things head next.

Britain’s Starmer effectively welcomed Washington’s criminal regime-change operation and threat to occupy Venezuela to control its oil. He said he “shed no tears” for Maduro.

Similarly, Kaja Kallas, Europe’s foreign policy chief, emphasised Maduro’s supposed lack of “legitimacy”.

Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, Greenland, Canada — all in Washington’s sights — should fear that similar “legal” pretexts will be found to justify attacks on their own sovereignty.

Trump’s favourite new catchphrase is that he can do global business “the easy way or the hard way”.

Now, having shredded international law, the “good cop” looks ready to discard an outdated disguise and reveal the serial villain underneath.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published by the Middle East Eye and reepublished from the author’s blog with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

SPECIAL REPORT: By Qasem Waleed El-Farra

On October 19, Israel launched a barrage of airstrikes across the Gaza Strip, killing dozens of people in a blatant violation of US President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan, which had come into effect just over a week earlier.

And a day after world leaders had gathered in Egypt to discuss implementation, I went back to my neighborhood in eastern Khan Younis on October 14 to gather anything that could protect me and my family against the approaching winter — clothes, sheets, wood, books even, for those cold nights where there will be little else to do but read.

I had not long been searching through the rubble of my home — which has been completely destroyed — when I heard shooting and saw people running.

I had been in enough of such situations to know not to ask questions. I left everything I had pulled from under the rubble and fled back toward downtown Khan Younis.

While we were — yet again — fleeing our area, I learned that an Israeli quadcopter had attacked a group of civilians in the area. One of them, I was told, was shot right in the heart.

I’ve faced death many times throughout the genocide. But this time was different. This was just one day after Trump, backed by a number of world leaders, announced a plan to bring peace to Gaza and the Middle East.

That day, Israel had also announced that Zikim beach, which is located in the Gaza Strip envelope, to enable the Israeli settlers there to “breathe again.”

When I arrived in my tent in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis, I pondered just one question: Is this the ceasefire they want to bring us? Or do they just want to announce a cessation of violence, but have no interest in enforcing it?

Targeting global solidarity
As a person in Gaza who has been living through a genocide for two years and five major Israeli attacks on Gaza before that, the term “ceasefire” is selective and always shadowed with deadly threats.

As far as I have experienced, the word simply means that Israel is able to do whatever it wants. We aren’t.

More broadly, for Israel, ”peace” in Palestine equals a Palestine with no Palestinians, as Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior government ministers have made very clear.

Over the years, Palestinians have learned the hard way that when the colonial plans and their various institutional manifestations — from the Peel Commission in 1936 to Trump’s “Board of Peace” — are formed, allegedly to bring peace, the oppressed people’s rights are lost.

The reason is that behind the proposal, there is always a gun pointed at us.

Or, like how Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, put it: “Ceasefire according to Israel = ‘you cease, I fire.’”

💥Again: Ceasefire according to Israel=“you cease, I fire.” Calling it “peace” is both an insult and a distraction.
All eyes on Palestine: Israel must face justice, sanctions, divestment, boycott UNTIL occupation, apartheid and genocide are over and every crime is accounted for. https://t.co/K73I2177Ms

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) October 14, 2025

When I read through the Trump-Netanyahu 20-point ceasefire plan for Gaza, all I could think of is that we have gone back a century in time: It is another colonial promise of peace that includes everyone but Palestinians, the land’s native population.

Of course, in Gaza, we all want this ceasefire to hold, to save what remains of our home. Still, it does not take a genius to see that the ceasefire plan is nothing but a grotesque charade directed by Trump and Netanyahu — a desperate move to save Israel from being internationally isolated, especially after the unprecedented pro-Palestine demonstrations across the globe.

Thus, the plan deprives Gaza of the increasing momentum of world support, while also resulting in the continued loss of people and land in Gaza. It is either Netanyahu’s rock or Trump’s hard place.

On-off genocide
The ceasefire plan depends fundamentally on a phased Israeli withdrawal “based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarisation that will be agreed upon between the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], ISF [International Stabilisation Force], the guarantors, and the United States.”

In more precise terms, there is no specified timeline.

This means that with Israeli troops withdrawal to the yellow line on the plan’s map, it is still in control of 58 percent of Gaza, and while some people might be able to return to their areas of residence, I cannot.

The plan has allowed Israel to do what it does best — stall, manipulate and deceive. By October 28, according to Gaza’s authorities, Israel had breached the ceasefire 125 times.

The killings continue, aid is still being hindered and the Rafah crossing remains closed, denying people travel to receive urgent medical treatment.

A significant reason for the continued killing in Gaza is that the Israeli withdrawal lines are tricky and ambiguous, even unknown to locals, especially those who live in the eastern part of Gaza.

On October 17, for instance, Israel killed 11 members of the Abu Shaaban family: seven children, three women and the father, as they returned to check on their house in the al-Zaytoun neighborhood of eastern Gaza City.

In my neighborhood, Sheikh Nasser, in eastern Khan Younis, neighbors marked a destroyed house with a big red sheet to warn others not to cross further.

We have witnessed two prior ceasefire agreements in the past two years of genocide. Both times I hoped they would bring an end to our misery. Many of us in Gaza remain very sceptical about this ceasefire, and we can’t afford to let hope in our hearts again.

Israel loves to fish in muddy water, or, like we in Gaza like to put it, ala nakshah, meaning that Israel is merely awaiting any slight excuse to resume the killing.

Netanyahu has repeatedly made it obvious that it’s either his political future or our future. For as long as he is in power, Israel will keep coming for us in an on-off genocide in order to make our misery constant.

This is the “peace” we are offered after two years of suffering the crime of crimes.

Qasem Waleed El-Farra is a physicist based in Gaza. His article was first published by The Electronic Intifada on 6 November 2025.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

EDWARD SAID MEMORIAL LECTURE: By Chris Hedges

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed “deep gratitude” for Papua New Guinea’s support to his country over many years and during the Middle East conflict.

Prime Minister James Marape was given the message directly yesterday by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel during a courtesy call at Melanesian House, Waigani.

The support by PNG, Fiji and a handful of other Pacific nations is controversial in the face of Israel’s growing global pariah status over its two-year genocidal war on the besieged enclave of Gaza that has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians.

A fragile ceasefire is in place between Israel and the liberation movement Hamas with the last 20 living Israeli captives being released last week in exchange for almost 2000 Palestinian prisoners, most of them held without charge.

Last month, the UN General Assembly endorsed a landmark declaration in support of an independent State of Palestine, with 142 votes in favour.

Ten countries voted against, half of them from the Pacific — Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, PNG, and Tonga — while the only other countries supporting Israel and its backer United States, were Argentina, Hungary and Paraguay. Twelve countries abstained.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Haskel highlighted Prime Minister Marape’s earlier decision to open the PNG embassy in Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv — the first Asia Pacific country to do so — and for supporting Israel at the UN, report the Post-Courier and the PNG Bulletin.

“My visit here was specifically addressed by the Prime Minister [Netanyahu] to see how we can strengthen our friendship further, and to say ‘thank you’ for standing beside us especially in the last two years,” she said.

‘Darkest hours’
“These have been some of our darkest hours since 7 October 2023 . . .

“And you have been one of the most outstanding friends we have standing together on the international front, on bilateral relationship, and in international forums.

She said the people of Israel were “extremely grateful” for the opening of the PNG embassy in Jerusalem.

“This is acknowledgement of our history, our tradition, and of us — the Jewish people — who are the indigenous people of the land of Israel; that we are able to return to revive our religion, culture and language in our ancestral homeland,” Haskel claimed.

She said Netanyahu had requested that the visit to PNG and the Pacific should proceed without delay.

Prime Minister Marape reaffirmed Papua New Guinea’s commitment to the bilateral relationship, highlighting that PNG recognised Israel’s “rights to the land of Israel through its Judeo-Christian worldview”, and continued to recognise Jerusalem as the “eternal” capital of Israel through the PNG embassy.

He added that the embassy opening had encouraged other Pacific countries — such as Fiji — to also establish their diplomatic missions in Jerusalem.

Only four other countries have done so.

Haskel reconfirmed Israel’s commitment to continue assisting PNG in the fields of science and technology, agriculture, health, small business development, and women’s empowerment.

During her two-day visit to PNG, Haskel and her delegation are meeting with ministers in respective fields.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Benjamin Netanyahu insisted, until just hours before Donald Trump’s arrival, that the war in Gaza would not stop. Then, standing in the Knesset before Israel’s hardline ministers, Trump announced that it had — and whisked a delegation of world leaders to Egypt to formalise the ceasefire before a global audience.

The message was unmistakable: Israel’s prime minister could no longer block peace without suffering public humiliation. Facing ministers who, only a day earlier, had vowed to press on with the war, Trump imposed an abrupt reversal — one that only he could engineer.

He came to Jerusalem not merely to speak, but to enforce the deal already reached and leave Netanyahu no choice but to comply or lose face.

He then carried that spectacle to Sharm el-Sheikh, gathering heads of state and government from the Middle East, Asia, and Europe to witness and sign the cessation of war.

The first phase — halting hostilities and exchanging prisoners — represented the sole ground on which both sides could agree. But the phases that follow are riddled with complications: a path of shifting sands, vague clauses, and undefined timelines, where the devil hides in every single point.

Trump’s declaration, messages and summit
Trump’s arrival in Israel was theatrical. He entered the Knesset, addressed lawmakers and ministers, praised Netanyahu’s wartime leadership, and then made a sweeping proclamation: the war was over.

That was a bold reversal from the very ministers he faced only hours earlier, who had publicly affirmed their intention to continue the conflict.

The symbolism mattered more than the logic. By announcing the end of the war in Israel’s Parliament, Trump cornered Netanyahu in front of his hardline allies and the world.

If the Israeli leader dared to resume hostilities, he would be defying not only his own coalition but a global consensus. Trump also asked President Isaac Herzog — then present — to pardon Netanyahu from his ongoing corruption charges, invoking the president’s constitutional prerogative.

The gesture fused diplomacy, domestic politics, and Israeli justice in a single, calculated act of theatre.

From Israel, Trump flew to Egypt, where on 13 October 2025 many of the world’s leaders convened at the Sharm el-Sheikh Peace Summit to formalise the Gaza ceasefire.

The event was co-chaired by Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The summit hosted delegations from approximately 27 countries, representing leaders from the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and international organisations.

The guest list included Emmanuel Macron, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz, Pedro Sánchez, Mahmoud Abbas, António Guterres, António Costa, and the Arab League’s Ahmed Aboul Gheit.

Notably absent were formal representatives of Hamas and Israel itself. Netanyahu had accepted the invitation initially but later declined, citing a conflict with a Jewish holiday and diplomatic pressure from certain participants.

Many leaders refused to meet with him and declined the invitation for that very reason.

At the summit, Trump, Sisi, the Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Erdoğan signed what was called the Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity — a symbolic document laying out commitments to maintain the ceasefire, support reconstruction, and discourage future conflict.

By bringing so many leaders together in one place, Trump embedded the ceasefire into a global diplomatic architecture, making it harder for Netanyahu and his extremist ministers to reverse course without triggering international backlash.

Israel’s unfulfilled objectives
Despite the scale of destruction, Israel failed to achieve any of its declared military or political objectives in Gaza. The circumstances of this devastating war were unprecedented — and yet, even with such intensity, Israel failed to ethnically cleanse Gaza or alter its demographic reality.

It did not eliminate Hamas or its leadership; it could not rescue its captives through force; it failed to dismantle the movement’s military infrastructure or install a new governing authority in the enclave.

After months of bombardment, Israel still controlled only half of Gaza and faced renewed armed resistance in areas it claimed to have “cleared”. The campaign, designed to restore deterrence, instead exposed Israel’s limitations: overwhelming firepower, backed fully by the United States, but diminishing strategic capacity.

Internationally, the assault deepened Israel’s isolation, eroded its moral legitimacy, and unified global opinion against it. What Netanyahu had promised as a decisive victory ended in a political and military stalemate — the very failure that forced Trump’s intervention.

Many Arab leaders refused to meet with Netanyahu, and Trump himself failed to bring him to Sharm el-Sheikh.

Why Trump intervened
Netanyahu had long survived politically by delaying agreements, shifting blame, and keeping his options open. But this time, the war had devastated Gaza to such an extent that global public opinion — and even international institutions, including the United Nations — began to describe Israel’s actions as genocide.

Israel’s reputation, and Netanyahu’s with it, lay in ruins.

Trump’s intervention offered a lifeline. By casting himself as the architect of peace, he provided Netanyahu with an escape route — a political rescue disguised as diplomacy.

Netanyahu’s coalition, under pressure from its far-right partners, had no credible argument left against a deal once it was validated by world leaders. Trump’s carefully staged ceasefire left Netanyahu with only two choices: resist and face international isolation and sanctions, or comply and survive politically.

Trump also reminded Netanyahu, both publicly and privately, that Israel’s campaign had depended entirely on American weapons.

“He called for different kinds of weapons all the time,” Trump said — a remark that exposed the scale of US complicity. The message was unmistakable: if Israel defied the ceasefire, the stream of arms that had sustained its war could be cut off.

It was an implicit acknowledgment from Trump himself of Washington’s partnership in the devastation of Gaza — a conflict that killed and wounded more than 10 percent of the enclave’s population.

The bombs that rained down on civilians had been supplied on a fast track, lavishly and without restraint, enabling the destruction that Trump now sought to end.

The fragile structure of the deal
The agreement Trump brokered was only the first stage. It prioritised the release of hostages and prisoners — a symbolic and political victory — but left withdrawal, reconstruction, governance, and disarmament undefined.

Netanyahu accepted phase one, but the path ahead is laced with traps. He intends to resume operations against Hamas, undermine clauses he dislikes, and prevent the formation of a Palestinian authority capable of governing Gaza.

Resistance groups are unlikely to lay down all arms; they may surrender heavy weapons like missiles while keeping small arms, ensuring that Israel remains vulnerable to renewed attacks.

The result is de facto partition: Palestinians control parts of Gaza while Israel holds the rest. Each side asserts authority over its zone, and both will use pressure to influence the other.

Netanyahu’s political calculus
Domestically, Netanyahu faces a precarious balancing act. If President Herzog pardons him, it removes the legal threat but not the political cost of the failures of October 7.

Critics will question why Israel did not negotiate a prisoner exchange earlier, when more hostages might have survived.

Should his popularity fall, Netanyahu may dissolve his government and call snap elections — likely before October 2026 — to regain legitimacy. The far-right ministers in his coalition, such as Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, are unlikely to respect the ceasefire.

Nevertheless, they, along with Netanyahu who shares the same objective, have no intention of conceding Palestinian statehood or allowing lasting peace. Trump’s deal restricts Netanyahu’s room for manoeuvre, but whether he abides by it or quietly undermines it remains to be seen.

Trump positioned himself as the guarantor of the ceasefire. For the remaining three years of his mandate, Netanyahu will be constrained: he cannot break the agreement without triggering diplomatic consequences.

But ending the Gaza campaign is not the same as resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which remains untouched. Trump’s envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, remain in Israel to monitor Netanyahu and ensure he does not quietly restart hostilities.

Their presence keeps pressure alive, but it cannot be permanent. Netanyahu, long known for exploiting ambiguities in past agreements, will test every margin.

Public trust in him is weak — among Israelis, world leaders, and his own ministers. If he obstructs the deal, he risks splitting from Washington’s agenda and losing what remains of Israel’s legitimacy.

Trump’s broader aim is to rehabilitate Israel’s global image. He believes halting the war helps Israel recover its reputation while giving Netanyahu a way to maintain power. But his gamble is that Netanyahu will accept limits; if he goes rogue, Trump may face the dilemma of confronting the ally he once defended.

The absent West Bank and the end of the two-state illusion
The West Bank was conspicuously absent from Trump’s discourse. The United States no longer recognises the two-state solution — the very framework established under the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, which Washington itself once sponsored to guarantee Palestinians the right to self-determination and statehood.

By omitting any reference to it, Trump effectively buried what little remained of that diplomatic vision.

This omission ensures that the conflict in Palestine will not end; it will only be renewed, sooner or later, and wherever resistance resurfaces.

In the two years of war, Israel has constructed 22 new settlements on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, further erasing the territorial basis for a viable Palestinian state and dismantling the last vestiges of Oslo.

What now remains is not peace but a state of permanent instability — a no-peace condition that guarantees the cycle of violence will continue.

The unresolved core
Trump’s ceasefire is a political theatre of control. It publicly enshrined a truce, placed Netanyahu under scrutiny, and allowed Trump to claim a diplomatic victory. But it did not resolve the Palestinian question.

The ceasefire applies to Gaza, not to the broader occupation, the blockade, or the issue of self-determination. The two sides now operate within a precarious arrangement: Israel controls roughly half of Gaza, the Palestinian resistance remains armed in the other half, and both test the boundaries daily.

Trump cannot hold his envoys indefinitely, and Netanyahu cannot be trusted to restrain himself. The US–Israeli alliance remains solid, but Trump’s personal intervention underscored a fundamental shift: unconditional support has limits when the costs to America’s reputation become too high.

Trump’s strategy was to save Netanyahu and Israel from total isolation — to stop a war that had already killed more than 76,000 people, 82 percent of them civilians, including more than 20,000 children. He halted the destruction at the price of ambiguity: a ceasefire without a settlement, peace without reconciliation.

The world leaders who gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh signed the end of a war, not the beginning of a solution.

Elijah J Magnier is a veteran war zone correspondent and political analyst with over 35 years of experience covering the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). He specialises in real-time reporting of politics, strategic and military planning, terrorism and counter-terrorism; his strong analytical skills complement his reporting. His in-depth experience, extensive contacts and thorough political knowledge of complex political situations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Syria provide his writings with insights balancing the routine misreporting and propaganda in the Western press. He also comments on Al Jazeera.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced that Canberra will be expelling the Iranian ambassador and legislating to list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist group”.

Albanese says the move is because an assessment by the intelligence agency ASIO has concluded that Iran used a “complex web of proxies” to orchestrate two antisemitic arson attacks in Australia in order to “undermine social cohesion and sow discord”.

As you might expect, not one shred of evidence has been provided for this assertion, much less the giant mountain of rock-solid proof required for intelligence agency credibility in a post-Iraq invasion world.

This hasn’t stopped the Murdoch press from going ballistic and framing the assertion as a “bombshell revelation” of an established fact.

It also hasn’t stopped Australia’s state broadcaster the ABC from publishing an article by Laura Tingle with the flagrantly propagandistic title “Revelations Iran was behind antisemitic attacks show IRGC tentacles have reached Australia”.

Evidence-free assertions made by the government are not “revelations”, and to frame them as such is journalistic malpractice.

The Israeli government has publicly claimed credit for pressuring Albanese to take these actions, after Netanyahu personally inserted himself into Australian affairs by repeatedly publicly expressing outrage about alleged antisemitic incidents in Australia.

21 questions about Australia’s Iran claim.           Video: Caitlin Johnstone

Anyway, here are 21 questions we should all be asking about these new claims:

1. Where is the evidence?

2. May we please see the evidence?

3. Why can’t we see the evidence?

4. In what way would it benefit Iran to orchestrate antisemitic attacks in Australia?

5. In what way would it benefit Iran to “undermine social cohesion and sow discord” in Australia?

6. Please explain how orchestrating antisemitic attacks in Australia would advance Iranian interests more than the interests of some other state, like, say, just for example, Israel?

7. What foreign intelligence agencies were involved in helping ASIO gather the information it used to make its assessment about the Iranian involvement in these incidents?

8. What were the names of all the people in the “complex web of proxies” allegedly used to conduct these attacks which ASIO claims ultimately traced back to Tehran?

9. Does Anthony Albanese’s announcement that Iran is staging antisemitic attacks in Australia have anything to do with Benjamin Netanyahu’s stern letter to Albanese a week earlier demanding that the prime minister take action on alleged antisemitic incidents in Australia by the deadline of September 23?

10. Does Albanese’s announcement that Iran is staging antisemitic attacks in Australia have anything to do with the fact that Israel is reportedly very close to initiating another war with Iran?

11. Does Albanese’s announcement that Iran is staging antisemitic attacks in Australia have anything to do with the way Australians have been filling the streets in massive numbers to protest the Gaza holocaust?

12. Why kick out the Iranian ambassador and designate the IRGC as a terrorist group while keeping the Israeli ambassador in Australia and doing absolutely nothing to stop the IDF during an active genocide?

13. Which state benefits more from the Australian government’s efforts to stomp out free speech in the name of curbing antisemitic incidents: Iran or Israel?

14. Which state would benefit more from fomenting hostilities between Canberra and Tehran: Iran or Israel?

15. Are we being asked to forget the way Australian intelligence services facilitated the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, or simply to ignore this?

16. Are we being asked to forget the fact that we’ve been lied to and manipulated about all things involving Israel for the last two years, or simply to ignore this?

17. Are we being asked to forget that the claims about “antisemitic attacks” in Australia have been exposed as bogus or riddled with glaring plot holes over and over again since 2023, or simply to ignore this?

18. Are we being asked to forget that supporters of Israel have an extensive history of staging false antisemitic incidents in order to advance the interests of the Zionist state, or simply to ignore this?

19. Does the Australian government believe Australians are all complete slobbering idiots?

2o. Does the Australian government believe Australians are all high on ayahuasca?

21. What specific mental illness, intellectual disability, or chemically-induced altered state of consciousness does the Australian government believe Australians are all suffering from which would cause us to accept these unfounded assertions as true?

Of course none of these questions will ever be answered by anyone with real power. The reason it’s ASIO telling us this happened instead of police or investigative journalists is because police and journalists are expected to lay out the evidence for their assertions, while intelligence agencies are not.

Whenever the powerful present us with evidence-free incendiary claims of significant consequence, I like to remind my readers of Hitchens’ razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

It sure was selfless of the Iranians to orchestrate these attacks against their own interests, solely to benefit the interests of Israel, just as hundreds of thousands of Australians are filling the streets in protest against Israel’s genocidal atrocities, and just as Israel prepares for war with Iran.

That sure was kind and charitable of them.

Bunch of top blokes, those Iranians. It’s too bad they’re terrorists now.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Dollars to donuts this was orchestrated by mossad https://t.co/2xhJxZrsGQ

— Maxine Gay (@GayMaxine) August 26, 2025

This article was first published on Café Pacific.