As the US and Israel battle to control the narrative of their war against Iran, their messaging gets harder to defend, reports Al Jazeera’s Listening Post.

With the war entering its third week, the upper hand that the United States and Israel hold militarily is being countered asymmetrically by Iran which has been targeting various economic pressure points outside of its borders.

With censorship and propaganda shaping coverage on all sides, news audiences are having to navigate a confused and often misleading maze of information.

Contributors:
Vali Nasr – Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Michael Omer-Man – Director of research for Israel-Palestine, DAWN
Matt Duss – Executive vice-president, Center for International Policy (CIP)
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi – Lecturer, University of St Andrews

On our radar
Israeli media outlets published near-simultaneous reports, citing anonymous officials, claiming Gulf states had attacked Iran. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates quickly denied the allegations, forcing corrections.

Critics say that the aim of the coverage was to suggest Gulf support for Israel and pull those states into the conflict. Tariq Nafi looks at how the episode has fuelled anger across the Arab world towards Washington and Tel Aviv.

Out Of Control: An escalating war accompanied by escalating war rhetoric    Video: AJ Listening Post

Battlefield AI: An interview with Matt Mahmoudi
Since the first attacks on Iran, the White House and Pentagon have been eager to test new military technologies.

As seen previously in Gaza, AI systems appear to be playing a central role in identifying targets and guiding strikes.

This raises serious ethical and accountability questions about how life-and-death decisions are being made on the battlefield.

Amnesty Tech researcher and assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, Matt Mahmoudi joins The Listening Post to discuss AI-assisted warfare.

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

The New Zealand Government’s response to Israel-US attacks on Iran has revealed a chasm. On one side are those who argue; that New Zealand must stay aligned with its 20th century allies right or wrong.

On the other side are those who insist; that the long fought for reputation, of a nation that stood for an international order based on law, justice and multilateralism, should be the guiding principles in good times and bad.

New Zealand has inched toward such societal rifts before; the Springbok Rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981; shortly followed by a generational shift and geo-political quake that came in the form of New Zealand’s anti-nuclear movement and subsequent enduring legislation. The United Nations security council endorsed response in Afghanistan to attacks on the United States shook the foundations of the Labour-Alliance coalition Government in 2001-02. And the fraudulently justified US-led invasion of Iraq triggered hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders to protest in the streets. (The Helen Clark Labour-led Government of the time refused to officially be included among the US-led coalition forces that invaded Iraq.)

In recent times, old loyalties and biases have been challenged with the genocidal disproportional response by Israel against Hamas and generally Palestinian woman, children, and the elderly whose only offence was to exist in the path of the military machine.

And now, the US Donald Trump Administration’s alliance with Israel has unilaterally justified its attacks on Iran – the murder of its supreme leader and the assassination of over 40 individuals in its operational chain of command – as a legal pre-emptive response to a perceived first-strike-plan by Iran. This, while negotiations were underway to address regional security concerns.

This is the backdrop to New Zealand Government’s response where Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters wrote on Sunday March 1:

“In this context, we acknowledge that the actions taken overnight by the US and Israel were designed to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security.

“We condemn in the strongest terms Iran’s indiscriminate retaliatory attacks on Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. We cannot risk further regional escalation, and civilian life must be protected.” (Ref. https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/nz-government-statement-iran )

*******

LISTEN: To Radio New Zealand’s The Panel, where host Wallace Chapman is joined by panellists Sue Bradford and Phil O’Reilly. First up, is an extended conversation on the US and Israel attack on Iran. Columnist and Iranian New Zealander, Donna Miles-Mojab, delivers her take on the conflict and what it means for the regime. Then, I (Selwyn Manning) give an analysis on New Zealand’s stance and the legality of the attack.

It’s well worth a listen, as the fault line of New Zealand debate is clear.

*******

For those who are prepared to abandon the process of law and justice on international affairs, the New Zealand Government’s statement offered clarity; that their government would stand at the side of traditional security ‘friends’ as they commit to fight against another ‘evil’ empire.

For others, the statement was another example of mediocrity from a coalition that lacks a morality within its own argument – an apparent abandonment of principles such as international law and multilateralism – frameworks that have served small significant nations like New Zealand well.

The argument follows; that New Zealand’s coalition government has jeopardised the national interest, the hard won identity respected by those nations that still hold true to multilateralism and principle.

Here’s a please explain moment:

New Zealand is a small nation, but it is a significant actor in international affairs. Once, it could be relied upon – especially on matters of principle – to articulate a strong position on breaches of international law and justice. We have held positions at the United Nations security council, have been a driven advocate among general assembly nations and a persuasive arbiter among multilateral groups such as CANZ (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) that tag-team diplomacy at the United Nations and elsewhere.

New Zealand was once a staunch advocate (and remains a member state) of the International Criminal Court. And, in matters of trade, New Zealand sought to develop common ground rather than difference – tools that have been beneficial to others in times past when conflict has raged and red-mist would otherwise have dominated attempts at a diplomatic solution.

Today’s New Zealand is a myriad of conflicting arguments; its current coalition government argues that Iran’s regime is evil so therefore the powerful must bomb it to peace.

But the fact that the Iran regime is not a paragon of virtue – either domestically or regionally – does not diminish the fact that the United States’ and Israel’s governments decided to attack – decisions that allegedly and arguably breach international law.

International law: In a rudimentary sense; it comes down to whether Israel in the first instance was legally obliged to commit a preemptive strike on Iran, murdering its supreme leader and taking out over 40 of those who were in its chain of command.

Was there an imminent threat to Israel? At this juncture, it appears not.

Were diplomatic efforts underway to address regional security concerns, through US diplomatic efforts? Yes… up until Thursday February 26.

When Opposition Is Beyond Political

Back to New Zealand: New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, on matters of geopolitics and global security, often appears to operate more like a CEO rather than the chair of a nation’s cabinet.

Widespread reports of the Prime Minister’s lack of coherency on this matter is reasonably consistent with a manager waiting to be guided by a governor, or board chair by way of policy, on the required pathway ahead.

The problem for Christopher Luxon is; he has no such external nor internal guidance. In geopolitics and matters of global security, policy alone does not help. Natural leadership qualities do.

Throughout his prime ministership, Luxon has displayed a tendency to outsource foreign affairs leadership responsibilities to his junior coalition partner, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters. Or, when that doesn’t work, he leans toward Australia and/or the United States to provide direction on big picture issues.

But for many New Zealanders, New Zealand can’t have it both ways; either it (the coalition government) sides with the ‘might-is-right’ Trump-led approach to chaotic global affairs, or it sides with the multitude of countries that still hold on to principles of justice and international law.

Where will New Zealand as a society tilt? It will likely be up to New Zealand voters, later in 2026, to finally decide which way this country tracks over the next few years.

US President Trump’s vanity and sense of global imperialism has become more expansive and performative this year.

These are times when countries like New Zealand, lacking persuasive moral leadership, can easily lose their souls, and, in the process of being risk averse, risk abandoning their own sovereignty, national interest, and identity.

*******

We keep hearing that Iran is an “evil” regime run by “clerics”. This conflation of an unscientific and emotive concept (‘evil’) with a cultural occupation (‘cleric’) is made in the context of picking on an ethnic or religious group of people as inferior. In this context, ‘cleric’ applies to Shia Islam, a major denomination of one of the world’s major religions. In the context of white supremacism, that word ‘cleric’ – as applied to Shia Islam – could have been ‘negro’.

Iran has been attacked by forces representing Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy; western super-elites who worship at the altar of military and surveillance technology. And the mainstream media within the imperium parrot the talking points of these supremacists; supremacists, seeking a unipolar world order (aka global hegemony) masquerading as capitalist democracy and riding on the coat-tails of progressive liberalism.

The West is as much a theocracy as is the Iranian regime. Only bigger, and vastly more lethal; and prone to excesses of cowardly asymmetric violence. (In the present event, one of the first groups of fatal victims were over 100 schoolgirls in southern Iran; most western media outlets have not even reported this.) As well as being a zero-out-of-ten on the scale of political ethics, the attack on Iran was illegal in both United States and international law. Once again, Congress was bypassed.

Further, we note that Israel is the world’s most secretive nuclear power; without even the semblance of a nuclear energy program that might act as cover for this. Why do we never hear about Israel’s nuclear hammer-in-waiting?

At the head of the attacking forces is an American President playing the role of the useful fool; himself being simultaneously played by, on the one side, the manifestly-evil regime of Benjamin Netanyau, and the forces of the Dark Enlightenment among which Peter Thiel of Palantir – a New Zealand citizen – is prominent.

Secret City, and President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

Yesterday I watched the final two episodes of Season Two of Secret City, an Australian political thriller. [Secret City finishes on Netflix tomorrow!]

The story, filmed in Canberra and Adelaide in 2018, was about an innocent Australian family killed from the sky by a deliberately misdirected drone attack; an attack like many similar executions of civilians living in northwest Pakistan, as part of a highly secret US/Australian ‘security’ program. A central point of Secret City was to highlight the asymmetry of western sentiment, whereby the deaths of four white Australians elicit 100 times more outrage than 400 similar deaths in or near Pakistan. In the story, the fictitious American company, Trebuchet, served as an equivalent to Palantir. (We note that last month’s mosque bombing in Islamabad was barely reported in the New Zealand media; deeply ironic given the Christchurch attacks on 15 March 2019.)

The end of the last episode of Secret City replayed extracts from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, televised in the United States on 17 January 1961.

Note these excerpts from Eisenhower’s address:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

And: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Much can be said about President Eisenhower’s tenure in office. I will note just this. It was Eisenhower who was able to settle a cease-fire of the Korean War in 1953, after the more-than-two years of extremely bloody stalemate – most of the blood was shed in North Korea – which endured under the previous Truman administration. Technically, that war has not finished. But the cease-fire has held since 1953, for as long as my life, and for longer than the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

Is Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy an imperial theocracy?

We note that the ‘First Reich’ – labelled well after its existence – was notionally an imperial theocracy; the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806). But, once created, it was not expansionist, rather it was a kind of Roman Catholic caliphate. Philosopher Voltaire claimed that it was neither ‘holy’, ‘Roman’, nor an ‘Empire’; it was essentially a German-led ‘commonwealth’ which made titular reference to the Church in Rome. It is arguable that the European Union is a Fourth Reich which references the First Reich.

The expansionist forces out of Europe, which have made the modern world – the world of the last 500 years – came from elsewhere: Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Washington. Until the 1990s, those European-sourced forces of dominance were increasingly secular. Whether or not Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy represents a development of these religious traditions, there can be little doubt that world dominance and appeasement is a process of empire-building.

Especially in Washington circles, there was an air of triumphalism around 1990. This was the unipolar moment. Helping to maintain the new unipolar moment, a man called Jeffrey Epstein – an alleged Israeli asset – became a conduit between the Israeli and American administrations in the 1990s. That’s where and when I see the origins of twenty-first century entitled Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy. (On Epstein and Israel, see Starmer, Mandelson & Mossad – it’s worse than you think,Double Down News, Feb 2026; and The anatomy of the Epstein network The Listening Post, Al Jazeera, 9 Feb 2026.)

The greatest ever threat to humanity and the rest of the planetary biosphere

As noted, just about everyone in elite western politics and journalism is now, without analysis or knowledge, asserting that Iran is ‘evil’. Maybe. Though this is little more than believer rhetoric; the rhetoric of religious fundamentalists, the rhetoric of inflammation rather than resolution.

If this ‘evil’ moniker is accurate in some objective sense, then Iran – in the present conflict – is the ‘lesser evil’. The greater evil is clearly the philosophy and aggression of the Judeo-Christian techno-supremacists. Further, the appeasement of this greater evil is itself a most unsavoury thing to behold; almost as bad as the greater evil itself.

(On that appeasement, in a news report on Al Jazeera on Sunday [NZ time], Berlin correspondent Dominic Kane noted – with a straight face – that the governments of Britain, France and Germany all condemned “Iran’s retaliation”; and that Spain, in addition, condemned the American and Israeli aggression. Only Spain had the guts to demur from appeasement. One of the most important forms of  media appeasement is the omission of vital information from reports. According to those chairing the ‘Peace talks’ in Geneva, Iran was just about to present an accommodation which came very close to meeting President Trump’s stated demands, and that the aggressors were aware of this. These ‘negotiations’ were not conducted in good faith.)

The nihilistic logical endpoint of Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy is apocalypse. Indeed many of the ‘Christians’ in the Americanised conflation of Israel and Christianity are fully cognisant of, even excited by, the prophecies of the last book of the Christian Bible – the Book of Revelation.

Nuclear apocalypse – if or when it happens – will not only destroy humanity. Earth stands to become like Mars or Venus, if humanity ends in this way. In today’s circumstances, would it be acceptable to allow Israel or the United States to acquire nuclear weapons; we accept their weapons because they are already there, and because too many of us prefer hypocrisy over moral consistency.

But the Dark Enlightenment is still a developing supremacist project, embedded into Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy. Resistance to it and its premises need not be entirely futile. Worse things happen when good people look away.

PS

New Zealand is scheduled to play Iran in the Football World Cup. How will the politics of Iran’s presence in the World Cup play out, especially given that, in last weekend’s events, Iran was the aggresse, not the aggressor?

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Israelis are determined to erase the evidence of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, through the use of paid and instructed propagandists to reshape the historical record.

Zionists have also taken over social media platforms. Those who are critical of Israel are being censored or arrested.

From YouTube to X, Wikipedia, and TikTok, Zionists are capturing all means of communication to erase the evidence of its genocide, reshape the historical record, and censor those critical of it.

Meanwhile, the Israel Lobby exercises its power through intimidation, paying influencers to endorse it, and arresting dissenters whom they frame as terrorists.

Last December, Israel announced it was boosting its Foreign Affairs Ministry “hasbara” (propaganda) budget by an extra US$150 million.

Back in August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to reporters that Tel Aviv was losing to “propaganda” war.

“I think that we’ve not been winning [the propaganda war], to put it mildly … There are vast forces arrayed against us,” he stated at the time, blaming the algorithms for this defeat.

Dismantling free speech
Since then, Israel has been working to dismantle free speech and censor everything critical of it, across social media, as part of an all-encompassing crackdown.

This press conference was no accident; instead, it was part of a much larger scheme that began in July with a targeted campaign aimed at brainwashing right-wing conservatives in the West.

The propaganda plan was hatched in three parts: One being Netanyahu going on a number of right-wing podcasts; another being a social media censorship campaign, along with the financing of propaganda trips to Israel for right-wing influencers.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance on the Nelk Boys podcast was his first stop in his attempt to revive right-wing support for him personally, yet it received enormous backlash at the time.

The podcasters were widely condemned for both “normalising” and asking no critical questions of the Prime Minister, who currently has an International Criminal Court (ICC) war crimes warrant out for his arrest.

The Israeli Prime Minister then went on a round of coordinated interviews across the American corporate media, as a range of other right-wing podcasters hosted him. The difference between the corporate media and the podcasters who hosted him was that the podcasters were even less critical and actively worked to bolster his image.

These disingenuous podcast hosts even attempted to frame themselves as defying cancel culture, being edgy and going against the mainstream, despite the fact that they were simply doing a worse job than that of the corporate media, battling nothing more than their own followings.

Erica Mindel – censorship Tsar
Meanwhile, in the background, TikTok hired Erica Mindel, an ex-Israeli soldier and ex-ADL employee who openly bragged of her loyalty to Israel, as its new “Hate Speech” censorship Tsar.

A move that appeared to have gone relatively unnoticed, but began to shape what was deemed acceptable discourse on the platform.

As this was in the works, the Israeli foreign ministry had already funded trips for 16 right-wing influencers to travel to Israel on closely coordinated propaganda trips. Their goal was to bring 550 such influencers on fully financed tours by the end of the year, which later included figures like Tommy Robinson and even former rapper Azealia Banks.

Upon visiting the White House in October, Benjamin Netanyahu attended a meeting with right-wing influencers and openly discussed ideas to capture social media platforms.

At this point, the agenda to kill content critical of Israel was already underway, as the TikTok app that the Israel Lobby sought to ban just a year prior fell into the hands of pro-Israel billionaires.

The world’s second-richest man and top donor to the Israeli military, Larry Ellison, is a key figure in this picture, as his company, Oracle, is poised to take over TikTok. The move was recently praised by The Times of Israel as “raising hopes for tougher anti-Semitism rules”.

Meanwhile, Ellison was busy buying up CBS News and installing the completely inexperienced, vehemently pro-Israel journalist, Bari Weiss, as the channel’s top executive.

Inexperienced for role
Weiss, whose claim to fame was being a temporary opinion piece writer at The New York Times before leaving and attempting to carve out a career as a right-wing commentator and, later, news outlet owner, is clearly inexperienced for taking on her current role.

Ellison just so happens to be a major stakeholder in Elon Musk’s Tesla and X.

In early October, YouTube also decided to quietly delete at least 700 videos from the platform that documented Israeli human rights violations, along with the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al-Mezan Center, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

The Intercept published an article explaining the move as a “capitulation” to President Donald Trump’s recent sanctions, enacted to shield Israel from accountability for its copiously documented war crimes.

Then there is Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, who came out against the website’s page covering the Gaza Genocide, asserting that it “needs immediate attention”.

“At present, the lead and overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested,” Wales stated, claiming it violates the platform’s “neutral” point of view.

At present, every major human rights organisation, including Israel’s own B’Tselem, all the top legal organisations relevant to the issue, the United Nations, and the most representative body of genocide scholars, all agree that Israel is committing genocide.

ICJ’s “plausible genocide’
In fact, the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s ruling on the matter considers it a plausible genocide. The only ones disputing this fact are the Israelis themselves, ideologically committed and/or paid Zionist propagandists, in addition to Israeli allies who are also implicated in the crime of all crimes.

Objective truth is, however, not relevant to any of these bad-faith actors. This is because Israel and its powerful lobbying arms are actively pursuing a total crackdown on criticism of Israeli war crimes.

On X (Twitter), a new censorship warning has been placed over all images and videos from Gaza that show Israeli war crimes, also.

What is currently happening is a widespread attempt to wipe content from the internet, erase the truth, ban, deport, and arrest those critical of Israel. All this as the Israel Lobby brings social media and corporate media under its direct control, using the excuse of “anti-Semitism” and “terrorism” to do so.

Israel’s censorship crackdown, which the Trump administration is working alongside to complete, is by far the worst iteration of cancel culture yet.

The ongoing crackdown on academic freedom, for example, in order to silence criticism of Israel, is by far the most severe in US history.

Meanwhile, the ADL has just set up a “Mamdani monitor” to track the democratically elected incoming New York City mayor.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz