It’s time that the obvious is stated explicitly. Binyamin Netanyahu and 2020s’ Israel need to be compared with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. And consider the narcissist, Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini. On the matter of language, we may call Benito Mussolini a fascist leader, and the Italian state under Mussolini – indeed the Italian Empire, which expanded under Mussolini – as history’s Fascist State.

While Nazi Germany is generally regarded as having been more extreme than the Fascist State, the word ‘fascist’ has commonly been applied to the former National Socialist regime of Germany. My language preference is to designate Nazi Germany as an ‘ultra-fascist’ state. (I would also note that Bolshevik Russia – the Soviet Union from November 1917 until the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 – might best be designated as an ‘orwellian tyranny’; and that there is a considerable overlap between an ultra-fascist state and an orwellian tyranny.)

Stacking-up Binyamin Netanyahu in 2026 against Adolf Hitler in 1940

Before conducting this simple exercise, we should note that the best perspective is one of academic detachment. Such detachment can be difficult in times of global conflict, in which most governments and probably most people take sides, explicitly or implicitly; the sides they take tend to be based upon the narratives which they have been repetitively exposed to.

We might imagine, as a detached observer in 1940, a Professor of World Affairs at the University of Chicago. And, for 2026, a Professor of World Affairs at the University of Guangzhou.

Having already designated Adolf Hitler as ultra-fascist, here are the three principal points that I would argue define ultra-fascism:

• a deep and intense racism
• an expansionist agenda, in the sense of Lebensraum
• a genocidal mix of hatred and indifference to selected other ‘peoples’ (where ‘peoples’ most commonly represents a conflation of ethnicity and religion)

It’s easy to see that Adolf Hitler ticks all three boxes, though, by 1940, Hitler had not yet committed genocide.

It’s also easy to see that Binyamin Netanyahu also ticks all three boxes; indeed, Netanyahu has already committed genocide. Unlike Hitler, Netanyahu’s career is not over, and we can have little confidence that he will not direct future genocides.

On these three bases, there can be no question that Binyamin Netanyahu and the present state which he presides over are ultra-fascist; worse than the Fascist State (and Italian Empire in Africa and the Mediterranean Sea) which Emperor Mussolini presided over.

Additional features of ultra-fascism

My first such feature is the use of pogroms, acts of terror by loyal private militias and hooligans acting with impunity. Germany before the 1940s was, in particular, characterised by judeophobic pogroms; the most famous being Kristallnacht (with at least 90 deaths) in November 1938. (There had been a substantial nineteenth century history of judeophobic pogroms in the former Russian Empire, especially in places like Ukraine with large Jewish population clusters. And also, in Western Europe in late medieval times; Jews were often blamed for the Black Death of 1347 to 1352, especially in lands which today would be classed as western Germany.)

In East Jerusalem and especially the West Bank (of the Jordan River), Netanyahu-supporting militias and hooligans commit regular and frequent pogroms on the indigenous Palestinian population, who in the main resist passively. The Palestinian death toll from these pogroms, just since October 2023, has been well over 1,000 people.

And, over the years, there have been no shortage of pogroms in Lebanon, many of which have been Israeli-incited. The worst was probably the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, which precipitated the formation of the Lebanese Shia resistance organisation Hezbollah. The 1982 pogrom death toll, mainly Palestinian refugees, was almost certainly in excess of 3,000; the principal perpetrators were Christian Lebanese Phalangists of the Kataeb Party, though aided by the Israel Defence Forces.

My second such feature is that these leaders – Hitler and Netanyahu – had and have extreme ultra-fascist henchmen. Most obvious were Goebbels and Himmler on the Nazi side; BenGivr and Smotrich on the present ultra-fascist Israeli side. These henchmen tend to blunt the malign edge of the leaders of their packs.

My third such feature is the role of propaganda and incitement through propaganda; in particular the context is that the propaganda of ultra-fascists includes overt and blatant lying – complete indifference to factual accuracy – and not simply the omission of inconvenient truths. The incitement includes, through precisely targeted narratives, the secretive and personalised incentivisation of historically allied regimes and potential new allies to participate in the ultra-fascist project.

My fourth such feature is the widespread use of assassination squads, and execution squads, to enforce a terror regime – especially but not only with respect to occupied populations. Hitler’s execution squads did most of their worst after 1940. We note that 2026 Israel has just last week passed the legislation to impose the death penalty on non-Jewish resistors and dissidents. And Israel is world-famous for its Mossad-facilitated assassination squads, even before the ascendancy of the Netanyahu regime.

Assassination was and is a terror tactic

Assassination came to be a favourite terror tactic of the Russian terrorists whose ideology found fertile ground there from the 1860s. Given that most of the most ardent of Israeli citizens today are descendants of people well familiar with the Russian political and literary landscape, the awareness and adoption of this terror tactic should be no surprise to us today.

We might note that Vladimir Lenin’s terrorist brother Alexander was executed for attempting to assassinate the Tsar of Russia, Alexander III, in 1887. A member of the same terrorist organisation, Narodnaya Volya, had successfully assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Lenin (aka Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) himself adhered to the same terrorist principles as his brother, as is reflected in his disturbing parody of the equally disturbing What Is to be Done, 1863, by Nikolay Chernyshevsky.

(The dark character of Chernyshevsky’s book is called Rakhmetov. When reading about Rakhmetov last year, I was eerily reminded of another malign character I had read about earlier in 2025; Friedrich Lindemann. And, in Rakhmetov delighting in Isaac Newton’s obscure work Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, I am reminded of Peter Thiel and his obsession with the Antichrist. See my Barbecued Hamburgers and Churchill’s Bestie 17 April 2025, and Peter Thiel: Was The John Key Led Government Taken For An April Fool? 1 April 2026.)

Two other assassinations to note are that of Pyotr Stolypin – Russia’s modernising Prime Minister, Russia’s greatest reformist politician before Gorbachev – in Kiev in 1911; perpetrated by Dmitry Bogrov, a Ukrainian Jewish leftist revolutionary lawyer. And that of Winston Churchill’s friend Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, British Minister of State in the Middle East, who was assassinated in Cairo in 1944 by two members of the terrorist group Lehi.

Outline of a wider comparison

My comparison here is between the two current Eurasian geopolitical conflicts and the two historical Eurasian geopolitical conflicts which conflated into World War Two.

Re World War Two, the two Eurasian conflicts were of course Japan’s war on China and Southeast Asia, which, after Pearl Harbour, became the Pacific War. And the war of aggression by Nazi Germany which began in 1938 with the annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Today the Russia-Nato conflict in Ukraine is one of the two Eurasian geopolitical conflicts. The other of course is the Israel-Iran-Lebanon-Gulf conflict, aided and abetted by the United States.

Re World War Two, I’ll rate some of the leading figures on a ‘badness’ or ‘malignity’ scale – some may call it a scale of ‘evilness’ – in which a ten is the absolute maximum (which might be applied to a person of power attempting to use that power to achieve Armageddon, the end of the world) and zero represents the most saintly version of Jesus Christ. Considering the four protagonists of the European War of World War Two, I would rate Josef Stalin a 9, Adolf Hitler an 8, Benito Mussolini a 7.5, and Winston Churchill a 7. While Churchill is the one whose terror crimes have been the least acknowledged so far, he still comes out as the least malign – the lesser evil – of these four characters.

In relation to the present situation, and by virtue of my analysis above, Binyamin Netanyahu comes out as at least an 8. I will also mention some of the henchmen. Goebbels, Himmler, BenGivr, and Smotrich would each come out as a 9 by my estimation. Two people would qualify for a 9.5 rating: Stalin’s henchman Lavrentiy Beria, and Churchill’s little known close friend and advisor Friedrich Lindermann (aka Lord Cherwell). German-born Lindemann – an Oxford University Professor of Physics, and a deep racist – engineered the massive 1943 famines in India and Iran through contemptuous indifference to those populations. He was the principal voice in Churchill’s ear; advocating the carpet bombing of German civilians (euphemism: dehousing) and civilian infrastructure, and the erasure of German civilisation.

WW2 analogues

The analogues which I suggest are as follows (and relating in particular to the years 2026 and 1940): Israel is an analogue to Germany, the United States maps to the Italian Empire, Iran (plus proxies) maps to the (white) British Empire, China maps to the United States, Nato (at least its core 16 members) maps to Japan, Russia maps to Nationalist China (including Vladimir Putin as an analogue of Chiang Kai-shek), India in a few respects maps to Soviet Russia (especially its initial uncertain alignment), Ukraine maps to Romania, and the Gulf States map to occupied Western Europe (with UAE mapping to Vichy France).

This becomes a useful thought-exercise, in that it can help us today to see some of the possibilities and outcomes arising from possible escalations in the present conflicts.

A word of note. In 1940 and 1941, it was said that it was just the British Empire resisting the German-Italian Axis. There is much truth in that. Churchill’s United Kingdom did not appease Nazi Germany, just as Iran in 2025 and 2026 refused to appease Israel. Britain paid for its non-appeasement by enduring The Blitz. Both resistances to ultra-fascism contained a mix of characters with a mix of agendas. For most of the first three years of the WW2, the British did not take the fight directly to Germany (the defensive Battle of the Atlantic excepted).

Most of Britain’s fighting was against Italy, at least before and upto the 1942 invasion of Madagascar; be it in Greece, North Africa, or Mandatory Palestine. In Libya, initially at least, Germany was fighting alongside Italy and under Italian command.

And the Italian Air Force bombed the then ‘British’ city of Tel Aviv in 1940. Italy effectively withdrew from the war in 1943, and, for its troubles, was occupied by Germany; hence the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino. Note that 1940 bombing of Palestine; the victim was the United Kingdom (analogue today of Iran), and the perpetrator was Italy (analogue today of the United States).

The final important learning from my analogy between the present conflicts and World War Two, is that – if the wars escalate and conflate – then China will emerge as the big winner (as the United States was in and after 1945) and the Axis-forces (and their allies such as UAE and Ukraine) and Nato will be the losers.

Important Note

I must emphasise that, while the two ultra-fascist regimes discussed here had and have many domestic supporters, there can be no conflation between regime-supporters and the ethnic or cultural groups which those ultra-fascist adherents identify with. ‘Germans’ as a collective never were ultra-fascist because of their nationality or their faith; though some Germans and non-German fellow travellers were, like the nazi regime, ultra-fascist. Likewise, in 2026, neither Jewish citizens of Israel, nor the wider Jewish population, can be characterised as ultra-fascist (or ‘far-right’ of any form) just because the present leaders of Israel are ultra-fascist.

Conclusion

We need to call a spade a spade. When too many good people pretend that ultra-fascists are not ultra-fascists – or choose to look away when ultra-fascism is gaining ascendancy – the world can too easily cross over a totalitarian tipping point, into something like orwellian tyranny.

————-

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.

Declining population in West Papua, and critical loss of life through clashes with the Indonesia military raise the question of genocide in a new book by Brisbane writer Dr Greg Poulgrain.

This work, Curse of Gold, published in English by Kompas, as the title indicates traces the roots of subjugation going on in West New Guinea (West Papua) to a cynical grabbing for resources. An Indonesian language edition is forthcoming.

The book is a history beginning with the discovery of huge deposits of gold in 1936, deposits more than twice the gold being mined at Witwatersrand, together with discovery of oil just off-shore.

The principal mine now, with an Indonesian billionaire as main owner, has 560 km of tunnels and produces 50 tonnes of gold annually.

The existence of the gold was kept secret, awaiting investment and development opportunities, held up by war with the Japanese, known just to Dutch interests, the Japanese, and significant for the future, the Rockefeller petroleum company Standard Oil in the United States.

The writer details the operation of a “Third Force” in a chain of political intrigues and manipulation over a half century: the US company, sometimes officers of the US government, and at all times an early player since the first discovery, Allen Dulles, who came to head-up the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Dulles as the lawyer for Standard Oil had already got a petroleum concession in Netherlands New Guinea before 1936, through forming a joint US-Dutch company with majority US interest.

Heyday of CIA operations
In the 1950s heyday of CIA undercover operations across the “Third World”, Dulles is depicted here manipulating political events in Indonesia, whether spreading disinformation, concealing information from governments, even setting up mysterious, destabilising armed skirmishes.

The objective given is always the same, to secure ownership of resources and a free hand for American commercial interests. At one point covert government help would be provided through some disingenuous work by Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State to Richard Nixon, and the always interventionist US Ambassador Marshall Green.

For people of West New Guinea the intriguing saga has been a catastrophe, seeing their rights, interests, existence and even human identity denied and ignored in the struggles over wealth and power.

The story is in two phases:

In wartime the occupying Japanese encouraged the Indonesian independence movement, as a block against any return to influence by European colonial powers, and naturally wanted Papuan resources themselves.

A Japanese intelligence operative, Nishijima Shigetada, familiar with the region, is given a key role. He had found out about the gold, and persuaded the Indonesian nationalists to include West New Guinea in their demands for a republic — the better to get the trove out of the hands of “colonial monopolies”.

The second phase of developments saw an ugly turn of events with the 1965 military coup in Indonesia, marked by large scale massacre across the country and coming to power of Suharto as President in 1967.

The new regime determined to build on the campaign by its predecessor, President Sukarno, to take over West New Guinea. In the calculus of Cold War rivalries, President John Kennedy had sought to keep him “on side” and the Russians provided guns and aid, in part to best their Chinese rivals.

Dutch gave in
The outcome was that the Dutch who had stayed on in the territory gave in to pressure and pulled out by the end of 1963. It was nominally then put under United Nations trusteeship until an “act of free choice” on independence.

But Indonesian forces moved in, violently put down any Papuan resistance, promulgated theories of an Indonesia Raya, a lost island empire to which all of New Guinea had belonged, and declared the decision on independence would be an issue of “staying” with Indonesia. Neither Kennedy nor Sukarno, who had planned to meet in 1964, is believed to have known about the gold in Papua.

Dr Poulgrain recounts the narrative of bullying and deception, including the sidelining of senior UN representatives, whereby the “act of free choice” became notoriously a series of managed gatherings, no plebiscite of the people ever countenanced. He argues that the “Third Party”, having helped to remove the Dutch, then moved in favour of its own preferred candidate, Suharto, no nationalist from the independence movement, a self-declared friend of US commerce and advocate for untrammelled investment:

“It could be argued that the fiery nationalism so characteristic of Sukarno, the tool that won him the right to enter the harbour of Soekarnopura (Jayapura) on board the Soviet warship renamed Irian, proved to be his own undoing. Under the mantle of Sukarno’s presidency, Indonesia ousted the Dutch from New Guinea, the goal of both Nishijima and the ‘Third Party’, finally bringing an end to the European colonial presence there.

“Only 30 months later, Sukarno was facing his own political demise …”

In case the reader considers this might all be a well-worn path, it should be emphasised there is new material and insight into the origins and enactment of cruelty, appropriation and dishonesty that became the pattern in Suharto’s New Order Indonesia and its captive provinces in West New Guinea.

It is a work of thoroughness and industry, especially where covert activity and actual conspiracy appears; extensive documentation has been provided making the case strong. Much of it is original material, such as diplomatic messaging obtained through libraries, and records of interviews or correspondence with leading figures, viz Nishijima or the former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Well defended
The thesis of the book is consistently propounded and well defended:

“This book is about the ownership of the immense wealth of natural resources in Western New Guinea”.

The colonised inhabitants did not get that ownership or any just share of it, with bad consequences for their culture and welfare. It was a bad beginning in 1963 with Indonesia in a dominating frame of mind:

“Papuan culture is the antithesis of life in Java.”

Where the Dutch colonisers are characterised as a very small population hardly penetrating the hinterland, the Indonesians who took over from them have been aggressive with their industry building, immigration and military occupation.

Papuans today make up barely half the population of 5.4-million, steadily outstripped by arrivals. Population growth in the comparable country, Papua New Guinea, since independence in 1975 has been much stronger, now pushing towards 11-million.

• Curse of Gold, by Greg Poulgrain (Jakarta, Kompas, 2026). ISBN 978, ISBN 978 (PDF)

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Yet this global diplomatic posture raises a critical question: how credible is Indonesia’s claim to peace leadership while a prolonged humanitarian crisis continues in West Papua?

In late February 2026, Prabowo offered Indonesia’s services to mediate rising tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, even stating he was prepared to travel to Tehran if both parties agreed to dialogue.

The message was reinforced when former Indonesian vice-president Jusuf Kalla met Iran’s ambassador, Mohammad Boroujerdi, on 3 March 2026 to reiterate Indonesia’s readiness to facilitate diplomatic engagement.

In response, Iran publicly welcomed the gesture but tempered expectations.

Iranian officials insisted that any meaningful mediation must include condemnation of US and Israeli military actions, warning that diplomatic initiatives without political clarity may have limited effectiveness.

The exchange highlighted both Indonesia’s aspiration to play a larger diplomatic role and the complexities of international conflict mediation.

Peacebroker limitations
However, Indonesia’s attempt to position itself as a global peace broker has already faced significant limitations. In 2023, Prabowo proposed a peace plan for the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The proposal, which included controversial suggestions such as a demilitarised zone and a referendum in disputed territories, was quickly rejected by Ukrainian officials. The response exposed the limited influence of Indonesia’s mediation efforts in conflicts far beyond Southeast Asia.

While presenting himself internationally as a peacemaker, critics argue that Prabowo has largely paid lip service to human rights at home, particularly regarding the unresolved crisis in West Papua.

Indonesian protesters denounce US link over Iran war         Video: Al Jazeera

While Indonesia promotes its diplomatic role in international conflicts, violence and instability continue to affect civilians in West Papua.

On 11 February 2026, only weeks before Prabowo’s international mediation initiative gained attention, a small civilian aircraft operated by Smart Air came under gunfire shortly after landing at Korowai Batu airstrip in Boven Digoel, West Papua.

A spokesperson linked to the military wing of Free Papua Movement (TPNPB- OPM) later claimed responsibility for the attack, stating that the aircraft had allegedly been used to transport Indonesian security forces.

The roots of the crisis stretch back to the early 1960s, when Indonesia invaded and took control of the territory following the withdrawal of Dutch colonial administration.

Act of Free Choice controversy
The subsequent 1969 referendum, known as the Act of Free Choice, remains one of the most controversial political processes in modern Southeast Asian and South Pacific history.

Rather than a universal vote, approximately 1025 selected representatives voted under significant political and military pressure.

Many Papuans and international observers argue that the process failed to meet internationally recognized standards for self-determination. As a result, the legitimacy of the referendum continues to be contested, and its legacy remains a central grievance fueling decades of political resistance and armed conflict.

For many analysts and human rights advocates, the Papua conflict cannot simply be framed as a domestic security problem. Instead, it represents a protracted humanitarian and political crisis that has yet to find a comprehensive and inclusive resolution.

In this sense, the issue has become what some observers describe as a long-standing wound within the Indonesian state.

Such incidents highlight the tragic reality faced by ordinary Papuans, who often find themselves caught between military operations and Papuan resistance attacks.

Civilians bear the brunt of a conflict that has persisted for decades without meaningful political dialogue capable of addressing its underlying causes.

Rising internal displacement in West Papua
According to reports by human rights organisations and humanitarian groups, displacement in West Papua has increased significantly in recent years.

The number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has risen dramatically, from roughly 55,000 at the end of 2023 to more than 103,000 by October 2025. Many displaced communities face severe shortages of food, healthcare, education, and basic security.

These figures reflect a broader systemic failure to protect civilians and provide sustainable solutions for affected communities. Despite decades of development initiatives and official rhetoric emphasising stability and prosperity in Papua, the lived reality for many residents remains defined by insecurity and displacement.

Prabowo’s own military history also continues to shape international perceptions of Indonesia’s human rights record. During the Indonesian occupation of East Timor between 1975 and 1999, Prabowo served as an officer in Indonesia’s elite special forces, Kopassus.

Human rights organisations have linked him to operations accused of abuses against civilians during that period.

Following the 1999 referendum that ultimately led to East Timor’s independence, the United Nations supported investigations into violence carried out by Indonesian-backed militias and security forces.

Although Prabowo was never tried or convicted by an international court, activists and some Timorese leaders have long argued that senior Indonesian officers should have faced deeper scrutiny.

Shaping of credibility
In international diplomacy, credibility is often shaped not only by external initiatives but also by a state’s domestic human rights record. When internal conflicts remain unresolved, claims to global moral leadership can face heightened scrutiny.

Prabowo was also involved in military operations in Papua during the 1990s. One of the most widely discussed incidents was the 1996 Mapenduma hostage crisis in the highlands of what is now Nduga Regency.

Human rights organisations have documented allegations of abuses committed by Indonesian security forces during that period.

Additional controversies have surrounded claims that aircraft bearing the emblem of the International Committee of the Red Cross were misused during operations. Such allegations, whether proven or not, continue to raise questions about adherence to international humanitarian law and contribute to lingering distrust among Papuan communities.

Taken together, these historical and contemporary dynamics create a sharp contrast between Indonesia’s global diplomatic ambitions and the unresolved realities within its own borders.

In international diplomacy, credibility is closely tied to domestic consistency.
It is difficult to advocate peace abroad while unresolved grievances and allegations of human rights violations persist at home.

For Indonesia, genuine leadership in global peacemaking would require more than diplomatic offers on the world stage. It would involve confronting the deeper structural issues underlying the conflict in West Papua.

Ensuring accountability
This would include ensuring accountability for past abuses, protecting civil liberties, and opening inclusive political dialogue that allows Papuans to meaningfully participate in shaping their own future.

Without such reforms, Indonesia’s peace diplomacy risks being perceived less as principled international engagement and more as a form of strategic public relations. The gap between Jakarta’s diplomatic rhetoric and the lived experiences of Papuan civilians remains stark.

Ultimately, Indonesia’s credibility as a global peacemaker will depend not only on its willingness to mediate conflicts abroad but also on its ability to address the long-standing humanitarian and political crisis within West Papua.

Until that gap is bridged, Indonesia’s aspirations for global diplomatic leadership will continue to face serious questions about legitimacy and moral authority.

The continued instability in West Papua also has broader regional implications for the Pacific, where several governments and civil society groups have increasingly raised concerns about the humanitarian situation faced by indigenous West Papuans.

Ali Mirin is a West Papuan from the Kimyal tribe in the highlands bordering the Star Mountains region of Papua New Guinea. He holds a Master of Arts in international relations from Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Three more schools and a major hospital have been bombed in Iran and more in Lebanon by the US-Israeli military, all within the first week of launching their latest war.

This is a pattern, not “collateral damage”. Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations Amir-Saeid Iravani said on March 7 that the US and Israel “recognise no red line in committing their crimes” against his country.

Densely populated parts of Tehran are being pounded by wave after wave of US and Israeli bombs.  Shahid Hamedani School in Tehran was struck on March 6, the day of the funerals of schoolgirls (6-12 year-olds) killed in Minab, Iran.

UN officials have confirmed that the Minab attack killed 160 children and five staff.

The Palestinians, despite the genocide inflicted on them by Israel and the West, have never become used to the daily killing of children: “The smallest coffins are always the heaviest,” Palestinians say.

Israel has killed many times more women, children and babies than they have Palestinian resistance fighters. There is even a name for this depravity — the Dahiya Doctrine.

Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine and the law of proportionality
International media are reporting that Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, is suffering another brutal aerial bombardment from the Israelis.

Dahiya — al-Dahiya al-Janubiya — is home to 700,000 civilians living in high-density housing. The suburb lends its name to Israel’s policy of using massive, disproportionate force against civilians and infrastructure to weaken an enemy’s resolve.

It is, of course, a war crime to do so.

In the 2006 Lebanon War, Israel attacked Dahiya, a popular stronghold of the Hezbollah movement. The massive bombing campaign wasn’t to achieve a military objective; the target was civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Hundreds of children were among the dead.

I have a fabric reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica on my office wall. It has been coloured red, green black and white – the colours of the Palestinian flag — to draw the important parallel.

The governments of New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Canada and all the others, with rare noble exceptions like Spain, support this depraved criminality. We share values with the Israelis and the Americans, our leaders tell us.

The Principle of Proportionality is critical to protect children
The Americans and Israelis have a bloodlust and openly brag about their destructive abilities. Operation Epic Fury screams to the world: “war crimes”.

What should constrain US-Israeli violence is international law and the principle that there are limits to what is acceptable in “incidental” harm caused to civilians.

Proportionality is one of the foundational concepts in international law, along with other important injunctions like the prohibition of force against sovereign states. Under the Geneva Convention, before undertaking military action states are obligated to consider: Distinction (separating civilians from combatants), Proportionality, Precaution (taking care to minimise civilian harm), Military Necessity (i.e. don’t launch wars of aggression), and Humanity — prohibiting unnecessary suffering.

This is the exact opposite of the Dahiya Doctrine and the American Way of War — from Korea to Iraq by way of Vietnam. Over six million civilians were killed by the US in just those three conflicts alone.

Article 51 of the Geneva Convention
The principle of proportionality is codified in Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions, and affirmed as binding customary international law applicable to all parties in all conflicts.  This is further affirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross’s Rule 14 which states:

“Launching an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.”

The West has torn up its copies of international law but we need to keep its spirit alive. New Zealand, Australia and most of the “civilised world” are signatories to various treaties that require them to enforce humanitarian law upon belligerents. Instead, our countries work day and night to support Israel and the US in their evil work. Evil is the appropriate word here.

I will give the last word to the Israeli commander who led the 2006 terror bombing of Dahiya, General Gadi Eisenkot, chief of Northern Command:

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it (villages) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

In an era when images can circle the globe in seconds and newsrooms claim to uphold universal humanitarian principles; one might expect the killing of 165 schoolgirls inside a primary school to dominate international headlines.

One would expect emergency debates, moral outrage, and relentless coverage.

Yet in the southeastern Iranian city of Minab — where Israeli-American strikes obliterated classrooms filled with children — the world’s most influential media institutions have responded with something far more revealing than condemnation: they have responded with silence.

These were not combatants. They were not militants. They were children seated at their desks, pens in their hands, notebooks open before them, studying, whispering to classmates, and imagining futures that stretched decades ahead.

In seconds, that ordinary school day turned into a massacre. Desks became splintered wreckage, classrooms collapsed into dust, and rows of coffins replaced rows of pupils.

Yet the names of these girls — 165 lives extinguished before they truly began — barely entered the global conversation.

This omission is not the product of oversight. It reflects something far more structural: the hierarchy of victims that governs much of the contemporary information order.

In theory, modern Western media institutions present themselves as defenders of human rights and guardians of moral accountability. In practice, their editorial priorities often mirror geopolitical interests with striking precision.

Human rights losing integrity
When the deaths of children generate outrage in one context but indifference in another, the moral language surrounding human rights begins to lose its integrity.

When tragedies reinforce established narratives about adversarial states, they are amplified, dramatised, and transformed into global moral spectacles.

But when tragedies expose the human cost of the military actions carried out by Western powers or their closest allies, they are quietly displaced from the front page —if they appear at all.

The massacre in Minab illustrates this logic with devastating clarity.

The deaths of 165 Iranian schoolgirls do not fit comfortably within the dominant geopolitical storyline that portrays Israel and its strategic partners as defenders of stability and order in a turbulent region.

Acknowledging such an atrocity would inevitably raise difficult questions: about the legality of strikes on civilian infrastructure, about the ethics of military escalation, and about the widening humanitarian toll of ongoing Israeli-American attacks across the region.

It is therefore far easier to look away.

Minab not isolated tragedy
But Minab is not an isolated tragedy. Across Lebanon, relentless bombardments have repeatedly struck civilian neighbourhoods, reducing homes and streets to rubble.

Across Palestine, entire communities have endured cycles of destruction that claim the lives of children whose only battlefield was the ground beneath their feet. Hospitals, schools, and residential blocks have all entered the expanding geography of devastation.

These events do not occur in a vacuum. They form part of a broader pattern in which military power operates alongside narrative power. Missiles shape the physical battlefield, while selective reporting shapes the battlefield of perception.

What emerges is not merely a media bias but a form of narrative engineering. Certain victims are elevated as symbols of universal suffering, while others — often far more numerous — are rendered invisible. Compassion itself becomes curated, distributed unevenly according to political convenience.

For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection. The credibility of humanitarian discourse depends on consistency.

The girls of Minab deserved the same recognition afforded to any victims of violence anywhere in the world. They deserved to have their stories told, their lives acknowledged, and their deaths confronted with the seriousness such an atrocity demands.

Instead, they encountered a second form of erasure.

First came the missiles that ended their lives. Then came the silence that followed.

Selective visibility needs reflection
For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection.

In the contemporary information age, propaganda rarely announces itself openly. It often operates through absence — through the stories that never reach the front page, the victims whose names remain unspoken, and the tragedies that disappear before the world has time to notice.

The massacre in Minab therefore stands as more than a local catastrophe. It exposes a deeper crisis in the global information order — one in which the value of human life appears disturbingly contingent on political context.

And if the deaths of 165 schoolgirls in their classrooms fail to trigger universal outrage, the question is no longer about geopolitics alone.

It becomes a question about the credibility of the moral system that claims to defend humanity itself.

Dr Hana Saada is an Algerian university lecturer and journalist, and editor-in-chief of the English edition of Dzair Tube. She holds a PhD in media translation and writes on geopolitics, media narratives, and international affairs. This article is republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Michael West

We are led by fools and sycophants. The illegal, unprovoked invasion of Iran is not just garden-variety stupidity. This is stupidity on a grandiose, stratospheric scale.

The Israeli propaganda narrative that Iranians would sprinkle rose petals at the feet of their invaders has not come to pass. It has already been demolished in fact.

Instead of bringing freedom and democracy — “regime change” — we have brought chaos, possibly a world war, and definitely the destruction of the Middle East.

The world economy is being hit hard as we write; oil prices spiralling, energy prices about to soar, and the inexorable spectre of inflation and recession.

And it didn’t have to happen.

This was a war of choice. Even without the “Epstein Coalition” — as the Iranian media so aptly dubs their invaders — murdering 165 Iranian school girls on day one, “peace through strength” was never going to happen.

Quite the contrary. The illegal and unprovoked invasion of Iran has hardened the resolve of Iranians, who are massing in their hundreds of thousands across the country to mourn their dead and chant “Death to America”, to back their regime.

Where was the advice?
The Epstein Coalition killed the Ayatollah, who was actually against nuclear power; he was a moderate.

Did Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong not seek advice from Foreign Affairs that attacking Iran was folly, that the anti-regime protesters were a minority, that the pre-invasion protests were a Mossad and CIA psyop, that Iran might attack US proxy states in the region, that invasion would be a Brobigdadgian mistake?

Or did they ignore the advice in favour of a Washington regime compromised by the Epstein pedophile scandal?

And now, we see the feeble, hypocritical whining by Israel and its supporters about Iran attacking the Gulf states. Is that our only moral defence?

Decades of supporting these regimes: Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — US proxy states all — regimes now unravelling, the oil price is soaring, inflation and recession are beckoning globally.

Images are emerging from Bahrain of locals cheering on the Iranian missiles. Were DFAT and our politicians unaware of popular angst in the Gulf states against American imperialism?

And what did they expect Iran to do in the face of this existential threat? Not blow up American bases and infrastructure while the US attacked them; after the US betrayed them at the very negotiating table when they were offering significant concessions on nuclear enrichment, all to avoid war? This war.

War drums over Tehran.             Video: The West Report

Australia, the US flunkies
Yet here was Australia, Saturday night, first out of the blocks worldwide to throw its support behind Donald Trump and his preposterous “Operation Epic Fury”, a probable pedophile being blackmailed and led around by the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu like a pony at the fairground show.

“Operation Epstein Fury”, it was fast labelled. The soaring, craven stupidity is hard to grasp. Both major parties backing it.

Albo first, then Angus Taylor rushing to tow the Donald’s line. Then, One Nation’s Pauline Hanson, too, who even congratulated and praised Netanyahu. We are led by fools and sycophants.

The flawed defence of atrocity
To address the empty rhetoric of the pro-war lobby, criticism of this war does not equate to support for the regime in Iran. Defenders of the US-Israel atrocity are busy with their swarms of social media bots peddling the argument that “you are an Islamist terror supporter” if you criticise the invasion.

This is the 2026 version of “You are a Hamas supporter” if you argue against genocide in Gaza.

The cold facts of this debacle are that regime change does not work, that Iran did not want this war, that Iran appears to be exceptionally well prepared, that the Epstein Coalition, which Australia supports, is daily backing war crimes: blowing up hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructure.

This is a war which has already been lost.

The obvious reality is that regime change wars are a demonstrable failure. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Iraq — a million dead, irretrievable regional stability. In Afghanistan, 20 years, trillions of dollars spent, four US presidents, six Australian PMs — all to replace the Taliban . . . with the Taliban.

And here we are, the world’s busybodies, doing it again.

Who would ever negotiate with the US in good faith again, or Israel for that matter? Iran did not want this war. Iran has not attacked another country in 300 years.

The US lured them to the negotiating table, then, without warning, murdered their leadership. This echoes last year’s 12-day war, where Israel and the US lured them in on the premise of good faith talks, then murdered them and now play the victim.

What did they expect Iran to do in the face of this existential threat?

The record speaks for itself. The US is the biggest invader of other countries in history. Israel has, last year alone, attacked Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, Qatar, Tunisia, Malta, and Greece.

Six illegal attacks of sovereign nations, as well as three illegal attacks in international waters equals nine all up. In one year.

And now they are invading Lebanon again, seizing more territory as their puppets, America, fight their campaign against Iran.

Albo, what are you doing?
We know who the warmongers are. We are the warmongers. Yet, in his bizarre statement of support, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was the fastest out of the blocks of all the allies on the weekend, issuing a false statement.

Australia stands with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression.

For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force, through its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support for armed proxies, and brutal acts of violence and intimidation.

Iran…

— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) February 28, 2026

The claim, echoed by the usual warmongers of the Lib-Lab establishment, is that Iran is guilty of attacks on Australian soil, referencing alleged attacks on a deli in Bondi.

Apart from the common sense, why would Iran commit an act of terror on a deli in Bondi? Senior police have conceded that there is no evidence of this.

The nuclear furphy
Then there is the age-old claim that Iran is about to produce nuclear weapons. The US and Israel’s nuclear risk claims have been so roundly discredited it’s a joke.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to instigate a war against Iran for 30 years — claiming Iran is days away, weeks away, months away from nuclear missiles.

And they were at the negotiating table again when the Epstein forces murdered them.

The propaganda
We are now seeing mainstream media decry the “illegal attacks” on Israel and the Gulf states. Yet the ‘victim card” is tapped out.

Around the world, outside the legacy media propaganda, there is little sympathy for Israel having razed Gaza and slaughtered between 72,000 and 700,000 Palestinians while stealing more land in the West Bank daily.

It will continue. The media and political classes have failed so majestically that they can only try to salvage their authority with more propaganda.

The deplorable coverage of the murdered schoolgirls in Iran is a case in point. The “40 beheaded babies” and the “mass rapes” of Hamas filled the headlines in the West on October 8, 2023. Yet real murders — 165 murdered schoolgirls — have hardly rated a mention. Yes, a mention perhaps, but a side story, buried, no headlines of outrage.

Can’t handle the truth?

Is the truth too hard to handle? Is it not evident to everybody except the most brainwashed advocate of the Epstein lobby that Israel — the government, the state — is the problem here?

Netanyahu has won his ambition to drag America into a war against Iran, and if you follow the money, while world stock markets teeter, the stock market in Tel Aviv is surging, replete with weapons companies as it is.

Meanwhile, the ASX is tanking, ergo our savings. Oil prices are surging, ergo higher energy prices and inflation. The Houthis, Iran’s allies, are shooting again in the Red Sea while, on the other side of the Arabian peninsula, Iran has blocked the Straits of Hormuz, choking off a large chunk of the world’s oil supply.

Higher prices in India and China will mean higher prices for imports and inflation around the world.

The lessons of history have not been learnt; in fact, they have been discarded in spectacular fashion.

> 70 years ago, Iran looked just like any Western country.
> Short skirts, rock’n’roll, open universities.
> It’s 1953. Iran elects a secular socialist: Mohammad Mossadegh.
> He nationalizes oil. That pisses off BP.
> Cold War excuse.
> CIA and MI6 stage a coup. Operation Ajax.
>… pic.twitter.com/ZNWaLdBlCN

— Dr. Simon Goddek (@goddek) March 1, 2026

Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

“One can oppose a hateful regime and, at the same time, oppose an unjustified and dangerous military intervention,” says Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

“I once again call for immediate de-escalation, respect for international law, and the urgency of resuming dialogue.”

While some governments around the world have easily managed to express their opposition to the unlawful military attacks by Israel and the US and their opposition to the Iranian regime, shamefully New Zealand has failed to follow their example.

Instead, the government has issued a statement that condemns only Iran; “acknowledges” the military strikes were “designed to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security”; and calls for “adherence to international law” — apparently blissfully unaware that the attacks comprise multiple breaches of international law.

In an interview on RNZ, the PM repeatedly responded to the question “Does New Zealand support these attacks or not?” by reading out “We think Iran is evil, we think it’s been repressing its own people.

“We think it’s been arming proxies and terrorist organisations. We think it has been developing its ballistic and nuclear programmes and years of diplomacy hasn’t actually paid any fruits.”

He also said more than once that New Zealand’s position was the same as Australia’s — the Australian PM has said they “support the United States acting to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons”.

Bizarre spectre
Which, aside from ignoring the US’s stated desire for forced regime change in Iran, raises the bizarre spectre of two nuclear-armed states attacking another state in case it might develop nuclear weapons — even though Iran is a state party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (#NPT), which Israel is not, and has opened its nuclear facilities to the #IAEA, which Israel has not. Indeed, the only state in the Middle East that does have stockpiles of nuclear weapons (entirely undeclared and unsupervised) is Israel.

New Zealand’s moral failure to condemn these military strikes, but instead to continue describing the Iranian regime as “evil” or “bad actors” as though that somehow makes armed attacks on a sovereign nation to assassinate its leaders to force regime change okay — regardless of civilian casualties — shows how far it has now moved from even the pretence of applying international law to the actions of its military friends and partners.

And what a missed opportunity to point out the urgent necessity for the elimination of ALL #NuclearWeapons — so much for New Zealand’s alleged commitment to a nuclear weapons-free world, and its promotion of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons #TPNW / #NuclearBan and the NPT.

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We, Alternative Jewish Voices, deplore Israel and America’s illegal war of aggression against Iran. We also condemned the repression of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but that does not justify this war.

International war will only bring — is already bringing — more civilian death and destruction. We support the right of the Iranian people to determine their own future.

America and Israel again attacked Iran in mid-negotiation, three days after Iran’s Foreign Minister, Sayed Abbas Araghchi tweeted: “Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”

No one has offered the slightest contrary evidence.

This war of aggression violates international and US domestic law. After the Second World War, the Nuremberg Tribunal called aggression “the supreme international crime”.

We see around us the world they were trying to avert: Israel has waged genocidal war on a trapped community and bombed six countries that were not at war.

This morning, Israel is occupying parts of Lebanon. Russia has invaded and pounded Ukraine for four years. Pakistan is bombing the cities of Afghanistan. US President Donald Trump doesn’t know what to grab next.

Imperial ambitions
We regard the attack on Iran as the latest enactment of longstanding imperial ambitions. How many countries has America tried to bomb into submission? How many times did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bomb the blockaded population of Gaza before America gave him the green light and the weapons to commit outright genocide?

This week, benefiting from the distraction of Iran, Israel has yet again sealed Gaza behind a total blockade. Aid agencies are again counting the days until they again run out of food.

Netanyahu boasts on camera that this war is “what I have yearned to do for 40 years”. Beware of men who prefer the risks of war to those of peace. Chaos and civilian misery are their signatures, but we share responsibility for their impunity.

Even after the horror of livestreamed genocide in Gaza, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon acquiesces to more war and speaks as if Trump and Netanyahu are trustworthy public officials.

Luxon’s appeasement disgraces us. We must not support this unfolding disaster, not materially and not out of the side of the Prime Minister’s mouth. We must say “No” in a bold, principled voice; joining states like Spain and Denmark.

As this fire spreads, we must also peer through the headlines and focus on the people of Iran, Gaza, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Civilians need protection, intervention and an end to the games of these warmongers.

We urge our morally vacuous government to stand with the civilians, the law and our future.

Alternative Jewish Voices – Sh’ma Koleinu is a collective of anti-Zionist Jews from the Far North to Dunedin. It has a liberatory Aotearoa Jewish identity, whether religious or secular or cultural. It is part of a movement for collective liberation, in Aotearoa and in Palestine.

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ANALYSIS: By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

On February 16, 2026, one of us (Jeffrey Sachs) sent a letter to the UN Security Council warning that the United States was on the verge of tearing up the United Nations Charter.

That warning has now come to pass. The United States and Israel have launched an unprovoked war against Iran in flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, without authorisation from the Security Council, and without any legitimate claim of self-defence under Article 51.

They are trying to kill the UN Charter and the international rule of law, but they will fail.

At the Security Council on February 28, 2026, the US and its allies directed their condemnation not at the American and Israeli aggression, but at Iran.

One US ally after the next condemned Iran for its retaliatory attacks yet absurdly failed to condemn the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran. This performance by these countries was disgraceful and turned reality completely upside down.

The joint US-Israeli attacks were described by Trump as necessary because Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.”

This is of course a flat lie. As the letter of February 16 recounted, Iran agreed a decade ago to a nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was adopted by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231.

Trump ripped up agreement
It was Trump who ripped up the agreement in 2018. In June 2025, Israel bombed Iran in the midst of US-Iran negotiations.

This time too, the Israel-US war plans were set weeks ago when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump, and the negotiations underway between the US and Iran were a charade. This seems to be the new modus operandi of the US: start negotiations and then aim to murder the counterparts.

It is easy to understand why the US allies behave in the embarrassing and self-abasing way they did at the UN Security Council. In addition to the United States, eight of the other 14 Council members host US military bases or grant the US military access to local bases: Bahrain, Colombia, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Panama, and the United Kingdom.

These countries are not fully sovereign. They are partially governed by the US. The US military bases house CIA operations, and the host countries constantly look over their shoulder to try to avoid US subversion in their own countries.

As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host US military bases and CIA operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.

As an absurd but telling example, the Danish ambassador parroted every US talking point, pointing her finger at Iran for its aggression as if Iran had not been attacked by the US and Israel.

She completely forgot that such humiliating vassalage to the US will not play well for Denmark if the US occupies Greenland.

Truthful voices at UN
The truthful voices at the Security Council came from the countries not occupied by the United States. Russia explained correctly that the so-called West (that is, the countries occupied by the US) is engaged in victim-blaming when it points its finger at Iran.

China reminded the Council that the crisis began with the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, not with Iran’s retaliation.

Somalia’s ambassador, speaking on behalf of several African member states, truthfully portrayed the source of this recent escalation.

The UN Representative of the League of Arab States spoke brilliantly about the root cause of Israel’s mad aggression: the denial of rights to Palestinian people, and Israel’s use of mass murder and regional war to prevent the emergence of a State of Palestine.

When Iran retaliates against US military bases in the Gulf, it is exercising its inherent right of self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter. We must remember that the US and Israel are openly and repeatedly assassinating Iran’s leaders, with the aim of overthrowing its government.

When states murder a foreign head of state and attempt to destroy the government, the target of those threats is entitled under international law to defend itself.

The US-Israeli bombing murdered not only Iran’s Supreme Leader and several top government officials, but also more than 165 young girls in their school in Minab. These young children are the victims of a horrific war crime.

Complicit in war crime
The countries that gave a UN Security Council pass to the United States and Israel for these killings — notably Denmark, France, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and of course the US — are also complicit in this war crime.

This UN Security Council emergency meeting will likely be remembered as the day the United Nations ceased to function from its headquarters on American soil. An international organisation dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes cannot credibly operate from a country that wages illegal wars, threatens member states with annihilation, and treats UN Security Council resolutions as disposable instruments of convenience.

For the UN to survive, and we need it to survive, it will need several homes around the world — in Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and others — honouring the true multipolarity of our world.

Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN and the international rule of law—an attempt that will fail.

Israel’s objective is to establish a Greater Israel, destroy the Palestinian people, and assert its hegemony over hundreds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East (from the Nile to the Euphrates, as US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently asserted).

The United States’ delusional efforts at global hegemony are proceeding region by region. The US has recently claimed, in a wholly twisted supposed revival of the Monroe Doctrine, that it controls the Western Hemisphere and can dictate how Latin American countries conduct their economic and political affairs.

The US kidnapped the sitting Venezuelan president to prove the point, and it now threatens to overthrow the Cuban government as well.

US ‘owns Middle East’
Today’s war against Iran aims to prove that the US similarly owns the Middle East. The war is part of a 30-year campaign, initiated by the Clean Break doctrine, to overthrow all governments that oppose US and Israeli hegemony in the region.

Those joint Israel-US wars have included the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the decades of wars and regime-change operations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

One part of the US global plan is to commandeer the world’s oil exports and to weaken China and Russia in the process. The US seizure of Venezuela was designed to ensure American control of that country’s oil exports, especially to control the flow of oil to China.

US sanctions on Russia aim to prevent Russian oil from reaching India and China. Now the US aims to stop the flow of Iran’s oil to China. More broadly, the US aims to control the entire Gulf region plus Iran to maintain its imperial dominance.

The international order that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to build after the catastrophe of the Second World War was founded on a simple and profound idea — that law and respect, not force, should govern relations among states. That idea is now being destroyed by the very nation that did most to promote it in founding the UN. The irony is bitter beyond measure.

The truth is that the devastation of the war will not directly affect the so-called West: their children will not suffer traumas or death, and their countries will not be set ablaze. The victims of this attack are the people of the Middle East. They are the expendable ones who suffer from Western arrogance, abuse of power, and addiction to war.

We close with two observations. First, the United States will not achieve global hegemony or kill the UN. The world is too large, too diverse, and too determined to resist domination by any single power, much less one with 4 percent of the world’s population.

World outside US
The world outside of the US and the countries it occupies want the UN to live and thrive. The US attempt will surely fail, but it may cause immense suffering before it does.

Second, if Israel continues its addiction to war and occupation, it too will not survive. That addiction represents a mix of theocracy and post-traumatic stress.

Part of Israel believes that it is the biblical kingdom of the 5th century BC. The other part lives in the traumatic memory of the Holocaust, and so is determined to kill any perceived adversary rather than learn to live together with it in peace.

The Israeli Ambassador’s twisted defence of Israel’s brazen attack on Iran, as usual, cited the Bible and Auschwitz as the two justifications. These are Israel’s two perennial references, but not the real world of today.

A state that depends on permanent war, permanent occupation and slaughter of the Palestinians, and the indefinite subjugation of millions of people has no viable future, and the policies that the United States is now pursuing on Israel’s behalf will accelerate rather than prevent that outcome.

The two-state solution, which the Council has endorsed repeatedly, offers Israel a path to peace. Tragically Israel rejects that. The result, eventually, will be the end of Israel itself in its current form, especially as the US population is rapidly turning against Israel’s violent theocracy and towards the cause of Palestine.

Perhaps there will be one democratic state for both Arabs and Jews living in peace, together, with an end of apartheid rule.

These are harsh truths, but emergencies demand honesty. The UN is being murdered by Israel and the United States. The Security Council must rouse itself from their military occupation by the US, and remember that they are the stewards of the UN Charter’s promise to maintain international peace and security.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. Sybil Fares is a specialist and advisor in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

Republished under Creative Commons.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Western countries, including  Australia and New Zealand, were quick to line up to support Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israeli blitzkrieg on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

They were effectively throwing international law into a cauldron of blood and mayhem.  These same Western powers — and the Gulf Arab states that stand with them — may soon live to regret it.

In an article on February 21, I wrote, “A precision strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan liquefaction trains (that purify, cool, and compress the gas), for example, would drop a bomb into the world’s gas market.”

Should the Iranian state survive the terrifying onslaught, it has vowed to strike back in ways that could crash the global economy.

Early signs point to a long war
Two early signs of their potential to do so are the closure of all the civilian airports in the Gulf and the effective closure by Iran of the Strait of Hormuz.

The first one stops the daily movement of 500,000 international passengers through Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and other airports, the second cuts off the shipment of 21 million barrels of oil and gas a day (20 percent of global daily requirements).

The knock-on effects of a prolonged war are almost incalculable but as I pointed out in a recent article if Iran manages to resist the most powerful military in the world, the shockwaves will soon transfer to our own economies.

I thought that would be a measure of last resort but Iran struck the site with drones on  March 3 and — should they choose — could destroy the facility entirely which would take years to rebuild.

Qatar immediately shut down Ras Laffan, the source of 20 percent of the world’s LNG. UK wholesale gas prices immediately jumped 50 percent.

Countries like Australia and New Zealand may end up on the losing end of a bidding war for oil, LNG and agricultural petrochemicals if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

One should remember that Iran has many thousands of short range missiles and countless mines sprinkled along its coastline which will be all-but-impossible to suppress.

Nuclear propaganda and mischaracterisations
For the moment, the assassination of the Supreme Leader may see champagne corks popping in Western capitals but, as I warned recently, a decapitation strike could lead a furious or desperate Iran to lash out, sinking a US aircraft carrier by using their hypersonic missiles.

There is also a non-trivial risk that the US and Israel could use nuclear weapons if things go sideways.

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The West is in turmoil over countries’ top legal minds declaring the US-Israel attack on Iran to be illegal, as China did.

But Israel-friendly Western politicians, including Starmer, von der Leyen, Albanese, and others are desperately blocking their ears as they try to justify actual war crimes.

Here’s what the specialists say:

1. The European Journal of International Law is very clear that “this use of force by the US and Israel is manifestly illegal. It is as plain a violation of the prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter as one could possibly have.”

2. Other top European bodies have agreed. “Trump’s strikes on Iran are an illegal war of choice—and Europeans should say so,” said a report published by the European Council of Foreign Relations.

It said leaders must “communicate clearly that this is a war of choice by America, in contravention of the same UN charter the Europeans have themselves invoked to condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and insist on Greenland’s sovereignty.”

3. Arguably even more telling was a statement from the former legal chief at US Central Command, literally the people who are carrying out the bombings on Iran:

“Not only does this violate international law in numerous respects, it clearly violates the US Constitution and the War Powers Resolution,” said retired Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel Rachel Van Landingham.

Her entire career has been about establishing the difference between legal and illegal attacks by US Centcom, the people doing the attacking.

4. “Trump and Netanyahu’s attack on Iran is an illegal act of aggression” was the title of an essay by Kenneth Roth in the UK Guardian: “Their actions are no different from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine…”

This is interesting as Roth is best known as the former head of Human Rights Watch, a US foreign policy tool thinly disguised as an NGO (evidence for that is in a separate report).

5. The same argument, with arguably even more fire, is erupting in the UK. Unpopular Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, known for his pro-Trump and pro-Israel positions, is being taken to task by people speaking for the British people, who tend to be anti-war and are generally not fans of Trump.

Jeremy Corbyn, elder statesman of the UK left, described the US-Israel attack as “illegal, unprovoked and unjustifiable”.

“Peace and diplomacy was possible,” he added. “Instead, Israel and the United States chose war. This is the behaviour of rogue states — and they have jeopardised the safety of humankind around the world with this catastrophic act of aggression.”

6. Even people on Starmer’s own team were clear. Labour MP Emily Thornberry, chairperson of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Press Association: “There is no legal basis for this attack.”

Israel loyalist Starmer pointedly chose not to repeat this point.

7. Patrick Harvie, Scottish parliamentarian, said: “It is part of a pattern of reckless and destructive behaviour from a White House that has shown total contempt for human rights, international law and negotiations… From arming Israel’s genocide against Palestinians to his illegal and immoral coup in Venezuela and his threats against Europe, Trump has acted like a gangster on the world stage.”

8. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a strong backer of the Israeli government, is also in trouble.

Legal experts in Australia have been pointing out the illegality of the attacks on Iran since last year. “Why the US strikes on Iran are illegal and can set a troubling precedent,” was the title of a report by Professor Donald Rothwell of the ANU College of Law, after earlier attacks on Iran.

Many Australians are anti-war, but prominent politicians and the media are pushing a strongly pro-war line.

9. “Israel said the strikes were ‘preventive’, meaning they were to prevent Iran from developing a capacity to be a threat. But preventive war has no legal basis under international law,” said a statement from two political specialists at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Shannon Brincat and Juan Zahir Naranjo Caceres.

Marko Milanovic, editor of the European Journal of International Law (mentioned above), made the same point. “Even if the broadest possible understanding of anticipatory self-defence was taken as correct, Israel’s use of force against Iran would be illegal,” he said.

10. The point is echoed by multiple experts. “The possibility of acting in self-defence in view of an attack that might be coming is illegal in international law and we’re all very, very clear about that,” said Maria Gavouneli, a professor of international law at Athens University, in an interview with Al-Jazeera.

11. Even in the US, lawmakers on both sides have criticised the attack on Iran as being against the law. Senator Ed Markey called the actions “illegal and unconstitutional”.

12. Former US Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes declared the attack to be an illegal war, ‘A war that has no domestic or international legal basis. A war that Americans do not support. A war in response to no imminent threat. A pointless war,’ he wrote on X.

Conclusion
Immediately after the US-Israel attack began, China’s Foreign Ministry said it was “a grave violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security”.

Legal experts across the Western nations agree.

There is no doubt that the US-Israel attacks on Iran are illegal, as numerous voices from around the world are saying.

Equally, there is also no doubt that the pro-Israel Western elite, who dominate politics and the media, will try to cover up this fact: Trump, von der Leyen, Starmer, Merz, and others.

Trouble is brewing in the West, as people realise just how controlled their rulers are.

Nury Vittachi is a Sri Lankan-born author based in Hong Kong and an independent writer. This article was first published on his X page.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

When I heard the terrible news that the Americans and Israelis had killed more than 165 children this week in an elementary school in Minab in Southern Iran it took me back to a wonderful day I spent in Isfahan in 2018.

I met lots of Iranian school children and their teachers that day. They were keen to practise their English and ask lots of questions. I want to share that day with you because it was filled with hope, with promise for a better world.

My wife and I were visiting Iran, both for the second time.

Right at the end of our time there we spent a day in Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan. It is a massive square that could enclose a dozen football fields.

Built by Shah Abbas I in the 17th Century, during the Safavid period, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site with markets, palaces and other cultural sites framing its four sides.  At one end is the magnificent Imam Mosque where a string of memorable moments happened to me.

I even saw a most astonishing one-woman demonstration.

We were just approaching the Imam Mosque when I noticed a young woman removing her head scarf. A mass of black hair fell down to her waist and then she began dancing.

‘Is this a protest?’
Rhythmically she swirled her upper body in a circular motion that sent her hair out horizontally around her. I was gob-smacked.

After a minute or two she stopped and started talking to her male companion who had been photographing her. I approached.

“Is this a protest?” I asked, somewhat gormlessly.  Yes, against the clothing restrictions.

Today the courage and determination of such people has, to a degree, paid off. Those restrictions, particularly in the cities, have effectively been lightened.  I have seen lots of footage of Iranian women without any head covering.

I salute their courage and determination and know their struggle will continue.

I also salute the courage and determination of the millions of Iranians who have turned out this week to support their government against the violent assault on the sovereignty of Iran by the racist, fascist genocidal Israeli state and its powerful vassal the USA.

Following the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, I saw remarkable footage of that same vast square in Isfahan filled to the four corners with what must have been hundreds of thousands of people. As with millions around the country, they were defying the missiles to protest the violation of their sovereignty.

The inconvenient truth
The scale of the pro-government demonstrations is virtually never shown in the Western media but to understand the contested political landscape that is Iran you need to understand that inconvenient truth.

Iranian politics in the Western view has been reduced to a cartoon, to a Manichean world of black and white — which partly explains why Westerners, most particularly the leaders, fail to grasp the fierce nationalism that has seen millions of Iranians rally round their government as their state comes under an existential threat.

That day in 2018 in that square I chatted with pro-government and anti-government people; all incredibly nice and open and welcoming. Everyone was keen to discuss Iran and the wider world.

There were lots of school parties and both the teachers and their students were keen to speak with us. It was an unalloyed pleasure for us. Iranians are remarkably hospitable, cultured and kind. For me, they are the finest people in the Middle East.

That is partly why I felt sad and bitter when I watched the footage of the bombed-out Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school (6-12 year-olds) in Minab and heard the screams of mothers calling for children whom they will never walk to school again.

The Western empire has a long history of killing children. I recently referenced Madeleine Albright’s infamous comment on the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children being “a price worth paying”.

This is just standard modus operandi for the West.

Protected by Mossad
Israeli football hooligans travel through Europe chanting “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no kids left!” They are protected by Mossad, local police and politicians like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Australian PM Anthony Albanese recently welcomed Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, who in October 2023 said: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

This is as clear a statement of genocidal intent as you could get and Israel made good on it.

Israel, the killer of tens of thousands of school kids, presents itself as a liberator for Iran? You don’t have to be an A-grade student to spot that lie.

Many people around the Western world want to commit the children of Iran into the hands of the President of the United States.

According to US Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA), Vice-Chair of the House Democratic Caucus: “In the Epstein files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”

Lieu, one of the architects of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is also one of those legislators who has had access to some of the files still kept out of the public record.

Iranian children have as much right to grow up in safety as our own children.

infamous bro-talk
We should all also recall Trump’s infamous bro-talk with the vile radio host Howard Stern. Stern asked if he could refer to Ivanka Trump as a “piece of ass,” and Donald Trump salivated back at him: “Yeah.”

While they were joking about this “piece of ass”, Trump said he would try to date Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. It is a relevant anecdote because we live in the age of American Geopolitical Epsteinism — a world of predators seeking to violate those weaker than them.

You don’t have to like the Iranian government to support the UN Charter and the insistence on the sovereign equality of nations.

Nothing in the Charter says it is okay for powerful white countries to attack other countries.  The West needs to bring its leaders to justice for the crime of genocide not launch yet another war on innocents.

Hands off Iran, Netanyahu. Hands off the children of Iran, Trump.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity on 2 March 2026.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

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

When I heard the terrible news that the Americans and Israelis had killed more than 165 children this week in an elementary school in Minab in Southern Iran it took me back to a wonderful day I spent in Isfahan in 2018.

I met lots of Iranian school children and their teachers that day. They were keen to practise their English and ask lots of questions. I want to share that day with you because it was filled with hope, with promise for a better world.

My wife and I were visiting Iran, both for the second time.

Right at the end of our time there we spent a day in Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan. It is a massive square that could enclose a dozen football fields.

Built by Shah Abbas I in the 17th Century, during the Safavid period, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site with markets, palaces and other cultural sites framing its four sides.  At one end is the magnificent Imam Mosque where a string of memorable moments happened to me.

I even saw a most astonishing one-woman demonstration.

We were just approaching the Imam Mosque when I noticed a young woman removing her head scarf. A mass of black hair fell down to her waist and then she began dancing.

‘Is this a protest?’
Rhythmically she swirled her upper body in a circular motion that sent her hair out horizontally around her. I was gob-smacked.

After a minute or two she stopped and started talking to her male companion who had been photographing her. I approached.

“Is this a protest?” I asked, somewhat gormlessly.  Yes, against the clothing restrictions.

Today the courage and determination of such people has, to a degree, paid off. Those restrictions, particularly in the cities, have effectively been lightened.  I have seen lots of footage of Iranian women without any head covering.

I salute their courage and determination and know their struggle will continue.

I also salute the courage and determination of the millions of Iranians who have turned out this week to support their government against the violent assault on the sovereignty of Iran by the racist, fascist genocidal Israeli state and its powerful vassal the USA.

Following the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, I saw remarkable footage of that same vast square in Isfahan filled to the four corners with what must have been hundreds of thousands of people. As with millions around the country, they were defying the missiles to protest the violation of their sovereignty.

The inconvenient truth
The scale of the pro-government demonstrations is virtually never shown in the Western media but to understand the contested political landscape that is Iran you need to understand that inconvenient truth.

Iranian politics in the Western view has been reduced to a cartoon, to a Manichean world of black and white — which partly explains why Westerners, most particularly the leaders, fail to grasp the fierce nationalism that has seen millions of Iranians rally round their government as their state comes under an existential threat.

That day in 2018 in that square I chatted with pro-government and anti-government people; all incredibly nice and open and welcoming. Everyone was keen to discuss Iran and the wider world.

There were lots of school parties and both the teachers and their students were keen to speak with us. It was an unalloyed pleasure for us. Iranians are remarkably hospitable, cultured and kind. For me, they are the finest people in the Middle East.

That is partly why I felt sad and bitter when I watched the footage of the bombed-out Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school (6-12 year-olds) in Minab and heard the screams of mothers calling for children whom they will never walk to school again.

The Western empire has a long history of killing children. I recently referenced Madeleine Albright’s infamous comment on the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children being “a price worth paying”.

This is just standard modus operandi for the West.

Protected by Mossad
Israeli football hooligans travel through Europe chanting “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no kids left!” They are protected by Mossad, local police and politicians like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Australian PM Anthony Albanese recently welcomed Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, who in October 2023 said: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

This is as clear a statement of genocidal intent as you could get and Israel made good on it.

Israel, the killer of tens of thousands of school kids, presents itself as a liberator for Iran? You don’t have to be an A-grade student to spot that lie.

Many people around the Western world want to commit the children of Iran into the hands of the President of the United States.

According to US Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA), Vice-Chair of the House Democratic Caucus: “In the Epstein files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”

Lieu, one of the architects of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is also one of those legislators who has had access to some of the files still kept out of the public record.

Iranian children have as much right to grow up in safety as our own children.

infamous bro-talk
We should all also recall Trump’s infamous bro-talk with the vile radio host Howard Stern. Stern asked if he could refer to Ivanka Trump as a “piece of ass,” and Donald Trump salivated back at him: “Yeah.”

While they were joking about this “piece of ass”, Trump said he would try to date Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. It is a relevant anecdote because we live in the age of American Geopolitical Epsteinism — a world of predators seeking to violate those weaker than them.

You don’t have to like the Iranian government to support the UN Charter and the insistence on the sovereign equality of nations.

Nothing in the Charter says it is okay for powerful white countries to attack other countries.  The West needs to bring its leaders to justice for the crime of genocide not launch yet another war on innocents.

Hands off Iran, Netanyahu. Hands off the children of Iran, Trump.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity on 2 March 2026.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Look around this morning.

America and Israel, nuclear-armed states have attacked Iran.

Israel, which has never declared its nuclear stockpiles nor its borders, has spent 2.5 years committing genocide against Gaza, a trapped community with no significant defensive weapons.

Israel has bombed six countries which are not at war with it. America funded it and elected Donald Trump to lead the violence from the front.

America and Israel pontificate about other states’ fitness to hold nuclear weapons.

Nuclear-armed Russia has invaded and battered Ukraine for four long years. Nuclear-armed Pakistan has begun to bomb the cities of Afghanistan, a state which lacks even an air force with which to defend its people (not that the Taliban care for the lives of their people).

We awake in the world that wise, caring people worked to avert for over a century; a world of impunity and gleeful slaughter by the already-overarmed.

People tried to minimise the risk and the harm of war with a few basic agreements. They dared to intervene for the protection and survival of civilians, doctors, journalists. They wrote laws to criminalise aggression and genocide.

All this is going up in smoke, and not one of the aggressors/provocateurs/genocidaires has a viable claim of self-defence.

How many people wake up in terror this morning (if they slept at all last night) in this new world?

Marilyn Garson writes about Palestinian and Jewish dissent.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz