Tucker Carlson takes on Christian Zionists

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Max Blumenthal
 
@MaxBlumenthal
This is a landmark moment in the cracking of the artificially manufactured pro-Israel consensus in the US. It’s reflective not only of Tucker’s evolution on foreign policy, but of the erosion of Israel’s fortress of support in conservative circles. GOP approval for Israel’s assault on Gaza has dropped over 10 points in the past month, and younger evangelicals are far less likely to support Israel than their parents and pastors.
 
There are three major factors behind the shift: first, many on the right have begun to share the same sense of disgust and indignation with Israel that progressives have. Who can suppress the pangs of outrage when confronted with the live-streamed industrial level Israeli butchering of children each day for the past 6 months?

Second, more American Christians recognize the threat Zionism poses to Palestinian Christians, whether in Gaza, Bethlehem or Jerusalem. The Christ at the Checkpoint Initiative Munther Isaac helps to lead and US groups like Sabeel have provided a critical network for connecting US churches to Palestine.

Finally, American conservatives are recognizing that the Israel lobby’s influence runs counter to the ethos of America First, and that many of the most heavily promoted right wing influencers are just controlled opposition projects whose careers were astroturfed by pro-Israel billionaires. They now correctly denigrate Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire as “the Israeli Wire,” and look back with contempt at the founding of Breitbart after a meeting between its eponymous dead founder and Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

And they cannot ignore the hypocrisy of pundits who built their brand on opposing woke cancel culture, cheering on the cancellation of Candace Owens for offending Shapiro’s fragile ethno-religious identity. It’s hard to say whether this phenomenon will lead to a concrete policy shift, but one thing is clear: the lobby can do nothing but throw more money at the problem.

 
Tucker Carlson
@TuckerCarlson
Apr 9
Ep. 91 How does the government of Israel treat Christians? In the West, Christian leaders don’t seem interested in knowing the answer. They should be. Here’s the view of a pastor from Bethlehem.
 
 
 
 


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A GUIDE TO NORAH O’DONNELL’S WIDE-EYED MILITARY INFOMERCIALS

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Over the past few years, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell has perfected a particular genre of Pentagon PR, doing numerous glossy ride-along reports and softball sit-down interviews with military brass and promoting the Pentagon’s overall message that it simultaneously keeps the world free from Bad Guys and desperately needs more and more money to keep up with a rotating cast of villains.

If CBS was paid to make PR packages for the Pentagon, they wouldn’t look any different than this. 

Let’s begin by breaking down her most recent Pentagon infomercial—a 60 Minutes lead segment from last Sunday detailing how the US Navy is “protecting international waterways” from Yemeni Houthis. O’Donnell’s puffy ride-along has all the trappings of the genre: no critical questions, only superficial historical context, sexy b-roll of American technological power, sycophantic sit-down interviews with US military officers, and, of course, no humanization of or perspective from the Official Enemy—just presenting them as faceless Arabs hellbent on terror for its own sake.


 

Essential context, that President Biden’s refusal to back a ceasefire in Gaza is leading to an escalatory framework, isn’t explored at all. That there could be an alternative to blowing up even more of the poorest country on earth, that pushing to end the bloodshed in Gaza is one path to reducing piracy in the Red Sea (something the White House itself admits behind closed doors), is simply not an option. Because it’s not an option the military presents O’Donnell, and their word is total. 

This embarrassing segment comes on the heels of last year’s more overt—and explicit—Navy commercial where O’Donnell aggressively analyzed the “State of the Navy” and determined they were scrappy underdogs who needed more money and more support in Congress. 

“Do you get briefed on China’s growing military threat and the progress they are making?”

  • “How aggressive has China become, in the air?”
  • “How much do you worry about the People’s Liberation Army rocket force?” 
  • “How much more advanced is US submarine technology to Chinese capabilities?” 
  • “Is it your hope that the force posture of the US Navy will deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?” 
  • “At some point are [the Chinese] going to reach numbers [of naval ships] that we can’t prevail over?” 
  • “How would you describe what China has been able to do militarily over the last 20 years?”
  • “Why is China able to build more warships more quickly than the US?” 
  • Later, when tossing even more softballs to hawkish lawmakers Democrat Elaine Luria and Republican Mike Gallagher, O’Donnell—looking Very Concerned—asks, “What is it about the US Navy that has allowed the two of you to find common cause?”  

    Wow, really tough stuff. O’Donnell could have mentioned that Luria paid offher considerable campaign debt with super PAC money from Raytheon and General Dynamics, but this would involve actual journalism and we couldn’t have that. The closest O’Donnell gets to anything remotely approaching pushback is when she tees up a grapefruit for Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of US Pacific Fleet, by asking, with a wry, skeptical smile, “China has accused the United States of trying to contain them. What do you say to China?” 

    Paparo gives a glib response, asking China: “Do you need to be contained?” O’Donnell nods along and it’s off to more b-roll of scary Chinese rockets.

    The entire point, of course, is to lobby the public and, by implication, Congress, to shovel more money into the US military—a public debate which, such as it is, happens every summer. The tough journalistic posture O’Donnell is striking here is that of a reporter bravely taking on military skeptics. “60 Minutes spent months talking to current and former naval officers, military strategists, and politicians about the state of the US Navy,” she says to open the second half of the segment. “One common thread in our reporting is unease both about the size of the US fleet and its readiness to fight. The Navy ships are being retired faster than they’re getting replaced.”



    So, O’Donnell talked to a bunch of conflicted parties who are funded by the military industrial complex and get rich off of it, and they said they need more money? Does O’Donnell talk to any peace activists or anti-escalation voices in Japan or the Philippines? Any senators opposed to the unprecedented large military budget? Anyone who thinks these billions could better be spent housing the poor? Or expanding medicare? Obviously not. 

    O’Donnell’s wide-eyed aircraft carrier field trips are just a variation on an old media workover trope of The Media Ride-Along, perfected in the context of police departments by local TV news and shows like COPS and Live PD for years, which themselves are variations on military embedding reporting. Only O’Donnell isn’t even feigning like she’s on the front lines, or reporting on anything that can’t be gleaned from a Senate military report. She’s just there to lob handpicked military spokespeople softballs and take sweet b-roll of kick-ass military hardware.

    O’Donnell then bizarrely asserts that China ignored American diplomatic outreach over a “spy balloon”—a “spy balloon” the US government later acknowledged wasn’t actually doing any spying. “Chinese military leaders have been mostly silent, and have ignored efforts by the US military to keep the lines of communication open,” O’Donnell tells the viewer. “Even when a Chinese spy balloon entered US airspace, and was shot down by the US.” 

    To compound these fears, throughout the segment O’Donnell insists China “now has the biggest navy in the world,” which is true in the technical sense that it has the most boats, but as David Axe at Forbes notes:

    There’s an important caveat in this hull tally. American vessels on average are much larger than Chinese vessels are. The smallest USN warship type—the Littoral Combat Ship—displaces 3,000 tons of water. The median USN ship—an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer—displaces up to 9,500 tons. The smallest PLAN ship in the DoD count is the Type 056 corvette, displacing 1,500 tons. The median PLAN ship is a Type 045 frigate displacing around 4,000 tons. In all, the U.S. fleet weighs in at around 4.5 million tons. The Chinese fleet might slightly exceed 2 million tons.

    All of these nuances and qualifications are lost. Instead, the viewer is fed only panic-inducing talking points of an axiomatically expansionist and sinister Chinese threat and a brave US empire that simply needs more money to keep up. This kettle logic, inherent in all military propaganda, is central to every single talking point O’Donnell gets across: The US military is simultaneously all-seeing and all-powerful but also woefully underfunded and in urgent need of hundreds of billions more dollars.  

    This isn’t to say O’Donnell has never criticized the military, but when she does it’s internal issues, not criticisms of its fundamental purpose. In 2020, she did a series on a failure of the Defense Department to properly investigate rape and assault cases in its ranks—a report she followed up in 2021 and again last December. Good reporting, no doubt, but nothing genuinely subversive to hawks in Congress or military leadership who tolerate this type of house cleaning so long as the budget remains unaffected. 

    There are too many other military infomercials to count. On Oct. 8, 2023, O’Donnell had a sit-down with retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. Here, again, no difficult questions were asked—except, of course, consistent with the media’s consensus on Biden, an attack from the right on the US withdrawal process from Afghanistan. But Milley’s spin was front-loaded on the segment, with O’Donnell telling viewers that “in 2021, Gen. Milley had counseled President Biden to keep 2,500 troops in and around Kabul,” as if preventing the Taliban takeover, long viewed as inevitable, was that easy. 

    In March of last year, O’Donnell did the obligatory imperial feminism segment about women rising up the ranks of the Pentagon, featuring a vacuous sit-down interview with “the four highest-ranking women in the US military to discuss learning lessons of resilience, battling discrimination with determination, and cultivating the next generation of leaders in the military.”

    CBS News has a recurring segment called “Profiles in Service” that’s directly sponsored by weapons-maker Raytheon (now—after years of bad press—rebranded RTX), where O’Donnell does puff pieces on various military personnel.



    Last December, O’Donnell did a workout segment for CBS Nightly News with “badass” US Marine Corps Captain Riley Tejcek, another “report” that looks indistinguishable from a military zoomer recruitment campaign.


    She hosted CBS Evening News directly from a US military base in Bahrain on Jan. 29 where she, according to CBS’s press release, “got rare access to the United States Naval Forces Central Command and the United States Fifth Fleet.”

    O’Donnell, who once did a rose-tinted nostalgic segment on the military base she grew up on in South Korea, clearly doesn’t think critically about any potential downsides to the US’s obscene Pentagon budget—which is predicted to top $1 trillion in the coming years. The sprawling global US military architecture is simply seen as a law of nature, an obvious and unquestionable good that is a force of order and humanitarianism. That it could, for example, be propping up ethnic cleansing in Gaza, is too unbearable to imagine, so this part of their duties is glossed over, bracketed as an unfortunate but separate part of their core function, and stripped from the context of broader regional conflict. After all, the Pentagon is just a humble enforcer of the Liberal Rules-Based Order. That it could do illiberal things, prop up illiberal ends, and work to defend myopic, brutal. and petty US imperial interests flies in the face of this cheesy 8th grade book report narrative. And to strip this narrative apart, or challenge it in serious ways, would be too messy, too unpleasant. And, most frightening of all, may involve doing actual journalism.

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    Rochdale and the future of democracy

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    Thomas Fazi

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    Rochdale and the future of democracy

    The panicked reaction of the establishment shows just how fearful elites are of the people


    George Galloway

    George Galloway, MP, hosting his immensely popular show, MOATS, dedicated to current affairs. His cogency, brillance, and courage make him a formidable enemy of a ruling class unaccustomed to such threats.


    By-elections — elections held in a single constituency to replace an elected member of Parliament who has died or resigned — usually don’t make headlines, especially when they’re held in small constituencies. However, the recent by-election in Rochdale, a small town in Greater Manchester, one of the UK’s most deprived areas, was different. The landslide victory of a radical working-class outsider like George Galloway — former Labour MP, longtime anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian advocate, and now leader of the Workers Party of Britain, an old-school anti-NATO and anti-EU socialist party — is causing a political earthquake.

    Galloway placed the bipartisan support of the UK’s two main parties for Israel’s exterminationist campaign in Gaza at the centre of his grassroots campaign, with a particular emphasis on the complicity of Keir Starmer’s Labour. It paid off: Galloway won twice as many votes as Labour and Conservative combined. “Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza”, Galloway said in his victory speech. “You will pay a high price for the role that you have played in enabling, encouraging and covering for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Gaza, in the Gaza Strip”.

    support a ceasefire. So this isn’t about the ethnic or religious makeup of Rochdale; it’s about the UK government’s bipartisan support for Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza — and the people’s growing opposition to it.

    10-minute speech simply to address the results of the Rochdale by-election.

    In the rather chilling speech, Sunak accused Galloway of being a terrorist sympathiser and, perhaps even more ominously, of being part of a broader extremist attack on democracy itself — against which the government would now be “taking action”. Sunak then went on to rehearse a script that we’ve become accustomed to in recent months: conflating the mass pro-Palestine and pro-ceasefire demonstrations with violence, antisemitism and pro-terrorist apology — despite the fact that these mass protests have been unequivocally peaceful, have been attended by people of all faiths, including thousands of Jewish people, and have been conspicuously devoid (with single-digit exceptions) of pro-Hamas imagery and slogans.

    The intent is clear: to criminalise people’s right to protest — or even to vote for candidates who oppose the uniparty’s policies on key domestic and/or foreign policy issues. All in the name of the “fight against extremism” (Sunak mentioned the term 13 times throughout his speech). In this sense, Sunak’s speech heralds a dangerous turning point in the authoritarian and anti-democratic regression of British society — and Western societies more in general — which has been unfolding for various years now.

    Indeed, there is something decidedly Orwellian, to put it mildly, about a billionaire oligarch who has never been legitimated in a national vote, and who is actively supporting a plausible genocide (according to the International Court of Justice), one of the most extreme policies imaginable, accusing a working-class politician who has just overwhelmingly won a popular vote, on a ceasefire platform shared by the majority of Britons, of being anti-democratic and an extremist — and promising to “take action” against the movement he represents.

    This tells us a lot about the state of Western “democracy” — and our elites’ conception of the latter. It tells us that they’ve become so averse to democracy that they’re shocked at the idea that people might actually use the ballot box to elect someone who’s not part of the oligarchy. From their perspective, the electoral “democratic” process serves only one purpose: to whitewash the fact that we live under a de facto system of oligarchic rule, in which the rules of the game are rigged by, and in favour of, the ruling classes.

    The more illegitimate a power is, the more it will perceive even the tiniest challenge to its rule as an existential threat — to a degree proportional to the power inequalities that characterise the regime in question.

    legal persecution is there to dramatically testify.

    We need to be honest about the implications of this: challenging the system through the electoral process has become close to impossible. Indeed, one can only shudder at the thought of the “dirty war” the establishment would wage on Galloway’s party if it were to start gaining traction at the national level. This, however, doesn’t mean that we should give up on democracy [as a goal] altogether. After all, the panicked reaction of the British establishment to Galloway’s victory is a testament to the impact that even a small, relatively uninfluential local election can have.

    But why? After all, Galloway becoming an MP doesn’t shift the power balance within Parliament, let alone the government, by one iota. Moreover, we’ve just said that the the ruling classes wield almost unlimited power — and are effectively able to safely control the (outcome of the) “democratic” process, at least at the national level. So what are they so afraid of? Couldn’t they just have shrugged off Galloway’s victory and got on with it? Why mount a head-on attack on him?

    About a century ago, during the Fascist era, an Italian historian and sociologist named Guglielmo Ferrero found himself pondering upon a similar question. He had been deeply shocked by the murder, in 1924, of the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti at the hands of the Fascist regime — not only because it revealed the latter’s brutality, but because Ferrero failed to understand the logic behind it. Sure, Matteotti was an outspoken critic of Fascism and Benito Mussolini — but he was also virtually the only member of Parliament to openly criticise the regime. Mussolini could count on a completely subservient Parliament, including the formal opposition. He could whisk through whatever law he wanted, and did. So why was Mussolini, who projected an aura of absolute self-confidence in public, so afraid of Matteotti’s solitary opposition — to the point of murdering him? Ferrero couldn’t wrap his head around it.

    The more he pondered on the issue, the more he realised that Mussolini’s apparently irrational behaviour had numerous historical precedents — most notably, Napoleon’s coup d’état of 1799, through which he outlawed all independent newspapers and established a military dictatorship under his absolute control. “Why did Napoleon, who was already an incredibly popular military commander, feel so threatened by the voices of a few critical journalists and lawmakers to the point of effectively outlawing any form of dissent?”, Ferrero asked himself.

    Ferrero’s intellectual investigation resulted in the publication of one of his most important books, The Principles of Power. In it, Ferrero offers an explanation of the behaviour of these all-powerful-yet-apparently-fearful leaders in terms of the relationship between power and legitimacy. “Principles of legitimacy are justifications of power, that is, of the right to rule”, Ferrero wrote. “Of all human inequalities none is as important in its effects or has greater need of logical justification than that established by power”. Power, in other words, because it implies a deeply unequal relationship between the ruler and the ruled, requires legitimacy — or consent, we might say. The greater the power that is wielded, the more legitimacy, or consent, is required to sustain it.

    No power, no matter how great, can be wielded indefinitely without legitimacy. Rulers understand this iron law of history very well, which is why, according to Ferrero, power that is gained or exercised illegitimately — especially following a coup — inevitably causes fear to insinuate itself into the minds of rulers, leading to increasingly paranoid, repressive and fearful regimes. The more illegitimate a power is, the more it will perceive even the tiniest challenge to its rule as an existential threat — to a degree proportional to the power inequalities that characterise the regime in question.

    I believe Ferrero’s analytical prism goes a long way in explaining what is happening today in the West. Our ruling elites are hugely powerful, but their power is illegitimate — they rule, and are able to reproduce their rule, for no other reason other than the fact that they are powerful. It’s a purely autochthonous form of power, but one that lacks the legitimacy of previous forms of autochthonous power, such as monarchies. They have no no legitimating symbolic reservoir, or “secular theology,” to draw from. Alongside fear — their claim to be protecting us from evil forces out to get us, be it Russia, terrorists, viruses, etc. — the only legitimising force the oligarchs have left is “democracy”. The vote is ultimately the only thing that lends some legitimacy to their de facto absolute rule.

    This is why they go to great lengths to control the democratic process — but can’t afford to do away with it altogether. Because, if they were to do so, all that would be left would be raw, naked elite rule, revealed in all its illegitimacy. But even this so-called democratic legitimacy is wearing increasingly thin — and elites know this. Hence their fear, which in turn leads to a constant tightening of the bolts of social control (greater censorship, repression, etc., as well as the constant search for foreign enemies) — and to hysterical reactions to even the slightest challenge to their rule.

    In this context, even though we shouldn’t foster too many illusions about the possibility of using the democratic process, under the current conditions, to fundamentally alter the balance of power, we nonetheless can, and should, use the democratic process to expose the true, fundamentally rigged, nature of the system — and thus chip away at the last legitimising force elites have left. Only by exposing the absolute illegitimacy of their absolute power can we hope to challenge their rule — and create the conditions for building a true democracy. This is why, despite everything, elites still fear democracy. In this sense, the Rochdale by-election might truly prove to be “historic”.

    Thanks for subscribing. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

    Thomas Fazi

    Website: thomasfazi.net

    Twitter: @battleforeurope 


    Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

    MAR 02, 2024

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    Another Crooke Monday: Revulsion Escalates

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    Karl Sanchez
    karlof1’s Geopolitical Gymnasium

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    Another Crooke Monday: Revulsion Escalates

    Hitler Netanyahu

    Not much of a joke any longer.


    After WW2, Hitler’s Plan Ost was revealed although not widely announced to the publics of the non-Russian allies. In fact, we can say it was actively suppressed since the US/UK wanted to use Nazis in their Anti-Communist Crusade that began as soon as the war in Europe ended. The plan’s goal was to eliminate 30-50 Million Russians, to essentially depopulate European Russia for the Lebensraum Hitler promised. Hitler came close to his target in what was WW2’s Genuine Holocaust. What Crooke reveals in his SCF essay is a similar Zionist plan for Gaza and beyond, which ought to cause further revulsion within readers who already understand the reality of the Gaza Genocide. Yet, there’s more as the Zionists prove they’re really no different from the Nazis, and I would say are even worse as even the Nazis didn’t commit the sorts of crimes the Zionists have in recent weeks. Of course, readers will judge for themselves.

    Crooke also engaged in his weekly chat with Judge Napolitano. The conversation delves into the essay which you can now read:

    We stand on the cusp of what might be termed Chaotic War. Not the formula used by Israel often in the past to intimidate adversaries; this is different.

    Israeli reporter Eddie Cohen said, in the wake of the attack on the Iranian Consulate: “We are very clear that we want to start a war with Iran and Hezbollah. Do you still not understand?


    Israel wants to drag Iran into a full-scale war in order to be able to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities”, though these facilities are beyond American and Israeli reach, buried beneath mountains.


    Cohen, and of course, Israel’s military leadership, will know that; but Israel nonetheless is locking itself into a logic that can only lead to defeat. Iran’s nuclear facilities are safe from Israeli assault. The destruction of civilian Iranian infrastructure, which is out in the open, may kill many, but will not, per se, collapse the Iranian state.


    Trita Parsi places Israel’s objective in attacking the Iranian Consulate in Damascus in a different context:


    “An important aspect of Israel’s conduct – and Biden’s acquiescence to it – is that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms around warfare.


    Even during wartime, embassies are off-limits [yet] Israel just bombed an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus.


    Bombing hospitals is a war crime, [yet] Israel has bombed EVERY hospital in Gaza. It has even assassinated doctors and patients inside hospitals. The ICJ obligated Israel to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Israel actively prevents aid from coming in.


    Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited under international humanitarian law. Israel has deliberately created a famine in Gaza.


    Indiscriminate bombings are illegal under international humanitarian law. Biden himself admits that Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately”.  The list goes on and on … However, Israel’s breach of Vienna Convention immunity accorded to diplomatic premises – plus the stature of those killed – is highly significant. It is a major signal: Israel wants war – but with U.S. support, of course.


    Israel’s aim, firstly, is to destroy the norms, conventions and laws of warfare; to create geo-political anarchy in which anything goes, and by which, with the White House frustrated, yet acquiescing to each norm of conduct obtrusively trodden underfoot, allows Netanyahu to grip the U.S. bridle and lead the White House horse to water – towards his regional End of Times ‘Great Victory’; a necessarily brutal war – beyond existing red lines anddevoid of limits.


    As symbolically significant as the Damascus attack is that the U.S., France and Britain – after a brief ‘hat tip’ to the Vienna Convention – refused to condemn the levelling of the Iranian Consulate, thus placing the shadow of doubt over the Vienna Convention’s immunity for diplomatic premises.


    Implicitly, this refusal to condemn will be widely understood as a soft condoning of Israel’s first tentative step towards war with Hizbullah and Iran.


    This Israeli chaotic ‘Biblical’ nihilism, however, bears no relationship in purely rational terms to Netanyahu’s aspiration for a ‘Great Victory’. The reality is that Israel has lost its deterrence. It won’t return; the deep anger across the Islamic world generated by Israel through its massacres in Gaza during the last six months precludes it.


    Yet, there is a second, adjunct reason why Israel is set on deliberately flouting humanitarian law and norms: Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham reports in +972 Magazine in great depth how Israel has developed a AI machine (called ‘Lavender’) to generate kill lists in Gaza – with almost no human verification; only a “rubber stamp” check of about “20 seconds” to make sure the AI target is male (as no females are known to belong to the Resistance’s military).


    The blatant extra-legality behind the Gaza ‘kill list’ methodology, as reported by Abraham’s various sources, can only be immunised and sheltered through normalising them as but one amongst a general pattern of illegalities – and in effect, claiming sovereign exceptionalism:


    “[T]he Israeli army systematically attacks the targeted individual whilst in their homes — usually at night whilst the whole family is present — rather than during the course of military activity … Additional automated systems, including one, [callously] called “Where’s Daddy?” were used – specifically to track targets when they had entered their family’s residences… However, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all”.

    “The result is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions”.


    “”We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives when they were in a military building … or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation – as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations”.


    “In addition … when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs) which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”.


    “… The army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians … in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander – the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander”.

    “Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants”, most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call)”.


    So, there it is – no wonder Israel might seek to camouflage the details within a normalised general array of transgressions against humanitarian law: “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy”.


    It is not difficult to speculate what the ICJ might determine …

    Does anyone imagine that this flawed Lavender AI machine would not be asked to churn out its kill lists, were Israel to decide to surge into Lebanon? (Another reason for normalising the procedures first in Gaza).


    The key point made in the +972 Magazine report (with multiple sourcing) is that the IDF were not focussed on pin-point elimination of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades (as claimed):


    “It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low”, said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants:


    “I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — high-rises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction”.


    This report makes clear nonsense of Israel’s claims to have dismantled 19 out of 24 Hamas Battalions: One source, critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy, points out the obvious flaw: “It’s a vague boundary”; How to tell a Hamas fighter from any other Gazan civilian male?


    “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets”, said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs”.


    Just last week, War Cabinet member and Minister Ron Dermer, was delegated to travel to Washington to plead that the IDF success in dismantling 19 Hamas battalions justified an incursion into Rafah to dismantle the 4 to 5 battalions that Israel claims still remain in Rafah.


    What is clear is that AI was a key Israeli tool to its Gaza ‘Victory’. Israel was going to sell a ‘smoke and mirrors story’ based on ‘Lavender’.


    By contrast, Palestinians, who are aware of their quantitative inferiority, have a very different outlook: they switched to a new way of thinking that gives the simple act of resisting a civilisational meaning – a path to metaphysical victory (and quite possibly a kind of military victory), if not in their lifetimes, then for the Palestinian People, thereafter. This constitutes the asymmetrical nature of the conflict that Israel has never managed to understand.


    Israel wants to be feared, believing this will restore its deterrence. Amira Hass writes that regardless of any revulsion for this government and its members: “The vast majority [of Israelis] still believe that war is the solution”. And Mairav Zonszein writing in Foreign Policy, notes that “The Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society”:


    “The focus on Netanyahu is a convenient distraction from the fact that the war in Gaza is not Netanyahu’s war, it is Israel’s war—and the problem isn’t only Netanyahu; it’s the Israeli electorate … A large majority—88 percent—of Jewish Israelis polled in January believe the astounding number of Palestinian deaths, which had surpassed 25,000 at the time, is justified. A large majority of the Jewish public also thinks that the [IDF] is using adequate or even too little force in Gaza … Putting all the blame on the prime minister misses the point. It disregards the fact that Israelis have long advanced, enabled, or come to terms with their country’s system of military occupation and dehumanization of Palestinians”.


    Yet neither Israel, nor the U.S., has a comprehensive strategy for this mooted war. Israel’s approach is all tactical – claiming to have degraded Hamas; turning Gaza into a humanitarian hellscape and setting the scene for the “decisive plan” devised by Bezalel Smotrich for the Palestinians. Amira Hass again:


    “Either agree to an inferior status, emigrate and be uprooted ostensibly voluntarily, or face defeat and death in a war. This is the plan now being carried out in Gaza and the West Bank – with most Israelis serving as active and enthusiastic accomplices, or passively acquiescing in its realisation”.

    The U.S. ‘vision’ is also tactical (and far removed from reality) – Imagining the transformation of Gaza into a ‘Vichy collaborator’ statelet; imagining that political pressure by the French in Lebanon will force Hizbullah’s retreat from its ancestral lands in south Lebanon; and imagining that the Biden White House is able to achieve politically through pressure what Israel cannot do militarily.

    The paradox is that, with Israel and the U.S. being dependent on an ‘image’ that has been confused with reality, this too works to Iran’s and the Resistance Front’s advantage. (As the old adage goes, ‘do not disturb an adversary who is making mistakes’). [All bolding my emphasis]


    Do note how points made by Crooke integrate with his previous Al-Mayadeen column I mirrored here last week. The second half of the chat focuses on the column, so readers may want to revisit that prior to watching that portion which comes after a sponsor break.

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    Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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    Why Biden Doesn’t Want Americans to Visit Russia

    Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.


    John Varoli
    OpEds

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    Why Biden Doesn't Want Americans to Visit Russia

    Western perceptions of Russia are based on propaganda wrapped in lies, inside mounds of disinformation. So, what's the real Russia like? I went there to find out. The results were shocking.


    The Holy Trinity Lavra in Sergiev Posad


    My lead above is obviously a play on Winston Churchill’s famous quip in 1939 about Russia being "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."

    In their effort to support the liberal globalist war machine, major western media unabashedly fabricate their coverage of Russia, a country that they hate because of its defense of national sovereignty and traditional values.

    This disinformation is so total and omnipresent that even the most educated and astute minds in the West can fall under its influence. The U.S. has few credible independent media and expert sources, and most Americans don’t have the time and skills to do their own research.

    Even I had my doubts — just before departing New York last month, I almost cancelled my trip because I was bombarded with messages from people who tried to convince me that “Putin will abduct” me and use me as “a pawn to exchange” for Russians held in U.S. prisons. I began to wonder — “Maybe they’re right.”

    With some apprehension, I boarded the plane and within a day I found myself on the Russian border. This was my first visit in five years. Instead of the lies and disinformation mentioned above, my trip revealed a country with a vibrant civil society where people enjoy far more freedom, economic opportunity and social protections than we do in the West.


    The Winter Palace on Palace Square, St Petersburg


    Developing in the right direction

    I spent two weeks traveling to five regions — the Leningrad Region, Saint Petersburg, the Novgorod Region, the Moscow Region, and Moscow. I saw life in both provincial towns and big cities, and talked freely to a wide range of people. I traveled on my own schedule, living in local neighborhoods not in hotels.

    Even though I visited in March, when the weather is gray and Russians still struggle with winter doldrums, I found the people to be of tremendous heart, goodwill, respect and kindness. I almost felt like I was back in the USA that we had 30 years ago.

    The violence, arrogance, rapacity and anger that marked life in Russia when I lived there in 1992 to 2012 seemed to have dissipated significantly. What had happened in the past 12 years to make such a difference….especially when in this same period the U.S. has been on a downward spiral of violence, strife, hatred and collective insanity?


    Visiting the tomb of St. Sergius in the Holy Trinity Lavra

    Orthodox churches are packed. Unlike the U.S. and Europe that are building ‘progressive’ societies based on secular totalitarian ideology, I saw Russians exhibit sincere devout religious sentiment, visiting houses of worship even during weekdays, and, in general, adhering to a moral code as they went about their daily lives.

    Even in Moscow and St. Petersburg the churches were packed, which was very unexpected. Urban dwellers across the globe often have little room for religious faith in their lives. But that’s not the case in Russia. Moscow lives up to its moniker as the “Third Rome”, Christianity’s central city.

    With some friends, I visited the tomb of St Sergius at the Holy Trinity Lavra in the Moscow Region. The line of the faithful stretched long to approach the saint’s tomb and leave a prayer request. In the fight with the West, Russia’s monasteries are the country’s ‘secret weapons’. No contraption designed by NATO’s military industries can overcome the spiritual power of Russia’s monasteries and its faithful.

    Unlike Zelensky’s Ukraine where the native Orthodox Church has been banned, priests jailed, and churches and monasteries bombed, freedom of religion flourishes in Russia. Traditional faiths are protected from the scorn, derision and persecution that they often face in the West.

    No anti-American feeling

    Even though I’m a citizen of a country that now sponsors terrorism and fuels a brutal war against Donbass and Crimea, Russians didn’t harbor ill feelings towards me. I had encountered far more anti-American sentiment while living in Russia in the 1990s, a time when relations were rather friendly.

    St. Petersburg — Nevsky Prospekt and Griboyedov Canal


    Rising living standards

    The Russian economy is booming and people now live far better than before the year 2000 when Vladimir Putin became president. Unemployment hovers just above 2.5%, and inflation is under control. Interest rates, however, are in the range of 17%, which is a drag on further economic growth.

    Even if we put aside the technological and industrial advances of the past two decades that have improved life for most people across the globe, there are specific policy decisions by Putin’s government that have improved the quality of life.

    These include his vigorous efforts to improve law-enforcement, restore public safety, as well as smash organized crime and the stranglehold that liberal oligarchs once had over Russia’s economy. Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the oligarchs siphoned off hundreds of billions of dollars in national wealth, mostly from the sale of natural resources, and then stashed the cash abroad.

    To this day, I can personally name Russian gangsters, fugitives from justice in Moscow, who have found a warm welcome in the U.S. This is why some oligarchs in exile can’t forgive Putin and continue to finance so-called ‘opposition figures’ such as the deceased U.S. asset Alexei Navalny.

    By ‘rising living standards’ I don’t merely mean material well-being. There are also non-tangibles to consider, such as living in a country where the government protects and supports national cultures, traditional values and sovereignty. This is certainly a major factor contributing to the optimism that I sensed in the air.

    Finally, the food — the food is fantastic. Natural. Delicious. Fresh. I surmise this is the result of strict state regulation over the food supply and the quality of ingredients and means of preparation — Something that’s nearly absent in the U.S.


    With students in St. Petersburg

    Everyone I spoke to, from the average person in the street to those who I met at events, exhibited an exceptional intellectual curiosity and ability. People were open-minded, eager to discuss and debate. They exhibited a high level of knowledge about their country and the world.

    For the most part, the vast majority of Russians sincerely support President Putin, as recent elections prove. There are two main reasons for his massive popularity — he stopped Russia’s disintegration in the 1990s, and his policies have made the country a much better place to live.

    Also, I attended a few talk shows on state-run TV where we discussed geopolitics. I was surprised that the TV host always presented the U.S. version of events, even showing western media coverage so that the audience would clearly understand both sides of the issue, and not just the Russian point of view.

    Then several of us would go on to discuss, debate and analyze the issue at hand. Never once did anyone try to prep me, control me, prod me or push me to say certain things. In fact, a few of the talk shows were live on air — which goes to show just how much freedom the Russian media allows.


    “Do Not Travel” to Russia?

    This could be the finest portrait of Joe Biden (left), capturing the essence of his soul — an evil man who has brought misery and suffering to so many. I suspect that such a portrait is hidden somewhere in a White House attic, something right out of Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

    The White House is afraid of Americans traveling to Russia. Why? Because they don’t want us to know the truth about how Putin has succeeded in making Russia stronger and more prosperous, how he protects the national culture and its traditions — All things that most Americans would love to see their own government do.

    That’s why the State Department has labeled Russia as “a level 4 risk — DO NOT TRAVEL.” John Kirby, the White House’s national security communications adviser, has said that “If you’re a U.S. citizen, including a dual national, residing in or traveling in Russia, you ought to leave right now. Depart immediately.”

    For my part, I can’t wait to return to Russia. And many Americans agree with me. Russia has become a destination for American dissidents and refugees, with a private effort afoot to build two ‘American villages’ outside of Moscow.


    Soviet heroes


    Crocus and Russia’s historic mission

    My trip to Russia was marred on my last day with news of the heinous terrorist attack in Moscow. Investigators have pretty much proven that Ukraine’s secret services were behind the Crocus City massacre and that the West most likely assisted. Earlier this year, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland had threatened Russia with “nasty surprises”, while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Miley threatened “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night.”

    At the very least, the U.S. and all of NATO bear responsibility for the attacks because over the past two years they’ve incited hatred of Russians through disinformation, as well as by arming the regime in Kiev, and because the CIA actively trains the Ukrainian secret police in committing terrorist attacks and other crimes.

    The Crocus City terror attack is a turning point. It’s the nail in the Kiev regime’s coffin, and possibly that of NATO. The attack has only strengthened Russian resolve. Just in the past week, the Russian Air Force has knocked out much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and a hunt is underway for agents of its secret services responsible for a multitude of terrorist attacks.

    More than ever, Russians understand very well that they’re fighting for their survival, against a formidable coalition of some 50 hostile nations that’s come to their doorstep to continue where Napoleon and Hitler failed. In many ways, we could even classify the liberal globalist onslaught as the ‘spiritual heir’ to the Nazi death cult.

    Recent events show clearly that we’ve left the realm of mere geopolitical rivalry between East and West. This is now another epic war against evil. And the past 210 years show conclusively that Russia always emerges triumphant.


    ABOUT JOHN VAROLI 
    Former foreign correspondent for New York Times, Bloomberg and Reuters TV. Trained as a U.S. foreign policy expert with a focus on Russia and Ukraine.


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    Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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    ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS