AARON MATE—The White Helmets have been marketed to Western audiences as a neutral aid organization conducting rescue operations in opposition-held cities targeted by Syrian and Russian bombings. But as The Grayzone has extensively reported, the White Helmets have worked closely with jihadist groups in Syria, and have been used as a PR tool to whitewash the proxy war against Damascus by their US, UK, Turkey, and Gulf state sponsors.
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Why would an Israeli attack envenom U.S.-Iran relations? Because Israel would only undertake such an attack with the O.K. of the Trump administration. (“While it’s highly unlikely that Israel would have carried out the assassination without a green light from the Trump administration, a more direct U.S. role cannot be entirely discounted” — Trita Parsi at Responsible Statecraft.)
Now does anyone really think this was Trump’s idea? No: Israel is acting to its own devilish ends, and the U.S. government is signing off. Netanyahu has directly told Biden he must not reenter the Iran deal.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Let’s clear this up before the girl power parade starts: the first woman to head the US war machine will not be a groundbreaking pioneer of feminist achievement. She will be a mass murderer who wears Spanx. Her appointment will not be an advancement for women, it will be imperialism in pumps. Modern mainstream feminism has abandoned women’s interests so thoroughly and completely in almost all spheres of importance that it has largely become only superficially distinct from the patriarchy it purports to oppose. The plight of mothers, elderly women, young girls, caregivers and wives have been almost entirely shuffled out of popular discourse, with focus instead shifted onto discussions about whether women are being adequately rewarded for their service to the God of Capitalism, or how they’re just as qualified as men to murder thousands of people at a time.
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MoA—Azerbaijan, with its wealth of gas and oil money, had been able to arm itself with hundreds of drones from Turkey and Israel that allowed it to achieve air superiority. The Armenian defenders were not trained to sufficiently camouflage themselves from air threats. Their old air defenses were not capable enough to detect and defend against small drones. They therefore lost hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces to suicide drone attacks.
Azerbaijan, and the contingent of ‘moderate rebels’ mercenaries it had rented from Turkey, failed to invade the mountainous core of Nagorno-Karabakh. They lost several thousand men, many more than the defending Armenians, while trying to do that.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The dominant worldview in any collective of journalists is statistically likely to be a mainstream worldview, simply because it’s more common by its very nature. Mainstream worldviews are only mainstream because vast amounts of wealth and effort went into shoving them into the mainstream by sheer force for the benefit of the rich and powerful, whose kingdoms are built upon the capitalist imperialist status quo. If you set out to just hire a bunch of journalists who seem good to you, you’re necessarily going to get a lot of people unwittingly promoting the interests of the rich and powerful just by sheer statistical probability.
