RICHARD MEDHURST—Hezbollah is gradually expanding its operations. Its missiles and rockets are beginning to zero in on more targets of importance in Israel, and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which remains a piece of Syrian territory. The probable upcoming presidency of uber Zionist Donald Trump will NOT fix the situation with the Israelis and may very well aggravate it. Trump and his in-laws, the Kushners, a notorious Zionist-American clan, will likely put US soldiers on the ground to further assist Israel in its battles with the anti-Zionist/imperialist alliance and Hamas itself. How that will play with Trump’s “antiwar” image in many quarters is still anybody’s guess.
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OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT—Scott Ritter today in an interview with Ania K says of him that he was not a good man, that he was a white supremacist (for example, he called Georgians cockroaches and advocated the shooting of Chechnyan Muslims) that he was a traitor to Russia who, in the 1990s, identified more with the West than with Russia. A lot of his funding came from non-Russian NGOs that were “democracy-promotion” fronts for Western intelligence. Ritter claims that Navalny was groomed, perhaps recruited, by the CIA at Yale (the paperwork that sent Navalny to Yale was signed off on, says Ritter, by then US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul) with a view to returning him to Russia as an opposition figure whose purpose was to bring down Vladimir Putin.
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PEPE ESCOBAR—As we keep searching for light in the darkness of insanity – complete with a genocide running 24/7 – we may visualize the pedestal standing in the middle of a vast desert, painted by Shelley with a couple of sublime alliterations, “boundless and bare” and “lone and level.”
This is all about a vast empty space mirroring a political black void: the only thing that matters is the blind obsession for Total Power, the “sneer of cold command” asserting the perpetuity of a hazy “rules-based international order”.
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EDITOR—The panel also discusses Biden’s (the Empire’s) options in regard to the Israel/Palestine conflict. It’s clear the Empire, and especially the Biden admin ·from the p.r. standpoint) has only bad options. If Biden allows Netanyahu to go on genociding the Palestinian people, the reputational damage is enormous. If he orders him to stop, and freezes all financial and military support, he gets in trouble with the powerful Zionist lobby. Either way, it’s clear that the US, the EU and Israel have suffered already a major defeat in their propaganda war, with possible lasting consequences, and, despite their arrogant moves to amplify the war, such as in Yemen or Iran, they may end up losing the war or dragging the whole world into a nuclear confrontation.
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THOMAS FAZI—“Experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza show that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century. Researchers say the pace of deaths reported in Gaza during the Israeli bombardment has been exceptionally high. People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of US-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.
