#Iran backed groups in the Middle East

[thegeopolitica]

U.S. Forces Launched An Offensive Against Iran-Backed Militant Groups In Iraq After Missile And Drone Attack

Following the end of World War II, the Middle East became one of the world’s most geopolitically contested regions due to the presence of vast hydrocarbon reserves and Israel.

The establishment of the Jewish state of Israel has resulted in multiple wars in the region, and the region has faced an endless war cycle since Israel’s inception in 1949.

Please complete your reading from the URL below —

[sayruq]

Senior White House figures privately told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to ramp up military pressure against Hezbollah — even as the Biden administration publicly urged the Israeli government in recent weeks to curtail its strikes, according to American and Israeli officials. Presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told top Israeli officials in recent weeks that the U.S. agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah in order to convince the group to engage in diplomatic talks to end the conflict, the officials told POLITICO. Not everyone in the administration was on board with Israel’s shift, despite support inside the White House, the officials said. The decision to focus on Hezbollah sparked division within the U.S. government, drawing opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.

[zvaigzdelasas]

[USA Today is US Private Media]

Lebanon has been attacked by something the world has never seen before ‒ a mass sabotage of electronic devices remotely detonated. Tiny bombs inside pagers and walkie-talkies went off as the devices' users were in homes, supermarkets, buses and on the streets. At least 37 people, including two children, were killed and thousands wounded in two waves of attacks this week. Lebanon's government and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed group that uses the nation as a base for its militants, both blamed Israel. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attacks directly, but anyone who pays attention to the Middle East understands that this operation almost certainly originated in Tel Aviv.[...]

On Friday, Israel launched an airstrike that reportedly killed senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil in Beirut. Israeli officials said Hezbollah later fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel.[...]

When you turn pagers into bombs, you have to know that there will be a high risk of collateral damage. The pagers belonged not just to military members of Hezbollah, but also medical staff and others.[...]

[Now,] an entire nation, Lebanon, has been terrorized. Its medical facilities are straining to handle all the bomb victims. Some in Lebanon are comparing the feeling of insecurity to the awful aftermath of the 2020 Beirut dock explosion.[...]

As an American, I financially support Israel with my tax dollars. If they are murdering Lebanese children, then to some extent, I did that.

Sure, Hezbollah’s ability to communicate internally has been gravely damaged, at least momentarily. But this tactic is spurring anger at Israel across all sectors of Lebanese society, and indeed, the Arab world. Iraq is sending medical supplies to Lebanon; Egypt is expressing solidarity.

Will it be harder or easier for Hezbollah to get recruits? The pager and walkie-talkie explosions killed and wounded a few fighters, but there will be three or four replacements for each one who fell.

[E]ven Hezbollah’s fiercest opponents are now rallying to their support.

It also will inevitably cause more and more Americans to wonder if we should be such strong supporters of a nation that uses tactics that terrorize an entire country and inevitably leave behind dead and wounded children.

20 Sep 24

[chanaleah]

At what point do you not see yourselves in Palestinians? At what point in all of this violence, do you not see yourself in the people of Palestine? I would genuinely like an answer, if you don’t mind. I simply cannot comprehend how you go about your day and not see all of the pain and trauma that was inflicted on the Jewish people in the conflict in Palestine. How do you go about life knowing that what happened to your people is happening to others, some of whom are also Jewish?

ok first of all, to address your latest point, there are no Jewish Palestinians. There have been people who have called themselves Jewish Palestinians or Palestinian Jews at points in history, but they do not exist as a people today - because all of the Jews who once lived in what are now the Palestinian Territories were kicked out in '48. The only Jews in Gaza are the hostages, and the Jews living in the West Bank certainly don't consider themselves Palestinian.

But I will answer your question.

Why must Jewish pain and trauma be projected onto anyone but Jews? Of course I feel for those in Palestine. They are dying in a terrible war. The situation in Gaza is awful. I don't deny that. It's true. I hope that there can be an end to the fighting and actual lasting peace in the middle east very soon. Palestinians deserve it, Lebanese deserve it, Syrians deserve it, Iranians deserve it.

But keep in mind that Israelis are suffering in this war, too. Hundreds of people, including a baby and many others, mostly civilians, are still held hostage in Gaza. Many of those taken have been killed. Those who are still captive are no doubt suffering greatly. Israelis in the north of Israel have faced incessant rocket barrages from Hezbollah since October 8th. Just recently, Iran fired hundreds of missiles towards Tel Aviv.

When I look at this conflict, I see suffering in Gaza. I see how the government of Gaza - Hamas - has stolen aid and resources from Gazan civilians and has embedded themselves into civilian infrastructure. I see how Gazans are starving, unable to get aid, and how their are constantly having to flee. I also see multiple terrorist groups, backed by the Islamic Republic (Iran), who are openly genocidal towards Jews - you can look at the statements their leaders have made and their charters. For example, an entire line of the Houthis' slogan is "a curse upon the Jews". These groups are not subtle about their hatred of Jews - neither in their actions or in their words. I also see how those countries have expelled - in the case of Yemen - every last Jew in the country.

In that, I see echoes, loud ones, of the millennia of antisemitism. And the pain and trauma we have faced does not have to be applied to other groups. It is completely right to ask that we care about Gazan civilians. The vast majority of us do. In my eyes, those who don't are in the wrong. But it is unfair to ask that we apply our own pain, our own trauma, to a situation that does not compare to what we have faced.

I'm not saying that what Gazans are enduring is not awful and terrible. I'm not trying to play oppression olympics here. Don't twist my words. But our pain belongs to us.

[stackslip]

Senior White House figures privately told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to ramp up military pressure against Hezbollah — even as the Biden administration publicly urged the Israeli government in recent weeks to curtail its strikes, according to American and Israeli officials.

Presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told top Israeli officials in recent weeks that the U.S. agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah in order to convince the group to engage in diplomatic talks to end the conflict, the officials told POLITICO.

Not everyone in the administration was on board with Israel’s shift, despite support inside the White House, the officials said. The decision to focus on Hezbollah sparked division within the U.S. government, drawing opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.

[ayaahh00]

There’s something I need to say. If you’re a Western radical feminist who claims to care about women’s rights in the Middle East, you must understand the role your countries played in creating the very oppressive systems. The U.S. armed the mujahideens (an extremist group they aided and created) in Afghanistan during the Cold War when it was a socialist country, leading to the rise of the Taliban. In Iran, they backed the Shah and then helped the Islamic regime come to power. Meanwhile, America supported Saudi Arabia since its very existence, spread Wahhabism across the region, fueling religious extremism when many countries were once secular.

Western imperialism especially American invasions and destabilization of the region must be addressed. The U.S. played the biggest role in creating Israel in 1948, funding and arming them while the rest of the region was still reeling from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Then there’s the Iraq invasion which killed 1.5 million Iraqis and the countless Arab lives lost throughout the Arab spring. You can’t talk about women’s rights in the Middle East without this context. If you don’t educate yourself on the harm caused by your governments, you’re just perpetuating a white savior complex, which is damaging to the very people you claim to support.

[girlactionfigure]

hunting Jews: the truth about Hamas

SEPTEMBER 15, 2024

Islam is a religion.

Islamism is a political ideology.

Recently rescued Israeli hostage, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, an Israeli Bedouin Muslim, gave the following testimony:

Farhan’s testimony, along with a plethora of other evidence, only makes what we’ve been saying all along abundantly clear: Hamas is not a “resistance” group against oppression. Hamas is a genocidal antisemitic terrorist group that targets Jews.

ISLAMISM IS AN INHERENTLY ANTISEMITIC IDEOLOGY

Hamas is an Islamist terrorist group. What does this mean? 

Islamists believe that the doctrines of Islam should be congruent with those of the state. Islamists work to implement nation-states governed under Islamic Law (Sharia), emphasize pan-Islamic unity (in most cases, hoping for an eventual worldwide Islamic Caliphate, or empire), support the creation of Islamic theocracies, and reject all non-Muslim influences. For this reason, Islamists tend to portray themselves as “anti-imperialist,” while in truth they are striving to swap western imperialism with Islamic imperialism.

Islamist ideology can be traced back to Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. Al-Banna viewed the 1924 dissolution of the last Islamic Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, and the European colonization of the Middle East, beginning with France’s 1830 occupation of Algeria, as an affront to Islam. The early 20th century was a period of rapid secularization in the Middle East, when Arab nationalism threatened to replace pan-Islamic identity with a pan-Arab identity. Al-Banna opposed all of this, hoping to return to “authentic” Islamic practice through the (re)establishment of the Islamic Caliphate.

Islamism is an antisemitic ideology. Islamists hate Jews -- and by extension, the Jewish state -- because of the Prophet Muhammad’s conflict with the Jewish tribes of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century. Islamistsbelieve that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in a struggle between Muslims and their “eternal enemies,” the Jews.

Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, viewed the dissolution of the last Islamic Caliphate (empire) and the secularization of the Muslim world as an affront to Islam.

ISLAMISM, DHIMMITUDE, AND THE JEWS

Islamists seek to revive “authentic Islamic practice,” by which they mean, essentially, that they wish to go back in time. This desire to turn back the clock puts them in conflict with Jews for two reasons:

During his earliest conquests, the Prophet Muhammad and his army came into fierce conflict with a number of Jewish tribes that had settled in Arabia, some of which had refused to convert to Islam and even accused Muhammad and his followers of appropriating figures from the Torah. For Islamists, this initial conflict between Jews and the earliest Muslims is “proof” that Jews are “eternal enemies” of Islam.

Following Muhammad’s death in 632, the Arab Islamic empires conquered lands exponentially quickly. As a result of this rapid colonization, the Muslim authorities were faced with the “problem” of how to handle the conquered Indigenous peoples that resisted conversion to Islam. This “problem” was solved with a treaty known as the Pact of Umar. This so-called treaty allowed select religious and cultural minorities, known as dhimmis, or “People of the Book,” to practice their beliefs so long as they paid the “jizya” tax and abided by a set of restrictive, second-class citizenship laws.

Under Islamist regimes, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, Jews are, to this day, still treated as dhimmis.

THE GENOCIDAL ANTISEMITISM OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

Hamas emerged as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, worshipped Adolf Hitler.

Like Hitler, al-Banna sought to exterminate all Jews…in his case, from the Middle East.

According to German documents from the period, in the 1940s, the Nazis trained some 700 members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nazi Germany heavily funded the Brotherhood, which contributed to its massive growth. In 1938, the Brotherhood had some 800 members. By the end of World War II, it had grown to a million members.

In 1939, Germany “transferred to al-Banna some E£1000 per month, a substantial sum at the time. In comparison, the Muslim Brotherhood fundraising for the cause of Palestine yielded E£500 for that entire year.”

Naturally, Nazism deeply influenced the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology. 

The father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yasser Arafat, the most influential Palestinian leader of all time, began his “career” fighting for the Muslim Brotherhood. Which brings us to Hamas. Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and was responsible for establishing the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. In 1987, he founded Hamas.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s hatred for Jews goes far beyond its original Nazi affiliations. During the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Mandatory Palestine, during which Palestinian Arabs revolted against Jewish immigration and carried out a number of antisemitic massacres, the Muslim Brotherhood began disseminating antisemitic rhetoric, often targeting the Egyptian Jewish community.

Al-Nadhir, the Muslim Brotherhood’s magazine, published openly antisemitic articles, peddling conspiracy theories and demonizing the Egyptian Jewish community for its success in various industries. Notably, Al-Nadhir even called for the expulsion of Jews from Egypt, accusing Jews of “corrupting” Egypt and calling Jews a “societal cancer.” Al-Nadhir made boycott lists of Jewish businesses.

Unfortunately, the Muslim Brotherhood’s antisemitism is not a relic of the past. Mohammed Badie, the Muslim Brotherhood’s present day “Supreme Guide,” believes Jews “spread corruption on earth” and calls for “holy jihad” as an antidote.

THE ORIGINAL HAMAS CHARTER: EXPLICITLY GENOCIDAL

Hamas’s founding 1988 charter is explicitly antisemitic and genocidal. Below are some excerpts:

“Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” -- Introduction

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." -- Article 7

“In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” -- Aritcle 15 

“With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.” -- Article 22

“Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people.” -- Article 28

BUT...HAMAS CHANGED THEIR CHARTER!

Some Hamas apologists will tell you that Hamas no longer intends to exterminate all Jews, because in 2017, they “replaced their [openly genocidal] charter.” Well, lucky for you, Hamas is here to set the record straight. See, after releasing their “new” charter, Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar assured the media that the 2017 document did not replace their original 1988 charter.

The 2017 document was thus not a “new” charter from a “reformed” Hamas, but rather, a propaganda document aimed at redeeming Hamas’s image to the west.

Since 2017, Hamas has made openly genocidal calls toward Jews. For example: 

In 2018, Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV media channel predicted “the cleansing of Palestine of the filth of the Jews.”

In 2019, Hamas Political Bureau member Fathi Hammad said, “You seven million Palestinians abroad, enough warming up! There are Jews everywhere! We must attack every Jew on planet Earth –- we must slaughter and kill them, with Allah’s help.” In 2021, Hammad called, via Al-Aqsa TV, for the Palestinians in Jerusalem to “cut off the heads of the Jews.”

In May of 2021, the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, led a rally in which the crowd was encouraged to chant, "We will trample on the heads of the Jews in front of everyone..."

ISLAMIST INFLUENCE ON PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM

The earliest Arab nationalists in Palestine were not necessarily Islamists. Falastin, an influential anti-Zionist, Arab nationalist newspaper, was founded by two Palestinian Christians in 1911. Khalil Beidas, who was the first Arab to identify as Palestinian, in 1898, was a Christian. Nevertheless, the Palestinian nationalist movement soon fell under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Initially, Palestinian Arab nationalists advocated for a unified Arab state in Greater Syria. In 1920, Haj Amin al-Husseini began advocating for an independent Palestinian Arab state. To draw people to his cause, which was not yet well-known to the average population, he began emphasizing the importance of Palestine to Islam, and particularly the importance of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque. Soon, he began disseminating the libel that the Jews intended to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque. This libel has cost thousands of Jewish lives and is spread widely to this day.

Early on, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt adopted the Palestinian cause. After World War II, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had spent the war working as a propagandist for the Nazis in Berlin, escaped to Egypt with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood fought against the State of Israel in 1948, along with other Islamist militias, such as the Army of the Holy War. Among its fighters were Yasser Arafat. In the 1960s, Arafat came under the influence of the Soviet Union and shifted his image to that of a communist counterrevolutionary, as opposed to an Islamist, though his rhetoric in Arabic continued emphasizing the importance of jihad and Al-Aqsa Mosque to the Palestinian movement. Nevertheless, after Islamic Revolution in Iran, after which the Islamic Republic adopted the Palestinian movement, and with the establishment of Hamas and groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Palestinian nationalism has once again been undergone an Islamization.

rootsmetals

as always: this post is not an endorsement of any given Israeli policy or politician. You can be highly critical of Israel’s handling of the situation without obfuscating or whitewashing the origins and goals of this ideology. It always, always came down to antisemitism. I won’t engage with straw man arguments in the comments 😗

MAIN SOURCES on Instagram

[tamamita]

why do people on the left consider media talking about women and gay people's oppression in non western countries as propaganda? I understand why you would consider it imperialist propaganda but at the same time it feels a bit disregarding of people's experiences. Like I saw a sign that had "we'll get our Iran back" and I mean it is true that gay people and women are oppressed in Iran, so why do people disregard these?

I'll make it simple for you

Look at Israel and how they assume they're the bastion of LGBTQ rights in the middle east, all the while they're currently upholding an apartheid, settler colonial system, which also works as a military outpost for the US imperialist machine. This is called pinkwashing, because it disregards the life of people in order to uphold this ostensible notion of liberal democratic values. True liberty should be secured for all, not for one exclusive group.

The same could happen to Iran in that if the Shah, who was a brutal despot himself, took back power, he would enable the imperialists to secure power in the middle east, and ultimately exploit the global south. People don't disregard these issues, but you can't talk about these issues in good faith while the west manufactures consent on a constant basis all with the interest of vesting power and throwing sanctions at them for the sake of control, despite the fact that they fostered this "threat"

The more you alienate these groups, the less they're going to accept you. Economic growth would allow for progressive groups to develop and thrive, but not through imperialist ambitions, which will only contribute to a greater hostility towards the west and whatever values they may hold. And whenever there is a nation that introduces these rights, they're often overthrown by US-backed elements. In fact Iran was a progressive nation at first. Mohammed Mossadegh was an elected PM who nationlized the oil industry, but was ultimately overthrown, because the Brits wanted the oil, and so they asked the CIA to help them out by overthrowing him. They installed a pupper leader and everything went down from there, do you understand why the Islamic revolution turned out they way it did?

[simply-ivanka]

Kamala Harris: Mystery Commander in Chief

How would the Vice President keep America safe in a dangerous world? The voters deserve some answers.

The Editorial Board --- Wall Street Journal

Kamala Harris is all but telling Americans they’ll have to elect her to find out what she really believes, as the Vice President ducks interviews and the media give her a free ride. This is bad enough on domestic issues, but on foreign policy it could be perilous. The world is more dangerous than it’s been in decades, and Americans deserve to know how the woman aiming to be Commander in Chief Harris would confront these threats.

Ms. Harris this week tweeted a photo of her sitting next to President Biden in the White House situation room discussing the Middle East. The point is to suggest she’s a co-pilot on Biden foreign policy.

This isn’t the credential the Harris campaign thinks it is, and the voters should hear directly from her what she thinks about the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, the failure to deter Russia in Ukraine, the Iranian nuclear program, China’s island grabs in the South China Sea, and more. The matter is all the more important because Ms. Harris conspicuously declined to choose a running mate who might lend foreign policy experience to the ticket.

Ms. Harris has given a few hints about her own views on the Middle East, and those aren’t encouraging. Her team spent much of Thursday walking back whether she told an anti-Israel group she’d be willing to ponder an arms embargo against Israel. She skipped Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress when our main Middle East ally is under siege. Did she pass over Josh Shapiro as her running mate because he would have enraged the anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party?

To the extent she has revealed a larger instinct on national security, it’s been wrong. She told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2019 that she’d rejoin the Iran nuclear deal as long as “Iran also returned to verifiable compliance.” But Iran didn’t comply and is now on the brink of a nuclear breakout.

Her 2018 Senate vote to “end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen,” as Ms. Harris put it in a tweet, also hasn’t aged well. The Houthis the Saudis were fighting are now targeting commercial ships in the Red Sea almost daily and putting U.S. naval assets at risk. Does she think this status quo can persist—and what would she do differently?

Ms. Harris will surely argue that she and Mr. Biden reinvigorated the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after Vladimir Putin’s invasion in Ukraine. But absent a change in U.S. political will, the war in Ukraine isn’t on track to end on terms favorable to American interests. Her past enthusiasm for banning fracking—which her campaign is trying to walk back—also suggests she isn’t serious about checking Mr. Putin’s main source of war financing.

Ms. Harris would no doubt also tout the diplomatic progress the Biden Administration has made in Asia with Japan, the Philippines and others. Yet she whiffed on one of the single most important diplomatic questions in Asia: She opposed Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that would have excluded China and boosted America as the region’s premiere trading partner.

Most important, will Ms. Harris build up the hard military assets required to deter China’s Xi Jinping and a consolidating axis of U.S. adversaries? “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget,” Ms. Harris said as a Senator in 2020 after voting against a Bernie Sanders proposal to slash the Pentagon by 10%. That vote needed no explanation, but Ms. Harris wanted to make sure the left knew she was sympathetic. Does she still want to slash the defense budget?

Donald Trump often shoots from the hip on these subjects, and his favorable comments about dictators are witless. But his first-term record, especially on Iran and the Middle East, is far stronger than the Biden-Harris performance.

Americans shouldn’t have to read tea leaves to figure out if Ms. Harris would keep the country safe in a treacherous world.

[palestinegenocide]

The exquisite choreography of hosting a war criminal at the White House

The grisly farce that is the Biden administration’s support for Israeli war crimes became even more grotesque this week.

Netanyahu is coming to Washington in a few days. Democrats believe overwhelmingly that Netanyahu is carrying out a genocide– nearly 39,000 Palestinians deaths with thousands more under the rubble. So some Dems will boycott Netanyahu’s speech to the Congress, but the Democratic Party leadership is rolling out the welcome mat.

Netanyahu is to meet at the White House with the president who has provided Israel with endless munitions to carry out the war. And though many expect Biden to drop out of the presidential race,the New York Times says Biden won’t do so before he meets with Netanyahu, because Biden does not want to give the far-right-wing prime minister who has repeatedly bossed Democratic presidents the “satisfaction” of seeing Biden when he’s a lame duck.

Though if you think Kamala Harris will stand up for human rights and U.S. interests if she becomes president—think again, she is going to meet Netanyahu too, the White House assured the press.

Why meet with this war criminal at all? To answer that, consider who are the most important voters in the Biden debate right now: the donors who are the last shoe to drop on Biden’s reelection hopes, pulling their money to pressure the president to get out of the race.

Many of these donors now in rebellion are big Israel supporters. Michael Moritz the latest billionaire to put it to Biden has been in solidarity with Israel. Reid Hoffman who organized a concerned donors call with Kamala Harris calls Israeli forces a model.

While another group of 75 donors almost all of whom want Biden out is reported by CNBC to include as leaders Ari Emanuel and his brother Zeke. Ari Emanuel said that Israel’s war is “justified” in May 2024, and has said that he loves the country. Of course, there are Dem donors who don’t care about Israel. But the power map is clear.

It’s not like Trump is any different. The top Republican donor is thought to be Miriam Adelson, the Israeli doctor, and she is reportedly spending millions to stake Trump to a promise to allow Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

Just as Adelson’s late husband Sheldon, once the biggest Republican donor, asked Trump to move the embassy to Jerusalem and trash the Iran deal, and Trump followed through, in utter contempt for the Palestinian people and world leaders.

So our Middle East policy is up for bid by billionaire zealots. This is what a liberal democracy looks like.

In any just order, the U.S. would have nothing to do with Israel. The country is committing flagrant war crimes in Gaza, killing journalists and athletes and other civilians with complete impunity.

And the International Court of Justice last week issued (yet another) ruling saying that the settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are violations of international law.

Back in December 2016 the Obama administration after 8 years of being walked over by Netanyahu allowed the U.N. Security Council to issue the same determination, in a resolution on which Obama abstained, that condemned the occupation. President-elect Trump called the Russians to try and stop the resolution but it went through. And of course nothing came of it. The Biden administration has never followed through on the landgrab, and the ethnic cleansing.

Al Jazeera graphic showing Israeli land seizures at a 25 year high in West Bank.

The Knesset passed a resolution this week saying there must never be a Palestinian state; that would be an “existential threat” to Israel.

Netanyahu repeated the claim of Jewish supremacy in his response to the International Court of Justice.

The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria, our historical homeland. No absurd opinion in the Hague can deny this historical truth or the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestoral home.

The Biden administration is incapable of condemning these racists. “It’s like pulling teeth to get you to say something on this,” a reporter complained in the State Department this week after the Knesset’s attack on a Palestinian state.

Antony Blinken was unable to say a critical word about Netanyahu during a fawning interview in Aspen (by NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly) in which he used a football metaphor to claim the U.S. was doing something to stop the genocide. “I believe we’re inside the 10-yard line and driving toward the goal line in getting an agreement that would produce a ceasefire, get the hostages home, and put us on a better track to trying to build lasting peace and stability.”

And keep the bombs flowing, as Israel bombs hospitals and refugee camps…

Netanyahu should be persona non grata in Washington. But he will be welcomed with open arms.

As a former Biden official Tariq Habash said on a webinar this week, our policy is “rooted in anti-Palestinian racism”– in the dehumanization and erasure of Palestinians.

Habash quit the Biden administration in January. Let’s hope that his courage and honesty are infectious.

[zvaigzdelasas]

[Sky News is Private UK Media]

Washington and London opted to strike Yemen with precision bombs rather than accelerating efforts to end violence in Gaza, where more than 20,000 people have been killed in three months. Regional diplomats say the longer that conflict continues, the less possible it becomes to contain.

The language being used by Biden administration is interesting.

"Iran is a primary - if not the primary - enabler or supporter, sponsor of the Houthis and Iran has been involved operationally in the conduct of these attacks," a Biden administration official said.

They don't talk about Iran directing the attacks against shipping or US military in the region in the way that they might have done not long ago.

They talk about Iran being the "enabler" rather than the puppet master. And that's because they know that the "Iranian proxies" in the Middle East are no longer puppets.

Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza - all are established forces making strategic decisions, aligned with Iranian ideology of course and with Iranian-made weapons, but driven by their own ambitions.[...]

The Houthis have claimed their attacks on shipping are in solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

They frame it as an international shipping lane-based protest against what they call a genocide.[...]

But make no mistake, among regional populations, the Houthis are seen, not insignificantly, as having chosen to back support for Gaza with material action.

America and the UK chose military action to try to stop the Houthi missiles. They chose to bomb the world's poorest nation with precision bombs. That's risky and optically awkward, to say the least.

Another course would have been to seek to remove the Houthi pretext by accelerating efforts to end the Gaza conflict and solve the Israel-Palestine question.[...]

The Americans have shown an unwillingness or inability to influence Israeli actions in Gaza.

And for that, they have not just lost credibility among regional leaders. America has lost populations in the Middle East these last few months.[...]

[C]rucially, [senior regional diplomats] say that while Iran doesn't seek to escalate all this into a regional war, it cannot mitigate for potential miscalculation in Lebanon, Yemen or Iraq because the groups operating there are more and more independent.

What's happening how is this in Sky [12 Jan 24]

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

So I think part of the reason--aside from the usual hatred of the Jewish people--that leftists in particular absolutely lose their minds over Israel is because Israel is a real world example that utterly destroys their worldview that the stronger party in a conflict is always the oppressor, and the weaker is always oppressed.

Israel is one of, if not the, strongest nations in the middle east. They have a stable government, a strong military, modern technology, and they even have nukes. They once fought off the combined forces of three different Arab countries. Their military is so good that they're cleaning house in Gaza right now while most of their army is on the border with Lebanon just in case they decide to try and invade. By almost every measurable metric, Israel is an absolute beast.

And yet they're not the ones oppressing their neighboring countries.

They're almost completely surrounded by countries who have either publicly stated that they want to wipe Israel off the map, or they house and fund terrorist groups who do. Hamas constantly fires rockets, unprovoked, at Israeli civilian centers and buildings from Gaza--a "nation" that only exists because Israel freed it, evacuated all the Jews, and allowed it to govern itself, mind. Iran is in the process of acquiring its own nuclear weapons and when that happens you better believe they're all going to be aimed directly at Israel. On the world stage, oppressive, genocidal kings and dictators are patted on the back and welcomed as friends while Israel is constantly sanctioned and demeaned and told not to defend itself.

And then you have October 7th.

Hundreds of "oppressed" terrorists struck back at their "oppressors" by launching a surprise raid where they murdered, raped, and kidnapped Jewish civilians, some of them children, then scurried back across the border because they knew they could never fight the IDF head on. More than just being evil, these were the tactics of cowards who know they can't stand against their stronger enemy. And what was Israel's response?

They declared war, then waged that war by sending their own citizens into danger instead of carpet bombing Gaza into slag. Which they could have done. They had a ready excuse, if they wanted it. Even without using nukes, which would have been bad for them too with the fallout so close, they could have utterly wiped Gaza off the face of the Earth. If they were oppressors, if they were the genocidal monsters the Mohammadans and their enablers in the west claim they are, they most likely would have done exactly that, hostages or no.

The fact that they didn't, that the truly oppressive actions are coming from the "weaker" party, exposes the leftist lie on power dynamics. Strength doesn't automatically mean oppression. Weakness doesn't automatically assign virtue. Instead, it's actions that determine morality.

And the left can't stand that. Because it means all the vile shit they do in the name of fighting "oppression" is no longer justified.

And that's not at all a conversation they're ready, or able, to have.

[sayruq]

Did you see that Biden said it would be "a huge mistake" for Israel to occupy the Gaza Strip?

According to Middle East Eye: https://www.instagram.com/p/CycHSCHIzhg/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

I'm not sure if he's backtracking on his own insistence on a ground invasion because he knows it's doomed or if he's trying to repair his own tarnished image after literally spreading fake news and war mongering propaganda over the past week, but it's so pathetic

It's been obvious for a while that the Biden administration knows a ground invasion will go badly for Israel. At the very least, it will lead to a regional war and it might even unite all of West Asia against a common enemy - America.

You know, I've posted about how Israel isn't behaving strategically. They're just bombing Gaza without causing damage to or even slowing down Palestinian militia groups but America also has the same issue. It's trying to prevent a regional war by speaking to Iran while also asking Israel to slow down because the bombing of Gaza is losing Israel a lot of good will

However, America is also doing things like this

Does America support a ground invasion or not? It looks like they know it's a bad idea but they're willing to support Israel by sending soldiers (which would trigger a regional war) even though there are people in the government that know it's a terrible strategy

They're also easing sanctions in Venezuela which is a big deal because it means they need Venezuelan oil since it might be harder in the coming months to get oil from West Asia if there's a regional war. They did this when the Russia-Ukraine war started and they were trying to stop countries from buying Russian gas.

I saw someone say that there are different factions within the administration which would explain a lot of things, like why they keep going back forth between escalating and calling for restrait (without using the word restrait of course).

Personally, I think it's because internal polling likely shows that Americans aren't interested in another expensive war after Biden sent tens of billions to Ukraine

So, they can't exactly afford to go all in on the ground invasion of Gaza and the subsequent regional war that will follow. At least not without first trying to change the public's perception.

[mariacallous]

There is no shortage of misery in the Middle East today. As the region marked the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Israel mourned the murder of around 1,200 Israelis and worried about the fate of the remaining 100 hostages held by Hamas. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent war, hundreds of thousands are currently homeless, and much of Gaza lies in ruins. Lebanon, too, is now devolving into a war zone.

Often overlooked amid all this misery is Iran, which is also having a terrible, horrible, very bad year. But unlike most of the other actors here, it has only itself to blame.

Consider where Iran was strategically on Oct. 6, 2023. The United States, torn between competing demands for its military forces, was looking to reduce its military presence in the Middle East. That brought Iran closer than ever to achieving one of its long-term goals: ridding the region of U.S. influence. Israel, meanwhile, was tearing itself apart at home over controversial judicial reforms. Iran had suffered a strategic blow a few years prior with the passage of the Abraham Accords, which promoted Israel-Arab ties, but Tehran had arguably countered this in part by forging closer military ties to Moscow. True, Iran remained under significant sanctions, but the Biden administration unfroze some $6 billion in Iranian funds in exchange for freeing American prisoners.

Now consider where Iran is just a year later. Hamas, an Iranian proxy, has been decimated. Israel has shown that it can reach into a VIP guest house in Tehran to kill Hamas’s leaders. Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran’s proxy network, has been mauled to the point where Iran needs to strike Israel on the group’s behalf, rather than vice versa. Israel’s fractured political spectrum doesn’t agree on much, but it is united when it comes to making Iran pay for its missile attacks on the country. The Abraham Accords—which normalized Israel’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—are strained but remain intact, and Saudi-Israeli normalization remains possible in the longer term, even if it is not in the cards right now. In fact, despite the violence, it is easier to fly to Tel Aviv from Dubai than from many European cities. And the U.S. military is once again surging into the region. Further Western sanctions relief—in this geopolitical climate—is currently off the table.

While Israel faces strategic problems of its own, at least Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can argue that he did not start this war. By contrast, it is an open question to what extent Iran’s leaders helped plan the Oct. 7 attack and set the region aflame in the process. Even if Iran was merely caught up in one of its proxies going rogue, it certainly did have a direct role in the missile barrages against Israel and, by extension, the retaliatory strikes that followed.

Perhaps the silver lining for Iran here is that it could have been worse. Tehran’s missile attacks—in April and again in October—failed to kill Israelis or cause significant damage. Had they done that, Israel’s retaliation would likely have been significantly more robust.

But this gets to the crux: Iran’s tolerance for risk is growing. Firing hundreds of ballistic missiles at a militarily superior adversary is a dangerous game. Firing them while repeatedly calling for the annihilation of a likely nuclear-armed, militarily superior, superpower-backed state with a right-wing government inclined to hit back hard is a potentially suicidal gamble.

That’s not the only thing Iran has done over the past year that was so risky that it could have threatened the regime’s stability itself, had it not been for Tehran’s incompetence. Iran reportedly tried to kill former U.S. President Donald Trump and other former senior Trump administration officials in retaliation for the killing of Iranian Quds Force leader Qassem Suleimani. Thankfully, those plots were foiled. But the attempt itself was a huge risk, especially given that Trump is a current candidate for the presidency and known for holding grievances. Indeed, after being briefed about the attempted assassination, Trump threatened to “blow [Iran’s] largest cities and the country itself to smithereens” if he gets back to the White House and Iran tried a similar ploy.

But whereas trying to assassinate a former—and potentially future—U.S. president on American soil is a gutsy move, imagine what would happen if such a plot actually succeeds. Republicans—many of whom are already pretty hawkish on Iran—would likely be calling for blood. Democrats would not likely let the killing of a former U.S. president go unpunished. Indeed, if one thing could upend the post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan received wisdom of eschewing regime change in the Middle East, killing a former president could be it. In short, if the Iranian regime survives this war, it will be thanks to luck and its own incompetence.

Of course, from the Iranian perspective, its actions—or at least its missile strikes—were driven by strategic necessities to reestablish deterrence after a series of Israeli and U.S. affronts to its sovereignty, such as striking Iranian diplomatic facilities in Syria and killing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders. But there is little evidence that Iranian actions are having any deterrent effect whatsoever. If anything, Israeli leaders are talking even more openly than before about regime change in Tehran and even more adamantly about destroying the Iranian nuclear program.

Strategically, the wisest option for Iran right now would be to retreat to the shadows, rebuild its proxy network, and fight another day. After all, it will take time to rebuild Hamas and Hezbollah into the formidable fighting forces they once were. At the same time, Israel’s ties to its Arab neighbors and the West are already frayed, thanks to the bloodshed of the Gaza campaign and the Netanyahu administration’s unwillingness to commit to any sort of Palestinian state—a win, if a Pyrrhic one, for Iran. Pulling back also leaves open the prospect of some sort of future deal with the West over the medium term—which Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says he wants and even Trump says he’s open to supporting.

That is not, however, what Iran seems intent on doing. Whether it’s because of Iranian domestic politics, concerns about losing face on the international stage, or simply a desire for revenge, the regime looks intent on doubling down. In a rare Friday prayer speech, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—with a rifle by his side in case anyone missed the point—praised the Oct. 7 massacre and promised that Iran “won’t back down. Israel won’t last long.”

Iran’s seeming unwillingness to reverse course has important implications for the United States and the West’s approach to Iran. It raises the question of whether threatening Iran with further costs will be sufficient to force a change in direction. The United States and its European partners can sanction Iran all they want; Israel could bomb Iranian oil fields. But it may not change Iranian behavior.

If deterrence by punishment won’t work, then the United States and the West will need to resort to deterrence by denial—destroying Iran’s ability to attack Israel and aid its proxies. That would be hard to do, since it requires destroying significant chunks of Iran’s military capabilities rather than simply threatening to inflict pain. But if the Iranian regime seems intent on escalating, then the United States and its allies may have no other choice.

And if that happens, while this year may have been a terrible one for Iran, next year might be even worse.

[eretzyisrael]

by Lee Smith

The Biden team’s offer to trade Yahya Sinwar, the man believed to be the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, for guarantees that the Israeli military stay out of Rafah points to two disturbing truths about the current conflict in the Middle East. The first is that the U.S. knows plenty about what the Hamas terror group is doing and has done. The second is that Washington has been keeping key information—like the terror leader’s whereabouts—from the Israelis, thereby prolonging the war that it claims to decry.

The implications of the administration’s offer, relayed in a recent Washington Post article, has Israelis and U.S. pro-Israel activists livid. Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, for instance, posted on X, “I am shocked and sickened by reports that the U.S. is withholding from Israel vital information on the whereabouts of senior Hamas leaders in Gaza. Is the administration still our ally?”

The Biden administration is making the offer because all its efforts to end Israel’s war have failed and if Rafah falls, Hamas is likely to fall, too. It seems there’s no other way to preserve a pillar of what the White House calls “regional integration”—a euphemism for the U.S.-Iran alliance system that Barack Obama has tried to impose on the Middle East for the last decade.

Leaks that the Biden administration is withholding actionable intelligence on Hamas’ paramount leader in Gaza confirm that, as Tablet reported shortly after the Oct. 7 massacre, the administration had a wealth of intelligence on the terror group and its plans. If U.S. intelligence agencies are confident that they know where Sinwar is squirreled away now, in the chaos of wartime, they also knew what he was doing in the lead-up to the massive attack.

Biden and his aides have formulated their scenario: Hamas ‘technocrats’ will constitute the Iranian-backed component in a unity government with the U.S.-backed faction that now rules the West Bank. Hamas is a pillar of the U.S.-Iran condominium.Share

The administration’s efforts to disclaim any foreknowledge of the attack were always absurd. The U.S. has not only its own unrivaled collection of signals intelligence but also significant intelligence channels in Qatar, where Hamas leaders are based; in Lebanon, where Hamas fighters trained under the supervision of Iranian officials; and Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza and allows Hamas to smuggle weapons through the terror group’s extensive tunnel network. Further, detailed open-source reporting, especially in The Wall Street Journal, months prior to the attack showed that top Iranian officials were visiting Lebanon to coordinate major operations with Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.

And yet, according to reports shortly after Oct. 7, there was no evidence U.S. spy services shared with Jerusalem their intelligence on Hamas. The Biden administration rationalized its failures by claiming there was nothing exceptional about its findings, much of which was gathered in areas where the U.S. prevented or discouraged Israeli intelligence from operating. As one U.S. source told the press, “I think what happened is everyone saw these reports and were like, ‘Yeah of course. But we know what this will look like.’” In other words, the Biden administration knew there was something big in the works; the only question is whether it had any indication of the full scope of the Oct. 7 operation.

Read the whole thing.

[rootjin]

y‘all need to stop saying „woman, life, freedom“ instead of jin, jiyan, azadi and here is why:

The struggle of women in Iran against a repressive theocratic regime cannot be separated from the struggle of Kurdish women against NATO-backed authoritarianism in Turkey and IS extremism in Iraq and Syria.

The iconic slogan of the protest movement - "jin, jiyan, azadi" or "woman, life, freedom" - has its roots in Kurdish women's over 40-year struggle against NATO-backed authoritarianism in Turkey and IS extremism in Iraq and Syria. Kurdish women in Iran, who were the first to use it in early protests, have an equally strong history of resistance against foreign intervention, repressive regimes and religious fundamentalists.

However, this history has been erased from mainstream narratives about the protests - but it is important for understanding how the uprising fits into the longer history of revolutionary struggles in the region.

The slogan "Jin, jiyan, azadi" has its origins in the Kurdish resistance movement in Turkey. It reflects the unique role of women in the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and in groups influenced by its ideas.

The meaning of ideas and symbols can change when they transcend borders and goals. But for Iranian women on the street today, "jin, jiyan, azadi" is as revolutionary a sentiment as it was for the Kurdish women who originally developed and spread it. In both Iran and Kurdistan, women are leading mass movements in unprecedented ways, and women's insistence on freedom from male and state violence is at the center of a struggle for the freedom of an entire society.

For women in the region, these parallels are clear. Women in northeastern Syria defied the constant threat of Turkish shelling and drone attacks and organized a mass march in Qamishlo in solidarity with women in Iran. Kurdish feminist political prisoners in Turkey cut their hair and expressed their support for the uprising in their court defenses.

Yet internationally, mainstream media, politicians, brands and celebrities are dividing these women's revolutions by erasing the Kurdish roots of this slogan and the struggle it represents. It is common for "Woman, Life, Freedom" to be written in English or "zan, zendegi, azadi" in Farsi without even mentioning the original Kurdish words.

Western leaders who proudly say "woman, life, freedom" to opportunistically support women in Iran have criminalized the movement that gave birth to "jin, jiyan, azadi" and are providing Turkey with the weapons with which to attack these women.

Real solidarity with the women's resistance requires us to remember that "jin, jiyan, azadi" is not a hashtag or a current trend. The phrase is a political philosophy that represents countless women from all walks of life who are on the frontlines of the struggle for a democratic, peaceful and pluralistic Middle East, free from all forms of oppression and exploitation.

In order to support these women, it is necessary to stand with them all against all the threats they face. Likewise, it is necessary not to allow their struggles against the various manifestations of patriarchy, imperialism, oppression and war to be divided, commodified or decontextualized.

IT‘S CALLED JIN JIYAN AZADI AND IT‘S KURDISH!

KURDISH WOMEN HAVE BEEN KILLED FOR NOT ONLY SAYING THIS BUT ALSO FOR LIVING AFTER IT.

KURDISH WOMEN ARE STILL BEING KILLED FOR BELIEVING IN THIS IDEOLOGY.