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Thursday, July 10, 2025

Some tweets you might find interesting... July 1 - 10, 2025

 

Posted by MariaS at 18:37 0 comments

Thursday, July 3, 2025

Some interesting Videos and Articles I have consumed in the 2nd half of June 2025.

 


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/23/donald-trump-benjamin-netanyahu-middle-east-iran-us-israel

Trump and Netanyahu aim to remake the Middle East with bombs. Iran shows why that will always fail

 
 
 June 23

 

The US has rashly followed Israel into a war that will not end Iran’s nuclear programme or topple its government

he joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran over the weekend – targeting nuclear facilities, infrastructure and symbolic state institutions – reflect the bankruptcy of a decades-long approach to Iran that has hinged on pressure, coercion and destabilisation. This latest gambit appears less a strategic gamechanger than a desperate bid to regime-change Iran and prop up a rickety regional status quo built around unchecked Israeli dominance.

The timing of Israel’s initial surprise attack on 13 June was no coincidence. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – who has long sought to sabotage any prospect of US-Iran detente – appears to have steamrolled Donald Trump into the escalation he has always wanted. The result looks like a trap: Trump, once again, manoeuvred into a destabilising Middle East conflict that serves Netanyahu’s agenda far more than the US’s.

Although the joint strikes have caused significant damage, they have also provoked a swift response. Iran’s missile barrages are piercing Israel’s vaunted defences, sending millions into bomb shelters day and night, and exposing strategic vulnerabilities previously thought secure. Crucially, Tehran appears to have anticipated the US attack on the Fordow uranium enrichment plant over the weekend – reportedly removing sensitive equipment and sealing the site’s entrances ahead of time. Even senior US officials now concede that Fordow was not destroyed. Instead, they’re signalling a return to negotiations as the only viable path for addressing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile – an implicit admission that there is no military solution to this problem.

The episode underscores a deeper reality: Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is designed to withstand precisely this kind of attack. Its dispersal, depth and scope mean that meaningful and verifiable destruction would require a full-scale ground invasion – repeating the catastrophic miscalculations of Iraq. Far from eliminating the threat, military escalation risks pushing Iran closer to weaponisation, while foreclosing the only durable solution: diplomacy........................

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https://www.972mag.com/american-jews-israel-hasbara-lebanon/


The war that canonized America’s hasbara playbook

The defensive line taken by the American-Jewish establishment during the 1982 Lebanon invasion solidified many of the methods that are deployed when Israeli violence makes headlines today.

By Natasha Roth-Rowland October 28, 2022

In 1984, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) began disseminating what it described as a “college guide” for understanding the discourse on Israel on U.S. campuses. “American college students are regularly exposed to bitter denunciations of the State of Israel in a way that most Americans are not,” warns the opening chapter of the booklet. It points to a “barrage of propaganda which is hostile not only to particular policies of a given government of Israel but also to the very right of the Jewish state to exist,” and which is, the authors continue, “designed to delegitimize the one viable democracy in the Middle East and America’s most reliable ally in the region.”

The responsibility for this “anti-Israel” campaign, the guide repeatedly stresses, lies with “foreign Arab students” who are “growing in number… dramatically.” In the back of the book are distilled dossiers on 100 different American universities, many of which name respected professors such as Edward Said, Walid Khalidi, and James Zogby as spearheading these efforts on their respective campuses.

AIPAC’s guide — which billed itself as “the first full-length study of the anti-Israel campaign on college campuses, and what is being done to fight it” — was far from the lobby group’s first foray into hasbara or pro-Israel messaging. But it was emblematic of the American-Jewish establishment’s stepped-up efforts to combat criticism of Israel following a massive blow to the country’s reputation two years earlier, when the Likud-led government staged a brutal invasion and occupation of Lebanon.............

 

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Must watch

Sharing This Video Could Get You 14 Years in Prison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECkVO4F_38I

 

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https://archive.is/4GKua#selection-1575.0-1581.126

by  Clive Cookson

In a laboratory outside Cambridge sits a remarkable “biological computer”. Its 200,000 human brain cells, grown in the lab, lie on silicon circuitry that communicates their synchronised electrical activity on a screen to the outside world.
The CL1 device, about the size of two shoe boxes, was developed by Australian start-up Cortical Labs with the UK’s bit.bio, in a bid to create “synthetic biological intelligence” — a new form of computing that could offer opportunities beyond conventional electronics and other developing technologies such as quantum.
“Like our brains, biological computers will consume many orders of magnitude less energy than conventional electronics as they process information. Future applications could include robotics, security and the metaverse,” Cortical Labs chief executive Hon Weng Chong told the Financial Times.
The fast-growing search for alternatives to energy-intensive conventional electronics has stimulated the new field of biological computing, which aims to tap directly into the intelligence of brain cells rather than simulating it in silicon through “neuromorphic” processing and AI.
Cortical Labs is at the forefront of this movement, though academic groups and other start-ups such as Swiss group FinalSpark and Biological Black Box in the US are also making progress.....
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Lessons Unlearned from Israel’s Bombing of Iraq’s Osirak Reactor

by | Jun 26, 2025


In a New York Times opinion article on June 21, Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israel’s military intelligence, attempted to defend Israel’s recent decision to start a war with Iran, in which Israel was briefly joined by the U.S. government under the administration of President Donald Trump.

Under the headline “Why Israel Had to Act,” Yadlin’s opening sentence states, “Forty-four years ago this June, I sat in the cockpit on the Israeli air force mission that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. In one daring operation, we eliminated Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.”

The parallels between that event and the current war on Iran are indeed remarkable—but the real lesson to be learned from it is precisely the opposite of the one Yadlin draws.

In addition to constituting aggression under international law, “the supreme international crime” as defined at Nuremberg, the American and Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities proves how policymakers in both countries refuse to learn from the lessons of history.

The claim that Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 halted or set back Saddam Hussein’s efforts to acquire a nuclear weapons capability is a popular myth.................

 

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https://judgenap.com/the-coming-police-state/

 

The Coming Police State

written by Andrew P. Napolitano

 

We have seen this before.

​A foreign entity attacks American persons or property and the government warns that its sleeper cells have infiltrated the United States and it is somehow necessary to expand the powers of the government and shrink protections for civil liberties — and this shrinkage will somehow keep us all safe.

​The premise of this deeply flawed argument is that less liberty produces more safety. That premise is historically and morally erroneous. Even if we had cops watching us on every street corner or FBI agents virtually in every home, who will keep us safe from them? And who would want to live, who could be private and free, in such an environment?

​Here is the backstory.

​When James Madison referred to the creation of the American republic as an inversion, he must have been met with quizzical looks and curious laughter. He meant that throughout history, popular governments came about by monarchs and despots — the sovereign — begrudgingly giving up power. This was, to Madison, power giving liberty.

​In America, however, Madison argued — following his neighbor and good friend Thomas Jefferson, who maintained that individual persons are sovereign — the government came about by an inversion of the old way. In America, liberty gave power..............

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Posted by MariaS at 20:52 0 comments

Monday, June 16, 2025

Some Articles and Videos from first half of June, 2025

 https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/us-sent-israel-hundreds-of-missiles-days-before-attack-on-iran/

  

tehrandamage 

 Iranian firefighters inspect damage at the site of an Israeli bombing in Tehran, Iran, June 13, 2025.

US Sent Israel Hundreds of Missiles Days Before Attack on Iran

by | Jun 15, 2025

Just days before the surprise and unprovoked Israeli war on Iran, the US shipped Tel Aviv 300 Hellfire missiles. An Israeli official implied they were used in the assault.

On Friday, Israel launched an offensive war against Iran, striking military sites, nuclear facilities, and carrying out targeted assassinations of top officials. Middle East Eye reports that on Tuesday, just three days before the attack began, the US sent 300 Hellfire missiles to Israel.

One Israeli official indicated that the precision air-to-ground munitions were used in targeted attacks on top civilian and military leaders. Ali Shamkhani, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in his home on Friday.

Shamkhani was part of the negotiation team engaging with the US to work out a new nuclear agreement. American and Iranian officials have engaged in five rounds of talks, with a sixth previously scheduled for Sunday. Tehran recently indicated it believed a deal was possible.

However, following the start of Israel’s undeclared war, Iran called off talks with the US. New York Times UN correspondent Farnaz Fassihi said Iranian officials made it clear that Tehran views Shamkhani’s assassination as “Israel targeting and killing nuclear diplomacy with the US.”

Israeli officials say President Donald Trump played a key role in deceiving the Islamic Republic into believing Tel Aviv was not planning to attack, and the window for diplomacy was still open. Additionally, Tel Aviv says Washington provided intelligence that Israeli forces used in the attack...............

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 Democracy Now talks to journalists from Israel and Iran  ... June 16

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYrzSs6Cznk 

 

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https://dissidentvoice.org/2025/06/israel-is-fully-integrating-its-gaza-food-aid-hubs-into-the-genocide/

 

Israel is Fully Integrating its Gaza “Food Aid Hubs” into the Genocide

by Jonathan Cook / June 3rd, 2025

  

It is entirely unsurprising that Israel has yet again been caught out in a lie – a lie that the BBC once again spread far and wide on its news services.

Israel claimed that it had not fired at starving Palestinians queuing on Sunday morning to get food from one of its highly militarised “aid distribution hubs” – a system Israel imposed on Gaza in place of a long-established and successful aid network run by the United Nations.

More than 30 Palestinians are known to have been killed and dozens more injured in the weekend incident.

Israel blamed Hamas fighters for shooting Palestinian civilians, saying they were trying to stop the crowds from taking food boxes. The Israeli military dished up a video, taken by one of its drones, as supposed proof.

The BBC broadcast that video on its main shows, and then did one of its standard “Israel said, the Palestinians said. Who can really know the truth?” reports of the incident.

The BBC should never have taken Israel’s disinformation seriously, not least because Israeli claims are always shown to be lies when subjected to any serious independent scrutiny. The default position should be that Israel is lying until it can demonstrate convincingly that it is not.

Doctors treating the dead and wounded immediately pointed out that their injuries were consistent with Israeli gunfire. The victims had single shots to the head or chest, in line with targeting by Israeli snipers. Others suffered shrapnel wounds from tank shells. Hamas has no tanks.........................

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https://morganc000.substack.com/p/operation-proteus

 

Operation PROTEUS:

How Canada and the U.S. Built a Proxy Security Regime in Palestine

Morgan Chase   June 3, 2025

 Canada’s involvement in Palestine is neither neutral nor limited to diplomacy. It functions as part of a Western security system designed to stabilize Israel’s occupation by outsourcing repression to Palestinian intermediaries. The instrument of that policy is Operation PROTEUS, a long-running mission that arms, trains, and directs the Palestinian Authority (PA) Security Forces in the West Bank under foreign command.

These forces do not exist to protect Palestinians. Their mandate is to carry out arrests, suppress dissent, and police civilians—demonstrating loyalty not to their people, but to Western backers and the Israeli state.

The program is administered through the Office of the United States Security Coordinator (USSC), which includes Canadian, British, and Dutch personnel but is led by American generals. Its strategic doctrine was imported directly from U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where local militias were rebranded as national forces under foreign supervision. In Palestine, this was called “state-building.” In function, it is occupation-by-consent.

Lieutenant General Mark C. Schwartz, who ran the USSC from 2019 to 2021, oversaw this structure. A former commander of elite U.S. Special Forces and strategic advisor to NATO, Schwartz now advises the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—a post-genocide entity claiming its creation to manage Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.His role in both arenas shows the system’s continuity. Same doctrine, same function, same personnel........

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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce814ez7030o

by Barbara Tasch

BBC rejects incorrect White House claims on Gaza coverage

 The BBC has rejected incorrect White House criticism of its Gaza coverage, describing a claim that it had taken down a story as "completely wrong".

At Tuesday's White House briefing President Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused the BBC of taking "the word of Hamas" when reporting on the number of people killed in a shooting near an aid distribution site on Sunday.

She also claimed, wrongly, that the BBC had retracted a story.

"The claim the BBC took down a story after reviewing footage is completely wrong. We did not remove any story and we stand by our journalism," the BBC said in a statement.

Karoline Leavitt criticised the BBC for changing the number of casualties in the story's headline. The corporation said its coverage was updated with new figures throughout the day, which is "totally normal practice on any fast-moving news story".

The numbers were "always clearly attributed, from the first figure of 15 from medics, through the 31 killed from the Hamas-run health ministry to the final Red Cross statement of 'at least 21' at their field hospital," the statement said.

There are conflicting reports on what happened near an aid distribution centre in Rafah on Sunday.

Civilian witnesses, NGOs, and health officials said people were shot at while waiting for food at an aid distribution point. But the Israeli military said the reports were false, and denied that its troops fired at civilians near or within the site. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US and Israel-backed group which now runs the aid distribution, said the reports were "outright fabrications".

Israel does not allow international news organisations, including the BBC, into Gaza, making verifying what is happening in the territory difficult.

On Tuesday, there was a similar incident when local officials said Israeli forces fired at civilians as they attempted to collect aid, killing at least 27 people..............

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Katie Halper

Jews Speak Out: Israel’s Genocide “Worse Than Nazis”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzjiwDmKQtAb 

 

 

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https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-rule-of-idiots

 

The Rule of Idiots

In the last days of all empires the idiots take over. They mirror the collective stupidity of a civilization that has detached itself from reality.

Chris Hedges
Jun 06, 2025
 
 

The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.

Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.

In “Hitler and the Germans,” the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people...............................

 

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https://original.antiwar.com/William_Astore/2025/06/10/golden-dome-idiocy/
 

Golden Dome Idiocy

Donald Trump has a dream: a “golden dome” over America to defend the country against nuclear missiles. It’s a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s dream, the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars” after the movie. The problem is that the dream represents a nightmare.

How so? Golden Dome would be dangerously escalatory, wildly expensive, and unlikely to work as a “shield” to America. It is worse than a mistake: it is a crime. It represents a massive theft from those who hunger and suffer in America. As Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1953, wasting enormous resources on weapons systems is no way of life at all. It is humanity crucifying itself on a cross of iron. Crucifixion is not made more pleasant when the cross is golden.

 Put differently, the Golden Dome is a golden idol, a false god, one that by making a massive nuclear strike more likely endangers all of us and God’s creation.

Golden Dome is a grotesque example of makework militarism and warfare as welfare for weapons makers. Though it’s unlikely to work, if it did (partially) it would make a massive nuclear strike more likely, not less, endangering the world with the ecocidal terror of nuclear winter........

 

 

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https://voicefromrussia.ch/en/diplomacy-on-his-deathbed-from-peace-president-to-warmonger/

 

Diplomacy on his deathbed – from Peace President to Warmonger

The US’s involvement in the attacks on Russia and Iran makes a negotiated solution to these conflicts unlikely. Trump, who promised his people peace, is bringing war.

Peter Hanseler

 

Untrustworthy Trump

One day before the second round of negotiations in Istanbul, Ukraine attacked aircraft from Russia’s strategic bomber fleet with drones hidden in trucks that were smuggled into Russia. We reported on this in “Operation Spiderweb: Ukraine and NATO attack on Russia: a new Pearl Harbor? Full escalation? Are the fanatics back? Facts and analysis.” The military damage was minor; what remained was a propaganda victory for the West – nothing more. On June 11, the Financial Times went to great lengths to prove that these attacks were carried out with AI without Western help. The FT should probably confine itself to business news – pure bcomplicity in the Israeli attack on Iran at the end of the week............

 

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Trump wants a city of 10 million Iranians to evacuate.   Let's open our borders to the Iranians as they are going to be made refugees by Trump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXwVvnEjpb4

 

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Posted by MariaS at 22:25 0 comments

Saturday, June 7, 2025

Some scenes from the holocaust 2023-ongoing, one can never forget. Ahmad's heart-breaking anguish over his mother's death is one of them.

 

A grieving boy in Gaza 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/jun/07/story-of-a-mother-shot-dead-searching-for-food-in-gaza

June 7, 2025

By Malak A Tantesh and Emma Graham-Harrisonb

These are traps set for the people’: the story of a mother shot dead searching for food in Gaza

Reem Zeidan was terrified of being separated from her children. As they trudged for hours through the ruins of Gaza towards a food distribution centre, she rehearsed over and over again with her 20-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son what they should do and where they should wait if an Israeli attack turned the column of hungry people into a chaotic, panicking mass and the family were torn apart.

It was the last conversation she had with them. She was dead before dawn broke on Tuesday, killed by a single bullet through her forehead. Her daughter and son spent nearly three hours beside her body, pinned down by gunfire.

“We went there out of desperation. Hunger is what forced my mother to go. She had been going every day for a full week walking six hours to get there and coming back with nothing,” Mirvat, her daughter, said in a phone interview.

A couple of days before, after Israeli forces had opened fire on the weary crowds approaching new Israeli and US-backed food distribution centres, Mirvat had begged Reem not to risk the trip any more.

The walking, waiting, battling the chaos and then returning empty-handed seemed a pointless risk, a waste of what little energy they had left after months of small, irregular meals. But her children were famished.

“I told my mother it was a sign from God not to go again and that convinced her,” Mirvat said. “But she would quickly change her mind when my little sister Razan, who is only five years old, cried to her that she was hungry.”

Reem tried to stretch out what little stocks the family had left after months of siege, but it is hard to trick a hungry child. After one meal of “soup”, made with just a handful of lentils for the whole family, Razan begged for food, telling their mother “water doesn’t fill my stomach”, Mirvat said.

So on Monday, Reem told Mohammad, her husband of 28 years, that she wanted to try again to get some food. They set off before midnight because the distribution point is several hours’ walk from Khan Younis, where the Zeidan family have been sheltering in the ruins of their old home. Food handouts begin early and end fast......


 

 

Posted by MariaS at 20:51 0 comments

Monday, June 2, 2025

Pages from a book with plenty of wisdom to end conflicts and live in peace. IT CAN BE DONE

 

 The pages below are from Peter Beinart's "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza" published in February, 2025.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by MariaS at 17:37 0 comments
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