Tag: war

The Vanishing Letter

Osama bin Laden wanted to speak directly to the American people. An undated letter promising endless war is one of hundreds of documents collected in the May 2, 2011 raid on his compound in Pakistan that was released Wednesday. The full text is below.

However, the full text of the letter was not actually provided by Foreign Policy. Two lines, highlighted below in bold italics, were omitted with the following note.

(TN: Two lines of poetry that say the Mujahidin will not stop fighting until the United States leaves their land.)

Even more intriguing, The Guardian just disappeared the page on which the letter had been published for the last 21 years.

Removed: document
Wed 15 Nov 2023 21.19 CET
This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people”, as reported in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

From Usama Bin Muhammad Bin Ladin to the American people,

I speak to you about the subject of the ongoing war between you and us. Even though the consensus of your wise thinkers and others is that your time (TN: of defeat) will come, compassion for the women and children who are being unjustly killed, wounded, and displaced in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan motivates me to speak to you.

First of all, I would like to say that your war with us is the longest war in your history and the most expensive for you financially. As for us, we see it as being only halfway finished. If you were to ask your wise thinkers, they would tell you that there is no way to win it because the indications are
against it. How will you win a war whose leaders are pessimistic and whose soldiers are committing suicide? If fear enters the hearts of men, winning the war becomes impossible. How will you
win a war whose cost is like a hurricane blowing violently at your economy and weakening your dollar?

The Bush administration got you into these wars on the premise that they were vital to your security. He promised that it would be a quick war, won within six days or six weeks; however, six years have passed, and they are still promising you victory and not achieving it. Then Obama came and delayed the withdrawal that he had promised you by 16 more months. He promised you victory in Afghanistan and set a date for withdrawal from there. Six months later, Petraeus came to you once again with the number six, requesting that the withdrawal be delayed six months beyond the date that had been set. All the while you continue to bleed in Iraq and Afghanistan. You are wading into a war with no end in sight on the horizon and which has no connection to your security, which was confirmed by the operation of ‘Umar al-Faruq, which was not launched from the battlefield and could have been launched from any place in the world.

As for us, jihad against the tyrants and the aggressors is a form of great worship in our religion. It is more precious to us than our fathers and sons. Thus, our jihad against you is worship, and your killing us is a testimony. Thanks to God, Almighty, we have been waging jihad for 30 years, against the Russians and
then against you. Not a single one of our men has committed suicide, whereas every 30 days 30 of your men commit suicide.

Continue the war if you will.

Palestine shall not be seen captive for we will try to break its shackles.
The United States shall pay for its arrogance with the blood of Christians and their funds.

Peace be upon those who follow right guidance.

Justice is the strongest army, and security is the best way of life, but it slipped out of your grasp the day you made the Jews victorious in occupying our land and killing our brothers in Palestine. The path to security is for you to lift your oppression from us.

There can’t be much doubt as to why Bin Ladin’s “Letter to the American People” is being disappeared, in light of the recent Hamas attacks, the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the rush of US men and material to the Middle East. The neocons in the US and UK media are obviously attempting to prevent the pro-Palestinian side from presenting its perspective to the public, and more importantly, they are trying to hide the material link between the past US military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan with the present US military presence in Syria, Israel, and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

I doubt it matters in the slightest. As even the ADL has reported, the youngest generation in the West is solidly against the Israeli position in the Gaza conflict, while only the Boomers generally support it. While the Millennials and Generation X are more balanced – or in the case of GenX, characteristically apathetic – neither of them are even remotely interested in fighting anyone in the Middle East for any reason.

But there can be little question that this is an all-hands-on-deck situation for the neocons, so it will be very informative to observe which public figures fall in line with the demands of the Narrative, and which ones are not being controlled.

UPDATE: The media is officially upset that its attempt to disappear the Bin Ladin letter has failed:

A vile letter written by the warlord behind the 9/11 atrocities has gone viral on TikTok with users saying that reading it has led to them ‘understanding’ as to why the horrific attacks were carried out in 2001. The letter began to gain traction online after UK newspaper The Guardian linked to a 2002 article which translated it in full in an article about the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. It was subsequently deleted with the outlet telling DailyMail.com in a statement that it was removed because was being shared ‘without its original context.’

They’re not even attempting to pretend to be journalists anymore. The letter is “vile”? The attacks were “horrific”? Furthermore, The Guardian linked to the article in 2002, so the letter began to gain traction 21 years later, which is indeed “after” the link, but is a very misleading way to describe what happened and why people are paying attention to the vanished letter.

Remember, facts provided without approved context consistent with the Narrative is misinformation.

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Endgame Ukraine II

The unravelling has started and it’s obvious that the neocons have already decided to pull the plug and turn off the life support system of the Kiev regime.

Let’s summarize recent developments:

  • Zaluzhny’s aides are deleted, one by assassination
  • Large-scale new ‘house cleaning’ of entire general staff is reportedly announced from Zelensky’s side
  • Major media campaigns from both sides push urgent narratives of stalemates, Zaluzhny implying the war will be lost, and an eye-opening exposé on a ‘isolated’ and ‘messianic’ Fuhrer-bunker version of Zelensky
  • Zelensky suddenly cancels presidential elections, likely sussing the plan to promote Zaluzhny as challenger
  • Money spigot has still been turned off for the foreseeable future, with no realistic plans on horizon at the moment
  • Ukraine now catastrophically losing on virtually every front of the war, set to soon lose another major, strategically critical city
  • Many influential voices like Arestovich now openly push ceasefire
  • The ‘grim reaper’ CIA director set to pay visit, which only happens on eve of some major pivot or escalation. Diplomats and Foreign Secretaries are sent to ‘discuss options’ or ‘negotiate’—CIA directors are sent to deliver final threats of action

Now, much of the foregoing information is already being discussed elsewhere. But the one chief question no one else seems to be asking is the most critical of all: if factions in the West intend to replace Zelensky with Zaluzhny, then what is the actual purpose? What do they intend for Zaluzhny to do or accomplish that Zelensky cannot?

Some haven’t thought this through, and just assume that “Zaluzhny is a strong leader” and therefore is being made to replace Zelensky so that he can whip the military into shape and win the war. But why would Zaluzhny need to be president to do that? He’s already the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and that’s literally his job description.

So, logically speaking, the only possible explanation I can see making sense is that Zaluzhny is being chosen to sell the ceasefire to the people. Such a thing would sound more acceptable from the standpoint of a military leader and strategist who can explain that the situation is hopeless without time to recover and replenish the forces with an armistice. And more importantly, to sell it to the troops.

Notice how all of this has been transparent to anyone who simply watches the direction that the elite neocons are taking. This was obvious as far back as April and May, but the need to focus on the defense of Israel, which is the absolute #1 neocon priority, means that the Ukraine war will be over as soon as a military leader a) replaces Zelensky/Yermak and b) meets Putin’s terms.

However, it may not be as easy to accomplish (b) as the neocons and the media believe. I expect Putin will demand, at the very least, a complete end of the collective sanctions regime, a disinvitation to NATO, and the province of Odessa, and it’s going to be very, very difficult for all the true believers in the Narrative to accept that.

Notice, in particular, that the CIA director who is meeting with Zelensky this week wrote the following to his then-boss, Condoleeza Rice, in 2008 when he was the ambassador to Russia:

“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

In any event, don’t be surprised if the collapse and first attempt to reach a settlement happens considerably sooner than anyone expects. Keep in mind that the speed with which these events are taking place tend to indicate that the war in the Middle East is not proceeding as well as anticipated.

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US Casualties in Middle East

It appears US special forces are already actively engaged in the Middle East and possibly even in Gaza.

Five American service members were killed in a crash late Friday after their helicopter had a “mishap” during a training exercise and went into the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the military said Sunday. Two officials confirmed that the five were Army special operations soldiers, as first reported by The New York Times and Washington Post. Search and rescue efforts went into Saturday before being called off, according to the officials.

“Training Exercise,” in the military context, is always a pseudonym. The US special forces don’t “train” overseas, unless they are training foreign militaries. The “mishap” was most likely the fact that the helicopter was shot down, although the list of possible culprits is far too long to even hazard a guess.

Meanwhile, Gazans are reporting encounters with English-speaking troops with US flags on their uniforms. Given the number of dual citizens in the IDF, this doesn’t necessarily mean US special forces are already on the ground in Gaza, but it would be very foolish to assume they are not already engaged there.

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Ukraine Endgame

As US supports pivots to the Middle Eastern front, Russian strategists are already contemplating what comes after the surrender of Ukraine, the fall of the Kiev regime, and the end of the Special Military Operation in Novorossiya.

Immediately after the end of the Special Military Operation, the West will not be able to fight with us. It does not have a trained army, it will not accumulate the required amount of resources, it has no plans for war with Russia. It only has scraps of speculation and guesswork. These three factors make war with NATO unlikely. It is clear that the United States can push the Europeans to take crazy steps. But on the economic and diplomatic front we have specialists who will try to keep them from doing this. And the NWO will lead to processes that will lead to a split in the European Union and NATO. If we break through a land corridor to Hungary, then Serbia will be magnetized to this axis. And it can be followed by Slovakia and Romania, where very interesting processes are taking place. Eastern Europe will begin to break away from old Europe, which will be severely depressed due to the economic situation. After all, Europe is  defeated not only on the eastern front, but also in the global south. 

Consider this: Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia have a combined population of roughly 42 million. This is substantial, it is also a promising market–make your own conclusion. As I already stated many times, Russia doesn’t need love or obedience, Russia is interested in trade with people who still recognize that there are only two genders. Simple as that. Once the land bridge is built, European structure changes dramatically.

It’s unlikely that either Zelensky or the Kiev regime will long survive the fall of Avdeevka, whether it is followed by a Russian winter offensive or not. Post-Zelensky succession struggles have already begun, and as the assassination of the top personal aide to the Ukrainian Armed Forces shows, they are likely going to be very violent and nasty. And the first priority of whoever wins will be to surrender to Russia on the most favorable terms possible.

My assumption is that Russia will not accept any settlement that does not include the transfer of Odessa. And while it is clear that Ukraine does not have the ability to prevent Russian forces from taking it, there is no reason for Putin to spend the Russian blood required to do so when a little patience and a new regime will likely allow him to accomplish his goals without it. This patient approach might, in fact, be a micro-analogy for the way Xi is approaching China’s desired reunification with its wayward island.

The longer Israel is enmeshed in Gaza, and the more US resources that pour into the region, the more it looks to me as if the October 7 attacks were intended to draw the US deep enough into the conflict to prevent its full engagement on any other front. While both the Netanyahu government and the anti-China faction of the neocons welcomed the redirection of the US military focus from Ukraine to Israel, it chiefly appears to serve the strategic interests of the Russians, which might explain why the Russians have been surprisingly inactive in Syria while Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran have all been unexpectedly passive in response to the slow-paced Israeli invasion.

The scale of the global violence may be limited and regional to date, but the strategic scope is observably worldwide. It appears the complexities of WWIII will pose an even greater challenge to historians than its predecessor. But now that the second front appears to have been opened, it can only be a matter of time before the third one – presumably Taiwan, though possibly the Philippines – follows suit.

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Do They Want Right-Wing Death Squads?

Because left-wing murders are, historically, how a society gets right-wing death squads:

The former head of Spain’s People’s Party in the Catalonia region was shot in the face in Madrid on Thursday, police said. Alejo Vidal-Quadras, 78, was shot on Núñez de Balboa street in the wealthy Salamanca area of central Madrid at about 1.30pm, as he was returning home from a church service, according to witnesses.

A Civil Protection spokesperson said Vidal-Quadras retained consciousness and was rushed to the nearby Gregorio Marañón hospital, while police are now hunting for two people who fled the scene on a motorbike, with the shooter wearing a black helmet. Witnesses described the attacker as a ‘young, small man’ who was wearing jeans and a dark coat and was seemingly waiting for the politician to pass by.

The pair exchanged no words, with the shooter reportedly stepping up and blasting Vidal-Quadras from near point blank range before hopping onto the motorcycle piloted by an accomplice.

Vidal-Quadras was the head of the centre-right PP in Catalonia and was also the Vice-President of the European Parliament from 2009-2014, when he left the group to join newly created party Vox.

People have mostly forgotten that the original Brownshirts were formed in Germany from groups of WWI veterans in response to murderous rampages by Communist militants. For all that it is feared by the Left and Center alike, the violence of the Right has historically been predominantly defensive and reactive.

Even Franco’s Nationalist government only came to power in Spain in response to eight years of murderous Leftist violence, particularly the Red Terror of 1936-1939 that left over 50,000 Spaniards dead, including 6,832 members of the clergy.

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Ben Shapiro and the Inevitability of Defeat

If you want to know why I expect that Israel will lose its war with Hamas and the Arab nations, and why the USA will lose WWIII, just read this transcript of a strategic analysis of Russian military doctrine by Ben Shapiro, and then recognize that he is a public microphone who simply repeats what the neocons who are running both the micro and macro war efforts genuinely believe:

Russia is not a first-world power. Russia is a second-world power. As they suggested, it’s a gas station with a nuclear arsenal. That doesn’t mean it’s not geostrategically important. It doesn’t mean it can’t cause all sorts of headaches and problems for the West. It doesn’t mean that it can’t turn off the gas that they get and cause serious problems for Western and Eastern Europe.

What it does mean is that when Russia goes to war, Russia does not go to war the same way the United States does. It does not go to war the same way Israel, or the UK, or NATO does. When Russia goes to war, it basically just uses overwhelming force and kills enormous numbers of civilians.

And what we’re seeing is that the Russians don’t even have the number of supplies that they need to fight this battle. What that means is that the war gets ugly, it gets ground down, and very vicious, street fighting, lots of civilian deaths, and this has been part of Russia’s playbook for quite a while. They’ve been using this since Chechnya in the late 1990s. If you cannot pacify a region, you just start killing as many civilians as you can.

At the very least, you try to shock and awe people into surrendering, by killing civilians and demonstrating that you are harder than they are, that you do not care how many civilians you have to kill.

Ben Shapiro, 3 November 2023

Now, read it again, this time keeping in mind the famous aphorism of Sun Tzu regarding knowledge and the likelihood of either victory or defeat.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

The neocons neither know the enemy nor do they know themselves. That is why, now that the conflicts have transformed from one of influence and subversion to one of power and war, they are destined to lose.

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Hultgreen-Curie, Naval Edition

Joe Biden proposed, and the US Senate confirmed, the first woman to lead the US Navy.

The US Senate has confirmed three high-ranking military nominations, including Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who becomes the first woman to lead the Navy. Senator Tommy Tuberville allowed the votes to go through after months of blocking all confirmations in an anti-abortion protest.

Franchetti, 59, was sworn in as the 33rd Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) on Thursday, following a 95-1 vote on Capitol Hill. The four-star admiral also became the first woman granted a seat at the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff. President Joe Biden nominated her in July – reportedly against the advice of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Since her nomination she has been serving as acting CNO, due to Tuberville’s obstruction.

First woman approved to lead US Navy, 3 November 2023

To say this bodes ill, particularly in the current circumstances, is probably the understatement of the year. But if the limits of imperial overstretch have indeed been reached, it would be absolutely appropriate to have that critical historical moment overseen by the first female Joint Chief of the Navy.

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Mailvox: Why International Opinion Matters

An SGer asks a reasonable question:

Why does Israel care what the international community thinks?

Because the nation is too small and too weak to survive without being provided resources and protection by other nations. Only large nations with abundant natural resources such as China, the USA, and Russia can afford to ignore international opinion without rapidly regressing into a pre-industrial state of starvation. Unfortunately, the current Israeli elite has transformed what was once excellent diplomacy into an abusive parasitism over time, which is short-term advantageous but long-term self-destructive.

The current crisis is almost certainly related to the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu is the Prime Minister of Israel. In the eyes of the world, Israel had a just cause to use force to take its hostages back. But it does not see Israel having just cause to ethnically cleanse Gaza or bomb the civilian population there. Hence the rapid loss of global sympathy, and the concomitant increase of global antipathy.

Here’s a hint: if you’re appealing to the historical examples of Dresden and Nagasaki, you are absolutely going to lose the rhetorical war every single time. Even many Americans regard those wartime acts as inexcusable war crimes, as does most of the planet.

Scott Ritter’s article on his complicated personal history with Israel is, as is often the case with Ritter, somewhat hit or miss – at this point, the current state of South Africa is better seen as an ex post facto justification of apartheid than as a positive example for Israel or anyone else – but he does manage to demonstrate why no world leaders, and even many Israelis, have absolutely no trust in Netanyahu or his leadership in this war.

I didn’t blame Israel as a whole, but rather the individual Israelis involved, first and foremost the man who had taken over from Yitzhak Rabin as the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s incompetence as a political leader had resulted in him being voted out of office in 1999, replaced by Ehud Barack (who had apparently learned to lie to a degree sufficient to the task of being an Israeli politician). In September 2002, Netanyahu testified before the US Congress about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Even though he did so as a private citizen, his status as a former Prime Minister gave his words credibility they did not deserve.

“There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said. “Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons.”

Netanyahu’s statements directly contradicted the findings that my Israeli colleagues and I had reached—findings that were shared by the International Atomic Energy Agency, responsible for overseeing the dismantling of Iraq’s nuclear program—that the Iraqi nuclear program had been eliminated, and that there was no evidence of its reconstitution.

But Netanyahu’s job wasn’t to tell the truth about Iraq’s nuclear program, but rather use the fear generated by the specter of an Iraqi nuclear weapon to justify a war with Iraq that would remove Saddam Husein from power. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu told his receptive congressional audience. “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

Looking back today, at the horrific consequences of America’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, at an Iranian regime firmly entrenched behind a nuclear program that is not going away, one can clearly see that Benjamin Netanyahu was wrong about everything. But that has been his modus operendi from the start—to exaggerate and lie about threats faced by Israel to justify military action which invariably resulted in disaster.

Now, regardless of what one thinks of Ritter, the fact that Netanhayu’s known modus operandi for more than two decades has been “to exaggerate and lie about threats faced by Israel to justify military action which invariably resulted in disaster” does not leave one with a great deal of confidence in a positive outcome of this recent war between Israel and the organization it helped create, Hamas.

This is Netanyahu’s war, one that he has long sought, and quite possibly one of which it will eventually be learned that he arranged and staged. We may even need to coin a new term for this sort of war, because if it is true that Netanyahu not only permitted, but was involved in encouraging the attacks, “green flag” wouldn’t suffice to describe it. “Puppet flag” would be more accurate.

And as for any objections that it would require a sociopath to contemplate and actually do such a contemptible thing, well, there appears to be considerable evidence that Netanyahu is not only a sociopath, but one whose psyche was deeply affected by the death of his heroic older brother at Entebbe. As the Germans learned to their great detriment, as the Ukrainians are presently learning to theirs, it is very costly to a nation to permit a psychologically-damaged individual to hold the reins of government.

UPDATE: Oh, Sweet Moses. Israeli PR doubles down on the rhetorical retardery.

Nations that have failed to support Israel’s response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 are on the side of the militant group in the conflict, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has declared. There can be no neutrality regarding the conflict, a ministry spokesman has insisted.

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Green Flag Confirmed

Jonathan Pollard, the US traitor and spy whose loyalty to Israel cannot possibly be questioned, has testified that IDF helicopter pilots received a stand-down order on October 7th that prevented them from responding to the Hamas attacks for six hours that day:

In a recent interview, Jonathan Pollard explicitly confirmed the only plausible explanation for what happened on Simchas Torah: there was a stand down order while thousands of Jews in dozens of communities were brutally murdered, tortured, raped, mutilated, and dragged off to Gaza.

The vital clip is available here, and a link to the complete interview with Kofy Time TV is in the description.

As copious video evidence has shown, the savages conducted their rampage methodically and at great leisure, without concern that an overwhelming military response was likely to arrive any moment. They somehow knew they had time to sit down and eat, take smoking breaks, pose for videos, loot the dead, and torture many of their victims.

If you managed, in spite of all odds, to break into Fort Knox, you wouldn’t take your sweet time.

Unless, of course, you knew with absolute certainty that the cavalry wouldn’t be coming for a while, because certain people in the highest positions of power made sure of it. As Pollard states:

“…It took six hours for any reaction to occur, when the army and air force bases were within earshot of what was going on. I have friends who were helicopter pilots, attack pilots, who were sitting in their cockpits ready to take off, fully loaded, ready to stop them at the fence. They didn’t get their orders for six hours. They could hear it. They could hear the fighting! They were called by friends in the border kibbutzim and moshavim that were being overrun and slaughtered, saying ‘Help us! Please! They’re killing our children!’ They weren’t given permission to take off. That will haunt my friend for the rest of his life. He feels personally responsible for many deaths because of that – wrongly.”

I respectfully disagree with Mr. Pollard. The helicopter pilots and others who obeyed orders to stand down while their friends and neighbors were crying out for help are personally responsible. The people who gave them this order, and all those who relayed it down the chain of command, are most responsible, of course, and these people must be identified, apprehended, interrogated, and brought to justice immediately, BEFORE we deal with our enemies in Gaza and elsewhere. We cannot continue to have these people in positions of power, giving orders to our family and friends in the army and playing with the lives of our people.

The history of US wars, from the Spanish-American War to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, are riddled with false flags and green flags. Nor did the USA invent the concept; the Romans were notorious for producing one excuse or another to justify their legions marching on various kingdoms and empires. The Nazis famously used a false flag to justify their invasion of Poland in 1939.

On August 31, 1939, German troops dressed in Polish uniforms pretended to attack a German radio station near the German-Polish border at Gleiwitz.. Concentration camp inmates had been previously shot and dressed in German uniforms and left at the radio station to make it seem the Poles had attacked Germany, giving Germany the excuse for starting World War II in Europe.

But as bad as false flags are, it is arguably even more noxious for a government to abdicate its primary responsibility of protecting its own citizens and knowingly permit foreign hostiles to kill, capture, and otherwise abuse them. And therefore it strikes me as highly unlikely that Israel is going to be any more successful in its war against Hamas if it is being led by a Netanhayu government than the USA was in its failed wars against Afghanistan and Iraq under the leadership of the Younger Bush.

It’s not possible to dismiss Mr. Pollard’s accusations as antisemitism, anti-Zionism, or secret sympathies for Hamas. This six-hour stand-down order proves that a) the Hamas attacks were, as we suspected, a green flag, and b) that Netanyahu and at least some IDF generals knew about the attacks before they took place. This also suggests, given the speed and scope of the subsequent US military response, there were also US parties aware of the planned attacks. The global opposition to the Netanyahu government’s actions may actually be the lesser of the two serious problems presently faced by Israelis, given that they are presently being governed by a leadership that appears to be almost as willing to kill them as its enemies are.

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