Tag: war

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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The Rage is Boundless

I don’t mean to elevate the blood pressure of anyone who is reading alternative media, but I fear it has been reliably reported on social media that new Hamas outrages have been discovered.

  • Hamas hands Israeli babies bottles but they are actually dynamite sticks painted to look like bottles, and they explode after the babies realize the fuse is lit.
  • Hamas paints walls to look like tunnels and then makes Israeli babies drive into the walls thinking it was a road the whole time.
  • Hamas puts Israeli babies on see-saws and then drops anvils on the opposite side, launching the Israeli babies into the stratosphere.

There is only one solution to these unconceivable horrors committed by subhuman animals, and that is to send in every single soldier in the US Army and the US Marine Corps to genocide the entire Gaza Strip, West Bank, and the East Bank. Also, Syria, Iran, and southern… what the hell, all of Lebanon too. After which, gold-plated condominiums will be constructed, at US expense, to console the shattered survivors of these unprecedented outrages.

Anything less would be an anti-semitic hate crime. Write your congressman!

UPDATE: The media elites really don’t get it. The lack of self-awareness is astonishing.

Israel has made two major mistakes.

  • First, the goals of the war have been poorly articulated.
  • It has failed sufficiently to emphasize that an entire army of accomplices stands behind Hamas.
Why Israel is fast losing the public relations war, THE TIMES OF ISRAEL, 1 November 2023

The first point is relevant, the second one is not, but neither explain the global loss of sympathy for the Israelis in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks. The reason Israel is now losing the public relations war is because a) the response is observably and statistically disproportionate, b) the misguided attempt to capitalize on the initial world reaction through argumentum iniuriae has failed due to both a lack of credibility and a complete failure to read the crowd, c) the media narrative contradicts the Ukraine media narrative of the last 20 months, and d) neocon + ADL overreach.

UPDATE: It appears the Israeli propagandists failed to learn the lesson of Sandy Hook, which is this: Americans don’t give a fuck anymore. GenX and the younger generations are not gullible Silents and Boomers. We all know that governments have historically done terrible things in order to get the people to buy into whatever their cause du jour is. So, the elites can fly false flags and slaughter every kindergartener in New Jersey, they can rape every puppy and kitten in Tel Aviv, and it still won’t move us to support them one little bit.

Also, you might not want to run with “dead babies” when you support abortion. Your rhetoric is DOA. I mean, what’s the real problem there, the lack of maternal consent to the murder?

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Absolutely Certainly Again

The founding editor of The Times of Israel cries out in shock while his people besiege and bomb a city without air defenses:

More than three weeks after that blackest Shabbat in our Israeli history, we remain, unsurprisingly, a nation deep in shock.

Shocked at the unrestrained murderous savagery that thousands of our neighbors unleashed upon us — the hysterical exultation with which they ripped away 1,400 lives in ways many of us still will not bring ourselves to watch….

But the shock is also expanding, now, to horror, disappointment and fury at the shift outside Israel — from brief, initial empathy for all those whose lives were shot and burned and butchered away, for their bereft and broken families and for the innocent snatched away into Hamas’s underground hellholes, to a rising global effort to deprive us of the right to ensure it will not happen again. A rising global effort propelled by Israel-haters and antisemites, assisted by falsehoods and misrepresentations everywhere from TikTok to supposedly responsible media, and inflated by fools, to try to halt our military response, or limit and undermine it. Basically, to tell us that what happened on October 7, if it happened, was terrible, but we need to get over it. Subverting “Never Again,” and telling us instead, well, yes, Almost Certainly Again.

But David Horovitz shouldn’t be shocked. He shouldn’t even be surprised. His people don’t need to “get over it,” they need to learn that their actions speak much louder in the ears of the world than their endless flow of words.

Let’s get this straight. Jews have been invading the British Mandate of Palestine since the end of the 19th century, just as they’ve been invading various countries for centuries, often illegally. After decades of anti-British terrorism led to the British withdrawal, the Jewish military forces won the wars of 1948 and 1967 fair and square, and they now hold the land currently controlled by the State of Israel and recognized by the international community by the same right of conquest that most modern states hold their land.

They hold no historical claim to the land prior to that 20th century claim, because their initial claim to the land of Canaan is also one of conquest, conquest that was repeatedly superseded by various other conquests by a number of other parties. Remember, the Jews didn’t even found the city of Jerusalem. Furthermore, the greater part of the land of Israel never belonged to either the tribe or the kingdom of Judah, so the Biblical claim to which the Christian Zionists hold so fervently doesn’t even apply to any of the Canaanite lands north of Jericho or east of the Jordan River.

The allotment for the tribe of Judah, according to its clans, extended down to the territory of Edom, to the Desert of Zin in the extreme south. Their southern boundary started from the bay at the southern end of the Dead Sea, crossed south of Scorpion Pass, continued on to Zin and went over to the south of Kadesh Barnea. Then it ran past Hezron up to Addar and curved around to Karka. It then passed along to Azmon and joined the Wadi of Egypt, ending at the Mediterranean Sea. This is their southern boundary.

The eastern boundary is the Dead Sea as far as the mouth of the Jordan.

The northern boundary started from the bay of the sea at the mouth of the Jordan, went up to Beth Hoglah and continued north of Beth Arabah to the Stone of Bohan son of Reuben. The boundary then went up to Debir from the Valley of Achor and turned north to Gilgal, which faces the Pass of Adummim south of the gorge. It continued along to the waters of En Shemesh and came out at En Rogel. Then it ran up the Valley of Ben Hinnom along the southern slope of the Jebusite city (that is, Jerusalem). From there it climbed to the top of the hill west of the Hinnom Valley at the northern end of the Valley of Rephaim. From the hilltop the boundary headed toward the spring of the waters of Nephtoah, came out at the towns of Mount Ephron and went down toward Baalah (that is, Kiriath Jearim). Then it curved westward from Baalah to Mount Seir, ran along the northern slope of Mount Jearim (that is, Kesalon), continued down to Beth Shemesh and crossed to Timnah. It went to the northern slope of Ekron, turned toward Shikkeron, passed along to Mount Baalah and reached Jabneel. The boundary ended at the sea.

The western boundary is the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea.

Joshua 15: 1-12

Now, Israel’s right to exist is no more questionable than the USA’s right to exist. No reasonable, historically-literate individual can deny it. Everyone has to live somewhere. Every nation has the right to live somewhere.

And Israel has the right to defend itself. No question. But therein lies the problem. Israel has more than 11 percent of its Jewish population living on what are not recognized as Israel’s lands, and the Jewish nation has more than 50 percent of its people living in a diaspora scattered throughout lands that belong to other nations.

And all of those nations have the right to defend their lands too. Including the Palestinians. So, it’s always important to look very carefully at the question: who is defending what?

Very few outside the Muslim world supported the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Most of the world was rightly horrified by them. But everyone also understands that they didn’t happen in a vacuum or for no reason. Similarly, everyone understands that Israel has the right and the responsibility to respond to those attacks with military action against Hamas, as well as to utilize its military forces to rescue the hostages that are being held by Hamas.

However, that understanding does not go so far as to provide pre-approval for an unlimited military response. If it is true that the IDF has already killed 6,747 Palestinians in Gaza in reprisal, and for which the Gaza Health Ministry has provided evidence to the U.S. President, then it appears Israel is already approaching the limits of what most fair-minded people around the world are going to accept, especially in light of the frothing-mouthed genocidal rhetoric being thrown about by too many loud-mouthed US supporters of Israel. The correct Israeli response to the massive pro-Gaza support being demonstrated around the world should not be shock, rhetoric, and even more doubling down, but rather, sober contemplation of the likely consequences if what appears to be a path toward opening the second front of World War III is continued.

The reason people are telling writers like David Horovitz “Almost Certainly Again” is because for every violent action or forced compulsion, the potential for an opposite reaction that corresponds to, or exceeds, the magnitude of the original action is created. This is not to justify these hypothetical reactions, merely to explain their inevitability. And as long as there are Jews who refuse to stay in their lanes and live in their own lands, there will be reactions to their various provocations, large and small, no matter how eloquently those provocations are justified or rationalized or legalized or defined away.

Those who advocate genocide should not expect much in the way of sympathy from the rest of humanity when they find themselves under attack by anyone, for any reason. Which is why I’ll go Horovitz’s imagined interlocutors one step better and say: Absolutely Certainly Again. Because the only thing that a nation can reliably control over time is its own collective behavior, and the recent rhetoric of the Israeli government as well as that of the global diaspora tends to indicate that neither has learned the vital lesson of the Third Law of Motion as it applies to violence.

We must pray for more reasonable minds to prevail. But we should not expect them to do so.

UPDATE: This sort of rhetoric from the Defense Minister is why people around the world do not trust Israel’s assertions of self-defense and refuse to support its military actions in Gaza. Because this isn’t some hot-headed relative of a Hamas victim, this is one of the government leaders to whom the IDF generals answer.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant underlined his government’s determination to ignore pleas for a ceasefire. He told families of the 239 hostages trapped in Gaza: ‘We are fighting animals, not people.‘

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A Warning for Americans

And for everyone else who just wants to be left alone. Sometimes, being left alone isn’t an option. Sooner or later, you may be forced to make a choice regarding for whom you will fight, like the people of Ukraine who now fight themselves conscripted and forced to fight for Clown World, NATO, and the Kiev regime. Simplicius quotes a letter from an award-winning Russian writer who volunteered for the Russian Army and is now fighting on the front lines at Avdeevka:

Do I feel sorry for them? No. They killed and injured my friends, they want to kill me every day. I don’t feel sorry for them. Although, for the most part, the people who stand against us are not rabid Nazis, but ordinary Hataskrayniks who were forcibly driven to slaughter.

But if you look at everything in its entirety, it was they who brought Ukraine to its current state. That same silent majority who don’t care about Bandera, or the Russians, or the USA – as long as their farm, kindergarten, pigs are not touched, as long as they don’t run out of vodka and lard.

They didn’t care about the Maidan, about the shelling of Donetsk and Lugansk, about the genocide of the Russian population, about the murders of children, women and the elderly, about Azov’s torture, about language bans, about the split in faith… And then it turned out that they couldn’t sit it out, that you have to take a machine gun and die for the interests and goals of NATO.

And then they hated us, with a fierce, terrible hatred. Because their little farmstead world collapsed. Because this war reminds them every day of their cowardice, weakness and silence. And in their anger they blame us for everything, because they are afraid to look in the mirror and ask themselves uncomfortable questions.

These reluctant Ukrainian soldiers would have been wiser, and they would have had a much better chance of surviving, if they had stood against the Kiev regime instead of doing nothing until they found themselves forced to fight for it. Because, as enemies from Japan to France and Germany have learned over the centuries, Russia very seldom loses its wars.

It all sounds a little too familiar, doesn’t it, as the USA goes to undeclared war again in defense of Israel and the collapsing Clown World Order.

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Netanyahu Rolls the Dice

The IDF appears to have launched its ground invasion of Gaza:

Israel’s war cabinet overcame a bitter rift to launch troops and tanks into Gaza yesterday – while Palestinians were left in a terrifying blackout as communications were shut off and Israeli warplanes unleased airstrikes on the strip.

Benjamin Netanyahu only agreed to press into the war-torn enclave after hostage talks with Hamas terrorists had collapsed and he had unanimous approval from senior ministers. He had previously refused to authorize an invasion as he rallied political support – angering military chiefs as their western allies began to call for a ceasefire, the Telegraph reported.

Now, the Jewish nation already have troops and tanks on the ground in Gaza as they ‘expand’ their military operation, with aerial bombardment overhead unleashing strikes of ‘unprecedented’ intensity into the burning region.

And those living in the besieged strip have been left in the dark as their electricity and communications were cut off – including that of struggling NGOs and emergency services.

‘Our troops and tanks are inside the Gaza Strip. They’re shooting and they’re operating,’ Major Nir Dinar confirmed to the New York Times.

Well, now we’ll find out if Hezbollah and Iran are all talk or not. As a general rule, IDF officers are trained to err on the side of aggression, and they assume that Arabs will usually run rather than fight. Their current training was shaped by the experience of their elders, who were described as follows by Col. Macgregor in his book Margin of Victory.

All of these men were tough task masters who trained their officers in unconventional ways. To compensate for the IDF’s small size, they emphasized individual responsibility, inventive tactics, and daring leadership. Their preference for demonstrated talent and guts over education and social standing infused the IDF with a degree of energy and imagination seldom seen in Western military organizations, which tend to reward longevity of service rather than performance. Only the youthful and dynamic leaders that rose to command inside the revolutionary armies of France in 1789 come close in comparison. Extensive combat experience against a known opponent—the Muslim Arab—translated into a strong preference for offensive action designed to surprise and unhinge the Arab enemy, a preference inextricably intertwined with the elasticity of mind that youth and imagination bring to warfare.

Margin of Victory, Col Douglas Macgregor

Israel’s political leadership is somewhat of a gerontocracy now, but one that possesses the advantage of actual military experience that is largely missing in the USA’s political leadership. But despite the tendency toward caution that tends to come with the years, any mistakes made by the IDF can be expected to fall on the side of taking excessive risks.

Only time will tell if this decision to engage in urban warfare is the correct call, and, as usual in the case of war, the decisions made by those parties that are not presently engaged in the conflict.

UPDATE: Some are saying it’s just a recon-in-force, but regardless, there isn’t any question that the infantry and armor are both in on the ground now.

IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari says the military is “advancing through the stages of the war” in Gaza, with ground forces carrying out operations in the Strip.

“Infantry, armored, engineering and artillery forces participating in the activity, accompanied by heavy [air] fire,” he says, noting that “the forces are still on the ground and continue the fighting.”

He says no soldiers have been hurt in the expanded ground operation in Gaza so far.

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Clown World Backs Down

There will be no Third Front in Africa, at least, not for the time being:

The West African regional bloc ECOWAS, which had threatened to use force against Niger in response to a recent coup, is now quietly demobilizing the standby forces that had been positioned for a proposed military intervention, according to French news outlet RFI.

A meeting of ECOWAS military commanders was scheduled to be held in Nigeria’s Sokoto State this week. However, this was reportedly canceled due to organizational issues. The military officers arrived in Abuja, the capital of Africa’s most populous nation and the headquarters of the regional bloc, but did not proceed to Sokoto, RFI reported on Friday.

The demobilization order was expected to be issued during the meeting but, following its cancellation, ECOWAS will now be “very discreet” in withdrawing the standby troops, a source told the French broadcaster. ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States) has two options, the source added: “Say nothing and let it be seen,” or “turn around.” The decision was made because “no one is opting for military intervention anymore,” RFI quoted a diplomat from one of the 15 ECOWAS member states as saying.

West African bloc ‘quietly’ withdraws forces deployed against Niger, 27 October 2023

It’s extremely informative to observe the way in which Clown World is reducing its support for Ukraine and refraining from attempting to claw back Niger, despite the African country’s importance to France, in light of what threatens to become the second major front in WWIII. This indicates that either a) Clown World has some sane and sober strategists involved in the decision-making process or b) Israel uber alles.

Either way, the more the US military gets itself enmeshed in the tar pit of the Middle East, the more likely it is that China will quietly go about its business of reunification with Taiwan and the faster the Kiev regime will fall.

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US SpecOps KIA in Gaza

The reports are, as yet, unconfirmed, but Col Douglas Macgregor was confident enough in his sources to openly discuss a joint US-IDF recon force taking heavy losses in Gaza recently.

TUCKER CARLSON: How is the U.S. military, do you think, having spent your life in it leading troops in combat and at the Pentagon, positioned to respond to a war with Iran right now? Are we in a strong position or not, in your view?

DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: No I think we are not in a strong position, we are probably at the weakest point in our recent history. I think you’ve got to look at the realities of new weapons systems and new capabilities.

The United States Navy, if it is going to preserve its capability, is probably going to be compelled to operate somewhere North and West of Sicily. If it comes within closer range, it falls into this envelope where the Iranians can strike it. And as I said before, you have to assume the Russians will come into this. Once you move into the Eastern Mediterranean, you are vulnerable to the [Russian] Kinzhal [ballistic missiles] and other cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles that the Russians have.

This makes it very difficult to fly strikes in support of the Israeli Defense Force against Hezbollah because now you are flying a very long distance, you deliver your ordinance, and you have to land in Israel in order to refuel. Israel is going to be operating under a hail, if not a rainstorm, of missiles and rockets, making it very dangerous to do so. So our Naval power, while substantial, may not have the desired impact on the ground that we would like.

And finally, we have no real Army anymore, the Army is down to perhaps 450,000, and how much of that is ready to fight is open to debate. Much of it is sitting in Eastern Europe right now. We don’t have the means to rapidly ship a large force of 80-100,000 troops on the ground into the region, which means were are reliant on Special Forces. And right now 2,000 Marines and perhaps 2,000 Special Forces and special operations forces.

That’s not going to make much of a dent, and as we’ve seen quite recently in the last 24 hours or so, some of our Special Ops forces and Israeli Special Ops forces went into Gaza to reconnoiter, to plan for where they might want to go to free hostages and make an impact, and they were shot to pieces and took heavy losses, as I understand it. I think that is where we are headed and I don’t see that as a win for Israel in any way, shape, or form. And I certainly think it is very dangerous for us.

As I’ve tried to point out to a number of people, until Britain entered World War One, it was just another European war. Once Britain entered it, it became a global war.

When one considers that it took 14 months for 50,000 Russian shock troops supported by 330 tanks to take Bakhmut, a city of 16 square miles with a population of 72,000, the idea that it will only take three months for Israel to clear out Gaza, an urban zone of 141 square miles and a population of 2.3 million in addition to a similar number of active combatants (est. 30,000), is simply not credible, even without the threat of Hezbollah to the north.

It is also highly improbable that the Israeli public will accept the tens of thousands of dead Israeli soldiers such an invasion would likely require, particularly when the wartime Prime Minister’s son is too busy living it up in Miami to share the risks with the common people.

Whether Macgregor’s sources are correct or not, and there is no reason to believe they are not since it was previously announced that US forces were actively training the inexperienced IDF to engage in urban combat against entrenched opposition, he’s correct in observing that neither the US military nor the IDF appears to be capable of successfully fighting a full-scale ground war in the Middle East.

It’s neither 1967 nor 1991 anymore. And frankly, the current parallels between the US military and the pre-WWI British military should seriously concern any perceptive student of military history.

Haldane resolved to transform a British army optimized for irregular warfare—the suppression of rebellious tribes and peoples throughout Britain’s far-flung empire—into a far more lethal professional military establishment… After 1815, the British army’s leadership focused almost exclusively on battles with technologically backward, even primitive, non-European opponents. British colonial warfare was not a complex affair. In battles with tribal opponents at Ulundi, Kandahar, and Omdurman, the application of overwhelming firepower substituted for tactics and strategy.

MARGIN OF VICTORY, Col Douglas Macgregor, 2016

At this point, US strategists need to seriously ask themselves whether there is a risk that support for a Gaza invasion could become the USA’s Sicilian Expedition. The end of the US empire is rapidly approaching, so it’s only a matter of time before someone tests the assumption of US military supremacy.

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They Won’t Fight for Israel

So why should anyone else? Neither Ben Shapiro nor Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Prime Minister, have any interest in defending their fellow Israelis against Hamas, Hezbollah, or any other enemies who might harm them.

The son of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been blasted for staying in Miami while reservists returned home to fight against Hamas. Yair Netanyahu, 32, has been in Florida since at least April, after his father told him to stop making inflammatory posts on social media, which saw him sued for defamation multiple times.

Meanwhile an unprecedented 360,000 reservists have been called up – many of them dropping everything to fly back to Israel, even abandoning honeymoons. But Yair has remained in Miami, to the irritation of some of the troops. ‘Yair is enjoying his life at Miami Beach while I’m on the front lines,’ one soldier, a volunteer serving on Israel’s northern front, told The Times.

‘It’s us who are leaving our work, our families, our kids, to protect our families back home and the country, not the people who are responsible for this situation. Our brothers, our fathers, sons, are all going to the front line, but Yair is still not here. It does not help build trust in the leadership of the country.’

Israeli soldiers blast Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair, 32, for ‘abandoning’ them by staying in Miami while 360,000 reservists are called up to fight against Hamas, 24 October 2023

There should not be any discussion of one single American soldier being sent to the Middle East until every single Jew resident in the USA between the ages of 18 and 40 has been sent there first. There is absolutely no reason to defend a nation that literally refuses to defend itself.

And the fact that Netanyahu’s own son is living the high life in Miami while his father screeches about Hamas and Hezbollah should be sufficient cause to ignore all of the non-stop propaganda. If it’s not their problem, it certainly isn’t ours.

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No Tears for Tehran or Tel Aviv

An Israeli government minister threatens to “wipe Iran off the face of the Earth”:

Israeli Economy Minister Nir Barkat warned on Sunday that the military is ready to “eliminate” the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and strike Iran if they open up a “northern front” in the current conflict.

“The plan of Iran is to attack Israel on all fronts. If we find they intend to target Israel, we will not just retaliate to those fronts, but we will go to the head of the snake, which is Iran,” Barkat told The Mail on Sunday. He added “the ayatollahs in Iran are not going to sleep good at night” if they move against Israel.

Barkat warned that Lebanon and Hezbollah, which is backed by Tehran, “are going to pay a heavy price, similar to what Hamas is going to pay.”

Israel would go “after the heads of Iran” if necessary, the minister said. “Israel has a very clear message to our enemies. We are saying to them, look what’s happening in Gaza – you are going to get the same treatment if you attack us. We are going to wipe you off the face of the Earth.”

Imagine if Putin was using this sort of rhetoric. We’d be hearing 24-7 non-stop about Russian atrocities and war crimes, which we’ve already been hearing a lot of for the last 19 months even though Russia refuses to so much as declare war against Ukraine.

Now, it is also true that the Iranian and the Palestinian leaders direct precisely the same sort of eliminationist rhetoric at Israel. The primary difference is that neither Iran nor the Palestinians make any serious pretense at being human rights-respecting democrats whose priority is protecting civilians on both sides and are only going to war reluctantly and in defense of their citizenry.

Americans and Europeans cannot support Israel under this rationale for the very pertinent reason that doing so would absolutely justify Russian attacks on London, Berlin, Paris, and Washington DC. Iran is no more guilty of waging war by proxy on Israel than the USA, the UK, and the rest of NATO are guilty of waging war by proxy on Russia.

And the more extreme the rhetoric coming out of both sides, the more apocalyptic the objectives, the more the rest of the world is correctly inclined to simply leave them alone and let them all fight it out amongst themselves.

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