Blog Archives

What a Mainstream Democratic Senator Talks Like

7/30/2025

Genocide? What Genocide?

Bill Astore
July 30, 2025

I highly recommend this interview of Senator Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, conducted by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti.

Asked if Israel has genocidal intent with Gaza, Senator Slotkin defers and deflects. Asked if AIPAC should register as a foreign agent, she does the same. Her positions and her answers place and keep her within the mainstream of the Democratic Party. She continues to support Israel, including weapons systems that are “defensive” (and almost any weapon system can be defined as defensive, including the bombs Israel used to flatten Gaza).

As an ex-CIA analyst, Senator Slotkin does her best to project studied detachment, even as she resorts occasionally to “I don’t know, I’m focused on Michigan” stances. The “rube from Michigan” act is unconvincing. She has an extensive background with the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Defense Department, giving her (one would think) a well-informed and global vision of events, but she beats a retreat to Michigan when questions become challenging to her.

Watch this woman—she has a bright future among the corporate Democrats. She knows how to swim along with the tide, never against it. I can see her as a vice presidential nominee for the Democrats in 2028. Which is yet another illustration of exactly what is wrong with the Democratic Party.

Read Bill Astore on Substack.

0 Comments

Israel No Longer Has a Right to Exist

7/29/2025

0 Comments

Ted Rall
July 29, 2025

In certain traditional societies, troublesome individuals who were perceived as threats to communal harmony were labeled as “witches.” To restore calm, accused witches were sometimes reintegrated into society via a ceremony of ritual cleansing. Other problematic people, particularly those whose socially unacceptable behavior persisted, were banished or killed.

As a political entity, Israel is a witch. Its conduct is incompatible with 21st century civilization.

To whatever extent it ever had one, Israel no longer has a right to exist.

The Netanyahu government’s cynical exploitation of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 raid is the last straw. With gleeful bloodlust that appears to have no limits, Israel has intentionally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians. It has reduced a bustling territory filled with high-rises and seaside resorts to rubble. It has cruelly imposed a blockade of fuel, water and food that has resulted in outbreaks of long-vanquished diseases like polio and meningitis. It has created a man-made famine a few miles away from where Israelis gather at LGBTQ-friendly restaurants to eat rich meals and drink sweet wine fermented from grapes cultivated on the soil of occupied land.

The argument that Israel, or any other nation-state, enjoys an inherent “right to exist” has always been absurd. From ancient empires like Parthia to 20th-century constructs like Czechoslovakia, countries exist so long as they are able to establish and defend their borders. When they cannot, they vanish.

Sometimes a country becomes so troublesome to its neighbors that the global community determines that it, like an alleged witch, must be excised to achieve calm. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany’s voracious expansionism were so disruptive that rivals with economic and political systems that were diametrically opposed to the point of recently having clashed militarily, including the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., formed alliances in order to destroy them. The Napoleonic Wars united powers with conflicting interests, such as Britain (a constitutional monarchy), Russia (an autocratic empire), Austria and Prussia because the defeat of Napoleon was seen as essential to curb France’s disruptive dominance and restore regional order.

Governments often act without their people’s blessing. That is true of the stateless noncitizens of Gaza. Hamas has not held an election longer than most Gazans have been alive.

If the government of Israel did not represent the will of its people, Israel the country could be forgiven. Israel, however, is a democracy. Netanyahu, a right-wing extremist, has been prime minister for 16 years over multiple terms, making him Israel’s longest-serving leader. His brutal treatment of the Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank is popular with voters. A June 2025 poll found that 76.5% of Israeli Jews “think that Israel should not take the civilian population’s suffering into account at all, or should only do so to a fairly small extent” in military planning. “Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5% of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” reports The New York Times.

Considering that the Israeli public supports the genocide in Gaza, the fact that IDF spokesmen dismiss media photos of starving, skeletal Palestinian children as “fake” is cause for a kind of optimism. When Netanyahu says “there is no starvation in Gaza,” at least he’s aware enough of international opinion that he feels compelled to lie.

You hear about demonstrations in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu. But those protests do not agitate against the genocide of Palestinians. Israel’s few leftists, who march against Netanyahu and the war, focus on the twenty or so remaining hostages held by Hamas, and the suffering of Israeli soldiers.

It is easy for culturally isolated Israelis, whose official language of Hebrew is spoken nowhere else on earth, to ignore their country’s war crimes. “The mainstream domestic news media has rarely provided vivid coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” notes The Times. The last surviving relic of British imperialism, Israel is an apartheid state that repeatedly ignores resolutions passed by the United Nations which it uniquely owes for its creation and brushes off negative public opinion in the United States upon which it is dependent for its economic, military and diplomatic survival. Like Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, it has normalized lawlessness, dehumanized and murdered people to steal their land, and committed itself to aggressive military expansion with no end in sight.

Read Ted Rall's complete post on Substack.

0 Comments

Airdrops and minimal aid are nothing more than doublespeak—and cover—for continuing the genocide of Gaza

7/28/2025

0 Comments

R Qureshi
July 28, 2025

Let’s be clear: the so-called “humanitarian pause” is a calculated smokescreen—openly acknowledged by Israeli officials—designed to deflect scrutiny while the machinery of famine and mass killing grinds on. A famine doesn’t pause; it accelerates. These gestures aren’t acts of mercy but tactical offerings to preserve international legitimacy as Gaza is destroyed.

Smotrich and Netanyahu have told the Israeli public—in Hebrew—that minimal aid must be allowed in so Israel can continue this campaign without foreign interference.

Their language is deliberately vague for outsiders but absolutely clear to Israeli society. They’ve planted the idea that there are no innocents in Gaza—not even newborns, who are portrayed as future threats. Hostages no longer figure in their plans—they are expendable.

This doublespeak exists to help Israel’s allies manage public anger in their own countries while the genocide proceeds.

No state has mobilised for Palestinians as they did for Ukraine; Gaza and the West Bank have been completely abandoned.

Just as the Gaza “Humanitarian” Foundation is doublespeak for extermination—after Israel successfully smeared and dismantled UNRWA’s 400 aid points across Gaza—the doublespeak is even more stark when Netanyahu speaks of building a “humanitarian city”.

It’s a phrase the international community can absorb without resistance—but the reality is far more sinister: an extreme concentration camp for the survivors of this genocide. Tents, with no healthcare, no universities or schools—only containment.
Gaza is now at Phase 5 of starvation—the final stage before mass death. This means irreversible physiological damage, particularly in children, and the deadly risk of refeeding syndrome, where food—after prolonged deprivation—can trigger collapse without medical supervision.

Famine Expert, Alex De Wall has studied famine for over 40 years. He warns that Gaza is facing the most "minutely engineered" starvation since WWII.

The UN has still not declared famine yet because of low reported numbers, which do not meet the standard for famine to be defined. But the Gaza health system is barely functioning. People are dying in their tents, on the streets, and at aid points—often with no one strong enough to report they died of starvation. The hospitals need bodies to confirm death —and which starving person has the strength to register a dead body? The data could only come from a functioning health system, which Israel has deliberately destroyed to prevent proper counting.

This is where we are. Israeli society, shaped by its government, is gripped by collective sadism and moral psychosis—except for a courageous few. Professor Norman Finkelstein referred to Israel as “a nation of monsters”. The starvation is not accidental—it is going as planned.

And we, in the outside world, will watch more children starved to death on our smartphones—until Israel has killed every journalist that dared report the truth.
They will not stop until the entire world becomes an episode of Black Mirror.
This is genocide in progress.

Any fool following the fascistic logic of the Israeli regime can see the next phase: those who survive extermination will be lured out of Gaza to an extreme concentration camp—a place of indefinite containment, humiliation, and erasure.

0 Comments

Opinion: Israel Won the War It Fought. But Iran Emerged Victorious in the One That Mattered

7/27/2025

0 Comments

Each side fought for different goals and claimed different victories. Israel did manage to achieve a few of its objectives; but Iran maintained its defensive position on everything it really needed

Moty Kanias
July 8, 2025

People burn the representations of the U.S. and Israeli flags as a poster of the late Iranian revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini is held at right during the funeral ceremony of Iranian armed forces generals, nuclear scientists and their family members killed in a 12-day war with Israel, in Tehran, IranCredit: Vahid Salemi, AP

For years, Iran has been enriching uranium and threatening the region with nuclear weapons, resulting in all-out war last month. But what has been presented as one war, with Israel emerging victorious is misleading. The 12-day conflict was two wars: one which Israel won, and the other won by Iran.

Israel and the U.S. had a clear mission in their joint endeavor: To strike Iran's nuclear program and restore regional deterrence by crippling Iran's nuclear and ballistic infrastructure. Hit the facilities. Destroy the capabilities. Eliminate the threats. Annihilate expertise. Set back Iran's nuclear timeline by years.

Yes, these strikes were vital and effective in reaching their targets. But the timing was four years too late.

Iran began enriching uranium to 60 percent in April 2021. In the four years since, Tehran has raced toward nuclear weapons capability, which largely went by without retaliation. Iran already built the very stockpile that would ensure their program's survival even after devastating attacks. That stockpile is 408 kilograms of uranium, enriched to 60 percent, just short of weapons grade.

Israel led the campaign while the U.S. landed the heaviest blows, with their awesome bunker-busting bombs. Coordination was tight. Intelligence was precise and even historic, proving the Israel-U.S. alliance is stronger than ever. The world watched with wonderment, glued to their screens, as the Natanz and Fordow enrichment sites were struck in what the U.S. called Operation Midnight Hammer and Israel dubbed Rising Lion. Missile factories and research sites destroyed. Key scientists and military leaders killed. Iran's nuclear infrastructure and missile programs suffered brutal hits.

But all of that was entirely replaceable. Iran seems to have kept what mattered: those 408 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent. Enough to continue their nuclear program even without the old infrastructure, the Islamic Republic's sacrificial lamb or perhaps its Trojan horse.

Each side fought for different goals and claimed different victories. Israel did manage to achieve a few of its objectives: take out infrastructure, pull the U.S. onto their side and even wreck Iran's aerial defense.

These objectives likely could not have been accomplished four years ago, when they could have actually far more effectively prevented Iran's nuclear program from enriching uranium. Only now, after the regional, strategic developments following October 7 were they feasibly attainable. First came the degradation of Iran's air defense systems after the April 2024 volley of attacks between the Islamic Republic and Israel. Then, Israel's victory over Hezbollah, taking out Iran's strongest proxy. Finally, came the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. Iran's protective shield was systematically dismantled, one piece at a time.

All this needed to happen in order for Israel to even attempt striking Iran's nuclear infrastructure. But doing so now was too late. The uranium is already enriched.

Iran fought a different war entirely. The Islamic Republic was likely not trying to win militarily – they were trying to survive politically while gaining strategic legitimacy. Turn losses into proof of importance. Make getting hit look like playing with the big kids, being respected by the world's superpowers. Yes, their nuclear infrastructure was severely damaged, but they had three outcomes in mind that to them were far more important than Fordow, than any general or even than strikes during a live TV broadcast.

Mourners chant slogans during the funeral ceremony of the Iranian armed forces generals, nuclear scientists and their family members who were killed in Israeli strikes, in Tehran, IranCredit: Vahid Salemi, AP

In the meantime, Iran fought a second war – on the narrative front.

Domestically, Tehran censored footage of the destruction helped by their 95 percent shut down of the internet while exaggerating the success of its own attacks on Israel. To their public, they showed strength and control, thus preventing regime change.

Internationally, global calls for restraint gave Tehran something more valuable: legitimacy. The world treated Iran as a negotiating partner – not a rogue regime.

And so in addition to keeping its 408 kilogram of uranium safe from combined U.S. and Israeli attacks, they also managed to hold on to control while improving their standing on the global stage. Iran's ability to absorb punishment, control the story and avoid collapse may be its biggest win.

Plus, with its uranium stockpile likely dispersed and intact, Tehran no longer needs to rebuild everything – just maintain ambiguity. In this way, they can maintain their position as a partner that must be negotiated with. You don't need to test a bomb if everyone assumes you have one.

A man holds a picture of Iran's late head of the Revolutionary Guard's ballistic missile program, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh during the funeral ceremony of him, some other Iranian armed forces generals, nuclear scientists and their family members, who were killed in a 12-day war with Israel, in Tehran, IranCredit: Vahid Salemi, AP

Iran can now mirror other regional powers, namely Israel: never confirm, never deny – just imply. This "threshold" position brings maximum strategic benefit with fewer consequences.

From Tehran's perspective, Iran may have emerged stronger: More legitimate at home, more respected abroad and closer to nuclear threshold status without crossing it. While the world watched explosions, Tehran quietly moved toward its real goal.

Their ultimate victory? Being treated as a nuclear power – without the risks of officially becoming one. In redefining what winning looks like, Iran may have changed the rules of modern conflict itself.

Moty Kanias is a reservist colonel in the IDF's Intelligence and Operations divisions, and a former senior executive in Israel security agencies.

0 Comments

A Must Watch from Trita Parsi

7/27/2025

0 Comments

View on Substack

0 Comments

<<Previous