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What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines ‘what Zionism became’

Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, when asked to explain the apparent about-face that led him to advocate the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, quoted a beloved Israeli pop ballad. “What you can see from there, you can’t see from here,” he said, referring to the shift in perspective he had supposedly undergone since coming to power.

Although the 2005 Gaza disengagement was perhaps less a change of heart than one of strategy, as his senior adviser later admitted, the lyric became a byword of Israeli politics, an oft-cited reminder that perspective is everything.

Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omer Bartov invoked the same line when he was asked how he had come to view Israel’s ferocious assault on Gaza as a genocide. Living in the US, where he has spent more than three decades, he said, had given him the necessary distance to see the annihilation of Gaza for what it was. “I think it’s very hard to be dispassionate when you’re there,” he said.

Bartov did more than simply apply the word genocide to Israel’s actions: he shouted it from the establishment-media rooftops, making the case in a lengthy July 2025 essay in the New York Times titled: I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. (He had addressed some of the arguments in a Guardian essay the year prior.) Bartov’s declaration cost him several close relationships, he told me, even though subsequent events have not only validated his analysis but further demonstrated the lack of concern for Palestinian suffering that has become prevalent in Israeli society.

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Far-Left Sen. Chris Murphy Backtracks After Backlash, Claims “SARCASM” Following Praise of Iran’s Shadow Fleet Dodging U.S. Blockade

Radical Democrat Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut is cheering for America’s enemies during active hostilities with Iran, and when called out, he pulled the classic leftist move, gaslighting, and deflection.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Murphy replied with a smug one-word “awesome” to a Lloyd’s List report claiming that at least 26 ships from Iran’s notorious “shadow fleet” had brazenly bypassed the U.S. naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz/Gulf of Oman area.

Murphy didn’t express concern for U.S. troops. He didn’t worry about Iranian oil money flowing to terrorists. He didn’t even pretend to support America’s interests.

He just typed “awesome.”

X users immediately unloaded on the Connecticut Democrat, calling the remark “literally rooting for the enemy” and “treasonous.”

White House officials ripped him for gleefully regurgitating Iranian propaganda while U.S. forces are actively engaged. Even some on the left couldn’t defend it.

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FAA Grounds Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Rocket in Epic Failure — Satellite Hurled into Wrong Orbit

In another humiliating blow to Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket following a spectacular mishap during its third flight.

The rocket successfully launched from Cape Canaveral on Sunday, April 19, and the booster even stuck the landing like a pro, but the upper stage completely botched the most critical part: putting a multi-million-dollar commercial satellite into the correct orbit.

The satellite is now a total loss, with its onboard thrusters unable to save it. It will deorbit and burn up in a fiery reentry.

Fox 35 reported:

The New Glenn rocket lifted off on Sunday without major issues, and its first-stage booster successfully landed on a drone ship, marking a technical achievement for Blue Origin. However, the payload — a communications satellite built by AST SpaceMobile — was placed into the wrong orbit, making it unusable.

The satellite, known as BlueBird 7, was intended to support direct-to-cellphone broadband service. Instead, it was deployed into a much lower orbit than planned, leaving it without enough propulsion to reach operational altitude. The satellite is expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere and be destroyed.

The lost payload represents a financial setback worth hundreds of millions of dollars and sent the company’s stock (NASDAQ: ASTS) lower on Monday. AST SpaceMobile is competing with firms including SpaceX and Amazon in the satellite communications market.

The FAA wasted no time slapping a “mishap” label on the mission and ordering a full investigation. New Glenn is now grounded indefinitely until Blue Origin and the feds sort out what went wrong with the second-stage engines.

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Trump’s extreme use of military is stirring a crisis of conscience among troops

As President Donald Trump increasingly uses the U.S. military to carry out his agenda through brute force, organizations that provide counseling services for U.S. servicemembers are reporting growing numbers of calls. These calls have further spiked in response to Trump’s war on Iran, one of the most unpopular in U.S. history.

The United States has carried out the war through intense attacks on densely populated civilian areas, the impact of which was clearly shown in the bombing of a girls’ school, killing well over 100 children. Not even concerned with selling the war to the public, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has leaned into treating the intervention as a “holy war” for Christianity.

Mike Prysner, an Iraq War veteran and executive director at the Center on Conscience & War (CCW), told Truthout that troops are telling his organization that they don’t want to be involved in the killing.

“That’s pretty much all of the cases that we have,” Prysner said. “It’s all people who don’t want to take part in killing in a war that they don’t believe in, and this war has made them realize that they can’t take part in any kind of U.S. military action ever again.”

The CCW, formerly the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, was founded in 1940 to assist religious communities whose beliefs prohibited them from participating in war. Over time, and as a result of broadening criteria for who can qualify as a conscientious objector (CO), the organization evolved to assist troops of all backgrounds whose values prevent them from being able to participate in war.

Prysner told Truthout that in recent weeks CCW has already been able to help several servicemembers become COs to avoid being deployed.

To reach more servicemembers experiencing crises of conscience, CCW and other organizations including the Quaker House founded the GI Rights Hotline in 1994. Steve Woolford, a resource counselor at the Quaker House, has taken calls for the hotline since 2001 and agreed that the war on Iran, and Trump’s broader use of the military, has caused a spike in calls.

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Trump Gives an Indefinite Cease-Fire to Iran. What Is This War?

Last Friday, President Trump posted a series of announcements on Truth Social, claiming that Iran had given him everything he wanted in exchange for nothing. The President asserted that Iran had agreed to hand over what he called their “nuclear dust” (the enriched uranium buried under ground from last June’s American air attack); to stop funding Hezbollah and Hamas; and to open the Strait of Hormuz and never close it again. Many of Trump’s pro-war supporters declared victory, reveling in their triumphalism.

While that was a feel-good story, there were many obvious problems with it, starting with the fact that Iran never confirmed any of it and would never realistically surrender, given its perception of the massive leverage it continues to possess. Sure enough, Iran later that day denied having agreed to anything beyond opening the Strait during the cease-fire negotiations. But after Israel continued to bomb Lebanon, despite Trump’s announcement that he had “PROHIBITED” Israel from doing so, which he followed by announcing a full military blockade of the Strait to prevent Iran from selling oil, it was clear that a deal to end the war was very far away.

During his flurry of victory claims, Trump set Wednesday — tomorrow — as the deadline for Iran to agree to a comprehensive deal, after which he said he would begin obliterating the country. He announced that he was sending Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff (with J.D. Vance being added later) to Islamabad to meet with the Iranians. In response, Iran announced that it would refuse to attend any negotiations while the U.S. was blockading the Strait. As a result, Trump’s deadline will come and go tomorrow, presumably without a deal.

As he has done before, Trump’s response to the lapse of his deadline is not to follow through on his threats (thankfully), but instead to announce an extension of the deadline. Today, he did exactly that, though notably, his extension came without any new deadline: it is just an indefinite suspension of hostilities pending an agreement. All of this raises a question that has lurked since the start of this: what is the purpose of this war, and how can it end? We examine those questions in the above 30-minute video.

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Schizophrenic man behind Toronto army recruiting centre knife attack approved for Mecca pilgrimage

A man found not criminally responsible on three counts of attempted murder for a March 2016 knife attack at a Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre in Toronto has been granted a three-week travel pass for Saudi Arabia and Somalia, despite the fact that he “continues to pose a significant threat to public safety.”

Ayanle Hassan Ali, who is Muslim, plans to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca with his father and meet a potential bride his dad found for him in Somalia.

He wants to travel abroad “to facilitate a meeting with a woman as his father has been working on arranging a possible marriage with a woman who resides in Somalia,” said a recent decision from the Ontario Review Board (ORB).

“Mr. Ali has advised that this is not uncommon in his culture, and the marriage would only proceed if both parties were agreeable. He is hopeful he will be able to travel to Somalia over the upcoming reporting year for an introductory meeting with the woman.”

Ali’s doctor testified that his patient’s “faith and religious beliefs continue to be very important to him, and he attends his mosque weekly, and he prays five times daily,” according to a recent decision from the independent tribunal that regularly reviews the status of individuals found not criminally responsible due to mental disorder.

“He and his father have planned for a religious ritual of Umrah pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Ali is studying to memorize the Koran and attends the mosque by his father’s house daily to meet with his teacher. He is hopeful that his tutor may assist him in securing a volunteer position at a local school to tutor in math or French.”

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FBI Officially Investigating Reports Of Deaths, Disappearances Of US Scientists

The FBI said it is leading federal efforts to investigate potential connections in reports of dead or missing U.S. scientists in recent years, coming days after President Donald Trump expressed alarm.

“The FBI is spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists. We are working with the Department of Energy, Department of War, and with our state and local law enforcement partners to find answers,” an FBI spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement on Tuesday.

The spokesperson, who didn’t provide additional comment, was responding to a question about whether the federal law enforcement agency was involved. Last month, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) called on the bureau to investigate the deaths.

This past week, Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to questions from reporters about roughly 10 scientists who went missing or died in recent years and whether those incidents involved any national security concerns.

Reports of the scientists dying or going missing, Trump told reporters on April 16, should be considered serious because “some of them were very important people.“ He added that he hopes they are ”random” occurrences.

A day earlier, Leavitt was asked a similar question during a daily press briefing, with the reporter saying that some of the scientists had knowledge of nuclear or aerospace research.

“I haven’t spoken to our relevant agencies about it. I will certainly do that, and we’ll get you an answer. If true, of course, that’s definitely something I think this government and administration would deem worth looking into,” she said in response.

Multiple House lawmakers, including Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), have suggested the possibility that their disappearances or deaths are connected.

“The numbers seem very high in these certain areas of research. I think we’d better be paying attention, and I don’t think we should trust our government,” Burchett told the Daily Mail in March, referring to the researchers.

In the interview, Burchett referred to the case of a former Air Force general, William McCasland, who went missing from his New Mexico home without his phone or glasses in February. His colleague, Monica Reza, who works as a rocket scientist, was also reported missing last year after going hiking in Southern California.

Speaking to Fox News this week, Burlison said he was particularly concerned about McCasland’s case, describing him as an expert on unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. He said that his office was working to contact the former general about a separate congressional investigation.

“He was on our list to talk to, and he disappeared, so that kind of piqued our interest,” Burlison told Fox News.

He later added, “It’s just really, really strange that in about a five-month period of time, four or five people walked out their front door and never returned, and were all doing advanced aerospace research.”

NASA released a statement on Monday saying that, while it is “coordinating and cooperating with the relevant agencies in relation to the missing scientists,” there is nothing to suggest “a national security threat.”

“The agency is committed to transparency and will provide more information as able,” NASA wrote in a post on X, responding to a video with Leavitt’s comments.

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Facial recognition to be ‘rolled out’ across UK after human rights challenge fails

Facial recognition systems will be introduced across the country, the government has said as it welcomed the failure of a legal challenge to the technology.

The case against the Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition technology (LFT) in London was brought by two people over concerns it could be used arbitrarily or in a discriminatory way.

The cameras are usually mounted on vans in busy high streets and designed to identify people on police watchlists if they pass by.

Youth worker Shaun Thompson, one of the claimants, said he was misidentified by the technology. The other person bringing the claim was Silkie Carlo, from the group Big Brother Watch.

Their lawyer told the High Court that LFT would also make it “impossible” for Londoners to travel without their biometric data being taken.

But judges ruled on Tuesday that the claimants’ human rights had not been breached and the force’s policy gave “adequate indication of the circumstances in which LFR will be used”.

They also said the argument the technology risked discriminating against people due to their race had not been convincing.

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Southern Poverty Law Center indicted on federal fraud charges related to past use of paid informants

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been indicted on federal fraud charges related to its past use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday.

The civil rights group faces charges including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the case brought by the Justice Department in Alabama, where the organization is based.

The indictment came shortly after SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its program to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.

SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”

Blanche said the SPLC paid at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.

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The Top Ten Marijuana Myths That No One Should Believe

Even today, with 80% of states legalizing cannabis in some form, and half the country legalizing it for medical purposes, I have been called a lunatic for ever thinking that cannabis would be recognized for the miracle plant that it is. Shockingly enough many have yet to see through the mainstream media facade to the ruling puppeteers behind. 

Many still hold fast in their belief that cannabis is dangerous and not medically efficacious, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary backed by scientists and industry leaders alike. The only ones, it seems, that are not reconciling their incorrect beliefs, and intentionally so, are the politicians with their hands in Big Pharma’s back pocket, also known as, the American political elite. 

They continue to stand on their podium of lies broadcasting their misinformation, casting aside what little integrity they retain while making the conscious decision to sell out their constituents, their country, and themselves, all for a little extra paper, that they most likely did not truly need in the first place.

Despite the onslaught of ridiculous claims and outright lies reminiscent of the days of “Reefer Madness” that have been cast into minds of unsuspecting Americans, it would seem that We, as a nation, or rather as the people of a nation, have chosen to see past the obvious attempts by the government to misdirect our attention and feed us State-sponsored comforting lies, that only benefit an elite few, and perpetuate a Deep State agenda. 

We, as the American people, have shown this country’s ruling masters that we see though their half-hearted attempts to coral us into an aligned way of thinking and viewing the world, a way of thinking that primarily benefits those in control and casts what little remains down to those of us still scrabbling for the scraps from their table. We have shown them, that we will think for ourselves. 

As there are most definitely more pressing issues facing this nation, and the world for that matter, the topic of cannabis and its subsequent legalization is, in my opinion, one of the primary catalysts that began the awakening we are currently experiencing. It showed every American citizen that when the people stand together, truly unite, our voices are all that matter.

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