Tag: iran

Trump Rolls Over for a New War

It is generally believed that American voters elected Donald Trump president at least in part due to their embracing his lies that he was a peacemaker who would not involve the United States in the pointless wars that have proliferated since 9/11. Trump’s predecessor the hapless Genocide Joe Biden had entangled the US deep in a conflict involving nuclear armed Russia and had also armed, funded and politically protected war criminal Israel in its openly declared objective to eliminate the Palestinians. Neither conflict could be justified based on actual American interests. So Trump looked like a better bet than a witless giggler like Kamala Harris, though voters would have benefited from looking at the Trump record during his first term in office where he was little more than Israel’s mouthpiece after being heavily bribed during his campaign by Nevada casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Trump and his ambassador in Israel David Friedman endorsed the oppression of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza and also illegally approved moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Trump also allowed Israel to annex part of the Syrian Golan Heights and ordered the assassination of Qassim Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and regarded as a major enemy by Israel, killing the man when he was in Baghdad Iraq for peace talks. Trump, like his successor Joe Biden, never said “no” to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Be that as it may, the past five months have demonstrated that searching for an honest man (or woman) in Washington would require Diogenes and his lamp, with little hope of coming up with someone who was not alternately a bad joke, an incompetent, or a screaming psychopath. The last several weeks illustrate just how bad things are, though the real fear must be that they can actually get worse if Trump joins Israel when it ignores the current ceasefire and attacks Iran once again. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump will no doubt have to construct a new big lie to explain their belligerency as it is now clear that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.

Even given the horrors being perpetrated by the United States as a bosom buddy ally of Israel, one is nevertheless particularly taken by the malapropisms and the verbal slurs and even threats of physical abuse increasingly being hurled about by the buffoon who pretends to be the president of the United States. Trump, pretending to negotiate with Iran, also saw fit to threaten to “eliminate” the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, if Iran did not submit to unconditional surrender. He claimed to know the “secret location” where Ali Khamenei was hiding but “won’t kill him for now.” Trump also called out Representative Thomas Massie, one of the most principled men in Congress, on social media, calling him a “LOSER” after Massie posted a social media post criticizing the president for unconstitutionally bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday night without a declaration of war. Worse still, Trump also engaged in screaming fits focused on two women journalists who questioned his claim that he had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, demanding that CNN’s White House correspondent “Natasha Bertrand should be FIRED from CNN! I watched her for three days doing Fake News. She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out like a dog.”

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Iran Damaged 33,000 Structures in Israel

The damage assessment in Israel from Iran’s counterattack against Tel Aviv’s unprovoked aggression against Iran last month is coming in.

Despite strenuous efforts by Israeli authorities to suppress news from bomb sites — including arresting news crews — the extent of the destruction suffered by Israel is now being revealed.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Monday that the vaunted Israeli air defense system, headlined by the so-called Iron Dome, failed to prevent a significant inundation of Iranian ordnance.

Some single ballistic missiles landing on Israeli streets damaged a wide area of surrounding buildings purely from the vibrations of the impact, the newspaper reported.

“Throughout Israel, between the shock waves and the direct impact of the heavy Iranian missiles, the destruction spread out over hundreds of meters,” Haaretz said. “Thousands of houses and buildings have been damaged, some severely, with exterior and interior walls collapsing.” 

“The common denominator is the person uprooted from his or her home, who will feel the shock for years,” the paper said.  It further reported: 

“In Tel Aviv, 480 buildings have been damaged, many of them badly, at five separate sites. In Ramat Gan, it’s 237 buildings at three sites, about 10 badly. In another Tel Aviv suburb, Bat Yam, 78 buildings were damaged by one hit; 22 will have to be razed.

The Israel Tax Authority has received applications for financial assistance for nearly 33,000 damaged structures. Another 4,450 files have been opened for the loss of belongings and equipment, and another 4,119 for damaged vehicles”.

The Iranian attacks killed 29 Israeli civilians and, according to a Haaretz map, 96 buildings were severely damaged. 

By contrast, in the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq fired 42 Scud missiles at Tel Aviv and Haifa, killing two Israelis and damaging 4,100 buildings, destroying 28. 

The Haaretz report deals only with civilian buildings. Iran also hit a number of Israeli military bases, including  Kirya and Camp Moshe Dayan in Tel Aviv; as well as the  BAZAN oil refinery in Haifa, causing significant damage; and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, destroying two buildings. 

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First it was regime change, now they want to break Iran apart

Washington’s foreign policy establishment has a dangerous tendency to dismantle nations it deems adversarial. Now, neoconservative think tanks like the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and their fellow travelers in the European Parliament are openly promoting the balkanization of Iran — a reckless strategy that would further destabilize the Middle East, trigger catastrophic humanitarian crises, and provoke fierce resistance from both Iranians and U.S. partners.

As Israel and Iran exchanged blows in mid-June, FDD’s Brenda Shaffer argued that Iran’s multi-ethnic makeup was a vulnerability to be exploited. Shaffer has been a vocal advocate for Azerbaijan in mainstream U.S. media, even as she has consistently failed to disclose her ties to Azerbaijan’s state oil company, SOCAR. For years, she has pushed for Iran’s fragmentation along ethnic lines, akin to the former Yugoslavia’s collapse. She has focused much of that effort on promoting the secession of Iranian Azerbaijan, where Azeris form Iran’s largest non-Persian group.

Shaffer’s views align with a recent Jerusalem Post editorial which, amid the euphoria of Israel’s initial strikes in this month’s war against Iran, called on President Trump to openly embrace Iran’s dismemberment. Specifically, it urged a “Middle East coalition for Iran’s partition” and “security guarantees to Sunni, Kurdish and Balochi minority regions willing to break away.” The same outlet is on the record calling for Israel and the U.S. to support the secession from Iran of what it calls “‘South Azerbaijan,” (meaning the Azeri-majority regions in northwestern Iran).

Meanwhile, the foreign affairs spokeswoman for a centrist liberal group in the European Parliament convened a meeting on the “future of Iran,” ostensibly to discuss the prospects for a “successful” revolt against the Islamic Republic. The fact that the only two Iranian speakers were ethnic separatists from Iran’s Azerbaijan and Ahwaz regions made clear her agenda. Since the European Parliament unilaterally cut all relations with Iran’s official bodies in 2022, it has become a playground for assorted radical exiled opposition groups, such as monarchists, the cultish MEK (Mojaheddeen-e Khalk), and ethnic separatists.

Yet Iran is not some fragile patchwork state on the verge of collapse. It is a 90-million-strong nation with a deep sense of historical and cultural identity. While proponents of balkanization love to fixate on Iran’s ethnic diversity — Azeris, Kurds, Baloch, Arabs — they consistently underestimate the unifying force of Iranian nationalism. As the scholar Shervin Malekzadeh noted recently in the Los Angeles Times, “There is a robust consensus among scholars that politics in Iran begins with the idea of Iran as a people with a continuous and unbroken history, a nation that ‘looms out of an immemorial past.’ Nationalism provides the broad political arena in which different groups and ideologies in Iran compete for power and authority, whether monarchist, Islamist or leftist.”

Decades of foreign pressure, from sanctions to covert operations to war, have only reinforced this cohesion. The idea that stirring separatist sentiment will fracture Iran is a dangerous fantasy — one that deliberately overlooks how schemes hatched, in major part, by pro-Israel neoconservatives, have backfired in Iraq and Syria leaving chaos in their wake.

Such a strategy also exposes its proponents’ deep ignorance of the realities on the ground. Shaffer, the champion of Azerbaijani irredentism, has gone so far as to cheer Israeli airstrikes on Tabriz, the cultural and economic heart of Iranian Azerbaijan.

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Trump Says He Gave Iran Permission to Bomb U.S. Base in Qatar and…Well, Mostly Crickets?

When political scientist Seth Masket shared this story on Bluesky yesterday, I couldn’t believe it was real. The right-wing Washington Times reported that at a press conference at the NATO Summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Trump revealed that he had given Iran permission to bomb the U.S.’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in retaliation for the American bombing of their nuclear sites. 

“They said, ‘We’re going to shoot them. Is one o’clock OK?’ I said it’s fine,” Trump said. “And everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn’t get hurt, except for the gunners.”

I poked around for other major coverage of this extraordinary admission, and landed only on a transcript of the press conference. And yes, amid a characteristically meandering monologue, Trump actually said that he let a foreign adversary bomb an American military installation. But this story has pretty much come and gone with virtually no attention and certainly none of the outrage commensurate with what Trump said.

Let’s consider what Trump’s verbal diarrhea here could mean. Suppose he is (for once) telling the truth. Wouldn’t that represent the most shocking dereliction of duty one could imagine for the commander-in-chief? (A high crime or misdemeanor, perhaps?) Is he saying he let Iran get its retaliation out of its system with what he called “a very weak response” to bring an end to hostilities? Perhaps Trump simply was rambling incoherently as he basked in his new “daddy” glow at NATO.

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Prophecy, not politics, may also shape America’s clash with Iran

When most people contemplate the future of America’s conflict with Iran, they hunt for clues in grainy satellite photos, statements from military analysts and President Trump’s social media posts.

But when scholar Diana Butler Bass considers what could happen next, her thoughts turn toward another group she says is now thinking more about prophecy than politics.

She recalls warnings from her childhood about the rise of an Antichrist, stories about weeping mothers clutching their empty blankets after their babies were suddenly “Raptured” to heaven and paintings of an angry Jesus leading armies of angels to an Armageddon-like, final battle in modern-day Israel.

Those stories terrified and thrilled Bass when she heard them growing up in a White evangelical church in the 1970s. It was a time when the end always seemed near, and books like the bestseller “The Late Great Planet Earth” warned Christians to gird their loins for a period of Great Tribulation and prepare for Jesus’ triumphant return to Jerusalem.

Bass, a prominent, progressive religious author who hosts a popular Substack newsletter called “The Cottage,” no longer believes those stories. Yet when she considers why the US struck three nuclear facilities in Iran this month and what could happen next, she now offers a prophecy of her own: Bombing Iran will reinforce Trump’s status as God’s “Chosen One” and Israel as His chosen nation among many of the President’s White evangelical supporters.

Many of these supporters dismiss the dangers of a larger war, she tells CNN, because such a clash would mean the world is approaching the “end times” — a series of cataclysmic events ushering in the Second Coming of Christ and the rise of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies.

“There’s almost a kind of spiritual eagerness for a war in the Middle East,” says Bass, describing attitudes among some White evangelicals. “They believe a war is going to set off a series of events that will result in Jesus returning.”

Trump’s decision to bomb Iran has so far been examined almost exclusively through the lens of politics or military strategy. Yet there is a religious dimension to his decision – and what could happen next – that’s been underexplored.

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Israel Called Its Initial Attack on Iran ‘Red Wedding,’ Referring to a Fictional Massacre that Relied on Deception

According to The Wall Street Journal, Israel codenamed its initial attack on Iran that killed senior military leaders “Red Wedding,” referring to a gruesome massacre from the book series “Game of Thrones,” which was adapted into a TV series on HBO.

In the Red Wedding scene, one family murders the members of the other, including a pregnant woman, during a wedding feast, a surprise attack that relies on betrayal and deception. Israel’s attack also relied on deception as it used the cover of nuclear talks between the US and Iran to catch Tehran off guard.

The Israeli attack was launched on Friday, June 13, two days before the US and Iran were set to hold another round of nuclear negotiations. According to the Journal report, part of the ruse involved Israeli officials leaking stories to the media about a split between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the possibility of Israel attacking Iran.

Trump and Netanyahu held a phone call on Monday, June 9, the day the Journal report said Israel had decided to launch the attack on June 13. Axios reporter Barak Ravid, a former IDF intelligence officer, reported the day after the call that an Israeli official and a US official told him that Trump expressed to Netanyahu that he believed he could reach a nuclear deal with Iran and opposed military action at that time.

According to the Journal, on the day of the attacks Trump told reporters that the US and Iran were “fairly close to an agreement” and that he didn’t want the Israelis “going in,” and Israeli officials told reporters they would wait to see the results of the next round of US-Iran nuclear talks before attacking.

The Journal report said: “The key to the deception, said a security official familiar with the planning of the operation, was the idea implanted in the minds of the Iranians that Israel wouldn’t strike without US authorization and participation. As long as the US wasn’t mobilizing its forces and was engaged in negotiations, Israel could threaten to attack and even mobilize its troops in plain sight of Iran without giving away the element of surprise.”

Hours before Israel’s bombing campaign started, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was still committed to a diplomatic solution with Iran. The Journal report said Israeli warplanes were already getting in the air when he made the post.

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Beyond the Bombs: Who Really Won the 12-Day War Between Israel and Iran?

On June 13, 2025, Tel Aviv launched what many international observers and Iranian officials have described as an unprovoked military strike on Iran. Israeli jets bombed military and nuclear sites, while Mossad-run sleeper cells carried out sabotage missions against air and missile defense systems from within Iran, and drones smuggled into Tehran were launched against local missile launch bases.

Dozens—perhaps more—of nuclear scientists and top military commanders were murdered with surgical precision, often in the presence of innocent family members, who were themselves frequently killed. A climate of chaos and uncertainty seemed to engulf everything.

These early results so exhilarated Israeli officials that they talked a big game on where their operation would lead, making several incendiary claims along the way. They boasted of operating in Iranian airspace without hindrance, invited the U.S. to get formally involved with the “elimination” of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program, and anonymously briefed the media that “a multi-faceted misinformation campaign”—in which Donald Trump was an “active participant”—had been conducted “to convince Iran that a strike on its nuclear facilities was not imminent.”

Internationally-wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu forecast on June 15 that Israel’s war on Iran “could certainly” produce regime change, as the government was “very weak,” and that “80% of the people would throw these theological thugs out.”

A hard-hitting response to Netanyahu’s premonitions and Tel Aviv’s military strike quickly arrived from Tehran in the form of a wave of missile attacks. Wreaking unprecedented damage on Tel Aviv and Haifa. The impact on Israeli military installations is difficult to assess due to its strict policy of internal censorship.

Visibly, though, Iran’s bombardments sent Israelis scurrying for shelter, while many others fled the country outright. Such was the exodus, from a country that has already suffered mass depopulation since October 7, 2023—the Israeli government has since scrambled to implement legally questionable bans on its citizens leaving.

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US Bombing of Iran Harms Non-Proliferation

Iran didn’t violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the United States did. When the U.S. bombed Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities on June 23, they didn’t just violate the cardinal rule of international law by attacking a sovereign nation, without Security Council approval, that had neither attacked it nor threatened to attack it. They also violated the NPT. In doing so, the U.S. may have done irreparable harm to the non-proliferation regime.

As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran was protected by the “inalienable right to a civilian [nuclear] program.” Iran and the world watched, not only as that nonnuclear umbrella collapsed and failed to protect Iran, but as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the guardian of the non-proliferation regime, whispered barely a criticism. Iran’s parliamentary speaker has criticized the IAEA for having “refused to even pretend to condemn the [American] attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Iran has accused IAEA director general Rafael Grossi of issuing a “biased” report on Iran’s nuclear program right as Trump’s sixty day window for diplomacy was closing that could be used as a “pretext” for the attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The U.S. was complicit in using the resolution that followed the report, since only 19 out of 33 countries voted in favor of it after the U.S. pressured eight countries they saw as “persuadable… to either vote with the US on the IAEA vote or not vote at all.”

After Grossi clarified that the IAEA “did not find in Iran elements to indicate that there is an active, systematic plan to build a nuclear weapon” and concluded that “We have not seen elements to allow us, as inspectors, to affirm that there was a nuclear weapon that was being manufactured or produced somewhere in Iran,” Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said the clarification came “too late.” He blasted Grossi for “obscure[ing] this truth in your absolutely biased report that was instrumentalize by E3/U.S. to craft a resolution with baseless allegation of ‘non-compliance’; the same resolution was then utilized, as a final pretext… to launch an unlawful attack on our peaceful nuclear facilities.” Baghaei finished with the accusation that Grossi “betrayed the non-proliferation regime.”

On June 20, Iran filed a formal complaint against Grossi to the Security Council, accusing him of a “clear and serious breach of the principle of impartiality.” Iran’s Ambassador to the UN, Amir Saeed Iravani, criticized Grossi’s failure to condemn American and Israeli threats and use of force against its peaceful nuclear program as demanded by IAEA resolutions “which categorically prohibit any threat or use of force against nuclear facilities dedicated to peaceful purposes.” He said that Grossi’s “passivity… amounts to de facto complicity.”

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US Refueled Israeli Jets Throughout Iran War

US military tanker aircraft refueled Israeli jets throughout the 12-day US-Israeli war against Iran to ease the burden on Israel’s limited and aging fleet of tankers, Israel Hayom has reported.

The report said that “hundreds of aerial refuelings were conducted for Israeli fighter jets flying to Iran” during the 12 days of attacks on Iran. It was always believed that Israel wouldn’t be able to launch significant airstrikes on Iran without the US supporting the attacks with refueling.

In the first days of the 12-day war, dozens of US KC-135s, KC-46s, and other tanker aircraft were spotted by flight trackers leaving the United States and heading east across the Atlantic Ocean. US officials confirmed that the tanker deployment was related to the Middle East, and the Israel Hayom report said that some of them were used to refuel Israeli jets.

Besides the refueling, the US also supported Israel’s attacks on Iran by providing intelligence, helping intercept Israeli missiles and drones, and eventually launching its own airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities using B-2 bombers, a fleet of fighter jets, and a submarine.

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Fatwa Calling for Muslims to Assassinate President Trump Issued by Iranian Ayatollah

Iranian Shiite Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi, 98, issued a fatwa calling on Muslims worldwide to assassinate President Donald Trump, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The semi-official Iranian news outlet Mehr News Agency reported on its English language site on Sunday (excerpt):

Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi has issued a fatwa in which he declares anyone who threatens Leader, and Shia Marja to be the Enemy of God, who has to be fought against according to Islamic teachings.

After threats were made by the criminal American president and the leaders of the child-killing Zionist regime against the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and the senior Shiite clerics known as Marja, a group of believers submitted a request to His Eminence Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi regarding the duties of Muslims in response to such threats. Grand Ayatollah Makarem response to the question put forward by his followers is as follows:

“Any person or regime that threatens the Leader or Marja (May God forbid) is considered an enemy of God,” Grand Ayatollah Makarem said in his Fatwa, which is a response to the question to him.

The senior Iranian Shia Marja added that “any cooperation or support for that enemy by Muslims or Islamic states is haram or forbidden. It is necessary for all Muslims around the world to make these enemies regret their words and mistakes.”

Definition of “Marja” via Wikipedia:

Marja’ (Arabic: مرجع, romanized: marjiʿ ; plural marājiʿ ; lit. ’source to follow’ or ‘religious reference’) is a title given to the highest level of Twelver Shia religious cleric, with the authority given by a hawzah (a seminary where Shi’a Muslim scholars are educated) to make legal decisions within the confines of Islamic law for followers and clerics below him in rank. The highest ranking marjiʿ is known as the marja al-mutlaq or marja al-taqlid al-mutlaq.[1][2][note 1] A marji’ is usually also[3] a grand ayatollah.

English translation posted by Mark Dubowitz:

In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful

It is clear that threatening the leader of the Islamic world, as well as the esteemed sources of emulation, is a war against Islam. According to the Quranic verse “Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against God and His Messenger…”, this act carries a severe punishment.

Strengthening the front of Muslims and the unity of Islamic ranks is an obligation. I consider it haram (forbidden) to remain silent in the face of such threats.

It is necessary for Muslims around the world to strongly condemn these threats and to take appropriate and united action.

May God preserve the Islamic community from the evil of enemies under the protection of the Imam of the Age (may God hasten his reappearance), and reward the righteous defenders.

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