Tag: israel

Western Media Normalize Ethnic Cleansing of Lebanon by Viewing It Through Israel’s Eyes

In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.

Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. It was, as Habib Battah and Christina Cavalcanti note in an investigation for the Public Source (8/27/25), an “awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies and dog-and-pony shows.”

Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? As Battah and Cavalcanti emphasize, these media professionals were also embedding themselves “within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence,” hosted by an “extrajudicial occupying military power—a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.”

The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, an old pro at conducting preemptive journalistic strikes on Lebanon, did not disappoint with her dispatch (10/13/24), “Just Over the Border From Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines.”

And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy.

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Why Do US Media Still Treat ADL as a Credible Source on Antisemitism?

More than a decade ago, a video (Mondoweiss, 8/7/14) showed Jodi Rudoren, then the New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief, having a casual and friendly meeting with Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. The cozy relationship in the video was telling enough, but when the video captured Foxman complaining that the “Arabs” had taken over a famous New York City hotel, and Rudoren shrugging it off, many skeptics viewed this as a window into the Times’ pro-Israel bias.

The recently deceased Foxman (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5/12/26), famous for promoting the pro-Israel viewpoint and insinuating that critics of Israel were antisemitic, wasn’t Rudoren’s source in this video; they were pals.

Emmaia Gelman’s new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, is a history of the group, framing it not as a racial justice organization but as a deputy sheriff for the US empire. Gelman shows how the ADL crafts a narrative for the public that pushes Western imperialism rather than equality. In recent years, the ADL’s main focus has been smearing criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian human rights as Jew hatred. As the group (4/4/23) says, “anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitism.”

The book is loosely part of the #DropTheADL campaign, which encourages both progressives and schools to stop citing the group as a source on political extremism, because of its “racist and right-wing” track record. The movement has had limited success: The delegates of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, voted to sever ties with the ADL, a move that was overruled by the union’s governing board (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7/21/25).

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Catholic Nuncio Visits Lebanese Christians Defying Israel Evacuation Orders

Apostolic Nuncio Paolo Borgia on Monday visited several villages in southeastern Lebanon whose residents have refused to leave, despite the ongoing battle between Israeli forces and the Iran-backed terrorists of Hezbollah.

Borgia has visited the region several times during the current conflict, which Hezbollah launched by attacking Israel from Lebanese soil in March. The nuncio does not limit his visits to majority-Christian communities.

“The war has severe consequences for villages — whether Christian, mixed, or Muslim. Many people have been forced to leave their homes,” the archbishop noted when visiting the conflict zone in March.

“There is much suffering in the Beirut area with all the displaced people, especially Shiites, who are in a very difficult situation. Many Christians are also displaced in Beirut or in the north,” he said after another tour in April. 

“It is certainly hard because they leave everything behind, and there is also a major economic problem, as activities cease when villages in the south are abandoned,” he observed.

“They feel they are carrying a burden alone. That is why we go to visit them: they must feel the presence of the universal and Lebanese Church, especially the presence of the Holy Father, as well as many people of goodwill who help and support those living through these tragedies,” he stressed.

As with his previous visits, Borgia brought humanitarian supplies to the villages he visited, provided by relief organizations such as Caritas-Lebanon, whose president Father Samir Ghaoui traveled with the nuncio.

Community leaders said these humanitarian deliveries were crucial because the conflict has cut them off from the rest of Lebanon. Local farmers said they were worried about the security situation preventing them from working their fields in the upcoming harvest season, which could lead to a devastating loss of income for already impoverished communities.

The Israeli military continues to issue evacuation orders for areas across Lebanon, which some villagers refuse to obey. Civilians and members of the Lebanese army have reportedly been hit by Israeli strikes against Hezbollah.

On Tuesday, the Israeli army published photos of a large Hezbollah weapons stockpile seized from a nominally civilian residence in the village of Zawtar Sharqieh, located north of the Litani River, the boundary between north and south Lebanon.

“The combat weapons found in the buildings include Kalashnikov-type rifles, missiles and anti-tank rocket launchers, magazines, grenades, communication devices, drones and other combat equipment,” the Israeli statement said, citing the raid as the latest evidence that Hezbollah deliberately uses “civilian infrastructure” in its operations.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said several more Hezbollah weapons depots have been found in civilian structures in Zawtar Sharqieh and other towns over the past few days.

On Monday night, a suspected Hezbollah fighter slipped into northern Israel from Lebanon and fired on Israeli troops, who returned fire and killed him. Local community leader David Azoulay said the incident was “further proof that there is no security even after almost three years of war in the north, even when the IDF created a sort of security zone.”

Azoulay said Israel should “charge Hezbollah a price for its audacity and attempt to penetrate Israeli territory and make it clear that these events will not pass as if nothing had happened.”

Israel launched airstrikes on the major Lebanese city of Tyre on Tuesday and warned the entire city to evacuate, including the Christian quarter of the Old City, which has previously been exempted from evacuation warnings. The IDF said last week that it has reason to believe Hezbollah fighters are operating out of the Christian quarter in Tyre because they thought it was safe from attack.

The Lebanese health ministry said the strikes conducted before the evacuation warning killed at least eight people and wounded 32.

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Did Iran Establish a New Equation in the Middle East Through Its Attacks on Israel?

It remains unclear whether Iran’s effort to establish a new equation in the region has truly succeeded — an equation in which, for the first time, Iran would directly strike Israel if Israel attacks Lebanon.

What is clear is that recent events suggest the strategic landscape may be shifting. Israel chose to defy President Trump and carry out strikes against Iran. Yet according to both Iranian and American sources, those Israeli attacks appear to have been deliberately calibrated to inflict limited damage, perhaps reflecting U.S. pressure to avoid a broader escalation.

Iran, for its part, responded by striking Israel once more after the Israeli attacks. The full extent of the damage caused by Iran’s two rounds of attacks remains unknown, however, due to extensive Israeli military censorship. As a result, outside observers still lack a complete picture of the military and strategic consequences of these exchanges.

The real test of whether a new regional equation has emerged may not lie in what has already happened, but in what comes next. Specifically: Will Israel strike Beirut again?

Even if it does, Israeli decision-makers will now have to factor in a cost that did not previously exis t— the likelihood of a direct Iranian response against Israel. For decades, Israel enjoyed near-complete freedom of maneuver in much of the region. It could bomb targets in Lebanon at will without facing meaningful costs imposed by third parties. That assumption may no longer hold.

At the same time, the United States has signaled clearly that it no longer intends to be an active participant in Israel’s confrontation with Iran. The White House has, for instance, stated that it did not partake in Israel’s defense this time around. This would be a first and a very alarming development for Israel, if true. Washington’s desire to avoid direct involvement has become increasingly evident, even as it continues to support Israel in other ways.

Taken together, these developments suggest that a new strategic reality may be in the making. The picture remains murky, and it is far too early to declare that a durable deterrence framework has been established. Much will depend on future Israeli actions, Iranian responses, and the degree to which both sides internalize the risks of escalation.

But if Israel now has to weigh the prospect of direct Iranian retaliation before striking Lebanon, then something important has changed. Whether that change proves temporary or enduring remains to be seen.

The next question is whether this emerging equation can be translated into renewed momentum for U.S.-Iran diplomacy.

The Iranians believe that their action demonstrated to the US that the value of the Memorandum is so low that Iran is willing to risk a complete collapse of diplomacy. The hope is that Trump yields on what appears to be the last sticking point in the talks, which is the release of $12 billion of Iranian frozen assets.

Trump, on the other hand, may calculate that the exchange of fire demonstrated both the cost to Iran if full-scale war were to break out again, as well as Trump’s ability to impose certain restraints on the Israelis. As a result, the Iranians should feel confident in Trump’s ability to deliver on his end of the bargain and not insist on the release of the assets at the outset of the MOU.

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U.S. Secretly Deployed Paratroopers to Israel

When the Pentagon announced that the 82nd Airborne was deploying to the Middle East in March, it concealed a key detail: some of the paratroopers were headed to Israel, as revealed in an Army deployment order I obtained.

A military source involved in war planning tells me the deployment is tied to new U.S.-Israeli joint contingency plans, completed since February, for seizing Kharg Island and carving out coastal territory inside Iran.

The 82nd Airborne Division is the Army’s premier quick reaction force, trained to parachute into hostile territory.

By keeping the deployment quiet, the Pentagon headed off public debate over a joint U.S.-Israeli operation inside Iran — a prospect many considered plausible at the time, amid a fever pitch of mainstream reporting on a potential ground invasion. The secrecy also sidestepped what’s euphemistically called “host nation sensitivities.” A joint U.S.-Israeli operation raises thorny questions for America’s Gulf Arab “partners,” especially over logistical support — hence the 82nd, which could launch directly from Israel without any Gulf state’s consent to use its territory.

The Army deployment order, issued April 7, 2026, directs elements of the 2nd Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment — the storied “Geronimo” battalion — to deploy to Israel on “temporary duty.” The Israel deployment has not been previously reported.

The Pentagon has never acknowledged it; in public it has said only that the 82nd was bound for “CENTCOM,” the military’s term for U.S. Central Command, the combatant command responsible for the entire Middle East. The press echoed the vague terminology, suggesting the unit was headed to existing U.S. bases in Kuwait or Qatar.

Asked about the number of troops deployed to Israel and their mission, the Pentagon referred my request to CENTCOM, which at the time of publication had not yet responded.

In late March, the New York Times reported that senior military officials were “weighing a possible deployment of a combat brigade from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division … to support U.S. military operations in Iran.” The forces would come from the division’s Immediate Response Force — a brigade of roughly 3,000 soldiers able to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours. Those forces, the Times noted, “could be used to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub.”

The groundwork had been laid weeks earlier. The Army abruptly pulled the division’s 300-member headquarters from a planned exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana, officials told the Times, so the command element wouldn’t be “caught out of place if the balloon went up.” The Aviationist reported that the division’s commander, Maj. Gen. Brandon Tegtmeier, and his command element had been ordered to deploy, and tracked a string of flights leaving Pope Army Airfield, which serves Fort Bragg, for the Middle East.

When the Pentagon finally did talk about the 82nd publicly, it took pains to keep Israel out of it.

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Angry Pentagon Sources Leak Report Of Israel’s ‘Unhinged’ Spying On US Officials

It’s no secret that Israeli spying and surveillance is pervasive, and it is often even directed at its most powerful ally and backer, the United States. But the phenomenon has escalated of late, outraging Washington intelligence officials.

Behind the scenes of this alliance which mainstream media and pundits typically project as essentially untouchable, deep-seated friction is boiling over. In an unprecedented move, the Pentagon has officially elevated Israel’s counterintelligence threat level to its highest possible category, driven by surging internal alarm that this primary Mideast regional ally is aggressively ramping up espionage operations targeting senior US officials – even Trump’s own top Iran negotiator.

The intelligence warning, freshly reported this weekend by NBC News and The New York Times, highlights a profound rift within the national security apparatus as tensions mount between the Trump administration and Israel over the ongoing joint war on Iran.

The revelation’s timing is interesting, given it comes after Axios reported at the start of this month that on a phone call President Trump ‘steamrolled’ Prime Minister Netanyahu. Trump is said to have been “pissed” and at one point yelled and berated Netanyahu, saying “What the fuck are you doing?”

And now, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is broadcasting an internal alert raising Israel’s specific threat designation to “critical”. According to details revealed in a Sunday NBC report:

The designation stems from concerns within the Pentagon that Israel is making a particular effort to surveil top U.S. officials to get information on the Trump administration’s internal deliberations and decision-making on the conflicts in the Middle East, the officials said.

The DIA assessment includes a seven-page document and features a chart, according to one of the current U.S. officials. The document says the assessment of Israel is that its ability to conduct human espionage and technical collection is at a “critical level,” according to the official.

And parallel to this, a report by the NY Times lists out names that are very high level within the Trump administration. Israel has allegedly focused its electronic and human efforts to eavesdrop on the following officials (likely among others):

  • Steve Witkoff, Trump’s premier regional negotiator.
  • Elbridge A. Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official.
  • Michael P. DiMino IV, one of Colby’s primary deputies.

The Israeli embassy in Washingtons has slammed the reports as ‘completely false’: “This entire story is false and sourced to someone who doesn’t have any knowledge of what’s going on,” it said in a statement.

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Israel Bombs Iranian Regime After Terrorist Strikes

Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, has been perpetually firing on Israelis, and an Arab terrorist murdered Master Sergeant (Res.) Haim Kalomiti and injured multiple others in a jihad attack Sunday in Tzur Natan, one of over a thousand attempted terror attacks on Israelis just since March. Then Hezbollah’s Tehran paymasters began bombarding Israel. There has never been a ceasefire. Both Hezbollah and Iran’s regime never stopped shooting at civilians, not for a single day.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted late on June 7, “The Israeli Air Force struck military targets belonging to the Iranian terror regime in western and central Iran a short while ago.”

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Another War for Israel We Should Never Have Gotten Into

In his highly-regarded podcast, Judging Freedom, on June 1, Judge Napolitano asked British diplomat Alastair Crooke if the Israelis really cared if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed and the U.S. economy, and by extension the world economy, suffered.

Crooke replied that the billionaires who support Israel so strongly have so much wealth that many would regard a recession or even a depression as an “opportunity” to buy farmland and other assets.

People of great wealth are not really affected by the higher gas and food prices and other inflation brought on by the U.S./Israeli war against Iran. But everyone else is, and this war, unpopular even at the start, is becoming less popular every day.

This is in sharp contrast with the Iraq war, which was very popular at the start but very unpopular three or four years later.

Even at the start, most polls showed 65 to 70% were against the war in Iran. And I believe that most who did not poll in opposition were really not in favor of the war, but just did not want to oppose the President on this.

Many leading conservatives, such as Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, Rand Paul, and many others, have come out against this war. Conservatives under 50 have polled heavily against it.

Megan Kelly said on the Piers Morgan Show that this was “clearly Israel’s war,” that it  “needed to end ugly, or any other way,” and that she favored an end even if it looked like a “surrender on our part.” She added: “It was folly to begin with. It was folly throughout. It remains folly.”

Tucker Carlson said in an interview with the BBC: “The single biggest mistake Trump, or any other American president, has made in my lifetime is going to war with Iran. We are only doing this at the behest and then the demand of Israel.”

I pointed out in several columns that almost every member of Congress would have been rushing to condemn the killing, starving, and maiming of little children that went on in Gaza if it had been done by any other Country than Israel. And the exact same thing can be said about the war in Iran.

The great majority of the American people are sick and tired of foreign wars and know that we have a mind-boggling $ 39 trillion in national debt. They want our elected officials to start putting America First, and they know this war is putting Israel First.

We have bought and paid for Congress when it comes to anything Netanyahu and Israeli warmongers want. Because of campaign contributions for members of Congress, or fear of contributions against them, from supporters of Israel, members are like the three wise monkeys: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.

The late Charley Reese was once voted as the most popular columnist in a poll by many thousands of C-Span viewers. He wrote many times that the terrorism against the U. S. was the  “direct result of our one-sided support of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.”

In 2005, Reese wrote: “The big pushers for war with Iraq are the usual suspects-Americans with a long record of pretending to speak about America’s interests when in fact they are pushing an Israeli agenda.” Now put the word “Iran” where he wrote “Iraq.”

Almost everyone, if asked, will say they favor peace for the Middle East. But the United States cannot be a neutral peace broker there as long as we are so far under the thumb of the international war criminal Netanyahu.

Even the longtime Jewish New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, wrote in May last year that “This Israeli government is behaving in ways that threaten hard-core U.S. interests in the region. Netanyahu  is not our friend.”

Many years ago, David Halberstam wrote words about the Vietnam War that could and should be applied to the Middle East today: “I do not think we are winning in any true sense, nor do I see any signs we are about to win. That is why this is such a sad story to write.”

He added: “I do not think our Vietnamese can win their part of the war, nor do I think we can win it for them. I think we will finally end up lowering our sights, encouraging our Vietnamese to talk to their Vietnamese, hoping somehow they can settle what we cannot.”

No matter how many bombs we drop or how many billions we spend, there will never be peace in the Middle East unless and until we get out of the way and force the people there to talk to each other and work things out themselves. We cannot do it for them.

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The Praxian Genocidal Kill Chain — Part 2

In Part 1, we discussed how a group of Silicon Valley oligarchs, the self-professed “Praxians,” have seized control of the Trump administration and have aligned themselves with the “startup nation” of Israel. In my latest book, The Technocratic Dark State, I refer to the Praxians as NEONERDS, but we’ll continue to use their own moniker in this series of articles.

In Part 1, we also explored Praxian companies’ practical symbioses with Israeli SIGINT, especially Unit 8200. The evidence strongly indicates that the October 7th Hamas attack, which the Israeli Zionist Likud government cited as the justification for its genocidal destruction of Gaza, was a LIHOP false flag attack, in which an unknown number of Israelis were evidently killed—not by Hamas, but by their own military. That the attack proceeded unimpeded as it did was officially attributed primarily to SIGINT “failures.” Thus, the strong possibility exists that the Praxians participated in the extraordinary sequence of supposed SIGINT mistakes, oversights, and miscalculations that allegedly enabled Hamas to attack Southern Israel virtually unopposed.

The result of this LIHOP false flag attack was the deployment of the Praxians’ genocidal kill chains in Gaza. And now we have a larger Middle East conflagration. Not only have Israel and the US jointly attacked Iran, but the Israeli government, with Praxian kill chain assistance, is attempting to do to Lebanon what it has already done to Gaza. In Part 3, we shall see how the Praxians’ fingerprints are also observable in so-called intelligence “misjudgments” that led the US, for otherwise inexplicable reasons, to attack Iran.

Also discussed in Part 1 was how the Praxians have used their signature investment strategy—which they call “accelerationism”—to disrupt everything from markets to international relations by deploying “creative destruction” as their version of a “revolutionary tool.” Indeed, just as the Praxians’ accelerated “digital kill chain” is central to the devastation of Palestinian lives, so is it now featuring in a “new kind of war” in the Middle East.

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NBC Report: Pentagon Raised Threat of Israeli Spying on US to Highest Level – White House Denies Report

The Pentagon has designated Israel at the highest counterintelligence threat level amid increasing concerns that the top Middle East ally is spying on US officials to gather information on Trump’s decision-making as it pertains to Iran, two US officials reportedly claim, according to NBC News. 

An Israeli Embassy spokesperson denied that Israel spies on the United States, describing the notion as “completely false.”

“Israel does not gather intelligence on American entities, let alone US government officials. Israel intelligence collection efforts are aimed at its enemies, not its allies. Any claims to the contrary are either misinformed or politically motivated,” the spokesperson said.

The White House further denied the report, saying, “This entire story is false and sourced to someone who doesn’t have any knowledge of what’s going on.”

The report from NBC cites two unnamed US officials and one former US official and points to past instances of Israel and the US both spying on allies, including Jonathan Pollard, who spent 30 years in prison for selling US intelligence to Israel.

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