Tag: israel

Israel Is ‘Rich Enough’ To Buy US Weapons Without Financial Aid, Rubio Says

The White House is much too late in belateldy ‘discovering’ this talking point, but admin officials continue to say that it’s time for Israel to stand on its own and begin purchasing weapons without relying on US financial assistance.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday stated, “Israel is now prosperous and rich enough to be able to be a sales country. They can buy weapons from us, but we no longer have to provide the financing.“

Coming off Republicans getting clobbered in the midterms, and with Israel being increasinly unpopular among the American electorate, Rubio followed by adding that “it’s something the Israelis themselves have offered us.”

When asked whether this could be something to take effect in 2027, Israel replied, “Well, that’s what the president said we’re going to do. So, ultimately, I think they could if they wanted to, yeah, absolutely.”

“On the question of financing, I think Israel has clearly graduated beyond that,” he said, alluding to Israel being a wealthy enough nation.

Just before last week’s midterm elections, President Trump had abruptly proposed ending nearly $4 billion in annual American assistance to Israel.

He floated this in acknowledgement that the Iran war angered most Americans, and that public opinion on Washington’s historic and ongoing support to Israel has fallen precipitously.

But obviously it’s all too little, too late – as Republicans have been punished at the polls. Many pundits who were once strong MAGA supporters have complained that Trump had effectively abandoned ‘America First’ principles.

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After Bibi’s Unity Plea, Israel’s President Gives His Rival First Shot At Power

Israeli President Isaac Herzog has given opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot the first chance to form a government, a setback for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose bloc finished 14 seats short of his rival’s backers. Herzog announced the decision Saturday night, a day earlier than expected, according to the Associated Press.

The timing was pointed. AP reported that the announcement came shortly after Netanyahu released a video calling for a “national unity government” and warning against “hastily swearing in a government with terrorist supporters,” an apparent reference to the Arab-led parties that now sit at the center of the count.

Eisenkot, a former military chief who led the challengers’ bloc, did not take the offer. His Yashar party answered on X, and AP said it urged Likud members to disavow their alliance with “radical parties,” an apparent reference to the harder-right partners in Netanyahu’s religious-nationalist base. Eisenkot himself said, as relayed on X, that “those who have divided and torn apart Israeli society from within only mention the word ‘unity’ when they realize their time in office is coming to an end.”

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Leak Reportedly Exposed Netanyahu & Mossad Chief’s Plan To Attack Iran Before Israeli Election

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad chief Roman Gofman sought to carry out an operation against Iran on the eve of Israel’s 27 October election, but the plan was thwarted after Washington was inadvertently alerted, Israeli media have reported.

A report by Channel 12 said the proposed operation was opposed by senior officials in Israel’s security establishment, who feared it could trigger a major escalation with Iran and lead to the postponement of the vote. It said preparations nevertheless continued until an Israeli security operative mistakenly alerted the United States, prompting Washington to move quickly to stop the plan.

Netanyahu’s office denied the account, saying: “The prime minister himself clarified in real time that an attack before the Israeli elections was not on the agenda.”

The report adds to allegations of tensions between Netanyahu and senior military officials over proposed action against Iran in the days before the election.

On October 25, two days before Israelis went to the polls, Channel 12 reported an “unprecedented confrontation” between Netanyahu and Israeli military chief of staff Eyal Zamir over a military action that defence officials feared could provoke a confrontation with Iran.

The network said Zamir had resisted carrying out the action and sought further deliberations, as well as signed documentation from Netanyahu confirming its legal authorization. A military source quoted by Channel 12 said: “This relates to an action that could lead to a flare-up with Iran, at a sensitive and dramatic moment, creating this [potential] miscalculation.”

The report also cited unnamed sources who said military leaders were concerned that the political leadership was seeking to “utilize the Iranian issue for political benefit”.

On October 26, a day before the election, Channels 12 and 13 reported that Zamir was the only senior Israeli security chief to oppose military action sought by Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz, amid concerns that it could trigger an escalation with Iran and disrupt the vote.

The New York Times also reported that Netanyahu had “sought for weeks to orchestrate a new airstrike on Iran” but was blocked by Zamir.  It said the military chief had become concerned that Netanyahu was pushing for a separate operation short of an overt strike, which Zamir believed could provoke an Iranian response.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, a critic of Netanyahu, said in an interview with Channel 12 on Thursday that the prime minister had planned to carry out “a provocation” involving Iran “via the Mossad, behind the back of the IDF chief of staff”.

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No, MAGA Didn’t Cut Israel Aid, They Hid It — And the Left Has the Same Plan

On the morning of Election Day, with polls open and the war in Iran dragging his party toward a historic beating, Donald Trump phoned into Fox & Friends with a surprise. The United States, he said, would stop sending roughly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel at the end of 2026, under a deal he claimed he and Benjamin Netanyahu had struck months ago. For a base that spent the past year watching its “America First” president drag the country into another Middle East war, it sounded like a long-overdue win.

It wasn’t, and the man who did more than anyone in Congress to force this issue into the open said so within hours. Rep. Thomas Massie called it “pennies on the dollar” and “a desperate Election Day lie,” warning that the same taxpayer money would simply flow through as military coordination instead of as a separate line item in the appropriations bills. He’s right, the paper trail proves it, and it fosters less transparency, not more.

Start with the motive, because Trump practically confessed it on air. He complained that Israel aid had become “a bad talking point” and asked why Republicans should “suffer the slings from lunatics” over money Israel doesn’t “need.” That is a campaign problem being managed, not a foreign policy being changed, and Bloomberg reported he pitched it explicitly as a way to blunt election-year attacks.

It also came with no plan. Trump never explained how the money would actually stop, even though the memorandum guaranteeing Israel $3.8 billion a year runs until September 2028 and Congress wrote those levels into the 2021 defense bill. A president doesn’t undo a statute on a morning show, and the deal he says was made months ago reportedly blindsided Israeli security and financial officials, who noted next year’s budget was already drafted around the existing agreement.

Meanwhile, Israel has been angling for more, not less. Axios reported a year ago that Israel was seeking an unprecedented 20-year security agreement likely worth at least $4 billion a year, repackaged with “America First” provisions to win over Trump’s base. Nobody negotiating a two-decade package is preparing to walk away from the money, which raises the obvious question of where it’s going instead.

The answer is the Pentagon. The Congressional Research Service, hardly a hotbed of antiwar agitation, laid out the mechanism months ago: replace grant aid with joint programs funded from defense accounts, and shift congressional oversight away from the foreign affairs committees toward the defense ones. The Quincy Institute was blunter, calling it not a reduction in support but a reorganization that moves billions out of State Department grants and into general Pentagon procurement.

That reorganization is already moving through Congress. The House-passed defense bill authorizes $750 million for U.S.-Israel cooperative programs and extends the weapons stockpile authority for Israel, and the source for that is AIPAC’s own press release celebrating it. The same bill creates a new U.S.-Israel defense technology initiative that critics warn would be harder for future Congresses to unwind and would shift the relationship away from highly visible aid votes. Lawmakers and military experts told The Intercept it was highly irregular, a near-copy of an AIPAC-backed bill that had already died.

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Till Death Do Us Part: The Unholy Matrimony Between the US and Israel

The standard narrative of American foreign policy has long rested on the pillar of moral exceptionalism: the assertion that the United States acts as a global guardian of human rights, international law and democratic governance.

However, Washington’s support for the ongoing holocaust in the occupied Gaza Strip, West Bank and unlawful war on Iran have exposed glaring contradictions at the heart of this narrative.  They reveal the true character of a political system defined not by its lofty noble declarations, but by its iniquitous decisions and actions.

These inequalities accentuate the true nature of U.S. geopolitics; essentially that human rights ideals are of little account to predatory imperial powers.

For over a century, the subjugation of Palestine and West Asia has been orchestrated through a legacy of colonial bigotry and pro-Zionist geopolitical engineering.  The region has been treated not as home to sovereign peoples but as an imperial chessboard ripe for exploitation.

The wars throughout the region, particularly on Palestine and Iran, are the culmination of imperial agendas set in motion a century ago.  The current geopolitical course began with the stroke of a pen set to the Balfour Declaration in 1917, in which a distant European empire casually bartered away a homeland that was not theirs to give.  This colonizing scheme reached its peak in the 1996 “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” document – a stratagem advanced by American neoconservatives and Zionist hardliners to reshape West Asia in Israel’s image.

Together these imperial blueprints established frameworks for domination that have led the region and global community to the precipice of disaster.

Underpinning these policies is a deeply-rooted colonial chauvinism that views the indigenous people of the region as obstacles to be displaced, managed or crushed, rather than human beings with inalienable rights to freedom, self-determination and dignity.

When examined across a century, the trajectory from Balfour to “Clean Break”  demonstrates a consistent structural logic. Whether foreign powers use imperial decrees, global mandates, diplomatic accords or military force, the goal is always the same: to secure and maintain control, fundamentally disregarding the rights of the native populations to govern themselves.

The bilateral partnership with Israel, originally formed to secure its existence, has now become a strategic liability.  The Israel that once proved useful to Washington as its regional enforcer, now seems to be in the catbird seat.

The eventual subordination of American foreign policy to Israeli strategic ambitions is not a historic accident, but the predictable outcome of a powerful deeply-entrenched military-industrial-security nexus that long ago equated regional dominance with U.S. national interests.

What began as a Cold War strategy to project American power across West Asia without a large-scale troop presence, has evolved into an institutionalized, self-perpetuating deadly alliance, in which the balance of control has become blurred.

Decades of deeply-entrenched military, intelligence and industrial ties with Tel Aviv have created an institutional inertia so powerful that Washington now reflexively accepts global criticism, regional anger and multi-trillion-dollar detours into foreign interventions as a matter of course – as a worthy price to pay for their “special relationship.”

Instead of exerting its strategic agency over a client state, the United States has become captive to Israeli dogmatism, which asserts that anything less than unconditional support signals U.S. weakness and vulnerability.  Consequently, this has fallen on American taxpayers to subsidize and service members to fight  military campaigns that compromise the nation’s interests and long-term stability.

Adding to this geopolitical trap is a domestic political echo chamber engineered to penalize flexibility and alternative strategies, while rewarding absolute conformity and compliance with Israeli objectives.

The alliance with Israel is so thoroughly embedded in the American body politic that it functions as a “third rail” of U.S. foreign policy and public discourse.  It remains above criticism through a combination of highly organized influential lobbying groups, massive political campaign financing schemes, a powerful evangelical voting bloc, and weaponization of the anti-Semitic label.

When paired with a deeply-ingrained pro-Israel media and cultural narrative that frames regional escalation as inevitable, rather than preventable, Washington’s political class most often chooses the safety of domestic capitulation over the discipline of sovereign statecraft, guaranteeing political submission to Israeli goading.

The result is a chronically unsettled America perpetually drawn into Israel’s expansionist wars.  This involvement is driven not by clear strategic necessity, but by a systemic inability in Washington to break free from domestic pressures and external mandates.

From the colonial promises of the Balfour Declaration to the “Clean Break” document, Israel has consistently prioritized expansionism over international law, formal agreements and even the strategic interests of its closest ally and main benefactor, the United States.

A core folly in Washington’s Israel/West Asian policy has been in treating a strategic burden as an indispensable ally.

Prioritizing the regional ambitions of a hegemonic foreign “ally” over core U.S. interests have entangled America in Israel’s reckless wars and conflicts.  Decades of blank-check diplomacy have inflamed anti-American sentiment, compromised its global credibility, strained vital alliances, and drained finite military and economic resources that would be better directed toward urgent domestic needs.

Paradoxically, the imperial strategies meant to safeguard Israel at the expense of West Asia are now taking a toll on America as well.  The United States will not, and cannot, recover its strategic autonomy and moral leadership unless it makes a clean break from its damaging relationship with Israel.

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A Billion Dollars and the Men Who Ran Israel’s Wars

The weapons a country fights with, the software that aims them, and the officers who command them were for a century things a state owned and could not put up for sale. That arrangement is coming apart. One by one these assets are being bought by private companies, financed through public stock markets, and traded like any other holding, and the firm that has carried the process furthest spent most of its life making radios for freight trains.

The shift is visible first in a component the size of a thumb. A fuze decides the instant a drone turns into a bomb: it holds the weapon inert through storage and flight and arms it only at the chosen second. An Israeli company called Gate Technologies, founded in 1996, builds these electronic fuzes, and its hardware is designed into more than ninety weapon systems, among them the loitering munitions that circle a battlefield until they dive into it. In September the fuze maker, with its Polish manufacturing partner, was bought for up to $390 million by a Nasdaq company called Ondas.

Two years ago Ondas sold radios to freight railroads. It reported $7.2 million in revenue for all of 2024, earned four hundred thousand dollars of gross profit on it, and had never turned a yearly profit in its life. Its shares changed hands for as little as fifty-five cents. In the eighteen months since, the same company has bought around twenty weapons firms for more than two billion dollars, reached a market value near four billion, installed a former director of the Mossad as the chairman of its defense arm, and moved to buy the software that aims Iron Dome. The change was bought, not earned.

The arithmetic says where the money came from. Revenue did climb, to $50.7 million in 2025, almost all of it carried in from businesses acquired in the second half of the year, and the company still lost $133 million over the twelve months, including a $101 million loss in the fourth quarter alone. What rose without pause was the share count, from ninety-three million at the end of 2024 to 380 million a year later, a quadrupling that diluted every existing holder to fund the buying. The purchases were financed by more than $1.8 billion in equity raised after June 2025 and another $960 million in January 2026, and the structure rests on a $489 million warrant liability whose value a single repricing swung by $82 million in one quarter. Having folded twenty companies into itself, Ondas tells investors to expect $375 million in revenue in 2026 and its first profit no earlier than 2028. The business is the stock, and the stock runs on the belief that the buying will keep compounding.

The purchases read as a map of modern war. Apeiro Motion for $12 million in August 2025, then three smaller firms in demining and optics across October. The counter-drone company Sentrycs for $224.6 million in November. The ground-robotics maker Roboteam, whose machines are sold as combat-proven for special operations forces, for $81.7 million in December. Rotron Aerospace, Bird Aerospace and INDO Earth inside a single month, for thirty-nine, one hundred ten and sixty million dollars. The American defense contractor Mistral for $175 million, with stakes taken in a stratospheric-balloon company and two more drone makers alongside. Earlier deals had already brought in Airobotics, Iron Drone, Omnisys and Aran. By Calcalist’s count the total since 2025 runs past two billion dollars across roughly twenty firms, the great majority of them Israeli. Laid end to end they form a whole kill chain under one ticker symbol: detection, interception, ground robots, sensors, propulsion, and what the company’s filings call long-range one-way effectors, the industry’s term for drones built to fly once and detonate.

Two of the purchases reach the center of Israel’s own defenses, and it is there that the private market meets the limit of what a state will allow. The fuzes from Gate arm the weapons. The second asset, mPrest, is the software that runs the command and control of Iron Dome, the system Israel relies on to decide what to shoot out of its own sky. mPrest is a subsidiary of the state-owned manufacturer Rafael, which would be left holding 43.25 percent once Ondas took control, and the deal values it near two hundred million dollars. The Defense Ministry’s security directorate, known by its acronym MALMAB, has frozen the transaction on the ground that the technology is classified. The question the directorate is said to be unable to settle is the one that hangs over everything the company has done. Late last year an investor whose identity Ondas refuses to reveal placed about a billion dollars into the firm, and that single infusion is what prompted the inquiry. The ministry has declined to disclose what it found, and questions put to the prime minister’s office went unanswered. The company calls its funding broad investor support. The reporting describes one unnamed backer. When the arsenal becomes a traded asset, its ultimate owner can stay anonymous, and a government can find that it no longer knows who is buying the most sensitive parts of its own defense.

The people arrive with the money, and they come straight from the offices that until recently ran this industry. In August, Ondas named David Barnea the global president and chairman of its defense arm, two months after he stepped down as director of the Mossad, a post he held from 2021 to 2026 across the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, the pager operation that detonated across Lebanon, and the bombing campaigns against Iran. The company says the appointment carried full approval from the Mossad’s legal advisers and is separate from his public service, and it says it hired him to open doors to foreign defense ministries and procurement bodies, which means selling to the establishments he spent his career inside. The market priced the hire within hours and lifted the shares eleven percent in two days. Behind him came the former chief executive of Rafael, Yoav Har-Even, a former head of military research and development at the Defense Ministry, and a line of other Rafael and ministry veterans. The distance between what the state asks of its departing officials and what this company takes from them is measurable in months: a former defense-research chief joining as a vice president was made to observe a ten-month cooling-off period imposed by a Jerusalem court committee, while the former head of the Mossad observed two, a speed a security source said the agency had once treated much more strictly.

Above the hardware sits the software, and here the ownership is not Israeli at all. In its own results Ondas describes what the arrangement buys: access to the full platform of the American data company Palantir, including its Maven targeting system and the advanced command and control used to run a mission. In March, Palantir joined Ondas and a stratospheric-sensing firm in a partnership built around three programs, with integration across the Ondas fleet to begin late in 2026. What Palantir does with that software elsewhere is a matter of its own disclosures. In early 2024 it agreed with Israel’s defense ministry to supply technology for “war-related missions”. A shareholder resolution filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, drawing on reporting by The Independent, Reuters and the New York Times, states that Maven was used to identify targets in hundreds of strikes during the United States and Israeli bombing of Iran, and records the company’s chief executive crediting it with most of the targeting in Ukraine. Palantir denies building the automated targeting tools the Israeli military used in Gaza, and the reporting the filing cites ties its platform to those systems regardless. Two large pension managers, Norway’s Storebrand and the Dutch fund ABP, have sold out over the exposure. This is the layer that will bind the Ondas arsenal together, and it is the layer the Israeli review of mPrest never reaches, because the review stops at Israeli ownership and the software is American.

The model has an origin, and it runs back to the agency that first used it. Palantir was carried through its early years by In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA, which made two rounds of investment totaling more than two million dollars, and from 2005 to 2008 the agency was the company’s only customer, shaping the product through years of testing while the venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s own forty million dollars kept it alive. A state grew its intelligence software inside a private company, and twenty years on that company supplies the command layer for a conglomerate assembling an allied state’s arsenal on a stock exchange.

What began with the fuze ends with a frontier. Ondas has formed a joint venture, 51 percent owned, with the German press-machinery maker Heidelberg to build inside Europe’s largest defense market, and its Airobotics subsidiary has won a government tender to ring a national border with a system designed around thousands of drones and the software to fly them.

None of this is the story of one strange company. Ondas is the clearest form of a general process, the turning of the security state into an asset class, in which the weapons, the software that aims them, the plants that build them and the officers who ran them are bought, financed through share sales, and traded like stock in anything else. The thing that market cannot deliver is the thing a state once took as a given, that it knows whose hands its own arsenal is in. The one purchase the Israeli government has refused to wave through is the one that reaches the brain of its own shield. The investor behind everything else has still not put his name to any of it, and the longer that holds, the more it looks less like an exception than a preview.

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Trump’s Legacy Will Ultimately Be Determined By The Outcome Of The Third Gulf War

The Democrats retook control of Congress in an electoral bloodbath that decimated the Republicans during the midterms. Many had predicted that this would happen, and it’s not because of the Canadian meddling that the White House recently drew attention to or any other countries’ related efforts, but due to the cost of living surging as a result of the Third Gulf War that Trump initiated with Bibi. Higher oil prices naturally translated into higher prices across the board that hit average Americans very hard.

Trump earlier threatened to become “Mr. Veto” if the Republicans lost control of Congress, elaborating that the Supreme Court recently strengthened his executive authority, and his sharing on social media of a pic of a red hat with the word “VETO” on it after the results poured in suggests that he’s serious. That’s sensible since it would be illogical for him to pass up the opportunity to veto legislation against his agenda when the Democrats don’t have the two-thirds supermajority in both chambers to overrule him.

The Democrats will therefore have to either compromise over the next two years or the US will remain legislatively paralyzed with both sides blaming the other ahead of the next elections. The Democrats might also try to once again impeach Trump, but they lack the two-thirds supermajority in the Senate to oust him from office, so it would only be symbolic. In any case, Trump might pivot towards foreign policy if domestic policy is deadlocked, which could have important implications for many countries.

Chief among them is Iran since Trump’s legacy will ultimately be determined by the outcome of the Third Gulf War. Each side blames the other for perpetuating the conflict across the entire year, but just like the Democrats will have to compromise if they want any of their legislation to pass, so too must Trump compromise with Iran if he wants to save his legacy. The reason is simple and it’s that perpetuating the high cost of living sparked by higher oil prices will doom the Republicans in 2028.

The scenario of a Democrat president presiding over a Democrat-controlled Congress would spell the end of everything that Trump achieved at home and abroad during his second term, and it’s a credible scenario too since voters care more about the economy than foreign policy or so-called “culture wars”. About that, the Democrats’ landslide wouldn’t have happened without some Republicans either staying home or voting for the Democrats in protest, which they did due to their surging cost of living.

This doesn’t mean that they “betrayed” Trump or the causes that they supported just two years ago, however, since most of them likely believed that Trump would indeed become “Mr. Veto” to preserve his achievements for at least the next two years. What they wanted to do was simply show him that the higher cost of living that the Third Gulf War is responsible for, which many of them consider to be a voluntary war since they don’t believe that Iran was on the verge of building a nuke, is unacceptable.

Therefore, nothing would rejuvenate his base more than to swiftly compromise with Iran as a means of showing them that he heard their message loud and clear, which would then facilitate a gradual decrease in the cost of living that could restore the economy by 2028 and help the Republicans win.

If he remains bogged down in the Gulf or provokes Iran into obliterating the region’s energy infrastructure in retaliation for being nuked, for example, then MAGA will likely be swept into the dustbin of history.

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Trump to cut off $4 billion in foreign aid to Israel by year’s end, convert to weapons sales

resident Donald Trump on Tuesday said that the U.S. would stop sending military aid to Israel by the end of the year.

Trump told “Fox & Friends” that Israel is in a position to purchase its own weapons and doesn’t need the U.S. to fund them.

The U.S. provides $4 billion per year in military aid, Trump said, and he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had discussed terminating the funding for years. He said that the idea originated with Netanyahu.

“They don’t need it. Israel is a very thriving country,” Trump said.

The U.S. provides approximately $3.8 billion annually through 2028 under the current U.S.-Israel security assistance agreement.

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Tucker Carlson Says Trump Is Considering a Nuclear Strike on Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain

Tucker Carlson claimed in a post on X on Sunday night that the Trump administration is considering launching a nuclear strike targeting Pickaxe Mountain in central Iran and that the president is expected to make a decision by November 7.

“Under pressure from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran,” Carlson wrote.

Carlson said that Israeli intelligence has claimed that the “Iranian government has restarted its nuclear enrichment program” underneath Pickaxe Mountain, allegations that Tehran has denied.

“No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place,” Carlson said. “No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place.”

For his part, Trump has publicly ruled out using a nuclear bomb against Iran, but he has been threatening to strike Pickaxe Mountain. “We’ve knocked out their nuclear. We still have to take care of, I would say one or two sites, but we can do that in 10 minutes,” Trump told reporters over the weekend. “You probably could look at Pickaxe Mountain, and you have to take care of that. We can do that all very quickly.”

In his post, Carlson said that Netanyahu was pushing for the US nuclear strike due to his precarious political position following Israel’s October 27 Knesset election. Netanyahu’s coalition led his opposition but failed to gain the majority needed to form a government.

“To that end, [Netanyahu has] applied maximum pressure to his closest allies in the administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper. Both oppose a negotiated settlement to the war they’ve so grievously mismanaged; both are pushing to restart major combat operations,” Carlson wrote.

The former Fox News host, who spoke with President Trump before he launched the war on February 28, went on to discuss the potential consequences of the US using a nuclear bomb, which would mark a first since World War II.

“An American nuclear attack on Iran would set a new precedent. The Russians have already told at least two other governments that an American nuclear strike on Iran would free them to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Pakistan and India would be tempted to do the same against each other, as would North Korea against Seoul. After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final,” Carlson said.

He pointed out that the Pentagon has been rewriting the US nuclear strategy to “make first use of so-called ‘battlefield nukes’ easier and therefore more likely.” The Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, has for more than a decade called for the US to develop additional capabilities to fight a “limited nuclear war.”

Carlson cited “close observers” who said Trump would likely decide by the weekend, or November 7, whether or not to carry out a nuclear strike. He also said that the president is “hesitating” for the time being and is “listening to his vice president, JD Vance, and to his envoy and friend Steve Witkoff, both of whom argue a deal with Iran can be made.”

Trump was also supposedly favoring diplomacy before joining Israel’s 12-Day War against Iran in June 2025 and before launching the current war alongside Israel on February 28.

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Canadian Propaganda System Goes Full-on To Justify War Against Iran

Canada is laying the groundwork for a new round of US/Israeli violence against Iran. This week Ottawa claimed Iran is occupying UAE territory, suggested Iran was funding attacks in Canada and signed a security accord that could draw us into the aggression.

On Wednesday Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada believes Iran is “occupying” the islands of Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb. In a joint statement with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Canada’s Prime Minister backed UAE’s position claiming the three small, strategically important islands in the eastern Persian Gulf near the Strait of Hormuz were under Iranian “occupation”.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baqaei denounced Ottawa’s “brazen and interventionist” position. For their part the Iranian Canadian Congress said it “strongly objects to the characterization of Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb as UAE territories ‘under occupation’, a statement which undermines Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and risks further unlawful aggression against Iran.”

Even hardline critics of the Iranian government also wrote articles, launched a petition and rallied in Toronto on Sunday against Canada’s position. Some of the opponents of the Islamic Republic pointed out that Ottawa didn’t publish any legal explanation for its support of UAE’s territorial claims over islands Iran has formally controlled since just before UAE’s 1971 creation and prior to the Islamic Republic.

As Ottawa has put Iran’s territorial integrity into question, it has also portrayed a country bombed tens of thousands of times recently as an aggressor. A number of reports linked to Canada’s new National Security Strategy suggested Iran has been attacking Canada (in reality, Ottawa has severed relations, labeled Iran a state sponsor of terror, listed part of its army a terror group, seized its diplomatic assets and imposed dozens of rounds of sanctions in support of a long-standing Zionist/imperial campaign against Iran).

On Tuesday CBC published “Why a spate of gun-for-hire shootings in Toronto were likely paid for by Iran. Attacks on Jewish, U.S. and anti-regime targets fit worldwide pattern of violence.” Despite the bold headline, there’s no evidence presented in the article linking Iran to the shootings. In a complaint to the CBC, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East’s Media Accountability Project noted, “What is not established through the facts in the article is any concrete link to Iran.” (Does anyone believe Tehran benefits to the point of paying random individuals shooting up various institutions in Toronto?)

Politically the CBC story served its purposes. In response, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre reiterated his call to deport Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operatives and the claims also boosted the anti-Iran angle in coverage of Canada’s new National Security Strategy.

Two days later the front of the Globe and Mail read: “Officials flag unprecedented security threats against Jewish community.” The third paragraph of an article tied to the release of the National Security Strategy mentioned “threats from Iran”. In another story this week, CSIS officials reportedly told Iran International they had “disrupted potentially lethal threats against people in Canada in multiple cases involving Iranian intelligence or proxies.”

Concurrently, Liberal MPs Anthony Housefather and Judy Sgro told the House of Commons Iran was a threat and criminal. Housefather announced a parliamentary petition calling the Iranian government a danger to Canadians while Sgro spoke “in solidarity with the courageous people and political prisoners of Iran” and “the ‘no to execution Tuesdays’ campaign.”

As politicians and media focused on Iran’s purported crimes, Canada hosted the leader of a deeply autocratic regional enemy that’s contributed significantly to violence in Sudan, Libya and Yemen. But there was little discussion of UAE monarch Mohamed bin Zayed’s repression and violence since the UAE is close to the US and Israel and has large wealth funds.

The Carney government signed a trade accord, launched formal negotiations on an extradition treaty and deepened its military ties to a small state with significant US and Israeli soldiers present there. According to the official release, the Canada-UAE Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Defence Cooperation “modernises the Canada-UAE Defence Cooperation Arrangement for enhanced bilateral cooperation on defence, including military education and training, defence policy dialogue, joint exercises, defence industrial cooperation, cyber security, and information exchanges, while creating a Joint Military Committee to guide its implementation.”

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