Tag: israel

The Failure of Biden’s ‘Just Say Don’t’ Foreign Policy

“Don’t.” That has been President Biden’s repeated message to Iran and Hezbollah in the year since Hamas attack Israel on October 7. Well, Iran just did. Again. That makes Tehran’s October 1 attack on Israel with about 180 ballistic missiles a test not just of Israeli resolve, but of American credibility. The United States should join with Israel in imposing, as national security advisor Jake Sullivan said, “severe consequences” on Iran.

The Biden administration’s strategy throughout the last year of conflict has been to seek de-escalation and avoid a broadening of the conflict wherever and whenever possible. That was the import of President Biden’s warning of “don’t” in last October, telling Iran and Hezbollah to avoid joining Hamas’s savage attack. He issued the same warning in April, as Iran was preparing to strike Israel.

The administration also backed up its warnings by deploying significant military assets to the region. That might have helped prevent a Hezbollah invasion of Israel a year ago, but that is about the extent his warning’s effectiveness.

Hezbollah attacked anyway, just from the air. Just a day after 10/7, it began raining rockets on northern Israel in a year-long war of attrition that has left over 60,000 Israelis homeless. Despite Biden’s warnings, Iran now has twice fired an unprecedented amount of missiles at Israel, which could have inflicted untold damage on Israel if they had penetrated Israeli airspace and hit population centers. Fortunately, Israeli and American air defenses neutralized them.

Indeed, Biden’s commitment to Israel’s self-defense has been admirable. His U.S. deployment of military assets has critically helped Israel in its defensive actions. But it is not just Iran that Biden has been trying to deter, it is Israel, too. And in that he has been far more successful.

Repeatedly, over the past year, Biden has said “don’t” to Iran, but Iran and its proxies did; Biden helps defend Israel, then tells Israel “don’t.” The Biden administration has opposed every Israeli action that would truly deter the Iranian axis and enable actual victory, such as the ground incursion in Gaza, the conquest of Rafah, and the killing of Nasrallah. After the April 13 Iranian attack, Biden told Israel to “take the win.”

The same pattern is repeating itself again.

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Biden Is Helping Netanyahu Attack Iran – and Risking the Lives of US Troops in the Process

President Joe Biden’s decision to deploy the THAAD advanced missile defense system to Israel, along with roughly 100 US service members, reinforces an undeniable reality: Israel is the country most likely to drag the US into another unnecessary war in the Middle East – and Biden is the president most likely to oblige Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war wishes.

After a year of Netanyahu repeatedly violating Biden’s ostensive red lines and acting in contradiction to the US president’s expressed wishes, there is little to suggest that Biden has seriously tried to stop Israel’s carnage in Gaza or sought to prevent Netanyahu from broadening the war. Rather, Biden’s strategy appears to have been to pace Israel’s escalations while softening its edges to avoid the inevitable international outcry and push back from becoming prohibitive. Biden is managing Israel’s war rather than ending it.

It is against this backdrop that Biden’s decision to deploy US troops and THAAD missiles in Israel is best understood. While Biden has claimed opposition to further escalation in the region, his strategy has been to solely pressure and deter the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi and Syrian militias, and Hamas – from taking escalatory steps while actively reducing the cost for Israel to widen the war. 

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Survivors of Israeli Bombardment Face New Catastrophe: Epidemics, Amputations, Starvation

As the northern Gaza Strip is subjected to a fresh campaign of massacres and enforced starvation, doctors working elsewhere in Gaza say that a quieter threat is now sweeping across the territory: chronic disease and infection. 

One year into the conflict, attacks on civilians in the territory have continued to escalate, including bombings of hospitals and schools in the north that have inflicted a staggering number of civilian casualties. While clinics in the north have been overwhelmed by traumatic injuries from aerial bombings and other attacks, medical facilities in other parts of the Strip that are not presently the focus of this campaign have seen a relative decline in such injuries, doctors in Gaza told Drop Site News. 

Amid this lull in trauma cases in other parts of the Strip, the full impact of disease and malnutrition on the Palestinian population is becoming clear to medical authorities, as patients grow desperate for access to the meager healthcare infrastructure still operating in the territory. 

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Israel To Attack Iran Before Elections

The response to the Iranian attack: a senior official – the attack will come before the US presidential elections.

A senior official clarifies that the action will come when preparations for and coordination with the US are completed.  Jerusalem is very interested in being maximally coordinated with the administration in Washington. Israel, take into account that Iran will respond and is already preparing for it, reported Israeli journalist Amir Tsarfati.

“We are at war, and an attack on a training base on the home front is difficult and the results are painful. You operated well to treat and evacuate the wounded and injured. Embrace the bereaved families, accompany the wounded, and strengthen the commanders and soldiers.”

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Do they WANT American Troops to Die?

Biden Administration mismanagement – or worse – from day one of the latest Israeli multi-front war in the Middle East has led us to where we are today, at the brink of an all-out regional war with some 40,000 US troops and multiple US military bases in the region with targets on their back.

Biden’s blank check to Israel after the attacks of October 7, 2023, to launch multiple wars against its neighbors and carry out the mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has drawn the US right into the middle of a bubbling cauldron of WWIII. And rather than take a sober look at actual US national security interests, Biden and his neocon incompetents are busy adding fuel to the fire hanging on to the pipe dream that they could do what they failed to do so many times before: remake the Middle East in their neocon image.

According to an article in Politico this past week, while Biden Administration officials publicly urged restraint and a reduction in violence, they privately were working with the Israeli government to encourage a widening of Israel’s military operations to include its northern neighbor, Lebanon. Two top Biden Administration officials, Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift Israel’s military focus from the already-flattened Gaza northward to Lebanon. 

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US THAAD Missile Systems Being Shipped To Israel, Americans To Operate

The USA has begun to ship THAAD batteries to Israel. They are among the most advanced air defense systems in the world and can intercept a ballistic missile even outside the atmosphere.

American soldiers will reportedly be sent with a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) air defense system to Israel in order to prepare for intercepting ballistic missiles from Iran.

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Israel is Turning Gaza into ‘Uninhabitable Ruins’ – Doctors without Borders

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Friday that thousands of Palestinian civilians are trapped in Jabaliya camp while the Israeli occupation army carries its latest military operation in the area for the sixth consecutive day.

“Nobody is allowed to get in or out, anyone who tries is getting shot,” said MSF project coordinator Sarah Vuylsteke on the organization’s account on X.

Headlining its post as an “Update from northern Gaza”, the international organization revealed that five of its staff are trapped in the camp, expressing fear for their life.

“We were staying at the Al-Yemen- Al-Saeed Hospital, but they bombed it. About 20 people were killed. I don’t know what to do, at any moment we could die,” MSF driver Haydar who is trapped in Jabaliya was quoted as saying.

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Facebook Faces Heat for Blocking Report on Arrest of US Journalist in Israel

Facebook has come under scrutiny for censoring an article by Matt Orfalea that reported on the arrest of American journalist Jeremy Loffredo in Israel. Loffredo was arrested shortly after publishing a detailed investigative report on Iranian missile strikes near significant Israeli military and intelligence locations, including an Israeli Air Force base and Mossad headquarters.

Loffredo has since been released pending an investigation and is not allowed to leave the country.

Orfalea’s article highlighted the circumstances surrounding Loffredo’s arrest and his findings that reportedly contradicted some official Israeli statements about the missile attacks.

According to the Times of Israel, as noted by Orfaela, “The exact locations of such impacts and damage are barred from publication by the IDF censor.”

Facebook’s censorship of Orfalea’s piece raises significant concerns about freedom of the press and the role of social media platforms in moderating content related to sensitive geopolitical issues. Orfalea questioned the transparency and fairness of Facebook’s content moderation processes, especially given the public interest in Loffredo’s arrest and the broader implications for press freedom.

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Greater Israel and America’s Holy War

A recent video going viral shows Israel’s Finance Minister saying that the Jewish state must extend into Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. But he’s been saying this for over a year.

“Look, the Jordanians, for starters, did not like the statement, but even less the setting of the stage, with Smotrich's giving the statement, it gave the address with on the podium was a map of Greater Israel that includes parts of modern day Jordan. And that's what got Aman, to blast the statement. They said that his actions constituted an act of reckless incitement, as well as a violation of international norms and the peace agreement between Israel and Jordan.

The deputy speaker of Jordanian Parliament took it a step further, calling on, the Jordanian military, to quote, "take up arms" and saying that all options should be on the table for Jordan, given the extremist, statements.”
~ i24NEWS (Israel)

Some Israeli soldiers wear the Greater Israel patch on their uniforms. Many Israelis believe it is prophesied by god. And the radical American Prophecy Christians agree.

“But what I'm saying is I believe eventually our borders will extend from Lebanon to the great desert, which is Saudi Arabia, and then from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. And who's on the other side of the Euphrates? The Kurds and the Kurds are our friends. So we have the Mediterranean behind us, the Kurds in front of us, Lebanon, which really needs the umbrella of protection of Israel. And then we're going to take, I believe we're going to take, Mecca, Medina, and Mount Sinai and purify those places.”
~ Avi Lipkin

“You know, it's going to happen.”
~ Gary Stearman (Prophecy Watchers)

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has said that he wants his country to become a “big Israel.” And while young Ukrainians are sacrificed for the US State Department war with Russia, Jewish settlers from Israel are setting up homes in their place.

We are told that Israel is defending themselves from Hamas. But a leaked telegram from Israel states that Hamas served as a useful counter group against the PLO.

In 2019 Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.”

The CIA, MI6, Mossad, and their intelligence counterparts, have a long history of fostering terrorist groups and using them as the boogeyman to sell non-stop illegal wars in the Middle East.

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IDF in ‘Outrageous Threat’ to Irish UN Troops in Lebanon

An Irish-Israeli diplomatic crisis has been defused after Israel withdrew its invasion force from firing positions metres from a U.N. post in south Lebanon staffed by Irish peacekeepers.

Irish President Michael D. Higgins had called Israeli demands for U.N. peacekeepers to abandon their posts as its invading army crossed deeper into Lebanese sovereign territory “an outrageous threat.”

The incident underlined how Israel is increasingly alienating itself on the international stage while continuing to undermine institutions and instruments of international humanitarian law.

Satellite images published by Irish state broadcaster RTE showed two dozen Israeli Defense Force (IDF) military vehicles, including tanks, located just 60 metres from the boundary of U.N. outpost 6-52 last Saturday as it exchanged fire with Shia resistance group Hezbollah.

[The Washington Post reported Friday that Israel has wounded U.N. peacekeepers after Al Jazeera reported Thursday that “United Nations peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix tells UN Security Council that safety and security of peacekeepers in Lebanon is ‘increasingly in jeopardy’ as Israeli forces open fire on UNIFIL posts in country’s south, injuring two.”]

Since Monday 30 Irish soldiers stationed at UNP6-52, approximately 1km from the Lebanese town of Maroun El-Ras, had been bunkered down and isolated from their 300-odd comrades at Camp Shamrock, which lies West of Bint Jbeil and 7km from the border with Israel. 

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