Tag: perpetual war

Working Hard to Justify Israel’s Unprovoked Attack on Iran

Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.

Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:

Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.

That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.

In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.

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President Trump Told Netanyahu To ‘Keep Going’ in Iran

President Trump said on Wednesday that he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call a day earlier to “keep going” with his attacks on Iran.

The president told reporters that Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for his role in war crimes in Gaza, is a “good man” who has been treated “very unfairly” by his own country. “He’s a wartime president. Going through this nonsense — ridiculous,” Trump said.

Trump’s comments about Netanyahu come amid anticipation over whether or not the US will enter Israel’s war with Iran directly by launching airstrikes. The US has supported the assault by providing weapons and intelligence and intercepting Iranian missiles and drones, but so far hasn’t launched direct strikes of its own.

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Stop Netanyahu Before He Gets Us All Killed

For nearly 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has driven the Middle East into war and destruction.

The man is a powder keg of violence.

Throughout all the wars that he has championed, Netanyahu [who is wanted by the International Criminal Court] has always dreamed of the big one: to defeat and overthrow the Iranian government.

His long-sought war, just launched, might just get us all killed in a nuclear Armageddon, unless Netanyahu is stopped.

Netanyahu’s fixation on war goes back to his extremist mentors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin. The older generation believed that Zionists should use whatever violence — wars, assassinations, terror — is needed to achieve their aims of eliminating any Palestinian claim to a homeland.

The founders of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, called for exclusive Zionist control over all of what had been British Mandatory Palestine.

At the start of the British Mandate in the early 1920s, the Muslim and Christian Arabs constituted roughly 87 percent of the population and owned 10 times more land than the Jewish population.

As of 1948, the Arabs still outnumbered the Jews roughly two to one. Nonetheless, the founding charter of Likud (1977) declared that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

The now infamous chant, “from the River to the Sea,” which is characterized as anti-Semitic, turns out to be the anti-Palestinian rallying call of the Likud.

The challenge for Likud was how to pursue its maximalist aims despite their blatant illegality under international law and morality, both of which call for a two-state solution.

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The U.S. killed almost as many civilians in 52 days as the previous 23 years of U.S. action in Yemen

On May 6 2025, a ceasefire between Yemen’s Houthis and the United States ended the most extensive military campaign of President Trump’s second term to date. But what was the full human cost of Trump’s eight-week bombing campaign, and how does it compare to the history of U.S. military action in Yemen?

Airwars analysed every public allegation of civilian harm during the Trump campaign against the Iran-allied Houthis – dubbed Operation Rough Rider – and compared it to previous harm allegations from U.S. campaigns in Yemen, both targeting the Houthis under President Joe Biden and against Al-Qaeda in the decades before.

Key findings reveal:

  • In the period between the first recorded U.S. strike in Yemen to the beginning of Trump’s campaign in March, Airwars tracked at least 258 civilians allegedly killed by U.S. actions. In less than two months of Operation Rough Rider, Airwars documented at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes – nearly doubling the civilian casualty toll in Yemen by U.S. actions since 2002.
  • The two deadliest civilian harm incidents publicly recorded in the history of U.S. military operations in Yemen occurred during Trump’s campaign. Strikes on Ras Isa Port and Saada’s Remand Detention Prison allegedly killed at least 152 civilians and injured almost 200 others. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have now questioned the legality of both strikes.
  • The scale of the campaign resulted in an unprecedented level of civilian casualties per incident. During Operation Rough Rider, Airwars documented more incidents with higher numbers of casualties per strike than in any other U.S. campaign.
  • Some of the most advanced munitions in the U.S. military arsenal were deployed, including the first documented use of the StormBreaker in combat – a new precision-guided U.S bomb.
  • Civilian harm incidents were concentrated in the heavily populated cities of Sana’a and Saada. This differed from President Biden’s campaign against the Houthis, where civilian harm was typically dispersed across less heavily populated areas in western Yemen.

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AIPAC Demands Democrats “Stand With Israel” on Iran

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has been furiously urging House Democrats to release messages of steadfast support for Israel in its war with Iran, the Prospect and Drop Site News have learned, even as bipartisan lawmakers come together on a War Powers Act resolution to prevent U.S. troops or funds being used in yet another Middle East conflagration.

One member relayed that a colleague had received literally 100 phone calls from members of AIPAC and its allied pressure groups. AIPAC wants House Democratic members to state explicitly that they “stand with Israel” in its actions against Iran aimed at destroying the Islamic Republic’s nuclear capability, and add that Iran “must never have a nuclear weapon.”

In addition, AIPAC has taken particular pains to denigrate the moderate pro-Israel group J Street, both in private conversations with members of Congress and in public, picking a fight aimed at blocking any Democrats from using J Street as cover to deviate from AIPAC’s maximalist position. “They’re worried their members in Congress may start to shift toward J Street and they’re trying to head that off,” said an aide to one Democrat.

“I did see that AIPAC took issue with my statement,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state. “They were taking on J Street for endorsing me, which was ridiculous.” To get a sense of how extreme AIPAC’s demands are, note that J Street’s own statement merely calls for diplomacy while still supporting Israel. “We urge the Trump Administration to meaningfully pursue a diplomatic resolution to this conflict as quickly as possible while making clear the US will do what is necessary to defend Israel and US troops from retaliation,” the statement read.

AIPAC issued the same tweet in response to any statement that fell short of its expectations, such as one by Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, which called for a diplomatic resolution: “Consistent pattern: J Street endorsees issue anti-Israel statements. @jstreetdotorg is many things, but it’s not pro-Israel.”

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Pentagon Officer on Joint Chiefs Of Staff Planning Team Removed For Calling Israel a “Death Cult”

An officer serving on the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Levant desk, tasked with assessing Israel-related matters, was sacked by the Pentagon after social media posts revealed he labeled the Zionist Israeli regime a “death cult.”

Reports claim U.S. Army Capt. Nathan McCormack, who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J5 planning directorate for the Levant and Egypt branch, was recently expelled over posts critical of Israel’s war on Gaza and more.

“The information on the X account does not reflect the position of the Joint Staff or the Department of Defense,” the Pentagon noted in a statement to the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS). “The individual is being returned to his service while the matter is being investigated.”

“He will no longer be on the joint staff while the matter is being investigated,” the Pentagon wrote.

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Discredited Neocon Talking Points From The Iraq War Are Back, Lazily Re-Purposed For Iran

Remember all the infamous one-liners from the Global War on Terror? In the years after 9/11, when the neocon establishment in Washington was pushing ahead with its disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were everywhere. 

It’s a slam dunk case! We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. We’ll be greeted as liberators. Islam is a religion of peace. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom.

Those last two are direct quotes from President George W. Bush, the man most responsible — whether through extreme naiveté or extreme duplicity — for propagating these ridiculous slogans and using them to justify decades-long wars that ended in ignominy for the United States. You’d think that after Iraq and Afghanistan this kind of rhetoric would be totally discredited. But you’d be wrong.

Over the past few days, almost since the moment Israel began bombing Iran, we’ve seen the reappearance of almost all the old GWOT rhetoric. Then as now, the purpose is to justify a U.S. military adventure abroad and gaslight the American people into supporting regime change in Iran.

For those of us who were in high school and college during and immediately after 9/11, who saw the propaganda play out in real time, it’s an amazing thing to witness what’s happening now.

In particular, the point about needing to stop Iran before it gets a nuclear weapon is almost word-for-word how Iraq hawks argued for a preventative war against Saddam Hussein in 2003. Iraq’s WMDs had to be destroyed, we were told, before they could be used in a terror attack against the U.S. that would dwarf 9/11. 

For those keeping track, we have been hearing about Iran’s impending nuclear weapon for at least 20 years. Tehran, we’re told, is always just months or weeks away from having deployable nukes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Iran was getting “extremely close” to a nuclear weapon — in 1996.

Similarly, the point about how we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here — a ubiquitous line in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — is exactly what Netanyahu argued recently on ABC News. “You want these people to have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to your cities? Today, it’s Tel Aviv. Tomorrow, it’s New York. Look, I understand ‘America First.’ I don’t understand ‘America Dead.’” (It’s worth noting, too, that Netanyahu was a loud voice in the build-up to the Iraq War warning against Saddam’s non-existent nuclear program.)

Remember how we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq? That was Vice President Dick Cheney’s line. Turns out the Iranians are also waiting to be liberated and will greet western militaries with open arms! After all, God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom, right? According to Mark Levin, who is old enough to know better, isolationists “stand in the way of Trump and Netanyahu transforming the Middle East” — as if transforming the Middle East is both a feasible and desirable thing for the United States to do.

It’s the same with all these neocon arguments. Remember Ahmed Chalabi? He was the western-friendly Iraqi dissident politician and founder of the Iraqi National Congress, which became a major source of evidence of Iraq’s WMD program and ties to Al Qaeda for the Bush administration. Chalabi himself was at one point floated as a possible post-Saddam leader of Iraq.

Yet nearly all the information Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress provided to U.S. intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the war turned out to be false, including information from an Iraqi defector codenamed named “Curveball,” whose first-hand descriptions of mobile biological weapons factories wound up in intelligence dossiers that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. In the end, Chalabi’s fabrications were exposed (no WMDs were ever found in Iraq), and he was revealed as almost certainly an Iranian agent.

Now we have a new Chalabi: Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Shah of Iran, who this week released a pro-regime change video. “The Islamic Republic has come to an end and is falling,” he said. “What has begun is irreversible. The future is bright and together we will navigate this sharp turn in history. Now is the time to stand; it is time to take back Iran. May I be with you soon.”

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Suspected Israeli hackers claim to destroy data at Iran’s Bank Sepah

An anti-Iranian government hacking group with potential ties to Israel and a track record of destructive cyberattacks on Iran claimed in social media posts on Tuesday that it had destroyed data at Iran’s state-owned Bank Sepah.

The group — known as Gonjeshke Darande, or “Predatory Sparrow” — hacked the bank because they accused it of helping fund Iran’s military, according to one of the messages posted online.

The hack comes amid increasing hostilities between Israel and Iran, after Israel attacked multiple military and nuclear targets in Iran last week. Both sides have launched multiple missile attacks against each other in the days since.

Reuters could not immediately verify the attack on Bank Sepah. The bank’s website was offline on Tuesday and its London-based subsidiary, Bank Sepah International plc, did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Customers were having problems accessing their accounts, according to Israeli media.

Gonjeshke Darande did not respond to multiple messages sent via social media.

“Disrupting the availability of this bank’s funds, or triggering a broader collapse of trust in Iranian banks, could have major impacts there,” Rob Joyce, the former top cybersecurity official at the NSA, said in a post on X.

In 2022, Gonjeshke Darande claimed responsibility for a cyberattack against an Iranian steel production facility. The sophisticated attack caused a large fire at the facility, resulting in tangible, offline damage. Such attacks are usually beyond the capabilities of activist hackers, security experts say, and would be more in line with the capabilities of a nation state.

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Al-Qaeda Leader Makes Chilling Demand of Muslims in America

What is happening in Los Angeles these days is insurrection enough, but Sa’ad al-Awlaki, the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), wants much more. If he gets his way, America will be awash in blood, with the principal leaders of the Trump administration, above all the president himself, all assassinated. Al-Awlaki sees such assassinations as an Islamic religious duty, and made his case to Muslims in America, some of whom are already out on the streets in Los Angeles, on the basis of their Islamic responsibilities. Whether any will take heed remains to be seen.

In a video published on Sunday, al-Awlaki asserted that assassinating non-Muslim leaders was a form of Islamic jihad: “Anyone who can revive the tradition of assassinations and is near the leaders of apostasy – those who support the war in Gaza with money, aid, and logistics, the Jewish Arabs, like the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and all the rulers of the Arabian Peninsula – should not hesitate even for a moment. By Allah, [assassinations] are the greatest form of jihad today.” The “Jewish Arabs” are the Muslim leaders whose countries have accords with Israel, or who have, like Saudi Arabia, been working toward a rapprochement with the Jewish state largely behind the scenes.

As for assassinating leaders, that is indeed an Islamic tradition. As “The History of Jihad” explains in detail, in the twelfth century, a Shi’ite Muslim sect, the Nizari Ismailis, came to be known as the Assassins. With their planned murders of many of their individual opponents, the Assassins gave the English language its word for one who commits planned, premeditated murder, and foreshadowed the individual jihad terror attacks of the twenty-first century. 

The word “assassin” is derived from “hashashin,” or hashish smokers, a name given to the group by its foes and based on stories about their novel method of recruiting new members. Recruits would be given hashish and taken into a garden where beautiful women awaited them. Later, when they came to their senses, they were told that they had been in paradise and that they could return there by killing Allah’s enemies and being slain in the process, thereby taking hold of Allah’s promise of paradise to those who “kill and are killed” (Qur’an 9:111). 

Today, al-Awlaki has some very specific targets in mind. He called upon observant Muslims in countries that aren’t attacking Israel, and who “fear Allah’s punishment for abandoning their brothers in Palestine,” to take matters into their own hands and “strike the Jews, the American military bases in the region, and the American aircraft carriers that are looming in the sea here.”

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