Tag: perpetual war

A Monstrous Media & Murder in Gaza

Here is yet another example of stunningly craven journalism from The Guardian, entirely illustrative of what is going on across the British establishment media in its coverage of Israeli war crimes in Gaza for the past 18 months.

We are now a month on from Israel executing 15 paramedics and hiding their bodies in a mass grave. Since then, video footage has surfaced of that atrocity, showing Israeli soldiers firing on a convoy of emergency vehicles that were clearly marked and with their warning lights on.

We have had postmortems of the victims showing they were shot from close-range in the head and torso. And we’ve had eye-witness accounts of the killings.

All of that, of course, is on top of compelling circumstantial evidence. Israel sought to destroy the evidence of its war crime by crushing the emergency vehicles and then burying them, along with the bodies of the 15 crew members, presumably in the hope that they would decompose and make it hard to forensically determine exactly what had happened.

The latest evidence to emerge, reported by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper this week, shows that Israeli soldiers fired continuously for three and a half minutes on the convoy, despite the emergency vehicles being clearly marked.

According to details from an internal investigation by the Israeli military leaked to the paper, the soldiers fired from near-point-blank range and even while the emergency workers were trying to identify themselves.

(Not surprisingly, the other parts of the investigation, those made public, have been a whitewash, suggesting only “professional failures” and “operational misunderstandings”.)

In other words, this new evidence confirms that Israeli soldiers intentionally murdered most of the occupants of the emergency vehicles with a prolonged hail of bullets.

Those who survived, the postmortems suggest, were executed with shots to the head or torso. Then the evidence was hurriedly buried.

None of this is surprising. We have known for some time, as repeatedly reported by the Israeli media, that the Israeli military has created undeclared “kill zones”, where anything that moves is shot — even children, aid workers and emergency crews.

As has also been evident for most of the past 18 months, Israel is implementing a policy to destroy Gaza’s health sector, including its hospitals and ambulances, and killing or kidnapping medical staff —on top of wrecking the rest of the enclave’s infrastructure.

The goal is to force the Palestinian population out of Gaza, driving them into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai.

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50 Years On: US Elites Learned Nothing From the Vietnam Defeat

April 30, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of the final, definitive defeat of the U.S. military crusade in Vietnam.  The images of U.S. helicopters desperately flying American diplomats and Washington’s high-level South Vietnamese collaborators from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon effectively captured not only the chaotic environment, but also the extent of Washington’s overall policy debacle.  The outcome of the war was a humiliating defeat for the United States in every respect.  Vietnam’s reunification under a communist government was now an indisputable reality.  Indeed, the United States finally succumbed to the pressure to establish diplomatic relations with that government in 1995.

Washington’s failed effort over more than two decades to prevent that outcome was extremely expensive financially to the United States, with more than $141 billion expended.  Measured in terms of 2025 dollars, that amount would be approximately $838 billion.  Even worse was the terrible cost in blood.  The war took the lives of more than 58,000 American soldiers and caused an estimated 3.8 million casualties, both civilian and military, in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Widespread disillusionment about Washington’s armed crusade in Southeast Asia was evident in the United States, and for a few years, the disastrous experience seemed to inoculate the American public against supporting any similar adventures.  When Ronald Reagan’s administration flirted with providing military backing for corrupt client regimes in Central America, there was noticeable pushback, especially from Democrats in Congress.  “No more Vietnams” became a popular mantra throughout the country.

However, a closer look at public attitudes, especially the views of political elites in both parties, would have suggested that the change in Washington’s overall foreign policy orientation was less substantial than it seemed at first glance. There was little resistance to pro-war adventurism elsewhere in the world, as long as U.S. military personnel were not directly at risk.  For example, Washington’s policy of using Islamist rebels in Afghanistan to harass Soviet occupation forces received extensive bipartisan support.

Even direct U.S. military involvement received little push back, as long as a U.S. victory was quick and decisive.  That point was confirmed when U.S. forces invaded Grenada in 1983 and promptly ousted a pro-communist regime that had recently seized power.  The Reagan administration’s meddling in Lebanon’s civil war, though, showed that there remained an extensive public and elite aversion to American casualties.  The loss of 241 Marines in the bombing of the U.S. barracks outside Beirut immediately caused the administration to move the remaining troops to ships off shore, and that step was just a prelude to the departure of all U.S. forces from Lebanon.

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Ben Gvir to promote Gaza starvation plan at private Brooklyn ‘welcoming’ brunch

Fascist Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is set to appear on April 27 at the home of a Brooklyn businessman and Jewish power broker named Harry Adjmi, according to a private invitation. 

Update: Jeremy Loffredo, a reporter for The Grayzone, was turned away from the Midwood, Brooklyn venue which hosted Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir on April 25. He witnessed a heavy security presence outside, with about 100 Shomrim, or volunteer Orthodox Jewish civilian patrolmen on the scene, operating alongside NYPD officers. Loffredo said a small number of Palestine solidarity protesters were confronted by a much larger number of local Zionist supporters of Ben Gvir, who attempted to intimidate them while the civilian patrols obstructed their movements. Among the Zionists outside the venue were members of the Jewish Defense League, the terrorist outfit founded by the late Meir Kahane, who serves as the inspiration of Ben Gvir’s fascist Jewish Power (Otzmah Yehudit) Party in Israel.

The Grayzone has obtained a private invitation to a “welcoming” party for Itamar Ben-Gvir, a messianic settler who has been convicted in a Jerusalem court of abetting a terrorist organization. The party will be held at the home of Harry Adjmi, a Brooklyn-based businessman and influential local Jewish powerbroker who has donated to the campaigns of Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Republican President Donald Trump.

Adjmi confirmed to The Grayzone that he will be hosting Ben Gvir at his home in the Syrian Jewish bastion of Midwood, just off Ocean Avenue.

Hailing from the openly supremacist Jewish Power (Otzmah Yehudit) party, Ben Gvir is the most extreme figure to have ever served as an Israeli minister. A zealous supporter of torture and genocide, he has been filmed celebrating a settler terror attack in which a Palestinian baby was burned to death. Ben Gvir was also videotaped in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron leading a mob of fellow settlers in a violent assault on Palestinian merchants. The Biden administration considered banning him from entering the US in 2022. 

According to the invite to the Brooklyn brunch with Ben Gvir, “RSVP will be required for security.”

Ben-Gvir’s first stop after arriving in the US on April 23 was Mar-a-Lago, the personal residence of President Donald Trump, where he said “senior Republicans… expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid warehouses should be bombed.” 

Throughout the Israeli minister’s speaking tour, which included a stop at Yale University’s Shabtai society, which was co-founded by Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, he advanced his plan to “starve Gaza.” 100 students and 30 faculty members reportedly attended his speech.

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ICJ Hearings: Assessing Israel’s Responsibility for Gaza’s Humanitarian Disaster

Monday, April 28, 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is conducting public hearings regarding the request for an advisory opinion concerning Israel’s obligations in relation to the presence and activities of the United Nations, other international organisations, and third states in the context of the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Israel has accused the International Court of Justice of ‘anti-Semitism’ and has abstained from hearings on its duty to provide urgent humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories.

On 20 December 2024, the Secretary-General of the United Nations submitted a request for an advisory opinion to the Court via a letter. Subsequently, on 23 December 2024, the President of the Court issued an Order indicating that the United Nations, its Member States, and the observer State of Palestine were likely to provide relevant information regarding the inquiry presented to the Court for an advisory opinion.  Following this, the Court permitted the participation of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the League of Arab States, and the African Union in the proceedings, as per their request. A total of forty-five written statements were submitted to the Registry by various States and international organisations.

Since March 2, the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have not received any food or medical supplies due to Israel’s longest blockade of the region, which was subsequently followed by the breakdown of a two-month ceasefire two weeks later. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has begun hearings in The Hague (NL) to assess Israel’s accountability for the humanitarian crisis affecting Gaza amid its conflict with Hamas…

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Bringing Back Medium Range Ballistic Missiles Fast Tracked Under Proposed $150B Defense Boost

The U.S. Army could be in line to get nearly $640 million in extra funding for new medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM), including ones capable of hitting ships at sea.

Work on MRBMs, a long-range strike capability the Army has not had since the end of the Cold War, is one of a slew of efforts that would be accelerated by a $150 billion defense spending package recently proposed by members of Congress. The Army is already looking at a medium-range version of its Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) short-range ballistic missile, but the legislation on the table now may also point to a new design in the works.

The current Republican Party chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees rolled out the proposed multi-billion-dollar defense spending legislation yesterday. If passed and signed into law, it would provide funds to accelerate work on a host of advanced capabilities across the U.S. military, including, but certainly not limited to the Air Force’s F-47 and Navy’s F/A-XX sixth-generation stealth fighter programs, the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, a new sea-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missile, new medium landing ships for the U.S. Marine Corps, and President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Additional funding to help expand the U.S. defense industrial base to meet these and other demands, as well as spur further research and development, is also part of the package.

When it comes to Army MRBMs, the spending plan includes four separate provisions amounting to a combined $639 million:

  • “$175,000,000 for production capacity expansion for next-generation Army medium-range ballistic missiles”
  • “$50,000,000 for the accelerated development of Army next-generation medium-range anti-ship ballistic missiles”
  • “$114,000,000 for the production of Army next-generation medium-range ballistic missiles”
  • “$300,000,000 for the production of Army medium-range ballistic missiles”

The legislation does not name any specific Army MRBM program, and TWZ has reached out for more information.

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Meet Russia’s real-life ‘Americans’ — spies hiding in plain sight

Ann Foley, a part-time real estate agent, lived a middle-class, all-American lifestyle with her husband, Don, and their two sons, in Cambridge, Mass., home of many of America’s most prestigious universities and think tanks.

But the likeable, friendly couple had a very secret life.

Ann was, in fact, Elena Vavilova, a deep-cover spy trained by the secret Russian intelligence agency, the notorious KGB. Don, her seemingly pleasant husband, was actually Andrei Bezrukov, also a KGB agent.

In June 2010, the couple, both illegals in the US, was arrested by the FBI.

In New York City, meanwhile, Anna Chapman also worked in real estate, but lived a far different lifestyle than Ann Foley. Voluptuous and flame-haired, Chapman had a reputation for flirting with her potential property  clients — the Big Apple’s men of power and wealth.

But the two women, Foley and Chapman, did have one commonality.

Chapman, too, was a secret Russian agent here to spy on America.

In 2010, she was arrested with nine other Russian spies, with authorities breaking up one of the largest intelligence networks in the US since the end of the Cold War.

It took decades for the FBI to unravel Russia’s most secret spy program. Now author Shaun Walker, in “The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West” (Knopf), has written a riveting and revelatory history of the Soviet Union’s spy program that asks the reader — do you really know who your neighbors are?

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Moscow accuses Ukrainian troops of killing civilians seeking food

The Russian Investigative Committee has collected new evidence and gathered accounts of alleged war crimes committed during the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk Region, including killings of civilians looking for food and murders during widespread looting.

The agency highlighted a handful of new cases over the week, sharing the accounts of those who survived the Ukrainian occupation. A woman from the village of Plekhovo testified that Ukrainian troops murdered her son in early September 2024, as he tried to retrieve some food from his house.

“According to the mother’s testimony, the man’s body was found with multiple gunshot wounds and his hands tied,” Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said. The woman also testified that the Ukrainians went on a looting spree immediately after entering the region in early August last year, breaking into homes and garages to steal people’s belongings, as well as their cars.

A similar incident was reported by a resident of Bondarevka, a village near the town of Sudzha. The woman told investigators that Ukrainian forces killed a local man who had gone to get some bread. The civilian was gunned down as he rode his bike in the street, according to the eyewitness.

A resident of Dmitryukov, a small village to the southeast of the city of Sudzha, testified that his father was killed by Ukrainian troops, who demanded his car, threatening to burn the vehicle and his house down. Although the man surrendered his vehicle, the Ukrainians still shot and killed him.

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Putin announces 3-day ceasefire in May to mark 80 years since WW2 victory

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday declared a three-day ceasefire in the war with Ukraine next month to mark the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union and its allies in World War Two.

The Kremlin said the 72-hour ceasefire would run from the start of May 8 to the end of May 10.

“All military actions are suspended for this period. Russia believes that the Ukrainian side should follow this example,” it said in a statement.

“In the event of violations by the Ukrainian side, Russia’s armed forces will give an adequate and effective response.”

There was no immediate response from Kyiv to the unilateral truce announcement – the second by Putin in quick succession, following a 30-hour Easter ceasefire that each side accused the other of violating countless times.

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Zelensky admits Ukraine can’t reclaim Crimea by force

Ukraine does not possess the military might necessary to retake Crimea by force, Vladimir Zelensky has conceded. The peninsula joined Russia in 2014 following a referendum.

The vote was held in the wake of a Western-backed coup in Kiev earlier that year and amid fears of forced Ukrainization of the predominantly Russian-speaking region. Ukraine has continued to claim sovereignty over Crimea, repeatedly vowing to take it back.

On Friday, Interfax-Ukraine quoted Zelensky as saying that “it’s true what President Trump says… that Ukraine does not have enough weapons to regain control of the Crimean Peninsula by force.”

The Ukrainian leader expressed hope however that further sanctions and diplomatic pressure on Russia would be conducive to future discussions over “territorial issues,” but only after Kiev and Moscow have sealed a ceasefire.

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