Tag: perpetual war

Israel Orders UK Jerusalem Consulate Closed And Expels British Diplomats Over West Bank Sanctions

Israel began to take action against Britain on Tuesday after twelve Western countries including Britain imposed trade restrictions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israel ordered the closure of the British consulate in Jerusalem within 30 days and expelled British representatives from two international coordination centers in the country, including the International Support Center for Gaza in Kiryat Gat.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced the retaliatory package after UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband confirmed that Britain — joined by France, Canada, and nine other countries — would ban imports of all goods originating from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, along with certain services including financing, construction, infrastructure, and real estate related to those settlements.

Sa’ar said the UK representatives at the Gaza coordination centers would be expelled within a month, British training operations for Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank would be terminated, and more than a dozen British politicians would be barred from entering Israel.

The UK had briefed the Trump administration before the announcement. U.S. officials confirmed Trump was briefed but that the White House did not ask London to hold off — signaling Washington’s ambivalence. American Ambassador Mike Huckabee said the U.S. “takes a different approach to the settlements” but expressed concern and said the intent could be achieved by other means.

Israel’s government called the sanctions “a political attempt to impair our sovereignty and prevent us from defending our citizens and interests.” A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office added: “These measures will not succeed in deterring us.”

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Israeli Legal Group Unveils ‘Self-Defense’ App to Protect IDF Veterans from Foreign Arrest Campaigns

Israeli legal advocacy group Shurat HaDin has launched a new app designed to protect Israel Defense Forces (IDF) veterans from efforts to arrest them while traveling abroad, with the organization’s president warning that pro-Palestinian groups are actively tracking Israeli soldiers and pursuing legal action against them in foreign countries.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder and president of Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center, told Breitbart News that the threat has become serious enough that Israeli diplomatic officials are regularly warning veterans about potential efforts to detain them.

“It’s a real danger because pro-Palestinian organizations, like Hind Rajab or the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, are tracing IDF soldiers,” Darshan-Leitner said. “Every week there are soldiers who get warnings from the Israeli consulate or the Israeli ambassador to leave a certain country because of an arrest warrant that these organizations are seeking against them.”

Shurat HaDin launched the app, called Shachpatz — Hebrew for “bulletproof vest” — in late August to give veterans a centralized system for preparing to travel, receiving warnings while abroad, and obtaining assistance if they encounter legal trouble.

The app incorporates travel warnings and alerts from Israel’s Foreign Ministry and IDF, legal information, emergency and diplomatic contacts, a pre-travel checklist, and instructions explaining what travelers should do if questioned or detained.

Darshan-Leitner said the organization has also assembled a “war room” of more than 600 lawyers across 17 countries prepared to provide emergency legal assistance.

“If something happens, we put it on the app. If somebody else hears about it, they immediately put it on the app,” she explained. “It has instructions on what to do to try to avoid such an incident, how to take care of yourself before you travel, what to be alert to when you travel, and what to do if you get interrogated or arrested.”

Travelers can also report their own experiences, allowing Israelis to alert one another about hostile incidents or identify destinations where they have been treated particularly well.

“You know, they protected us, so now we have to protect them,” Darshan-Leitner said. The goal, she added, is to create “a community of travelers from Israel” capable of warning one another when problems arise.

Darshan-Leitner identified Belgium, South Africa, Canada, Thailand, and the Netherlands among countries where she believes Israeli veterans face heightened legal risks, pointing particularly to countries whose legal systems recognize forms of universal jurisdiction.

She sharply rejected the premise that foreign courts should be policing the conduct of Israeli soldiers, arguing that Israel maintains its own system for investigating allegations of misconduct by its forces.

“Israel does not need a foreign country to govern its soldiers,” she said. “Israel has a very strong law-enforcement system that prosecutes soldiers if they need to.”

Darshan-Leitner argued that the groups pursuing Israeli veterans are ultimately interested less in securing convictions than in generating the spectacle of an Israeli soldier being detained abroad.

“All they need to claim a victory is a photo of an IDF soldier arrested in a foreign airport,” she said.

Such an arrest, she warned, could have repercussions far beyond the individual involved by making reservists reluctant to travel and potentially causing young Israelis preparing for military service to reconsider joining combat units.

“People who served in reserve 300 days or 600 days and now want to go on vacation to chill out shouldn’t be afraid to go everywhere in the world,” she said.

Shurat HaDin’s involvement in the issue predates the current war. Darshan-Leitner said the organization has spent roughly 15 years fighting legal actions targeting Israeli soldiers and officials, including proceedings involving the International Criminal Court.

The organization has also pursued legal actions of its own against Hamas and Palestinian Authority officials and challenged international legal proceedings against Israeli officials.

Earlier this year, Shurat HaDin filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court against Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and other senior Spanish officials, alleging that Madrid enabled Iran’s “terror machine” through the export of dual-use components to the Islamic Republic.

Darshan-Leitner described Shachpatz as an extension of that broader legal campaign, but one aimed directly at protecting individual Israelis before an attempted detention can become an international incident.

“This time, the act is actually an act of self-defense,” she said, “to defend the IDF soldiers and do anything possible in order to prevent such arrest warrants.”

Because Shachpatz had been available for only about a week when Darshan-Leitner spoke with Breitbart News, the app itself had not yet been used to intervene in an attempted arrest, although Shurat HaDin had previously assisted Israelis facing legal threats abroad through its existing network.

Thousands of people had already downloaded the app, she said.

“We don’t want to see it happen,” Darshan-Leitner said of an arrest attempt requiring the app’s emergency resources, “but I’m sure it will become handy, unfortunately.”

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Ukraine Peace Talks: No Deal Reached, More War Expected

U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held more than three hours of talks with Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Sept. 5, marking their first visit to the city since January.

In recent months, the war in Ukraine has received less attention as Washington has focused U.S. foreign policy and military resources on the conflict with Iran. The Moscow visit was intended to revive negotiations that had been stalled for nearly eight months.

The Kremlin meeting concluded without an immediate announcement about its outcome. Putin’s adviser Yuri Ushakov described the talks as “constructive and extremely frank.” He said the two sides discussed resolving the war, economic issues, and potential “mutually beneficial Russian-American projects.”

Ushakov told Russian reporters that “note was made of the Russian army’s tangible advances in the combat zone.” The passive, unattributed phrasing is typical of Kremlin readouts of closed-door diplomatic sessions. Moscow was placing its military progress on the record with the Americans, likely to project strength and shape its negotiating position.

Ushakov added that the talks needed to address the “root causes” of the conflict. “Root causes” is longstanding Kremlin language, used since before the 2022 invasion, for Russia’s underlying justifications for the war.

These include Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and broader Western military alignment; Ukraine’s governance and political orientation, which Russia has at times framed around “denazification” and the protection of Russian speakers; and the post-Cold War security architecture in Europe, which Russia argues expanded NATO into its sphere.

In this framing, Russia’s demands go beyond retaining the territory it currently occupies. They also include Ukraine renouncing NATO membership and reducing the size of its armed forces. Moscow separately said it remains confident that it can achieve its military objective of seizing the remainder of eastern Ukraine.

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Washington Is Underwriting the Proliferation It Went to War To Stop

The Trump administration sent Congress its civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. Asked what the deal permits, the president wrote: There will be no enrichment of material. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, has said the opposite. The agreement gives Riyadh a pathway to enrich uranium on its own soil, and in doing so the potential for a Saudi nuclear Bomb. To placate fears Wright has put enrichment years down the road but not in doubt. Wright is describing the document. Trump is describing a country he is at war with to prevent from doing exactly this.

The war is meanwhile six months old and the reader knows its shape. American and Israeli aircraft killed the Supreme Leader of Iran in February to end all Iranian enrichment and prevent Iran from ever building a weapon. It has not ended. A settlement deadline passed on 17 August with the president in no rush, and his Treasury Secretary now promises an economic D-Day, the toughest sanctions in the country’s history, on the concession that the bombing did not do what was promised. Enrichment is the thing the war is supposedly being waged for. It is also the thing the Saudi contract is for.

The agreement is a 123 agreement, the legal instrument that lets American firms build a foreign country’s nuclear program, and the Energy Department’s announcement calls it peaceful, upholding the highest standards of nonproliferation. Not so fast. Past American deals kept enrichment out of the recipient’s hands, because low-enriched fuel for a reactor and the highly enriched metal of a warhead come off the same cascades; the separative work that makes the first does most of the work of the second. The Saudi deal instead preserves the enrichment option and, on the reporting, opens a route to reprocess spent fuel, the plutonium road to a bomb that runs parallel to the uranium one. In place of international inspection it substitutes a bilateral arrangement whose terms are not public.

There is a standard for this, and it was set relatively recently and right next door. When a US firm built the Emirates’ reactors in 2009, the UAE volunteered the strictest safeguards on offer, renounced enrichment and reprocessing outright, and today draws a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power without owning a single centrifuge. Saudi Arabia has refused that bargain. It has declined to sign the Additional Protocol, the enhanced-inspection regime that 144 states accept and that lets the International Atomic Energy Agency hunt for undeclared sites, and in 2024 it rescinded even the small-quantities protocol it once held. The country being handed the fuel cycle is the one refusing the cameras. The country being bombed to give up enrichment, Iran, was under those cameras, and before the war the IAEA director general said there was no proof of a systematic Iranian move toward a weapon.

The American reassurances offered for the Saudi deal deserve scrutiny. The deal is called conditional: the president announced, the day after his own Secretary signed it, that it would proceed only if Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords and normalized relations with Israel, a term absent from the agreed text. A condition attached by afterthought can be lifted by afterthought. The deal is called subject to congressional review: in practice, lawmakers have ninety days to pass a resolution killing it, the clock can be stopped and has been stopped before, and if the two chambers do nothing it takes effect. Congress must muster a veto-proof majority to halt what it never voted for. Silence is assent. Some of the members are not silent. In November a group of them wrote to the secretary of state warning that the deal could enable Saudi Arabia to produce a nuclear bomb, and reminding him that he had once, as a senator, demanded the gold standard himself.

To see why enrichment is a reason for war in Tehran and a business line in Riyadh, look at what Saudi Arabia has already bought. In September last year, days after Israel bombed Doha and Washington did nothing, the kingdom signed a mutual defense pact with Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and holds an estimated 170 weapons. Any attack on one, the pact says, is an attack on both. Asked whether it covered the arsenal, a Saudi official called it a comprehensive agreement encompassing all military means. Pakistan’s defense minister said the capabilities his country holds will be made available; once the sentence had done its work he said nuclear weapons were not on the radar. The saying and the unsaying are not a muddle to be resolved. They are the product. Riyadh takes the deterrent value of a Pakistani umbrella and the deniability of an official denial, and the world is left to guess. This is called strategic ambiguity and has been applied by Israel for decades. Three weeks ago the arrangement widened: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, extending the same all-for-one clause across three states, with Pakistani troops and aircraft already deployed on Saudi soil.

This is the government the United States has decided can be trusted with enrichment. Its crown prince has said, on the record and more than once, that if Iran gets a weapon Saudi Arabia will follow suit. Its own officials tie the nuclear question openly to Iran’s. It shelters under a foreign bomb it will not confirm and refuses the inspections Iran accepted. Nonproliferation experts read the deal for what it is, a US-blessed hedging strategy toward a bomb option, and say so.

There is one more fact, and it does not go in a footnote, because the war was sold on the memory of exactly this kind of fact. Fifteen of the nineteen men who flew airliners into American buildings on 11 September 2001 were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was born in the kingdom, a son of one of its richest families. None of the nineteen was Iranian. The state that produced the hijackers and the man who directed them is being handed a path to enrichment. The state that produced none of them is being currently bombed back into the stone age.

What connects the two decisions is money, and it runs through one family. Jared Kushner ran Middle East policy from the Trump White House and cultivated the Saudi crown prince throughout it. Six months after he left office, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund put $2 billion into his new and untested firm. The fund’s own screening panel had recommended against it, finding the operation unsatisfactory in all aspects and the fees excessive. It was overruled by the fund’s chairman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man the CIA concluded had ordered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and cut apart, and whom Kushner had defended. The kingdom pays Kushner’s firm about 1.25 percent of $2 billion a year on that money, – do the math. The House committee that examined the arrangement called it the appearance of a quid pro quo for his foreign-policy work. The president’s son-in-law draws a continuous income from the Saudi state while the president tells the public, falsely, the Saudi state is not getting the thing it wants most, enrichment.

No investigation, if there was one, has shown the money bought the policy. What can be set down is narrower and still hard to look away from. A denial as flat as no enrichment, said over a document that permits enrichment, by a man whose Energy Secretary confirms the pathway and whose family is on the Saudi payroll, is not the language of a president who has not considered the future the document contains.

Set the pieces in a row and the shape stops looking like contradiction. The United States is bombing one country to deny it enrichment while writing enrichment into a contract for another. It invokes nonproliferation in the press release for the act that proliferates. It strikes the state that admits inspectors and sells the fuel cycle to the state that turns them away. It bombs the country that produced no hijackers and arms the country that produced fifteen. Each decision has a reason, and the reasons are not the ones on the label.

The label is where the empire now does its work. A power able to enforce nonproliferation would not need to kill a head of state to attempt it, and would not find itself six months later reaching for sanctions because the strikes had failed. Its clients are interpreting the weakness for exactly what it is. They watched Doha burn and Washington stay silent, watched their own refineries burn and the guarantor offer only more war, and concluded that the protector cannot protect. So they bought a Pakistani deterrent and widened it into a three-state pact, and they extracted an American enrichment pathway as the price of a normalization the president wanted more than they did. The order the United States built and policed for eighty years is fraying at the hands of the government that claims to enforce it, and the fraying does not stop at the Gulf. The same erosion of trust in the American umbrella is visible in Seoul and in Warsaw. What a disarmament body called a tradable security service is what the end of an order looks like from inside it. The enforcer has begun to auction the thing it once forbade, because the auction is the leverage it has left.

No enrichment, the president wrote. In a few years, when the feasibility study is filed and the centrifuges the contract allows begin to turn, the sentence will read as the first official confirmation that the enrichment was always coming.

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America’s War on Iran Has Always Been a Bipartisan Effort

American bombs are now falling on Tehran, and while Donald Trump ultimately pulled the trigger, administrations before him—Republican and Democrat alike—constructed the gun, and even loaded it.

In 1995, US president Bill Clinton issued executive orders banning US investment tied to Iran’s petroleum sector and, soon after, most US trade with and investment in Iran. His administration justified the sanctions with an accusation that would later be used against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq not even a decade later: “Iran’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction” and their alleged support for terrorism.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which had visited Iran a few years prior to inspect their nuclear activity, reported no evidence of nuclear weapons.

In 1996, Congress followed up with the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which passed 415-0 in the House, and by unanimous consent in the Senate,targeting foreign and US companies investing more than $20 million a year in Iran’s energy sector.

Much like embargoes on Iraq, which were linked to catastrophic civilian deaths, over time, American sanctions on Iran decimated the economy and its people by devaluing currency, shrinking living standards, and limiting access to food and medicine.

In 2000, a report by a neoconservative think-tank called Project for the New American Century warned that even if Saddam Hussein were removed, “the need for a substantial American force presence” in the region would remain because “Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests in the Gulf” as Iraq has.

Several prominent figures involved with the think-tank later joined the Bush administration, including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Bolton.

In 2001, shortly after 9/11, Iran offered counter-terrorism assistance to the US, but instead, President Bush lumped them in with Iraq and North Korea under an umbrella he termed the “Axis of Evil”. Clinton-era sanctions were kept in place, new ones were added, and covert measures began to undermine the Iranian establishment.

That same year, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force by a vote of 420-1 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate, granting the president sweeping authority to use military action against those connected to the 9/11 attacks. Although Iran had no connection to 9/11, the deliberately broad language of the bill created a permanent legal framework for military action across the Middle East without requiring new congressional approval.

Towards the end of Bush’s final term in office, a 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (a comprehensive report involving all US intelligence agencies) concluded with “high confidence” that Iran was not currently building a nuclear weapon.

Still, Barack Obama’s policies continued beating the drums of war.

In 2010, he significantly expanded financial sanctions on Iran’s oil, gas, and banking sectors, measures that severely restricted access to essential medicines in Iran, which passed the House 408–8 and the Senate 99–0.

At the same time, his administration intensified Bush-era cyber operations against Iranian nuclear facilities. The Stuxnet computer worm, reportedly developed by the US and Israel, was credited with disabling hundreds of centrifuges and delaying enrichment efforts, even though the nuclear program continued to show no signs of weaponization.

In 2015, Obama concluded a nuclear deal that imposed strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. But its premise was a masterclass in propaganda that worked to build further consensus for war, first by painting Iran as an aggressor, and second by continuing to perpetuate a narrative that it was interested in pursuing nuclear weapons, despite continued evidence to the contrary.

Meanwhile, far more aggressive American allies in the region—namely Israel—were exempt from such scrutiny, with their own nuclear stockpile shrouded in secrecy and tucked away from international oversight of any kind.

After the nuclear deal lifted certain sanctions in 2016, Iran’s economy rebounded. And yet at the same time, US and Israeli hawks continued to fret, alternating their fearmongering and moving the goalpost away from Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons and instead towards their regional influence and ballistic missile program.

Republicans and Democrats joined together the following year to pass new sanctions on Iran’s missile program, along with entities tied to the Revolutionary Guard. These measures were approved with a vote of 419-3 in the House, 98-2 in the Senate.

Fortunately for the many warmongers adorning both major political parties, the arrangement with Iran had been signed late into Obama’s second term, paving the way for a new president to conveniently overturn it.

In 2018, Donald Trump did exactly that. His administration unilaterally withdrew from the deal and reimposed sanctions. In April 2019, the US designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s most powerful military and political force, as a foreign terrorist organization. The following year, Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, head of the Guard Corps’ Quds Force, a dramatic escalation.

Taking office in January 2021, the administration of Joe Biden largely maintained Trump’s “maximum pressure” framework, leaving existing sanctions in place, along with Trump’s designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

And while Biden campaigned on rejoining the nuclear deal, once in office, he demanded Iranian compliance as a prelude to sanction relief, which effectively made it impossible given growing Iranian distrust for the US.

In late 2022, after being asked about the nuclear deal by a woman appearing to wear a hair ribbon in Iran’s flag colors, Biden reportedly responded that the deal was “dead”, adding, “I know they don’t represent you, but they will have a nuclear weapon.”

Two years later, an assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that Iran “has undertaken activities that better position it to produce one, if it so chooses” but added that “the Intelligence Community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”

Even so, in October 2024, when asked who she thought America’s “greatest adversary” was, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris replied: “I think there’s an obvious one in mind, which is Iran.”

Harris, like Trump, repeated the lie that Iran was in the business of pursuing nukes, saying the US “will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. Period.” And like Trump, she maintained that “all options” remained on the table to keep them from obtaining nuclear weapons, including military force.

In 2025, a majority of Democrats voted with Republicans to hand the Trump administration $900 billion in military spending, which provided funding for Pentagon operations, weapons procurement, overseas deployments, and military readiness programs for the upcoming fiscal year.

At nearly every stage, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, along with presidents from both major parties, have laid the foundation for a war on Iran.

The Bush administration lied its way into an invasion of Iraq, but nobody was held accountable. The Obama administration expanded the Bush-era Authorization for Use of Military Force to include drone-bombings in at least seven different countries, along with the targeting of US citizens accused of terrorism, and again, nobody was held accountable. Trump built on these precedents during his first term not only by amping up Obama’s drone strikes, but also by assassinating an Iranian commander. Again, no accountability. The Biden administration funded Israel’s flattening of the Gaza Strip while also shielding it from repercussions at the United Nations and International Criminal Court, effectively demonstrating that the so-called rules of international law were never fair, but instead, selectively applied.

Over time, escalation itself became normalized.

Economic warfare became cyber sabotage. Cyber sabotage became targeted assassinations. What were once extraordinary war powers became permanent executive authorities. By the time Trump entered the White House for his second term, the framework for America’s long-awaited war on Iran was already in place.

All he had to do was pull the trigger.

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How Britain Tried To Rig the Trial of a Genocide Opponent – and Lost

The jury took just two hours. Tony Greenstein – Jewish socialist, anti-Zionist – had faced fourteen years under the Terrorism Act for three social media posts and a blog article opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Crown called it “inviting support for Hamas.” The jury called it something else.

Section 12 of the Terrorism Act makes it an offense to invite support for a proscribed organization. Greenstein’s reference to a “Gaza ghetto uprising”, it argued, amounted to support for Hamas. Three social media posts and a blog article. The bill the State was demanding for those words – fourteen years.

Judge Sarah Plaschkes repeatedly objected when Greenstein brought the wider historical-political context of Palestine/Israel into the courtroom – warning him against treating the proceedings as a political forum. When the closing speech came, Greenstein was by now so concerned about what might happen to his barrister that he decided to address the jury himself (no doubt considering what had happened to Barrister Rajiv Menon KC – more of whom later). For thirty minutes he examined the prosecution case and the context in which his posts had been written. The jury wasn’t asked to lay aside the offending words; instead, he guided the jurors in an articulate reading (see his address to the jury, here) in which the world in which they’d been written was made clear (full trial coverage at the Canary, here).

But this court was rigged and thus determined to keep all context out of the courtroom. Nevertheless, despite Judge Plaschkes’ hostile interruptions, Greenstein’s speech laid bare the realities the prosecution had no interest in facing: his opposition to Hamas evident in dozens of articles he’d penned and published on his platform over the years; and Israel’s genocide in Gaza after October 2023. He spelled out the difference between supporting Hamas and defending the right of Palestinians to resist Israeli oppression, and the obvious point that the posts in contention clearly did not express support for Hamas.

Greenstein recounted to the jury how his grandparents fled Poland before the War, and most of those left behind perished in Treblinka. To him, Greenstein told the jury, the Holocaust was not history, but inheritance. He invoked the story of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a parallel of Gaza: young Jewish men and women rising up against the SS with smuggled pistols against tanks, knowing it was hopeless yet choosing resistance anyway. October 7th was Gaza’s uprising. The judge objected.

Once Greenstein had finished speaking (to a round of applause from the public gallery), Judge Plaschkes addressed the court to say that she had considered referring Greenstein for contempt of court. She then dismissed his address as a “rambling speech delivered by an old man”. An extraordinary turn of phrase in a criminal trial in which Greenstein was about to find out whether he was to be sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper added Palestine Action to the UK’s list of proscribed organizations in July 2025, under section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2000. But proscription criminalizes more than membership. Up to fourteen years in prison can follow under section 12, which makes it an offence to “invite support for a proscribed organization” or to “express an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization…” That was the provision the Crown used to prosecute Tony Greenstein, and it applies right now to public expressions of support for Palestine Action. Serious concerns over freedom of expression and peaceful assembly were raised by a group of five UN Special Rapporteurs over proscribing a group for property destruction.

On 6 August 2024 activists from Palestine Action staged a break-in at Elbit Systems, in Filton, near Bristol.  It’s an Israeli defense company with British operations supplying equipment to the IDF. They entered facilities, sabotaged machinery and hindered production they regarded as part of Israel’s war-making infrastructure. During the parliamentary debate on the proscription order, it was argued that Palestine Action had targeted only industrial facilities, and not civilians. The government went ahead with proscription anyway.

Rajiv Menon KC represented one of the six defendants in the February 2026 Filton Trial. All six were acquitted of aggravated burglary but the jury failed to agree on criminal damage. At the May retrial, four were convicted. Menon’s closing speech was a masterclass and invoked the 1670 Bushell case – a landmark ruling on jury independence from judicial interference, arguing that the judge could not direct a conviction. Judge Jeremy Johnson then referred Menon for contempt, a referral the Court of Appeal overturned on procedural grounds in May before Johnson referred to it correctly in June.

The Filton defendants were acquitted of the most serious charge – the barrister who defended them is now facing contempt proceedings for the way he did it.

So what lies behind all this courtroom drama is a routine machinery. Proscription – the government’s designation of an organization as terrorist – takes effect by order of the Home Secretary. It falls to the barrister to gauge how far a closing speech can go before crossing the line into contempt, while the judge cautions against political argument. Indeed, the evidence shows that judges are increasingly directing what juries are allowed to hear before threatening barristers with contempt. To an outside observer there is little sign of a conflict – yet behind these routine procedures is something damning: what the jury doesn’t get to hear – could mean years in prison.

And, of course, the elephant in the room is that Britain is directly implicated in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In September 2024, as the government suspended thirty arms export licenses to Israel, Foreign Secretary David Lammy told Parliament that “there exists a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law”. Thirty licenses suspended out of three hundred and fifty. Britain would also continue to supply F-35 components through the global parts pool serving Israel, with the government arguing that withdrawal would undermine allied security. British weapons armed a state committing a genocide despite their supposed withdrawal.

The state that arms Israel prosecutes those who oppose it.

The Crown had brought three posts, a blog article and an accusation of terrorism before the jury. But Greenstein stood on that essential context – despite the hostile judge’s interjections. And a mere two hours after retiring – the jurors returned with a unanimous verdict of not guilty.

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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up – Ukraine Wants To Pay For Its Bombs With OnlyFans

Ukraine’s parliament is weighing a bill that would legalize pornography production so the state can tax OnlyFans creators and funnel the proceeds straight into the defense budget. The measure, co-authored by opposition lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak, cleared its first reading in July and now sits awaiting a second vote. Fenix International, the parent company of OnlyFans, already handed Ukrainian tax authorities records showing 7,900 locals pulled in $131 million on the platform last year. Zhelezniak claims legalization could yield roughly $25 million annually, enough to buy about 30,000 drones.

That figure looks microscopic next to Ukraine’s stated annual defense requirement of $120 billion. The gap underscores how far the country has been reduced to scraping for loose change while the larger conflict grinds on. Current law still treats pornography as a criminal offense, with penalties reaching seven years in prison for production, distribution, or even possession. Tax officials, however, have been chasing the same creators for unpaid levies on their earnings. The result is a perfect trap: pay the taxes and risk prosecution for the underlying activity, or withhold the taxes and face charges for evasion, writes the Wall Street Journal.

One prominent creator, Svitlana Dvornikova, who claims over a million subscribers, has flown repeatedly to France and Spain to film content and says she has already remitted $900,000 in taxes. Police raided her home anyway, seizing electronics and $200,000 in cash she had set aside for further payments. She filed a petition to President Zelensky that gathered 25,000 signatures. Tax lawyer Lesia Mykhalenko, who has represented more than 100 OnlyFans models, notes that the existing statutes simply overload the courts at a moment when resources should be directed elsewhere. Separate reporting from Ukraine’s general prosecutor indicates police departments in three regions each collect over $20,000 a month in bribes tied to the adult industry.

Former waitress Iryna Mosiychuk now runs Beezone, a company registered as a consulting firm that actually operates webcam studios outside Lviv serving mostly American clients. Models there reportedly clear $2,000 to $7,000 a month. The arrangement illustrates the parallel economy that has taken root while official policy remains frozen in contradiction. As the Wall Street Journal documented, these arrangements persist precisely because the legal framework offers creators no safe path forward.

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Israeli Defense Minister Katz: 70% Of Gaza Is Desolate, 80% Of Gazans Want To Migrate, Israel Is Ready To Move Them Out

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz delivered a wide-ranging assessment of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, making clear that the forced displacement of Gaza’s population remains central to Israel’s strategic vision — and that Israel is prepared to carry it out the moment political conditions allow.

Katz stated that between 60% and 70% of Gaza is now desolate. “About 70% of the area is desolate — without residents, without houses, without tunnels,” he said, while acknowledging that work remains to be completed.

On the question of Gaza’s population, Katz was direct: “There is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration.” He cited surveys showing that approximately 80% of Gaza’s population wants to emigrate, adding that Hamas is the primary obstacle preventing them from leaving. “Hamas doesn’t allow them, and there are no countries in the world that will take them,” he said.

Katz said Israel is fully prepared to facilitate the departure of Gaza’s population by sea, by air, or by any other available means. He noted that Egypt has refused to serve as a transit route. The sticking point, he explained, is that Arab countries willing to accept Gazan migrants are demanding U.S. backing before moving forward. “Every country that is willing wants American backing,” Katz said. “Currently, President Trump didn’t cancel this; he froze it. All the Arab countries came to him due to their pressure on this matter.”

Katz indicated that the moment for resumed military and territorial action will come when it becomes clear that Hamas is not meeting its commitments. “Then we will get a green light to move forward militarily, territorially, and in other areas, and this thing will gain momentum,” he said.

On the West Bank, Katz rejected the characterization of settler violence as “Jewish terror,” stating he has canceled that term. “Terror is whoever acts to commit terror against the State of Israel,” he said. He confirmed that the IDF has conquered refugee camps in the West Bank, evacuated 40,000 residents who have not returned, destroyed infrastructure, killed terrorists, and remains inside those areas.

Katz also summarized the broader scope of Israeli military action: “We destroyed 70% of Gaza. We destroyed areas in southern Lebanon; we ruined dozens of villages that served as Hezbollah strongholds. We evacuated 200,000 residents.”

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Iran Vows ‘Faster, More Painful’ Response To US Attacks After Weekend Sea Battle

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf on Sunday announced a heightened military posture in the war with the US, saying that new attacks on the country will “meet a faster, heavier and more painful response.“

“If they haven’t understood by now, they should understand before it’s too late that the rules of the game have changed and that from now on, any violation of Iran’s interests and security will receive a ‘faster, heavier, and more painful’ response,” Ghalibaf said in a post on Telegram. He has warned that Iranian retaliation will no longer be “proportionate”.

Ghalibaf also conceded that Iran faces severe economic pressures amid US-led sweeping sanctions and the campaign of ‘strangulation’ and isolation efforts.

“Severe fluctuations in the exchange rate, inflation, unemployment, and market management are fundamental challenges that have put serious pressure on people’s livelihoods,” Ghalibaf said.

He also laid out that the Islamic Republic must aim to bolster domestic production and use technology to “devise short-term and permanent solutions.” Iran’s military has all along touted that it never stopped manufacturing missiles and drones, even as US-Israeli bombs decimated many industrial sites.

Ghalibaf’s words come a day after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it attacked three American military ships and three oil tankers using an “unauthorized” route in the Strait of Hormuz. Also, in the latest:

Iran said Sunday it struck an unmanned U.S. vessel trying to enter the Strait of Hormuz, a claim that the U.S. military dismissed as a “total lie.”

The US military earlier on Saturday had struck three Iranian oil tankers, M/T Downy, M/T Stark 1, and M/T Kylo – in a major first of the conflict (that is, a US attack on civilian vessels).

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Jihad Near and Far: The Order of Priorities in Establishing a Modern Islamic Caliphate

For the past year, an al-Qaeda affiliate has been strangling the capital of a West African nation by burning fuel trucks, blockading roads, and imposing sharia law on captured towns, without striking a Western or Israeli target. Since September 2025, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), al-Qaeda’s Sahelian affiliate, has waged an economic siege of Bamako, Mali’s capital.

In April 2026, JNIM and an allied Tuareg separatist group launched an offensive that killed Mali’s defense minister and seized or contested several cities, including Kidal, Gao, Mopti, and Sévaré, bringing fighters within reach of Bamako, the country’s capital.

In towns it controls, such as Farabougou, JNIM has imposed sharia law, banned secular music, and required women to cover their heads. Its strategy mirrors the approach used by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria before each group toppled the government and seized power.

If JNIM or its ISIS-affiliated rival, the Islamic State Sahel Province, captured Bamako, it would be the first time a group with current, direct ties to al-Qaeda controlled a national capital.

This makes Mali the clearest test of near-enemy jihadist strategy in the world today. JNIM’s campaign is aimed at toppling Mali’s military government, the definitional near enemy in jihadist doctrine, rather than attacking the United States, Europe, or Israel.

Mali illustrates a decades-old debate that shapes jihadist strategy across theaters and organizations: which enemy should be fought first, the government ruling over Muslims or the outside powers backing it. The distinction between the “near enemy” (al-‘adaw al-qarib) and the “far enemy” (al-‘adaw al-ba’id) predates every group that uses it today. Understanding this hierarchy explains why movements calling for a global caliphate spend most of their resources fighting other Muslims and Muslim governments rather than the West or Israel.

At its territorial peak in early 2015, the Islamic State controlled roughly 41,000 square miles across Iraq and Syria, an area comparable to Portugal, and ruled as many as eight million people.

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