First, some quick updates.
Netanyahu is currently threatening a “preemptive” strike against Iran. Uh, how does this work? Israel, which claims to be for peace, murders Hamas’ chief negotiator in Iran while Iran is inaugurating its new reformist president, then, when Iran doesn’t initiate a military response on Israel’s schedule, Israel threatens to preempt? But why would Iran be in a hurry?
Nearly $2 Trillion Wiped Out from Stock Market as Fears of Global Recession Spark Panic Among Investors — Warren Buffett Dumped Nearly Half of Apple Stake and Holds $277 Billion in Cash Reserve
Date:8/5/24 2:16 PM
And that’s just one among many global reactions that are under way. Meanwhile Iran is in intensive discussions with its allies. Like Russia. You have to wonder about the nature of the discussions between Netanyahu and his coterie that made their triumphal appearance in the Imperial City on the Potomac recently and engaged in backroom discussions with the reps for whoever actually rules America. Time is working against Israel. The WSJ is running a major story today:
‘Everything Is Collapsing’: Israeli Reservists Confront Toll of Protracted War
As Gaza conflict drags on, reservists are exhausted, constraining Israel’s options as it weighs war with Hezbollah
These are desperate times for the entire Anglo-Zionist Empire. Did the glib and overbearing Netanyahu convince our rulers that he had the solution? A provocation that would be so provocative that it would guarantee that Iran would strike out irrationally, guaranteeing the opportunity—in the eyes of world opinion—for massive retaliation before Iran and Russia (and China?) could get their ducks in a row? If so, it looks like one more in a long line of bad bets.
And before we move to the titled topic …
A big, big story:
Google loses massive antitrust lawsuit over its search dominance
New York CNN — Google has violated US antitrust law with its search business, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing the tech giant a staggering court defeat with the potential to reshape how millions of Americans get information online and to upend decades of dominance. The decision by the US District Court for the District of Columbia is a stunning rebuke of Google’s oldest and most important business. The company has spent tens of billions of dollars on exclusive contracts to secure a dominant position as the world’s default search provider on smartphones and web browsers.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
And a recommended view/listen and recommended reads:
Satyajit Das: The Middle East’s Dance of Death – Part 1: Deluge
Former Secret Service Chief Wanted To Destroy Cocaine Evidence
Alastair Crooke has two recent articles that are must reads. For now we’ll look at the article from Friday that deals with internal Israeli politics and the state of near civil war. Crooke portrays the reality of Israel, a country in the grip of an eschatological cult that espouses Jewish Supremacy and instigation of The Last War to hurry that along.
I’ll be quoting from the second half—read it all. The first part addresses the events that people in the West seem to miss. All the Israeli manufactured crises that are designed to 1) prevent meaningful negotiations with anyone else in the Middle East that would lead to compromise with Palestinians, and 2) draw the US into a war of elimination. Then …
Yet these obvious facts are completely ignored by a rationality that, as Weinstein suggests, actively prefers fraud to truth. Spokesman Kirby said Hizbullah had attacked children in northern Israel.
Israel even refers to these Arab Druze kids in occupied Syrian areas as “Israeli” kids. As if they care about Arab children being killed, when they’ve been doing little else but kill Arab kids by the tens of thousands for the past 10 months.
Israel’s Defence minister repeatedly says: “We don’t want war”. Western leaders parrot the same meme: No-one wants war. ‘We are fully confident that Israel’s response will be constrained and limited to military targets’. The White House: “In our view, there is no reason for some dramatic escalation in southern Lebanon and there is still time and space for diplomacy”.
So what then occurs? Two major assassinations: one in Beirut and the other in Tehran (i.e. to a guest on Iranian sovereign territory). Western leaders express their ‘concern’. The Hamas target in Tehran, Ismail Haniyeh, as the Qatari PM noted, was the key Gaza hostage negotiator.
This too will be overlooked, though Netanyahu’s intent to weave together Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran into a single ‘axis of evil’ cloth – thus speaking to his Joint-Session of Congress thesis – must be evident even to a blinkered Washington.
Recall the new ‘equation’ that followed the assassination of a senior IRGC official in the Iranian Consulate in April 2024: Henceforth Iran will respond directly – and directly from Iran. Washington says it does not want war with Iran, yet the latter explicitly was what Netanyahu advocated. Did the legislators miss his point?
For nearly ten months, Israel has been unable to stabilize the situation along the northern border and allow for the return of displaced Israelis to their homes. Even if the Beirut strike doesn’t lead to wider war, restoring a negotiated stability on the Lebanese border is now beyond reach – as is too, a Gaza hostage deal. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side”, Qatari PM al-Thani ruefully observed.
So too ‘overlooked’ in the West, will be that which happened in Israel on the same day the assassinations later took place: Right-wing vigilantes descended from their settlements, storming two military IDF bases. The anarchic scenes of mass break-ins, fomented by several members of the ruling coalition, some of whom took part in the forcible entries, sparked angry condemnation from Defence Minister Gallant.
Only in Israel, with the most moral army in the world, would perps of forced sodomy (resulting in horrible deaths) be hailed as “our best heroes” by government ministers:
The invasions were supported by one minister and several Knesset members seeking to free reservists that are suspected of aggravated abuse and forcible sodomy against a Palestinian detainee. According to a security source, the injured detainee was taken to a hospital with severe injuries, including to an intimate body part which left him unable to walk.
“The spectacle of military police officers coming to arrest our best heroes at Sde Teiman is nothing less than shameful”, said Ben Gvir, whose ministry controls the Israel Police and Israel Prison Service, said of the storming of the IDF post.
Yet the wider picture as related by Yossi Melman is:
“What is happening on the part of the nationalistic messianic Right with the backing, winking or silence of ministers and MKs of the Right is a “putsch”. The youth coming down from the hills of the ‘State of Judah’ to act with the same violent methods – used against the Palestinians – (but now) are being used against the state of Israel. MK Limor Son Har-Malech (Otzma Yehudit) said: “The people of Israel will fight against enemies from outside and enemies who try to destroy us at home” [those such as the Advocate General seeking to investigate the torture being practiced Sde Teiman]. The concept of the knife in the back and the betrayal at home echoes the voices in Germany after WWII”.
Again, overlooked but not in the news: The situation at Sde Teiman was widely-known and said to be “more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo”. A UN report has detailed how Palestinians arbitrarily detained faced torture and mistreatment. The vigilantes from the settlements nevertheless described those committing the anal rape as “heroes” – and cast the IDF investigators as fifth columnists. Reports suggest that the perpetrators at Sde Teiman enjoy high level protection.
This account of systematic torture followed earlier revelations that the Israeli army had marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system, called Lavender, with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties.
In the same vein, Right wing Cabinet ministers celebrated the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on social media Wednesday morning, as: “This is the right way to purge the world of this filth”, Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, a member of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, tweeted:
“No more imaginary ‘peace’/surrender agreements, no more mercy for these dead men walking. The iron fist that will strike them is the one that will bring quiet and a modicum of comfort, and strengthen our ability to live in peace with those who seek peace. Haniyeh’s death makes the world a slightly better place”.
What then is this ‘truth’ that the West ignores and silences reality, whilst amplifying its narrative frauds? It is that the Israel which they presume to understand is now something very different. And that it has an epistemology at odds with mechanistic rationalism.
An eschatological Right-wing cult now holds the majority in cabinet – and wields a vigilante militia ready to attack the military establishment, and the Israeli state. No one was arrested for the attack and take-over of the two bases. They do not dare.
Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who also served as Israel’s Defence Minister, had this to say in a video interview on the forces taking over in Israel:
“When you talk about Smotrich and Ben Gvir: They have a Rabbi. His name is Dov Lior. He is the Rabbi of the Jewish Underground, who intended to blow up the Dome of the Rock – and before that the buses in Jerusalem. Why? In order to hurry up the ‘Last War’. Do you [not] hear them talking in terms of the Last War; or of Smotrich’s concept of ‘subjugation’? Read the article he published in Shiloh in 2017. First of all, this concept rests on Jewish supremacy: Mein Kampf in reverse”.
“My hair stands on end when I say that – as he said it. I learned and grew up in the house of Holocaust survivors and ‘never again’. It is Mein Kampf in reverse: Jewish supremacy: and therefore [Smotrich] says: “My wife won’t go into a room with an Arab”. It is anchored in ideology. And then actually what he aspires to – as soon as possible – is to go to a big war. A war of Gog and Magog. How do you start the flames? A massacre like the [1994] Cave of the Patriarchs? Baruch Goldstein is a student of this Rabbi. Ben Gvir has hung up Goldstein’s picture [in his house]”.
“This is what goes into the decision-making process in the Israeli government”.
Rabbi Dov Lior has been described by Netanyahu as the “élite unit that leads Israel”, because of his influence and control over the settler forces. The 1948 Irgun, drawing heavily on the Mizrahim, is being reborn?
Isn’t it time that the western ruling structures raised their eyes from their reverie, and read the runes that manifest all around them? Some serious players don’t think as you westerners do; they seek Gog and Magog (the prophecy that “the children of Israel” will be victorious in the battle of Armageddon). That is what you risk.
"Some serious players don’t think as you westerners do; they seek Gog and Magog (the prophecy that “the children of Israel” will be victorious in the battle of Armageddon). That is what you risk."
Some on the evangelical right are absolutely giddy about a ME war wherein Israel will begin to fulfill its prophetic destiny. These purveyors of poor exegesis (e.g. Rev Hagee, Speaker Johnson) peddle their prophetic timelines and incessant warmongering according to the heretical dispensational theology, invented by John Nelson Darby in the 1830s and popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible and Hal Lindsey's "Late Great Planet Earth". They anticipate the rebuilding of the Temple and the reinstitution of animal sacrifices right where the Islamic Dome of the Rock is located. They'd like to nudge Israel along to its Armageddon destiny, even if it means significant death and suffering (two-thirds of ethnic Israel is destroyed) because it's what they think is necessary for the return of Jesus.
Bibi and his ilk hold these evangelicals in great contempt, but they'll take their money and political support, and use it to engage in perpetual war instead of figuring out how to live in peace with their neighbors. I don't see how this ends well for anyone in the ME, or for the US.
It’s not just Israel. Ubiquitous adoption of DIGITAL tech is a world wide phenomenon: they even know about it among Amazon tribes.
DIGITAL destroyed Modern/Post-Modern/Globalism. The idea that the Devil is in the tech, and that there is a widespread spiritual war going on, not necessarily here on Earth, is everywhere. Everyone talks about Evil, the Devil and Morality now. The idea of the end is coming fast is rampant across faiths.
A big question is: are there religious wars coming?
Many in Russia (ROC) think this is already happening…
Anyone talking about this in a serious way?