Exterminating Palestinians, Invading Lebanon, Screwing Iran, and Losing the Coming War
Navalny
Nothing convinces the world of the utter collapse of US moral authority more surely than hearing Joseph Biden and Hilary Clinton assure everybody that Vladimir Putin murdered Alexander Navalny. Without a shred of evidence but simply on the back of their own incessant propaganda against Russia ongoing for decades. The likelihood of Putin ordering the murder of Navalny, the electoral cipher, when he was safely imprisoned away from the population in a remote corner of Russia - just at the start of the opening of the Munich (In)Security Conference, just as Zelesnkiy is engaged in his latest round of begging the world and, in particular, Washington (now on vacation) for the $61 billion of US wealth that Joe would so love to hand Zelenskiy, and just as Russia announced its major victory over Ukrainian forces in Avdiivka, and within a few weeks of Putin’s reelection as the President of Russia - is close to, or is actually at zero.
Scott Ritter tells Judge Napolitano today that Navalny was both an MI6 asset and a CIA asset, an anti-Islamic and anti-Georgian racist, who participated in three failed attempts to assassinate Vladimir Putin and was trained, funded, and directed by the CIA to destabilize Russia.
Lamestreaming the Cancellation of Russia
Lamestream western mainstream media, spearheaded by the ever feebler Guardian seem to have entered the “lets just make stuff up any old how” propaganda phase of their long journey to moral, political, and technological oblivion.
(They are hardly ever read, incidentally, by my own students, who favor a seemingly random feed of information from such noble, if censored or “algorythmed” sources as Facebook, Tiktok and X. This perhaps does them a service - their road to enlightenment no longer needs to pass through what was once the essential first step of being systematically propagandized).
The Lamestream are now leading with stuff about how it was Russian snipers who fired on innocent protestors on the Maidan in 2014 (the best evidence firmly points towards Banderites), reminiscent of their earlier insistence on such fables (“proved” by the Nethertlands in the Hague) that it was the Russians who brought down MH17, that it was the Russians who tried to kill the Skripals in 2018 and Navalny in 2020 using what was supposedly one of the deadliest poisons on earth but which killed none of them. Oh, and also that Russian disinformation agents are behind any statement anywhere that is critical of the foreign policy of the collective West. Just like they were behind Russiagate, although this (ahem) was eventually shown (pretty much noted at the time by Patrick Lancaster) to be a fable concoted by the Hilary team to distract attention from DNC support of her candidature for the Democratic Presidency over that fearful leftwing lion (for Israel) Bernie Sanders, using her legal offices to recruit a small computer investigation company to say it had found evidence of the “footprints” of Russian hacking (but didn’t actually have hard evidence of this when asked to produce it by a Congressional hearing), and to recruit, in effect, a former MI6 agent (Christopher Steele) to say that Trump was a Russian agent.
You cannot make this stuff up, except, apparently, you can.
Old Joe
Compared with Hilary Clinton, Joe was once fairly sensible. Before he lent his support as US vice-president for the US-orchestrated coup d’etat in the Maidan of Kiev in 2013-2014, he had actually opposed Hilary’s lunatic hopes for an extreme Salafist takedown of Assad in Syria in favor of the infamaous “moderate” Islamists beloved of Western mainstream media folklore and BS. Their business model seems to have been the taking of Western arms and cash, in return for spouting anti-Assad, pro-democracy (so comical) slogans to Western-trained Syrian Islamist journalists, and then to have surrendered money and weapons to the offshoots of Al-Qaeda and ISIS who could pay steeper monthly stipends to their fighters in any case.
Kyle Anzalone told Judge Napolitano yesterday, February 19, that the IDF has concluded that it will not be able to defeat Hamas, in a report cited on Israel TV Channel11. You cannot defeat an armed group by indiscriminately bombing and killing civilians. Four of five Hamas fighers are still underground. The movement is headquartered in Qatar and Beirut. All the genocide achieves is to increase recruitment to any such armed group, but Israel is focused not on that but on the business of expulson and land-grabbing. The genocide of Gaza is being celebrated in Israel as an opportunity for Israelis to build villas on the Meditteranean. Since the city is destroyed, there is nowhere for Palesinians to live right now, and no resources for them to rebuild. And Israel will never allow a Palestinian state. All talk to the contrary is simply wishful thinking or deception.
This murder of Palestinians is taking place with US and Western help. It is, in the words today of Scott Ritter, pure evil. This evil has the support of three out of four Israeli citizens (I assume the remaining 25% are mainly Arab), and some of the pro-genocide Israelis are illegal, rabid, out-of-control, fanatically Zionist settlers. They, and their Western enablers, have become war criminals, symbolized, says Ritter, by the appearance in Congress of representatives who think it is a good idea to wear Israeli uniforms. The US and its effete Western acolytes are, therefore, engaged in pure evil. The aim increasingly does seem to be to evacuate those Palestinians who survive into the Sinai, with or without Egyptian help.
Now Joe
Biden says he is now calling for a temporary ceasefire, but Anzalone does not think that Netanyahu will ever agree to that and has openly said he will not defer to international opinion. Until the US utilizes its real leverage (the many $ billions sent from the US to Israel each year, plus emergency provision of additional weapons to help along the extermination of Palestinians) there will be no ending to the tragedy. The US will likely vote down a call for a ceasefire from Algeria at the UNSC today in favor of its own call for a temporary ceasefire that will be conditional on the return of Hamas hostages and other things.
War in Lebanon
Over 500 Israeli soldiers so far have been killed in Gaza, some them in friendly fire. The country’s economy has sunk 20%. Israel has increased the number of troops it has in northern Israel. Hezbollah is preparing for a massive Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. This is confirmed also in interview yesterday with Judge Napolitano by former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, who cites a former CIA colleague.
In view of the buildup of Israeli forces in northern Israel and its strikes on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon, it does not seem likely that Hezbollah can avoid a major conflict with Israel. As Larry Johnson notes, Hezbollah is now a formbidable army, one that has transitioned to modernity since its 2006 defeat of Israel when Israel last invaded Lebanon. I am not as confident as some that Israel will lose this war, but of course there is the possibility that it might, not least on account of what Johnson refers to as its odious combination of arrogance and hubris. But I do note the extraordinary circumstances in which Israel is engaging in this conflict at a time when it has lost all credibility as a moral force in the world, and given the large number of Arabs that live, not just in the occupied lands, but in the State of Israel itself - 2.1 million, or over 20% of Israel’s total population. Ritter notes that Hezbollah will have to move into villages of Southern Lebanon and perhaps of Northern Israel, attracting Israeli fire and aggression against these villages, in a way that will sim,ply reinforce the inevitable reaction against Israel.
The upcoming Israeli invasion will likely open up the conflict between Israel and Syria (which for many years governed Lebanon) with Israel sending troops through Syrain territory seized by Israel in the Golan Heights in readiness for increasing pressure on Lebanon from the east. As it does this, it will likely accelerate escalation towards war with Russia. It seems unlikely that Russia can simply standby as Israel increases pressure simultaneously on the Assad regime, on Lebanon and on Iran, and this may bring Russia, acting with Iran, in support of Hezbollah in Lebanon and in preparation for a much wide war. A critical question to which there is currently no safe answer is whether China will allow itself to become involved in this war. Sooner or later, of course, it must engage, just as Russia felt that it had to engage in 2022, but we just dont know when China will judge that it is in China’s best interests so to do, and where it will judge this engagement is most required (possibly when the West forces its hand in protection of what is still the Chinese island of Taiwan).
Yemen
The Houthis meanwhile have successfully hit a Qatari vessel in the Red Sea, and shipping through the Red Sea continues, after many weeks, to be stymied by Houthi missile attacks. As I have previously argued, the Yemeni threat to international shipping or, rather, shipping linked to the US, UK, Israel and their allies is probably less important to Washington (given the availability of alternative routes and the boost that the Yemeni blockade gives to Israel’s own transportation ambitions) than the usefulness that it provides as a further pretext for initiating the long-simmering conflict with Iran.
Palestine
Riyad Mansour, Palestinian envoy to the UN, represented his Palestinian people to the International Court of Justice, yesterday, calling for an end to the genocide, pleading for respect for the human rights of all human beings. This is contrasted by Judge Napolitano against a statement from the Israeli Minister of the Interior’s call for the shooting dead of Palestinian women and children who move “too close” to the border between Gaza and Israel. In recent days many Palesinian children aged between 5 and 8 were shot by an Israeli sniper. Palestinians in southern Gaza or dying by the hundreds each day. The Palestinian delegation yesterday demonstrated to the ICJ evidence from Riyad al-Maliki (Palestinian Foreign Minister) of the systematic and forcible expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their lands by Israel at the start of the Nakba from 1947, and referred to a map shown by Netanyahu a few months ago in the UN in which the very name of Palestine is totally disappeared in favor of the apartheid state of Israel from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean.
I note that even Ritter now concedes that the Israelis had plenty of advance warning of a Hamas attack, even if he is still not at the point of believing that Israel let it happen on purpose or even encouraged it (because he finds it very difficult to think that Israel would have allowed the killing of Israelis that such a plan would inevitably have involved and did involve). But he does allow that such things can happen. He tells the horrifying story of how IDF soldiers set up the killing of a family, the survival of its small girl, and their exploitation of her call for help as bait to entice Palestinian rescuers whom they killed, along with the little girl.