USA – Asia Pacific Report

Caitlin Johnstone: The world’s first trillionaire is not your friend

APR editor — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:32:29 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

It’s so pathetic watching Elon Musk’s groveling bootlickers fall all over themselves on social media to defend their favorite oligarch from criticism as he becomes the world’s first trillionaire.

They’re like “Don’t be mean to the trillionaire, just become a trillionaire yourself! All you need is luck, connections, wealthy parents, the ruthlessness to step on anyone who gets in your way, and a willingness to cooperate with murderous imperial institutions like the Pentagon and the CIA!”

Elon Musk is a military-industrial complex plutocrat who is balls deep in the US intelligence cartel and recently facilitated the US-Israeli attempted regime change operation in Iran.

You have infinitely more in common with the average person in Iran, Cuba, Lebanon or Palestine than you have with the world’s first trillionaire.

It’s so gross how many fawning admirers this freak still has. The trillionaire is not your friend.

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People who say “Zionism is just the belief that Jews should have a homeland” are hilarious. Zionism isn’t some abstraction; we can all see its material manifestations with our own eyes. We can all see that Zionism means genocide, apartheid, and nonstop wars and abuse.

This isn’t some kind of theoretical debate where we all get to have our own opinions about what Zionism is and what it entails. It’s 2026, not 1890. The facts are in and the case is closed, kids. This is what Zionism is. This is the only Zionism in existence. What you see is what you get. And what you see is quantifiably one of the most evil things happening on our planet.

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Some guy told me, “Why are you fine with the existence of approximately 50 Islamic nation-states, but the single Jewish one is apparently too many?”

I showed him an illustration of a nail stuck in somebody’s foot and said, “Why are you fine with an entire foot made of flesh, but a single metal spike is too much? The only possible explanation is that you have a seething hatred of metal. It can’t possibly be that you object to a foreign object being violently forced into a region where it does damage.”

He got upset and wound up telling me he hopes I get murdered by Mossad.

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Hasbara is so gross because it’s just Zionists throwing walls of language at you to convince you you’re not seeing what you’re seeing.

You see raw video footage of the most horrifying thing imaginable in Gaza, and then you see them in the replies going “This is actually fine and normal because words words words words words words words.”

You see a news report about Israel doing something astonishingly evil in Lebanon, and there they are underneath it going “There’s actually a lot more to the story because words words words words words words words.”

You see some far right Israeli minister spouting nakedly genocidal rhetoric, and they’re swarming all over it saying “Well this isn’t actually what it looks like because words words words words words words words.”

You see every major human rights group on earth saying Israel is guilty of genocide and apartheid, and they’re running around frantically telling you it’s a giant conspiracy to frame Israel and the truth is that words words words words words words words.

You see more and more mainstream news institutions reporting on the mountains of evidence of widespread rape and torture in Israeli prisons, and they saturate the airwaves claiming it’s an antisemitic blood libel because words words words words words words words.

The idea is to just pound your intellect with a firehose of verbiage until your inner sensemaker has been shredded and you’re too confused to form a coherent picture of what’s actually going on. It’s a disgusting, abusive, and profoundly unethical thing to do to people.

But the good news is it’s not working anymore. Language is immensely powerful, but its power has its limits. Israel’s behavior has become so transparently unacceptable that no amount of word magic can manipulate people into seeing anything other than what’s happening in front of their face.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

They’re saying the attack on Iran was ‘proportional’ – here are the stats: You decide

APR editor — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 05:05:20 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Nuri Vitacchi

The US on Wednesday night destroyed civilian water utilities serving 20,000 Iranian people.

“The mission is a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression,” US Central Command said in a statement on X.

The punishment was “in response to yesterday’s downing of a US Army Apache helicopter,” the US Centcom said.

So, one item of military transport (crew escaped without harm) is deemed equivalent to bringing harm and misery to 20,000 people.

And this was just hours before a so-called “peace deal” was announced as close to signing.

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces began launching self-defense strikes against Iran at 5 p.m. ET today at the Commander in Chief’s direction, in response to yesterday’s downing of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter. The mission is a proportional response to unjustified Iranian…

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) June 9, 2026

Yes, it was war crime
Destroying water utilities is a war crime. Under Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, it is strictly prohibited to attack or destroy infrastructure essential to civilian life, including water installations.

And the US committed this war crime for what?

The truth is that the destruction of the helicopter was no big deal.

Who said that? Donald Trump did. “Wasn’t a big deal. The pilot is fine,” he told the press.

Even more galling is the fact that the Iranians downed the helicopter as part of its self-defence efforts against a US-Israeli war that has been deemed illegal by multiple countries and organisations, including many in the US.

The lack of “proportionality” is the key to understanding what is really happening in West Asia. Here are three examples with up-to-date statistics.

1. Compare Lebanon and Israel numbers
Lebanon reported this week that Israeli attacks have now killed at least 3696 people and injured 11,413 others since March 2. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced.

On the Israeli side, 29 soldiers and one civilian contractor have been killed in Lebanon, according to the military.

Just 29 soldiers on the Israel side. On the Lebanon side, even if we ONLY count women, children or medics killed by Israel, there have been 730. So far.

And before anyone is tempted to say that Lebanon’s figures are untrustworthy, let’s remember that Lebanon’s government has long been US-aligned and opposed to Hezbollah.

2. Compare Iranian and US numbers
How many times have we heard about the 13 members of the US armed forces who lost their lives as part of the attack on Iran? Each was given a lengthy obituary in multiple media, including the The Guardian.

Just 13. And what about the 2988 men and 511 women killed by the US and Israel in Iran, as reported on Wednesday?

They’re just statistics.

3. Compare Israeli and Gaza numbers
In recent days, Israel killed at least 11 more Palestinians in Gaza, including women and children, adding to a total of more than 72,000 lives lost. The majority have been women and children.

Since the beginning of the retaliation after the October 2023 attack, Israel has lost just 1152 personnel, identified by its government as soldiers, police, and security officials.

See what I mean about proportionality? The contrast between casualties on the US-Israel side and those they are targeting is startling.

This week, the richest nation on earth lost a helicopter.

“No big deal.”

Nury Vittachi is a Sri Lankan-born author, writer and political commentator based in Hong Kong. He has written the novel series, The Feng Shui Detective and non-fiction works.

Mark Naglazas: Blaming immigrants when we need to look inside for our heart of darkness

APR editor — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 02:00:14 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Mark Naglazas

Trying to get my head around Pete Hegseth’s bonkers, deeply offensive D-Day memorial speech in which the US Secretary of War drew an equivalence between the Allies storming the beaches of Normandy — the largest seaborne invasion in history — with illegal immigrants seeking refuge in Europe.

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies — beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria,” Hegseth told those gathered at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France.

“Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he said.

“The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe. That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war fighters, or what they fought for was merely temporary.”

Most of the blowback against this speech has been in Hegseth’s staining the memory of a noble sacrifice of the Allies with a contemporary political reference.

But what is truly appalling and completely nuts is the comparison of illegal immigrants to Nazis.

Hegseth says that America saved Western civilisation, which has some truth,

But Nazism didn’t come from outsiders: it came from the belly of Western civilisation.

Crowning glories but . . .
Germany was one of the crowning glories of the West yet it murdered six million Jews and waged a war that killed many more.

The Allies were saving Europe from itself.

Ironically, while Hegseth was shooting his big fat mouth off in France over in Germany a member of a neo-Nazi party so far to the right that even the booming extremist Alternative for Germany have condemned them has narrowly lost a mayoral election Saxony.

Soon we won’t be laughing at Mel Brooks’ famous song “Spingtime for Hitler”. It’s happening in Germany now (even Chancellor Merz is worried)

All over the world — in the UK, in the United States, in Australia — we are blaming immigrants for our ills when we need to look inside our own countries for the heart of darkness that gave us the Holocaust and is threatening to unleash demonic forces again.

Mark Naglazas is a West Australian journalist specialising in Perth culture and the arts. Republished from his FB page with permission.

Hegseth compared migrants to a ‘dangerous invasion’ at the graves of D-Day soldiers.

Here’s the reaction pic.twitter.com/WX7Pkq2wta

— The Daily Britain (@dailybritainonx) June 7, 2026

Paying the price for US-Israeli wars – and NZ’s shameful stance over genocide

APR editor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:24:23 +0000

COMMENTARY: Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa

Today the US and/or Israel have been attacking Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Venezuela.

The US is also strangling Cuba with an illegal economic blockade, threatening Greenland and preparing for war against China.

History shows that US invasions kill, injure and destroy ordinary people’s lives, homes, essential infrastructure — and they usually leave repressive regimes to rule.

The ordinary people of the US pay the price of these wars with their lives, taxes, poverty and are dependent on jobs that manufacture weapons.

US and Israel knew their attack on Iran would trigger an international oil crisis.

The result has been massively increasing oil and food prices and profiteering here in Aotearoa New Zealand, causing the greatest suffering for working class people especially the poorest in the country and world wide.

Why have the US and israel attacked Iran?

• To enforce US and Israeli domination and control of the Middle East region and the world’s oil resources; and
• To control world central trade routes and oil supplies to the main US economic rival — China.

Waiting on oil companies
Shamefully, the current NZ government refuses to oppose the illegal US and Israeli attacks on Iran, and fails to oppose the genocide still happening in Gaza. They just wait for oil companies to determine NZ’s supply, and help mega corporations to profit.

“Demand that NZ government oppose US and Israeli wars” . .. poster for next Saturday’s “Stop Wars Aotearoa” rally in Auckland. Image: PSNA

This government has no plan for making Aotearoa New Zealand more food and energy secure. But it is increasingly integrating the NZ military with the Australian and US war machines and preparing for the US-promoted “War with China”.

We are already in a cost-of living crisis, and rising fuel prices are adding to the price of food and other essentials. Kiwi families are struggling. Many people in town and country are facing huge price increases.

Some families have been getting the government’s limited support package. But 92 percent of households don’t get anything.

Don’t let this government drag us into war. Demand an independent foreign policy for Aotearoa/NZ.

Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition rally and march to US embassy: 2pm, Saturday 13 June 2026, Aotea Square, CBD, Auckland

Lim Tean: Why standing on the wrong side of history cost Germany its UNSC seat

APR editor — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:46:07 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean

Germany learnt to its huge cost and embarrassment last week that supporting Israel’s genocidal operations in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East leads only to opprobrium from the international community.

A country which had been a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for decades lost in its bid for re-election to Portugal and Austria.

It is a great setback for Germany which aspires one day to be a permanent member.

Germany may not want to admit it, but the defeat was in every way tied to its unstinting support for Israeli genocidal operations and policies in Gaza.

If America is Israel’s staunchest supporter, then Germany comes second.

A “universal morality” has enveloped the world. It is a morality that does not condone genocide or the stealing of other peoples’ lands, as Israel has done for decades.

It is a morality which demands the creation of a Palestinian State so that the Palestinians are not refugees in their homeland.

Lesson to Israel supporters
Let Germany’s defeat be a lesson to all those nations who support Israel. Don’t be foolish and stand on the wrong side of history.

Germany built its postwar identity on Never Again. It atoned. It paid reparations. It taught its children the truth. For that, it deserves credit.

But atonement is not a blank cheque.

The Holocaust was more than 80 years ago. The sins of fathers cannot be visited upon their children forever — and acknowledging past wrongs cannot become the excuse for ignoring present ones.

That isn’t moral courage. That is moral cowardice in a noble disguise.

Gaza is burning. Lebanon was devastated. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has spoken. And Germany looks away.

Did support for Israel cost Germany a UN Security Council seat? Video: DW News

Routine rotating seat
For decades, Germany secured its rotating seat on the UN Security Council as a matter of routine.

Last Thursday, for the first time ever, it lost — humiliated at the UN General Assembly by nations that saw through the pretence.

France, United Kingdom, Spain, Norway, Canada and Australia have found their backbone and recognised Palestinian statehood. Germany could not.

Never again was supposed to mean never again — for anyone.

In addition to the five permanent members — the US, China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom — there are 10 non-permanent members who rotate every two years. Since 1987, Germany, one of the world’s most economically powerful countries, had been elected to the body every eight years. That streak is now over.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Chris Hedges: Gaza and Iran – the rise of the Global South

APR editor — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:51:29 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Chris Hedges

The humiliating defeat of Israel and the United States in their war on Iran, along with the savagery of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, are ushering in a new world order.

This order is one where voices of reason and stability emanate not from the West — which spent tens of billions of dollars sustaining Israel’s genocide — but from the Global South, including China.

It is an order where alliances are being rapidly reconfigured to protect countries from a rogue American state that lashes out like a wounded beast, as it spirals toward terminal decline.

Hubris Gargantua – by Mr Fish. Cartoon: The Chris Hedges Report

The end of the US Empire, led by an impetuous and clueless President Donald Trump, is irreversible. The US has lost its sixth war in the Middle East in 25 years. Iran’s power has been enhanced not only because it — along with Oman — controls the Strait of Hormuz — where roughly 25 percent of the world’s seaborne oil and 20 percent of the world’s seaborne liquified natural gas pass through — but because it has delivered a stark message, with its drones and missiles, to US allies and bases in the region, while sending the global economy into a tailspin.

Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who reportedly lured Trump into the war with Alice-in-Wonderland visions of easy regime change in Iran following the decapitation strikes against the country on February 28, 2026, which included the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other political and military figures, along with 168 school children and their teachers — may strike Iran again.

They are desperate. But a renewed bombing of Iran will not work. Iran’s mosaic defence strategy ensures all political and military commanders are easily replaced.

Iran can strangle the world economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz. It can accelerate the pain by getting its Yemeni allies — Ansar Allah — to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea, just as they did to Israel-bound ships when defending Palestinians after October 7.

A complete blockade
This could result in a complete blockade. Saudi Arabia, with the Bab el-Mandeb Strait open, is able to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and export five million barrels a day through its pipeline to tankers in the Red Sea port of Yanbu.

If a ceasefire between the US and Iran is not reached soon, the global economy will crash, perhaps within weeks. The US and its allies, such as Japan, have released some of their extensive strategic oil reserves, however they will not be able to cushion markets indefinitely.

Stockpiles in America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve are near their lowest in more than 40 years. Once these reserves are depleted, the price of fuel will skyrocket. If a barrel of oil shoots up to $200, the price at the pump could climb as high as $10 per gallon. This, coupled with shortages of other petroleum-based products, along with nitrogen fertiliser, aluminum, and helium — an indispensable element in the production of MRI machines and semiconductors — are already shutting down vital industries and driving up prices on basic commodities.

The World Bank projects a 31 percent increase in the cost of nitrogen fertilisers alone — which are produced in the Persian Gulf and transit through the Strait of Hormuz — if the war continues. This will mean a steep rise in the price of food.

Trump is like a dog being pushed unwillingly into a crate. When it appears a deal with Iran is close, he snarls and barks, sabotaging the proposed 30-to-60-day ceasefire agreement.

Netanyahu’s apoplectic fits about any agreement that would halt Israeli attacks against Lebanon, along with the potential release of some of Iran’s estimated $100 billion in frozen assets, spurs Trump’s momentary defiance.

Clock is ticking
But the clock is ticking. There is little time left. And the longer Trump waits, the worse it will get. Neither Trump, nor Netanyahu, are the masters of this game. Iran holds the cards.

Israel’s dream of formalising its hegemony over the Middle East, codified in the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term — which normalised relations between Israel and regional states — is dead. This war and the genocide in Gaza killed it.

Trump is attempting to revive them by inserting them into a deal to end the war on Iran. He has demanded states previously uninvolved with the Abraham Accords, such as Pakistan and eventually, Iran, sign up to normalise relations with Israel.

Pakistan — the only state to publicly respond — rejected the invitation due to what it called a clash with the country’s “fundamental ideologies”. Every other state Trump appealed to reacted with bewildered silence.

Iran demands the removal of sanctions and an end to the naval blockade — which the Central Intelligence Agency concluded Iran can endure for months before it experiences severe economic hardship — in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The proposed agreement makes no mention of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, which US military and intelligence officials believe remains at 70 percent pre-war levels, according to The New York Times.

Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Qatar — a lead negotiator with Hamas — are the new powerbrokers in the region.

Pakistan not only signed a mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia in 2025, it deployed troops, jets and air defence systems to the Gulf dictatorship in April. It has also been hosting ceasefire talks between Trump’s Dumb and Dumber duo of lead negotiators — his feckless son-in-law Jared Kushner and fellow real estate developer and golfing partner, Steve Witkoff.

Prestige, power of China
The war has enhanced the prestige and power of China, which compared to Washington is seen globally as embodying rational, prudent and stable leadership. Iran, in a sign of the new global order, permits Chinese and Pakistani tankers, along with other ships not allied with Israel and the US, to travel through the Strait.

Israel, unable to convince the US to do its dirty work of bombing Iran into a failed state, will, I expect, strike out with renewed fury against Gaza, perhaps occupying the remaining 30 percent of what is left of the besieged territory.

It will continue its Gaza-like policy of turning every structure south of Lebanon’s Litani River into rubble, which it bombs daily despite Iran stating that attacks on Lebanon violate the current ceasefire agreement.

Trump’s savagery and bluster — he threatened to “blow up” Oman if it fails to “behave” after reports of Oman jointly charging tolls with Iran for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz — cannot mask the impotence of the US. The refusal by America’s allies to heed Trump’s call to help him reopen the Strait, along with the economic misery visited on nations struggling to cope with shortages and the rising costs of energy and fertiliser supplies, are stark evidence of Washington’s pariah status.

Empires, blinded by the myth of their own omnipotence and military superiority, blunder at the final stages into conflicts with little understanding of where they are headed. They alienate their allies. They stumble from one military fiasco to the next, as the US has done for over two decades in the Middle East.

The British Empire in 1956, already in precipitous decline, was humiliated when it conspired with France and Israel to seize the Suez Canal, which Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalised. The US forced all three countries to halt the invasion. Britain’s pound sterling gave way to the petrodollar. It signaled the last chapter of the British Empire.

The war on Iran is Washington’s Suez Crisis.

This may not be the end of the American Empire, but it is the beginning of the end.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This commentary was first published on the Chris Hedges Substack page and is republished with permission.

The Chris Hedges Report

The world owes Cuba a debt – and the US a condemnation

APR editor — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:33:39 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Jeremy Rose

In 2015, the John Key government announced a cooperation agreement that would see NZ Aid pay for Cuban doctors to be taught English in New Zealand before their deployment to the Pacific Islands as part of the communist island’s Medical Brigades.

Cuba, a country of just 11 million people that has been under continuous US economic sanctions since 1962, has sent more than 400,000 healthcare professionals to 155 countries over the last six and a half decades.

Since 1960, when an earthquake devastated Valdivia in Chile, Cuban doctors have been on the frontlines of medical emergencies around the globe.

READ MORE: Other Cuban reports

They were there for the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami, in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, in Africa during the Ebola outbreak, in South Africa for the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, and Italy during the outbreak of covid.

In any given year the country has had more health professionals working in aid programmes abroad than the USA, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the UK combined.

The National government and Cuba were unlikely bedfellows. The conservative party’s founding constitution in 1936 committed it to combating communism and socialism.

But the communist nation’s medical assistance programme has been a spectacular success when it comes to providing healthcare to those most in need, and the cooperation agreement was a concrete acknowledgement of that.

Soft power, hard currency
Cuba’s overseas doctors programme is both an exercise in what is sometimes called soft power and a source of desperately needed hard currency.

Economists are divided over whether the US dollar’s status as the global reserve currency is an “exorbitant privilege” but there’s no debate over the power it gives the US government to inflict economic devastation on its perceived enemies.

Last year, the medical journal The Lancet published an article that found that economic sanctions — the majority being unilateral imposed by the US — had caused more than 560,000 deaths every year between 2010 – 2021.

In total, the study attributes 38 million deaths – half of them children – to sanctions since 1970.

No country on earth has been under US sanctions for longer than Cuba. A 1958 arms embargo was expanded to include all goods four years later.

The laws and regulations governing the embargo have been described as the “oldest and most comprehensive US economic sanctions against any country in the world.”

Cuba not only survived those sanctions, but its commitment to investing in healthcare at home saw it achieve lower infant mortality rates over a sustained period than the US, while matching it for life expectancy.

Massively impressive
To describe that as impressive is to massively understate the achievement. Life expectancy and low infant mortality normally correlate very closely with a country’s relative wealth.

The US’s GDP per capita has been about eight times that of Cuba for decades.

During the Cold War, trade with the communist bloc helped insulate Cuba from the full impacts of the embargo. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw the island nation facing catastrophic shortages of oil, food and basic goods.

A deal struck between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, in 2000, to swap Venezuelan oil for Cuban medical professionals was critical to the island nation surviving the crippling US sanctions regime.

That ended with the US’s imposition of a maritime blockade of Venezuela following its “arrest” — kidnapping is a more accurate term — of its president, Nicolas Maduro, in January of this year.

The longest running US sanctions regime in history has become a near total siege resulting in a devastating health crisis.

The UN reports that more than 100,000 patients are awaiting surgeries due to power outages.

“Shortages of electricity, fuel, medicine and medical supplies are severely disrupting emergency care, blood banks, laboratories, immunisation programmes and maternal and child health services.”

Blackouts lasting up to 20 hours have forced hospitals to suspend non-emergency operations. There’s no fuel for ambulances or private cars, so people struggle to get to health services even in an emergency.

Infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 deaths per 1000 live births. At least half of those deaths are directly attributable to US sanctions.

Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Cuba a “severe national security threat” due to its military ties to China and Russia. (The US has around 800 military bases in 80 different countries. Neither China nor Russia has a base in Cuba although both are said to have spy facilities — presumably not unlike the ones the US has in New Zealand and Australia.)

And in an effort to illustrate the “heinous nature” of the Cuban government, the US last week issued an arrest warrant for its former Defence Minister, 94-year-old Raul Castro, for the 1996 shooting down of two civilian planes off the coast of Cuba.

The planes were flown by the Brothers of the Rescue, a group that both rescued Cubans attempting to flee the island and dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana.

The then President, Fidel Castro, declared the planes a threat to Cuba’s national security.

Many would take issue with that claim, but it is surely as credible as the US claim that the 57 boats it has sunk in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean since September last year, killing 194 people, were a threat to US national security.

The US accuses Cuba of human rights abuses, including those of medical brigade doctors who it says are victims of human trafficking and forced labour.

This would make Cuban doctors, surely, the only victims of forced labour anywhere to be given a free tertiary education before being trafficked to jobs paying significantly more than if they stayed at home.

(The American Civil Liberties Union has estimated that around 800,000 prisoners in the US produce more than $11 billion in goods while being paid just pennies an hour.)

None of the US’s explanations/accusations can be taken seriously. So, what else could be driving the ramping up of its decades old campaign to topple the Cuban government?

Noam Chomsky called it “the threat of the good example.” A poor country showing it’s possible to redistribute resources and defy Western dominance is simply unacceptable and must be crushed.

One showing that, for a fraction of the cost of what most Western countries spend on “defence,” it can be a superpower in the supply of medical assistance to the Global South is it seems doubly unacceptable.

And then there’s the threat to the bottom-line of US corporations.

ExxonMobil is currently before the courts seeking $1 billion in compensation for the nationalisation of its refineries in 1959.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of a US company — Havana Docks Corporation — that claims its waterfront property had been seized by the Cuban government in 1960. It will likely open the floodgates to similar claims.

In 1971, the government commission that first certified that the Havana Dock Corporation’s property had been unlawfully confiscated did the same for 6000 other companies with “legitimate” claims to property worth a combined $1.9 billion ($9.3 billion in today’s term).

Every year for the last three decades, New Zealand and Australia have joined a large majority of UN General Assembly member states in voting for a non-binding resolution demanding an end to the US blockade. (Last year’s vote was opposed by the US, Israel, Argentina, Paraguay, North Macedonia and Ukraine.)

But as that blockade is being tightened to the point of catastrophe, and with the US threating an armed invasion both governments have remained mute.

It’s shameful. Doubly so given that New Zealand’s last National government acknowledged Cuba’s contribution to the alleviation of suffering caused by poverty and scarcity with its cooperation agreement.

The people of Cuba are now suffering unprecedented poverty brought on by scarcity due to an entirely man-made disaster. We know who the culprits are, but not only do our governments remain silent, they continue to be slavishly committed to military cooperation and integration with one of the world’s leading enablers and purveyors of violence.

Our governments may be silent but civil society isn’t. Here’s a link to an international petition and a NZ one. To keep up with what’s happening in Cuba and solidarity actions in Aotearoa follow the New Zealand Cuba Friendship Society on Facebook.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based freelance journalist. You can follow him on his Substack Towards Democracy.

Eleven Fiji police officers investigated for ties to Auckland drug trade links

APR editor — Tue, 19 May 2026 03:00:56 +0000

By Kaya Selby, RNZ Pacific journalist

A multinational police investigation implicating 11 Fiji police officers in collusion with drug traffickers has been handed over to prosecutors.

The Fiji police announced that the investigation, lasting nearly six months, now awaits advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) on how to proceed.

On December 1 last year, a social media activist posted more than 100 screenshots of Viber messages between the officers and a member of an Auckland-based organised crime group.

READ MORE: Other Fiji crime reports

Police personnel depicted in the screenshots ranged from beat cops to Criminal Intelligence Division (CID) officers to the head of the Narcotics Bureau.

The texts purportedly showed the Narcotics Bureau chief and others demanding a hit be put out on an individual, providing tip-offs about possible locations and movements. They also depicted officers demanding payments, with details of drop zones and pickup arrangements.

Police said that each officer’s financial histories was investigated.

Commissioner Rusiate Tudravu told local media on 19 December 2025 that the Narcotics Bureau chief had been placed on leave.

NZ ‘assisted’ investigation
A statement confirmed that Australian and New Zealand authorities “assisted” in the investigation. Tudravu confirmed in a press conference that United States authorities were also involved.

New Zealand police said they were “in touch” from December onwards.

“Fiji Police is leading the investigation, and New Zealand Police has offered any support that Fiji Police may require,” they said.

On December 2, Tudravu announced the investigation, with the officers’ phones confiscated shortly after. Police confirmed the investigation concluded last week.

The US Embassy in Wellington, where an FBI office is set up, declined to comment.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Trita Parsi: Is Trump poised to restart the Iran war?

APR editor — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:12:09 +0000

Tehran believes Trump will attack in the next 48 hours — and is ready to counter-escalate, writes US-Iran affairs analyst Trita Parsi.

ANALYSIS: By Trita Parsi

The Middle East is once again teetering on the brink as Trump appears poised to reignite war with Iran.

Press reports indicate he will convene military advisers on Tuesday, though my understanding is that both the meeting and the decision are likely to come sooner.

Over the past several hours, Trump has flooded Truth Social with a barrage of incendiary threats. While some of this may be theatrical brinkmanship designed to force Tehran into submission, sources in the Iranian capital tell me they expect the United States to resume hostilities within the next 48 hours.

We should first recognise that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit– the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed.

As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades.

Although negotiators have made meaningful progress on several fronts, talks have thus far failed to produce an agreement, largely because of irreconcilable differences over Tehran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. And as Washington has come to realise that the blockade is backfiring, a new and dangerous dynamic has emerged: both sides now believe another round of fighting will strengthen their hand in the negotiations that follow.

As I argued in numerous interviews in January, Trump dramatically underestimated Iran’s strength, while hardliners in Tehran believed war would strengthen Iran’s leverage by exposing the illusion of Iranian weakness.

Vindicated assessment
In their view, the outcome of the conflict vindicated that assessment, leaving them increasingly confident — even emboldened — about what a second round of war could yield. I am told the new Supreme Leader belongs to this camp.

Moreover, just as Tehran believes Trump intends to prosecute the next war with far greater ferocity, Iranian planners are preparing a far more expansive and punishing retaliatory campaign, complete with new strategic objectives and targets.

First, Iranian officials increasingly describe the next war as an opportunity to inflict maximum strategic damage on the United Arab Emirates, citing Abu Dhabi’s active role in the previous conflict, its deepening and increasingly overt partnership with Israel, and its role in urging Trump to resume hostilities.

Tehran is likely to target American data centers in the UAE, a move that serves multiple purposes. Iranian officials argue that these American technology firms have already become participants in the conflict through their support for the Pentagon.

At the same time, Tehran sees an opportunity to cripple the UAE’s ambitions to become a global artificial intelligence hub — and, in doing so, potentially undermine Washington’s AI competition with China.

This points to a second defining feature of Iran’s strategy in a future war. Tehran believes Trump and his family hold financial stakes in many of these same technology ventures.

Targeting Trump’s personal business interests is a lever Iran conspicuously avoided pulling during the first conflict but now appears increasingly willing to use.

Logic straightforward
The logic is straightforward: Trump may tolerate damage to American strategic interests, but he is acutely sensitive to threats against his own financial empire. Raise the personal cost to Trump himself, the reasoning goes, and he may prove more willing to adopt a realistic negotiating position.

Third, Tehran is likely to show far less restraint if evidence emerges that other Gulf Cooperation Council states permit the United States or Israel to use their territory or airspace in a renewed conflict. The result would be broader and far more perilous horizontal escalation, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global economy should critical energy infrastructure come under attack.

Fourth, the Red Sea is now in play. That would dramatically widen the geographic scope of the conflict while placing even greater upward pressure on already volatile oil prices.

Finally, Tehran is increasingly examining the possibility of severing the major submarine fiber-optic cable networks running beneath the Persian Gulf — arteries through which most GCC internet traffic flows, including billions of dollars in financial transactions. Iranian officials increasingly view this as a potential second Strait of Hormuz: a powerful new point of leverage capable of disrupting the global economy at enormous scale.

Renewed war is not inevitable. But when both sides convince themselves that another round of fighting will strengthen their negotiating position, the gravitational pull toward conflict becomes dangerously strong — however irrational the logic may ultimately be.

Trita Parsi is an Iranian-Swedish political analyst and foreign policy scholar specialising in Middle East geopolitics and US-Iran relations. He is the co-founder and executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). Republished with permission.

Palestine Forum slams NZDF share in military exercises with ‘genocidal’ Israel

APR editor — Fri, 15 May 2026 05:00:18 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand has criticised plans for the country taking part in next month’s military exercises with Israel and the United States, saying Wellington must not be seen aligning militarily with a state “facing serious allegations of war crimes and genocide before international legal institutions”.

In a statement today, the Palestine Forum expressed “deep concern” over the reports that the NZ Defence Force (NZDF) would participate in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) military exercises with Israel and the US in Hawai’i between July 21 and 31.

“New Zealand has long claimed to uphold international law, human rights, and an independent foreign policy,” the statement said.

“Participating in joint military exercises alongside Israel fundamentally contradicts those values and risks damaging New Zealand’s international reputation.”

Such exercises should not happen at a time when the world was witnessing the ongoing devastation in Gaza and growing international condemnation of Israel’s actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Palestine Forum said.

“There should be no military cooperation with states engaged in ongoing conflicts and facing credible allegations of violations of international humanitarian law.”

The Palestine Forum called on Christopher Luxon’s coalition government to “immediately review” New Zealand participation in these exercises and “ensure the country does not become complicit directly or indirectly in legitimising violence, occupation, or collective punishment”.

Stand on side of justice, peace
New Zealanders expected their country to stand on the side of justice, peace, and international accountability, not military cooperation with governments accused of grave human rights abuses.

Valerie Morse, a member of Peace Action Wellington, yesterday released a statement about RIMPAC 2026 from the NZDF obtained in response to an Official Information Act (OIA) request last month.

“The NZDF is sending the largest contingent of troops and materiel in a decade to the this year’s RIMPAC including three ships and 328 service personnel,” Morse said.

“This is while Israel continues its genocide in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the US and Israel wage an illegal war on Iran.”

Defending NZ values in a volatile world – but in what kind of a world?

APR editor — Fri, 15 May 2026 03:39:07 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Frances Palmer

While appreciating certain points in Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s speech “Securing NZ’s Future in a more Volatile World” on current challenges to international law, enshrined “rules” and “order”, we must take a hard look at the solutions he offers to enhance security.

Security now clearly is shaped in a global context. The world’s geopolitical issues affect us all, not just those near sites of military engagement, as wars on Ukraine and Iran show.

So it’s misleading to consider security as simply a national or even regional issue, though people within range of military missiles and drones suffer the most horrendously.

Peace advocate Frances Palmer . . . “We don’t exist in a defence structure siloed off from a former ally who flouts any semblance of a “rules-based order.” Image: Scoop/APR

We would agree, as Luxon claims in closing remarks, that we have values worth defending.

What kind of a world and what network of values do we most want to defend? And how can we do this without compromising those same values?

Does anyone really believe that cultural and political values such as democracy are best defended by doubling military spending as he proposes? Or that 20th century national security perspectives and “bomb them to hell” strategies are fit for purpose today, while nuclear arsenals grow month by month, no longer restrained by arms control agreements?

We don’t exist in a defence structure siloed off from a former ally who flouts any semblance of a “rules-based order”. Australia, now our only officially acknowledged defence partner, is closely linked militarily with the US.

Exercises against ‘enemy’
Last year. NZ’s navy joined US and Israel in regular RIMPAC military exercises, to prepare for war against those labelled “enemy”. Judith Collins justified this on the basis that the US sent the invitations; NZ didn’t create the guest list. (Jack Tame interview, The Nation).

Clearly it’s time to weigh up our bedfellows more judiciously, and what values their actions, rather than their words, show they are defending.

It’s hard to see how one defends values like democracy by preparing for war alongside nations whose “Ministries of War” commit and enable genocide in Gaza, threaten to add Canada and Greenland to the US real estate portfolio, and bomb weaker nations back to the Stone Age, while kidnapping presidents of other nations if US corporate interests could benefit.

Luxon is right in stating that this is a historical inflection point, and the way in which we react, along with other nations, will determine “what kind of world comes next”.

How are our values best defended? With weapons and threats? Or by joining like-minded nations to call out all who undermine the values, rules and institutions that endeavoured since the end of World War Two and the United Nations Charter to enhance genuine human security worldwide?

Only ethically grounded values, policy and strategies, supported by inspired multilateral diplomacy and conflict resolution skills, can promote such values and the multilateral order which supported them.

War is a barbaric, blunt tool from a past age which cannot deal with worsening 21st century existential threats which need global collaboration to solve, if most of humanity is to survive the future.

We owe it to our descendants to defend ethical values appropriately to build the foundations of a world that is fit for them.

Frances Palmer is a peace and conflict studies advocate and commentator. She was a SCF nurse in Vietnam and Khmer refugee camps 1975, 1980. Palmer wrote history resources for schools on “Cambodia, Faces of Violence, Hegemony & Holocaust” and “Aotearoa NZ 1980s-1990s, Participation & Resistance to International War”. This article was first published at Scoop.

The West’s bubble of illusion about Israel – and about itself – is finally being burst

APR editor — Wed, 13 May 2026 03:10:25 +0000

The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy, writes Jonathan Cook.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

For decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel.

On the one side, an official Western narrative portrays a plucky, besieged “Jewish” state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbours. Even to this day, that story dominates the political, media and academic landscape.

Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to “the Arabs”, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed.

A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection of a vulnerable minority.

A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic “blood libel”.

It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state — armed by the United States and Europe – bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft.

On this view, the West implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost, there to subdue the native Palestinian population, and terrorise neighbouring states into submission through relentless and overwhelming displays of force.

No middle ground possible
Palestinians cannot make peace, or reach any kind of accommodation, because Israel pursues only conquest, domination and erasure. No middle ground is possible.

The proof, note Palestinians, is Israel’s long-standing refusal to define its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, ever more extreme political agendas have surfaced, demanding not just Israel’s takeover of the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies but expansion into neighbouring states like Lebanon and Syria.

Here are two conflicting narratives in which each side presents itself as the victim of the other.

Two and a half years into a series of Israeli wars against the peoples of Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, how are these two perspectives holding up?

Does Israel look like the frustrated peacemaker facing off with barbaric opponents, or a rogue state whose decades-long aggression has provoked the very retaliatory violence exploited to excuse its constant war-making?

Is Israel a small, reluctant fortress state defending itself, or a Western military client so drunk on its own power that it can no more limit its territorial ambitions than a great white shark can stop swimming?

The truth is that the past 30 months have graphically exposed not only what Israel always was but, by extension, what our own Western states aspired to achieve through their most favoured Middle East client.

“The truth is that the past 30 months have graphically exposed not only what Israel always was but, by extension, what our own Western states aspired to achieve through their most favoured Middle East client.” . . . A protest against Israel in New Zealand’s Devonport Naval Base last weekend. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Ambassador let slip
In a moment of imprudence last month, Christian Turner, Peter Mandelson’s replacement as British ambassador to the US, let slip the reality. Washington, the West’s imperial hub, he said, had no deep loyalty to its allies — apart from one.

Unaware his words were being recorded, he told a group of visiting students: “I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel.”

That special relationship requires that the political and media class in Washington’s other client states, such as Britain, shield the West’s Sparta in the Middle East from critical scrutiny.

So glaring have Israel’s atrocities become that the British government announced last month that it was shuttering its Foreign Office unit tracking war crimes — citing the need for cuts — rather than face further exposure of its collusion in those crimes.

If the British government refuses to monitor Israel’s war crimes, don’t expect more from the establishment media.

For months, Israel has been blowing up village after village in south Lebanon, driving millions of inhabitants from lands lived on for millennia by their ancestors, and it barely registers with our politicians and media.

Israel is destroying Gaza’s water supplies, as it earlier did the tiny enclave’s hospitals and health system, ensuring the further spread of disease, and our politicians and media have barely a word to say about it.

Israel kills, jourmalists, first responders
Israel kills journalists and emergency crews in Gaza and Lebanon week after week, month after month, and it raises barely an eyebrow from the political and media class.

Israel declares “yellow lines“ in Gaza and Lebanon, demarcating expanded borders that formalise its theft of other peoples’ lands, and this instantly becomes the new normal.

Israel continuously violates ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, spreading misery and inflaming yet more anger and bitterness, and once again, our politicians and media turn a blind eye.

Which Western media outlets are pointing out a starkly revealing fact: that Israel now occupies more of Lebanon than Russia does of Ukraine?

An analysis by the Newscord media monitoring group last month confirmed earlier research: that the British media studiously avoid naming ethnic cleansing and genocide when it is Israel — rather than Russia — carrying them out.

Comparing the coverage of the most “serious” establishment British news outlets — the BBC, The Guardian and Sky — with that of Al Jazeera, the study found that UK media consistently choose to obscure Israel’s responsibility for its crimes.

Israel was identified as conducting attacks in Gaza in only around half of British news reports, in contrast to nearly 90 per cent of Al Jazeera’s. As Newscord noted: “Half the time, BBC readers aren’t told who killed the person in the story.”

Hind Rajab headline
That was graphically illustrated in a notorious BBC headline: “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help.”

In fact, an Israeli tank had sprayed a stationary car with gunfire even though the Israeli military had known for hours that it contained a Palestinian girl — the sole survivor of an earlier attack — who emergency crews were desperately trying to reach. Israel killed the rescue team, too.

In another revealing finding, Newscord notes that four out of every five BBC reports on casualties caused by Israel’s attacks used the convoluted passive — rather than active — voice, clearly with the intent to downplay Israel’s culpability and savagery.

The British media also actively undermined the enormity of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza by regularly attributing the figures to a “Hamas-affiliated” Health Ministry — even though the numbers, currently at well over 70,000 Palestinians, are almost certainly a massive undercount, given Israel’s early destruction of the enclave’s government and its capacity to count the dead.

The fact that the United Nations has found the Gaza figures to be credible was mentioned in only 0.6 percent of reports.

Similarly, the BBC and The Guardian made the decision to humanise Israeli captives of Hamas twice as often as they did Palestinian captives of the Israeli state.

The inappropriateness of that double standard is underscored by continuing insinuations from politicians and the media that Hamas “beheaded babies” and carried out systematic rapes on 7 October 2023 — more than two years after those claims were utterly discredited.

Sickening practice
Contrast that with the media’s effective burial of Euro Med Monitor’s report last month on the sickening practice by the Israeli military of raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs trained for that very purpose.

There has been a flood of accounts from Palestinians held captive by Israel of their systematic rape and sexual abuse, confirmed by human rights groups and by the testimonies of whistleblowing Israeli soldiers and medics. Little of this is making headway in the Western media.

Newscord points to a further, veiled problem that skews Western coverage: the omission of established but inconvenient facts that would present Israel in a depraved — that is, an accurate — light.

For example, observes Newscord, the BBC has entirely failed to report all but one of the hundreds of clearly genocidal statements made by Israeli officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down.

It is easy to understand why. Legal authorities usually struggle to make a conclusive determination of genocide because, crucially, it depends on divining intent, which is typically hidden by those committing atrocities.

Starkly, in Israel’s case, not only do its actions in Gaza look like genocide, but its leaders have been crystal clear that those actions are intended to be genocidal. That is behaviour only seen in those intoxicated by a sense of their own impunity.

Once again, the British media have obligingly taken it upon themselves to shield Israel from any legal jeopardy — all in the interests of objective reporting, you understand.

Same story since 1948
This is nothing new. It has been the same story since before Israel’s violent creation on the Palestinians’ homeland in 1948, when 80 percent of the native population were ethnically cleansed by Israel from the new, self-declared “Jewish” state. Or when, in the continuing language of deceit employed by Western political, media and academic elites, some 750,000 Palestinians “fled”.

The aim has been to manufacture and maintain a bubble of illusion for Western publics, one where our own crimes — and those of our allies — remain invisible to us.

Note in this regard the UK government’s determined exclusion of Israel from a recent “independent” inquiry, under former Whitehall bureaucrat Philip Rycroft, into malign foreign financial influence on British politics. It was, of course, Russia that was put chiefly under the spotlight.

Predictably, Keir Starmer’s government rejected in April a petition signed by more than 114,000 people calling for a similar public inquiry into the influence of the powerful Israel lobby.

That came as no surprise, given that any such investigation would have risked foregrounding the many hundreds of thousands of pounds known to have been received by Starmer and his ministers from pro-Israel lobbyists.

The same British political and media class so averse to investigating the malign influence of the pro-Israel lobby is also ignoring Israel’s current, systematic destruction of villages and infrastructure across south Lebanon — in flagrant violation of a supposed ceasefire.

Israeli soldiers have told local media that their job is to target all structures indiscriminately, whether civilian or “terrorist”, with the goal of preventing the Lebanese inhabitants from returning to their villages.

Colonising occupied lands
That fits with Israel’s announcement that it does not intend to withdraw after the fighting ends, and widespread plans to colonise the occupied lands in Lebanon with Jewish settlers.

Were it not for videos of Israel blowing up Lebanese communities breaking through on social media, despite algorithmic suppression, we might not know about Israel’s wholesale efforts to ethnically cleanse south Lebanon.

Responding to these videos with a rare “mainstream” report on the campaign of destruction, The Guardian sugar-coated the horror faced by Lebanese families discovering their homes gone, along with priceless memories and heirlooms. This experience was described — absurdly — by the paper as “bittersweet”.

Critics note a consistent pattern. Israel is not only levelling south Lebanon; over the past 30 months, it has levelled almost every building in Gaza, too.

But the template for both is of much earlier origin, as every Palestinian learns from a tender age.

Having expelled most Palestinians from their homes in 1948, Israel spent years blowing up some 500 villages one after another — even as Israeli leaders publicly claimed to be begging the refugees to return and Western leaders were extolling Israel as the “only democracy” in the Middle East.

Expulsions that the West still pretends did not take place eight decades ago are now being live-streamed. This time, they are impossible to deny, as well as the colonial, supremacist agenda behind them.

Villify the messenger
If the message inhering in Israel’s atrocities can no longer be disappeared, laundered or normalised — as it was in an age before 24-hour rolling news and social media — then a different strategy is required: villify the messenger.

This is the political task of our times.

The anti-racist left are demonised as Jew-hating bigots for trying to burst the West’s long-established bubble of illusion by noisily flagging both the atrocities committed by Israel, supposedly in the name of Jews, and the complicity of their own governments in those atrocities.

Last month, Starmer’s government forced through the Commons a law allowing the police to outlaw protests causing “cumulative disruption” — that is, repeat protests like those against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The media barely blinked.

Last week’s attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, allegedly by a mentally ill man with a long history of violence, is being quickly exploited by the main parties to prepare for even tighter restrictions on the right to protest.

Britons who try to stop Israeli war crimes, whether by targeting Israel’s factories of death located in the UK or by holding placards in support of this kind of direct action, continue to be treated as “terrorists”, even after a court ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action is unlawful.

With juries often proving reluctant to convict, the British state has set about openly rigging the trials. Juries are blocked from learning about the reasons for the targeting of Israeli weapons factories — the accused’s main defence. Judges instruct juries to convict.

Long-established right
Members of the public who silently hold signs outside court are arrested for reminding juries of a long-established right in law to defy such instructions, follow their consciences and acquit — a police abuse contravening hundreds of years of legal precedent, and one the courts appear increasingly ready to condone.

There are gags, being dutifully obeyed by the media, on other secret malpractices designed to help the British government secure the verdicts it needs to stop activism against the genocide. We only know because Your Party MP Zarah Sultana has used parliamentary privilege to draw attention to them.

It was telling last week that, in the current repeat trial of six Palestine Action defendants, five of them dispensed with their barristers for the closing speeches. They noted, darkly, that their legal representatives could not properly represent them due to “decisions made by the court”.

Meanwhile, the Starmer government is pressing ahead with plans to finally rid itself of troublesome juries and let more reliable judges decide these political show trials alone.

Welcome to the rapid unravelling of Britain’s most cherished constitutional rights — needed chiefly, it seems, to protect a far-off country that, according to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), commits the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and may plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published on the author’s website and republished with permission.

Iran war fallout – Trump is going to Beijing on bended knees

APR editor — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:38:19 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean

Why is US President Donald Trump carrying on with his State visit to Beijing this week on May 14? I wouldn’t if I were him.

It also shows that he is surrounded by incompetent officials. Any competent advisor would advise him against undertaking this trip.

He goes as the leader of a “defeated” nation, against a foe on which the United States has imposed the stiffest sanctions for 47 years. He will be viewed by the Chinese as the President that ended the American empire.

He thinks he is going as a conquering hero and can wow the Chinese with his empty boasts that America won a huge victory and destroyed Iran. He will be met by President Xi and the Chinese leadership with polite smiles and smirks of the greatest disrespect.

If he has any EQ, he will know that his treatment in Beijing is going to be brutal. The Chinese may even gift him the symbolic white flag of surrender. You will see that in this summit, the US will be very much the junior partner.

Iran will never give this defeated President the satisfaction of a peace agreement which he so desperately needs, and is begging for, before his trip to Beijing. They will make sure he goes to Beijing as a defeated man.

Iran is not after a peace deal, but the total and comprehensive defeat of America as the global hegemon. Iran will see to it that the US gets out of the Middle East totally so that Israel is isolated and the Greater Israel project totally destroyed.

Security architecture shifting
Even as I write, the security architecture of the Middle East is shifting rapidly. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman are shifting their allegiances increasingly toward Iran, Russia and China.

Fifty-five years of being America’s poodles are coming to an end. These countries have realised that the US is an unreliable partner and cannot guarantee their security.

The stupid countries are the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, which still hitch their wagons to the Americans and Israel. They have dug their own graves.

History has never witnessed another event as dramatic as the Iran war, where a global power has lost power and prestige in such a short period of 4 months.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Iran war almost over . . . and the end of an era – a Global South perspective

APR editor — Thu, 07 May 2026 02:53:25 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Prince Taofeek Ajibade

The signals are now coming from both sides of the negotiating table. American sources confirm it. Pakistani mediators confirm it.

The end of the US-Iran war is near, and the terms of that ending will echo across the international order for decades.

Let us be precise about what has happened here.

Iran, a nation under sanctions for more than four decades, subjected to assassinations, sabotage, proxy warfare — and finally direct military assault by the most expensively armed forces in human history, backed by a nuclear-armed Israel — has not been defeated.

It has not collapsed. It has not surrendered its sovereignty, its nuclear programme, or its dignity. It stood, absorbed the blows, struck back with precision, and forced Washington to the negotiating table.

That is not a stalemate. That is a victory.

Trump’s 10-day ceasefire declaration in April initially appeared like a pause. However, as days went by, it became clearer it was an exit strategy in search of a face-saving wrapper.

Silence terminal, not tactical
The Americans have not fired a significant shot since. The silence was not tactical. It was terminal.

Consider what Iran has demonstrated to the watching world. It faced two nuclear powers simultaneously, America and Israel, with all the military technology, intelligence infrastructure, and political backing that entails.

Strangely, Iran depleted American missile stockpiles to the point of a three-to-five-year restocking timeline. It struck American bases across seven countries.

It collected tolls on the Strait of Hormuz. It watched its adversary’s approval ratings collapse domestically while its own national resolve hardened.

Trump, the self-proclaimed dealmaker, cannot exit fast enough.

The man who launched this war with the language of dominance is now scrambling for the language of diplomacy, mediated by Pakistan, concluded on terms nobody in Washington would have accepted 12 weeks ago.

History will record this clearly. A civilisation several thousand years old, armed with ingenuity, patience, and righteous resistance, outlasted the last empire’s appetite for a fight it should never have started.

The war is ending. Iran is standing. The world has been watching, and the world has learned something.

Prince Taofeek Ajibade is an educator and digital creator from Ibadan, Nigeria.

Blame the NZ govt for ‘selective’ human rights morality, not activists

APR editor — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:49:27 +0000

COMMENTARY: By John Minto

Forough Amin in her opinion piece “The consequences of selective morality” (The Press, 28 April 2026) argues that the Palestine solidarity movement’s call for sanctions against Israel is “selective morality”. She says we should be calling out all human rights abuses everywhere — which in her case means Iran.

We agree with Amin’s basic premise that calls for action against countries abusing human rights should be consistent and comprehensive.

Our focus, given our organisations’ title, is however on Palestine. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is objectively the worst atrocity this century and one which all Western governments, such as ours, support. That genocide is in our name.

It is precisely because our government refuses to sanction Israel for the mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and the pogroms conducted by Israeli settlers, with the support of the Israeli military, throughout the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territory) that we must all speak up and demand accountability for Israel and from our government.

The complete avoidance of accountability by Israel is the single most important reason that it continues its brutal occupation in the OPT, its daily theft of Palestinian land and its refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to land from which they were ethnically cleansed by Israeli militias in 1948.

Our government operates a simple, easy to understand, double standard — it calls out and acts on human rights abuses in countries that the US sees as enemies, but refuses to call out or act on human rights abuses in countries the US sees as friends.

That is why the government has enacted comprehensive sanctions against Iran and Russia, but miserly measures against a small handful of racist Israeli settlers for the most egregious of war crimes.

Tight business restrictions
Regarding Iran, for example, our government has imposed tight business restrictions, targeted travel bans, asset freezes, import/export bans and suspension of bilateral engagements.

in October last year the government even re-imposed UN sanctions following Iran’s non-compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on nuclear technology, ignoring the fact that the US pulled out of the JCPOA eight years ago.

New Zealand expects Iran, yet not the US, to keep following the trashed agreement.

So comprehensive and pervasive are the sanctions against Iran that the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) advises that “given the wide scope of the Regulations, and the penalties for non-compliance, it is recommended that anyone contemplating doing business with Iran obtain independent legal advice before engaging in business with people in Iran, or with entities that are incorporated in Iran or subject to its jurisdiction”.

The sanctions regime against Russia is similar in scope and designed to hold Russia to account for its invasion of Ukraine.

So, what did we do when the US and Israel twice launched massive air attacks against Iran, both times while the US was in negotiations with the Iranian leadership? Nothing.

Our Minister of Foreign Affairs issued a statement, not condemning the US and Israel, but condemning Iran for retaliating against US bases in the Gulf states. It would make great satire in a TV comedy but unfortunately its real.

No coup condemnation
Amin does not condemn the US-orchestrated overthrow of the first democratically-elected government in Iran in 1953 when Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was deposed in a coup to make way for the US-installed Shah of Iran — a lineage Amin wants to reinstate, albeit temporarily.

Needless to say, calls for democracy under the Shah were met with hideous brutality and widespread oppression of Iranian human rights activists.

It’s important to consider the feelings of New Zealanders who have community connections to overseas conflicts. It’s also important not to blame any community here for war crimes committed on the other side of the world.

Palestinian New Zealanders in particular deserve our support and empathy as they watch tens of thousands of their kinfolk, mostly women and children, being killed in Gaza — actions driven by the most hideous, genocidal rhetoric from Israeli political and military leaders.

The situation with Israel is similar to apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Western governments, especially New Zealand, stood with apartheid South Africa and resisted black South African calls for sanctions, until international civil society groups (including HART and CARE here) mobilised public opinion to demand action against that apartheid state.

All major human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, along with human rights groups in Israel, describe the regime there as an apartheid state. It has a whole host of laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.

Two to one back sanctions
The government’s selective morality is in our sights. Already public surveys show that of New Zealanders who give an opinion, they are two to one supporting sanctions against Israel.

Let’s hope Auckland City Council votes to end procurement of goods and services from companies identified by the UN Human Rights Council as supporting Illegal Israeli settlements in the OPT. These settlements constitute a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

And if Amin can find any comparable human-rights-abusing companies the Auckland City Council is working with, then she should take that up with the council and would be guaranteed backing from our supporters.

John Minto was national co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Press and is republished with permission.

Eugene Doyle: Iran demands hundreds of billions in reparations for being attacked. Guess who’ll pay?

APR editor — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:53:32 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Eugene Doyle

If Iran succeeds in extracting reparations for the damage done to it in the US-Israeli war, it will be a world historic moment.

Iran may be bloodied but it remains unbowed and is seeking compensation from the Arab states over “direct involvement” in the US-Israeli war of aggression.

Iran sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres this month outlining its claim against Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan. They also intend to apply a transit toll on the Strait of Hormuz as an instrument of restorative justice.

Under international law — if anyone still pays attention to such things — the Iranians have a strong case. What will determine if justice is done, however, is victory over the aggressors.

More than 100 US-based international law experts, professors, and practitioners have released a letter stating that the United States and Israel violated the UN Charter by launching strikes on Iran on February 28. The signatories include leaders of prominent international law associations and former Judge Advocates General — the top legal advisors to the US armed forces. They cite the complete lack of evidence of an imminent Iranian threat that could support a self-defence claim.

Under international law the aggressor is responsible for all the destruction that follows. The white-dominated Western countries like the US, Australia and New Zealand should stop banging on about the illegality of Iran taking control of the Strait and address the root causes of why it did so.

The case against the Arab states
In the early days of the war, radar systems operating from these countries were fully engaged in the war. Thousands of US troops were operating from 14 US bases in their territories.

Attack planes, refuelling planes and aerial surveillance planes all operated from bases like Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd Air Base, as reported by Middle East Eye. Major Western outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times documented missile launches and multiple other ways Jordan and the Gulf States were directly involved in the war despite the mainstream media portraying them as innocent bystanders and victims of Iranian aggression.

Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have both described the Gulf States as fighting “shoulder to shoulder” with the US and Israel. In filing their letter with the UN the Iranians have also provided satellite and other data to support their claim.

Iran argues that the Arab states, under international law, are co-belligerents. The UN’s International Law Commission (ILC) Articles on State Responsibility (2001) defines the concept of “Aid or Assistance” in the commission of an internationally wrongful act. It is not hard for Iran to prove that these states did not maintain neutrality.

In reality, for Iran to get justice, deterrence and reparations, there is no international body or court to turn to; it must win by making a continuation too painful for the aggressors.

There are signs it might just succeed. Iran has achieved something few on the Western side anticipated: the destruction of most of the US bases. Marc Lynch, director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University told Middle East Eye, “The bases around the region are suffering real damage, and I think it’s very unlikely that we’re ever going to go back and put our Fifth Fleet back in Bahrain. It’s too vulnerable.

“This is the physical architecture of American primacy, and Iran has essentially rendered it useless in the span of a month.”

The War on Iran is a long way from finished. Even if the ceasefire holds, the Israelis and Americans will see this only as a stage in their multi-decade project to wreck Iran as a major regional competitor.

The victims are usually the ones who must pay
At the end of imperial wars, the victims are traditionally made to pay.

In the 19th Century, the British fought the Chinese over the latter’s resistance to the British government’s lucrative opium trade into China. The imperialists won and imposed the infamous Unequal Treaties on China, including awarding to Britain the island of Hong Kong.

Queen Victoria even shamelessly named a stolen Pekingese dog “Lootie” after the British sacking of Beijing’s Summer Palace, one of the great cultural crimes of history.

When the genocidal US war on Vietnam ended, decades of harsh US sanctions on their victims began. As the US moved towards accepting it had lost the war, Nixon promised $3.3 billion in reconstruction aid under the Paris Peace Accords (1973). The Americans never paid a cent.

The US also pressured the IMF, World Bank, and UN agencies to block Hanoi’s applications for loans, seriously retarding reconstruction.

When the slave revolt in Hispaniola (present day-Haiti) drove out the French, the Western powers returned in force a few years later and imposed harsh “reparations” for being dispossessed of their “stolen” land and humans. From 1825, Haiti was forced to pay 150 million francs to France to compensate former slaveholders for their “lost property”. This debt was only fully paid off in 1947, permanently crippling the nation.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is something different. Iran, like the Vietnamese, the Algerians and the Indians may have what it takes to prevail over imperial aggression. Iran may also have something different: the power to impose reparations on the aggressor.

Across the West we are subjected to the astonishing chutzpah of Western leaders decrying the “illegality” of Iran’s declaration of sovereignty over the Hormuz Strait in response to the war launched against them. These same leaders stood silent and complicit and lifted no more than an eyebrow as hundreds of Iranian schoolchildren were killed, hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure destroyed, and leader after leader were assassinated.

Cowards, all of them, they at best offered whispered rebukes when Trump threatened the destruction of Iranian civilisation in a single night. But tax a barrel of oil and “Oh my god, this is intolerable!”

Iran has every right to insist on reparations but they will only come about if Iran succeeds in imposing its position on the belligerents. The Israelis and Americans are unlikely to face justice at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or International Court of Justice (ICJ), so reparations must be extracted from the other enabling states like the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and France. It is an elegant solution.

One thing the Iranians will hopefully recover soon is their stolen money. Experts estimate more than $100 billion remains blocked in foreign banks (including in the US, Qatar, South Korea, and Iraq).

We should remember that since 1979 the Western world has grievously damaged Iran’s economy via sanctions and the weaponisation of international trading systems, as well as blocking its integration within the community of nations.

A world historic moment is possible
If Iran succeeds in extracting reparations, it will be a world historic moment. It will be an achievement that will benefit countries around the globe which are similarly assailed by major powers. Nuclear powers like the US and Israel should respect the territorial integrity of non-nuclear states. They have done the opposite — and should face consequences.

For these reasons and more, I hope the Iranian government succeeds in its historic mission to preserve the territorial integrity of the sovereign state of Iran and that they can receive just compensation for the terrible crimes committed against them.

I will give the last word to Mohaddeseh Fallahat, a mother who spoke to the UN Human Rights Council this month about losing her daughter to a US airstrike at Minab at the very start of the US-Israeli war on Iran:

“As they walked out the door, they simply said, Mum, come pick us up after school. That simple sentence now repeats in my mind a thousand times. Each time my heart burns with pain. No mother ever thinks she will send her child off to school with a smile, only to be met with silence.”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He is a contributor to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz

No wonder Iran went cold on sham talks, considering the lying US-Israeli track record

APR editor — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:03:04 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Tim O’Shea

I don’t blame Iran for going cold on another sham negotiation session with the US.

After all, why would they take the US or Israel seriously? Or even remotely trust either of them when:

They both bombed Iran right in the middle of two sets of previous “negotiations”; and
Trump lied about Lebanon being included in the recent ceasefire agreement.

That inclusion was acknowledged by the mediators, Pakistan.

As a result, Israel continued to bomb Lebanon; in fact they stepped up their attacks and killed 300+ people in one day.

In the very latest agreement, Iran opened up the Strait of Hormuz as agreed, but the US (incredulously) continued with its blockade.

Yesterday the US escalated things by attacking and confiscating an Iranian merchant ship.

750+ Palestinians have been murdered by the IDF during Trump’s fake ceasefire in October 2025. They are slaughtering women and kids in Gaza and the West Bank every day.

Thousands of Israeli violations
Israel broke their ceasefire agreement signed in November 2014 with Lebanon thousands of times (according to UN peacekeepers in Lebanon).

Both Trump and Netanyahu have made numerous threats to obliterate Iran, to commit genocide and even holocaust.

They have bombed thousands of Iranian civilian targets in contravention of international law — residential buildings, government buildings, historic sites, bridges, police stations, schools, universities, pharmacy companies, factories, public transport, ambulances, medical centres and hospitals.

So WHY the hell would Iran have any confidence that anything that these devious and untrustworthy US and Israeli war criminals agree will ever be adhered to?

Both of these warmongering nations have displayed a total lack of integrity and credibility through their disingenuous words and actions over many decades.

I don’t see any other alternative than for Iran to play hard ball.

Time is Trump’s enemy, not Iran’s.

And now Trump has extended the ceasefire at the last moment.

Tim O’Shea is a New Zealand social, environmental political activist and commentator.

Who is breaking international law in the Strait of Hormuz? It’s not Iran, says scholar

APR editor — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:09:29 +0000

Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman.

As we continue to look at the US and Israeli war on Iran, we’re joined now by Dr Maryam Jamshidi. She is an Iranian American associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute. She has written a new piece for The Nation magazine headlined “Only One Side Has Clearly Broken the Law In the Strait of Hormuz: And it isn’t Iran.”

Professor Jamshidi, explain.

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me.

So, you know, what I was trying to get at in that piece is that, you know, there’s been a lot of international outcry about what Iran has done in the strait, specifically its efforts to regulate passage of ships through the strait and to charge certain ships a fee for going through the strait.

The international rhetoric has been that what Iran is doing is completely and clearly illegal. And from my perspective, that’s not entirely true. This is not a black-and-white issue. Iran does have a reasonable legal argument to regulating the Strait of Hormuz, as well as to charging fees.

By contrast, the criticism of what the United States and Israel has done to Iran, which is an aggressive and illegal war, has been more muted, in particular from Western states, as well as from some of the regional Arab states. And I think this contrast between these two reactions is very telling — on the one hand, total condemnation of Iran on legal issues that are far from clear, and very more muted criticism, more limited criticism of the United States and Israel when it comes to actions they’ve taken that are very clearly unlawful under international law.

I think this says a lot about the ways in which international law is being deployed in this moment as a way of restraining and regulating Iranian behavior, while effectively allowing the United States and Israel a free hand to do what they want against the Iranian government.

Who is breaking international law in the Strait of Hormuz? Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think this unprovoked war that Israel and the US — this war of choice, as it’s called — have engaged in with Iran has done to international law and people’s perspective view of it around the world, and the consequences when people want to apply international law?

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. I mean, you know, over the last few years, we’ve seen the ways in which Israel, in particular, with support from the United States, as well as with support from much of the rest of the West, Western governments, has eroded and violated and scoffed at international law, in its actions towards the Palestinians, its actions in Lebanon, its actions in Syria, its actions in Yemen, its other actions in Iran.

And I think that, you know, these actions that Israel has taken has understandably led many to question the utility and importance of international law, whether or not it still exists or not. And, you know, now with this war against Iran, that, those concerns, those fears that international law is really meaningless, have only increased.

In this moment, though, I think what’s also important to understand is that states like Iran are also at the same time saying, “No, international law matters very much, and we expect to be treated as equals under international law.”

Iran, in this moment, is framing a lot of what it’s doing in international law terms, because it understands that if international law is truly going to be thrown into the dustbin, then it’s going to be far more vulnerable on the international stage.

So, we basically see a battle. We see a battle between, on the one side, states like Israel and the United States, states that are, by and large, Western, you know, basically saying, “International law doesn’t apply to us. We can do what we want,” and then other states, like Iran, states of the Global South, saying, “No, we want international law. We value international law. International law is necessary to ensuring that we are sovereign and equal to other states on the international scale. And so, we are not going to let international law just be taken away from us.”

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about the UN Security Council? You’ve noted multiple resolutions have been introduced to condemn Iran’s regulatory actions in the strait. Who is behind these resolutions? Meanwhile, the Iranian Parliament is reportedly considering legislation that would formalise its regulatory system, including the fee system, as part of its domestic law.

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: Right. So, there were — there have been multiple resolutions brought before the Security Council since the war started. They have mostly been focused on Iran and Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz. The states that have been the real force behind these resolutions appear to be the Arab Gulf states, in particular Bahrain and the UAE, who have also been the subject of the most attacks by Iran.

What’s, again, very interesting and, I think, important to understand about these resolutions is that they very clearly and absolutely condemned Iran for its regulatory actions within the Strait of Hormuz. As I mentioned, even though those actions do have a legal basis, those resolutions presented them as being fully unlawful.

And one of those resolutions, which, thankfully, was vetoed by China and Russia, would have effectively authorised all UN member states — that’s over 190 states — to go to war with Iran in order to open the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, that is a very radical proposition, to basically validate and allow states to engage in armed conflict against another state simply for the purpose of opening a waterway.

So, you know — and again, there were no resolutions that were brought to the Security Council to explicitly condemn the US and Israel for their actions against Iran.

In terms of the domestic legislation inside Iran, you know, that the Iranian Parliament appears to be contemplating, as you mentioned, this legislation would basically make the regulatory scheme within Hormuz, in the Strait of Hormuz, a part of Iranian law.

It’s not entirely clear what the terms of that law are, you know, what the basis for it is, what kind of regulation it will in fact implement. But it does seem to have a fee system as a part of it. So, the Iranians are trying to take this ad hoc fee system that they have developed over the course of the last few weeks and actually institutionalise it within domestic law.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end by asking you about [US President Donald] Trump’s comments. On Saturday, he told a reporter at Fox News, “If Iran doesn’t sign this deal, the whole country is getting blown up.” That followed two weeks before, when he warned, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Professor Jamshidi?

MARYAM JAMSHIDI: These comments are absolutely unacceptable. I mean, they are borderline genocidal in their intent and in their implications. To say to the world that you’re going to obliterate an entire civilisation is, in fact, to make very clear that you desire to destroy an entire people.

You know, I don’t know if he thinks that this is an effective negotiating tool, but certainly from a legal perspective, from a moral perspective, it’s beyond the pale.

This article is republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Caitlin Johnstone: I hope the US loses and the empire collapses

APR editor — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:31:21 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

I don’t mind admitting that I hope the US and Israel suffer a crushing, devastating defeat in Iran.

I hope this war collapses the entire US empire. My only loyalty is to humanity, and being on Team Human in today’s world means being against the US empire and against Israel.

I hope the empire falls. I hope the apartheid state of Israel is dismantled.

LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley

I hope humanity is able to pry the steering wheel from the fingers of the ghouls who currently rule our world, so that we can create a healthy planet and a harmonious future together.

I hope the US loses and other notes Video: Caitlin Johnstone

YouTube has banned the channel that’s been creating viral AI Lego music videos criticising the US war on Iran. The Google-owned platform claims the Lego videos somehow constituted “violent content”, but we all know it was to facilitate the US propaganda effort by shutting down effective propaganda for the other side.

Silicon Valley is a crucial arm of US imperial control.

It chooses to advance the interests of the empire at every significant juncture. It’s a branch of imperial soft power in the same way the military is a branch of imperial hard power.

Iran-linked accounts are circulating a new LEGO-style propaganda video portraying U.S. and Israeli leaders as corrupt elites tied to the “Epstein files,” part of a broader online campaign aimed at undermining support for the war.

The animation depicts President Donald Trump… pic.twitter.com/PdjcJGrjuy

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) April 9, 2026

❖

The US and Israel have so normalised the assassination of national leaders that the mainstream press now discuss it as a standard military tactic. The other day The Washington Post ran an article by Marc Thiessen arguing that the US should “carry out a final barrage of leadership strikes, eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations”.

“Iran’s leaders must be made to understand that their lives literally depend on reaching a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking. If they refuse to do so, they will be killed,” Thiessen writes.

At some point one of America’s enemies is going to assassinate a US official and my replies are going to be full of shrieking, outraged Americans acting like I’m the bad guy when I say Washington had it coming.

❖

Even if the US wasn’t directly responsible for the Strait of Hormuz situation, it would still be the last country on earth with any business whining about it. They’re openly imposing a fuel blockade on Cuba while complaining that nobody should be allowed to block shipping lanes, for Christ’s sake.

❖

The Democratic National Committee voted to reject a resolution denouncing the influence of AIPAC in US politics. Eighty percent of Democrats have a negative view of Israel today. The DNC’s main function is to keep the Democratic Party and its representation on the ballot from reflecting the will of the public.

❖

pic.twitter.com/K0kNiJYbKs

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 14, 2026

Dear Trump supporters, send me all of your money. I have a plan to make America great again. I will end all the wars and drain the swamp. Don’t worry if it looks like I’m not doing any of those things, I’m playing 4d chess, trust the plan. Send me your life savings right now.

❖

It’s important not to let them pin this all on Trump, in the same way it’s important not to let them pin Israel’s crimes on Netanyahu. Everything we are seeing with this disastrous Iran war is the product of the entire power structure which gave rise to it, not one guy’s dopey decisions.

The warmongers in the DC swamp have been pushing war with Iran for decades. Trump is just the guy who was chosen by Zionist oligarchs and bloodthirsty empire managers to carry out the deed. He happens to be the face on the operation, but if it wasn’t him it would have been someone else.

American warmongering insanity didn’t start with Trump, and it isn’t going to end with him either. Don’t direct your rage merely at the fleeting puppets who come and go from the imperial stage as the US murder machine trudges onward. Direct it at the empire itself.

Trump’s naval blockade of Strait of Hormuz actually targets China

APR editor — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:39:31 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean

Most of Iranian oil — 96.7 percent — is destined for China. If you note this figure, you will realise that the Americans are really trying to choke off the supply of Iranian oil to China by blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

This is a major part of the American containment strategy against China.

Now that America will most likely lose control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, they are shifting their attention to the other most critical chokepoint in the world — the Strait of Malacca.

About 80 percent of China’s imported oil has to pass through the Strait of Malacca. Vessels come down the Strait, sail past Singapore which is at the southernmost tip of the Strait, before they swing upwards into the South China Sea to go to the Philippines and East Asia, including China.

The two most important countries which border the Malacca Strait are Indonesia and Malaysia, one on either side of the Strait.

A very interesting development took place on Monday in Washington when the Defence Minister of Indonesia Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin signed a cooperation agreement with US War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Speculation on details
People are speculating about the details of the agreement:

Will it allow the Americans to base troops in Indonesia and use Indonesian airspace for their air assets?
Will American naval vessels be allowed to dock at the old Dutch port of Belawan, near Medan, in Northern Sumatra, which is near the opening to the Strait?
Will the Malacca Strait now become the focal point in this great power struggle between America and China?
What will Indonesia’s other BRICs partners, principally China and Russia think of Indonesia’s move in signing this agreement with the Americans?

To spice things up, Indonesian President Probowo Subianto was in Moscow a few days ago meeting with President Putin.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

The two most important countries which border the Malacca Strait are Indonesia and Malaysia, one on either side of the Strait. Image: Lim Tean FB

What on earth just happened? Trump, Iran, and the unlikely ceasefire

APR editor — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:11:39 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Trita Parsi

Yesterday began with Donald Trump issuing genocidal threats against Iran on social media and ended — just ten hours later — with the announcement of a 14-day ceasefire, on Iran’s terms.

Even by the volatile standards of Trump’s presidency, the whiplash is extraordinary. What, then, have the two sides actually agreed to — and what might it mean?

In a subsequent post, Trump asserted that Iran had agreed to keep the Strait of Hormuz open during the two-week pause in hostilities. Negotiations, he added, will proceed over that period on the basis of Iran’s 10-point plan, which he described as a “workable” foundation for talks.

Those 10 points are:

The US must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.
Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear programme.
Removal of all primary sanctions on Iran.
Removal of all secondary sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Iranian institutions.
End of all United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting Iran.
End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Compensation payment to Iran for war damage.
Withdrawal of US combat forces from the region.
Ceasefire on all fronts, including Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The United States has not, of course, signed on to all 10 points. But the mere fact that Iran’s framework will anchor the negotiations amounts to a significant diplomatic victory for Tehran.

More striking still, according to the Associated Press, Iran will retain control of the Strait during the ceasefire and continue — alongside Oman — to collect transit fees from passing vessels. In effect, Washington appears to have conceded that reopening the waterway comes with tacit recognition of Iran’s authority over it.

The geopolitical consequences could be profound. As Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti note in Responsible Statecraft, Tehran is likely to leverage this position to rebuild economic ties with Asian and European partners — countries that once traded extensively with Iran but were driven out of its market over the past 15 years by US sanctions.

Also strategic
Iran’s calculus is not driven solely by solidarity with Palestinians and Lebanese. It is also strategic. Continued Israeli bombardment risks reigniting direct confrontation between Israel and Iran — a cycle that has already flared twice since October 7.

From Tehran’s perspective, a durable halt to its conflict with Israel is inseparable from ending Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. This is not an aspirational add-on; it is a prerequisite.

The forthcoming talks in Islamabad between Washington and Tehran may yet falter. But the terrain has shifted. Trump’s failed use of force has blunted the credibility of American military threats, introducing a new dynamic into US-Iran diplomacy.

Washington can still rattle its sabre. But after a failed war, such threats ring hollow.

The United States is no longer in a position to dictate terms; any agreement will have to rest on genuine compromise. That, in turn, demands real diplomacy — patience, discipline, and a tolerance for ambiguity — qualities not typically associated with Trump.

It may also require the participation of other major powers, particularly China, to help anchor the process and reduce the risk of a relapse into conflict.

Above all, the ceasefire’s durability will hinge on whether Trump can restrain Israel from undermining the diplomatic track.

No illusions
On this point, there should be no illusions. Senior Israeli officials have already denounced the agreement as the greatest “political disaster” in the country’s history — a signal, if any were needed, of how fragile this moment may prove to be.

Even if the talks collapse — and even if Israel resumes its bombardment of Iran — it does not necessarily follow that the United States will return to war. There is little reason to believe a second round would produce a different outcome, or that it would not once again leave Iran in a position to hold the global economy hostage.

In that sense, Tehran has, at least for now, restored a measure of deterrence.

One final point bears emphasis: this elective war was not only a strategic blunder. Rather than precipitating regime change, it has likely granted Iran’s theocracy a renewed lease on life — much as Saddam Hussein did in 1980, when his invasion enabled Ayatollah Khomeini to consolidate power at home.

The magnitude of this miscalculation may well puzzle historians for decades to come.

Dr Trita Parsi is the executive VP of the Quincy Institute and an award-winning author. Washingtonian Magazine has named him one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy. Noam Chomsky calls him “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran”.

How Trump’s White House demands as prerequisites for stopping bombings bit the dust

APR editor — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:22:24 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Yanis Varoufakis

Having launched an illegal, destructive war that brutally struck the entire planet’s economy (and confirmed once again Europe’s combination of irrelevance and hypocrisy), and after threatening Iran with genocide and “civilisational annihilation,” President Trump ultimately backed down on everything.

Like a Roman Emperor during the Empire’s declining years would declare victory and stage triumphs in Rome following massive defeats of his legions at the hands of Gothic warriors, so now does this modern American Nero struggle to convince us that he “won”.

In reality, Iran now decides which vessels pass through the Strait of Hormuz and, for the first time, charge them tolls for so doing.

The demands of the White House, which Trump had set as prerequisites for stopping the bombings, have bitten the dust.

The surrender of Iran’s enriched uranium, the demand for the destruction of Iran’s missiles, the vain hopes for regime change, the designs on Iranian oil — all of these goals were forgotten.

What has not been forgotten, and will not be forgotten, are the 180 schoolgirls that the US murdered on the first day of their attack by striking their school — along with the thousands of other killed and maimed civilians.

False sense of relief
Lest the world be overtaken by a false sense of relief, it is crucial to brace ourselves for the long-lasting economic repercussions of Trump’s idiotic war.

Make no mistake: the shockwaves of economic hardship caused by the US attack on Iran may wane but it will not be averted.

The wave of soaring prices, the blow to employment, the increase in interest rates and foreclosures will not disappear with this ceasefire.

On the contrary, because of the oligarchic cartels that also see this crisis as an opportunity, it will take political pressure by the many on the very few to reverse the negative consequences of this criminal war, as well as all the various crises that preceded it.

Republished from Yanis Varoufakis’ X feed.

‘Someone, everyone, stop them’ – and now Trump has pulled back from the brink

APR editor — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:59:59 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Marilyn Garson, of Sh’ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices

Vietnam survived Nixon’s madman theory and the world survived the era of mutually assured destruction. Now we face the moment of two super-empowered shitheads. There is nothing nicer to call them.

Who will stop two self-obsessed, very old men, already dedicated to tearing down humanity? Today Trump openly declares his intention to destroy a civilisation. They are apparently only able to see war personally, Netanyahu as the climax of 40 years of dreaming, and Trump as his arbitrary prerogative.

In lockstep they destroyed Gaza’s homes, places of learning and culture, health and modernity. They murdered civilians with abandon and drew pictures of capitalist castles on the beach — and still they failed, just as their over-armed predecessors have failed from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

People still live, in great need of our action.

The scorched-earth vision of Trump and Netanyahu rolls onward. Now in Iran and again in Lebanon, they make war on civilian homes and infrastructure. They destroy families and livelihoods, places of beauty and culture, the bridges that connect us, the industries that rebuild and the energy that lights the darkness.

They desecrate all of our religions. The list of their crimes grows daily.

Presidential communique on social media.

These two evil despots are content to erode the world’s supplies of power, fertiliser, manufacturing components. They are oblivious to the lives they imperil in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine — and countless other people who they will kill around the world by hunger and hardship.

Anything to rule, even over a landscape of bones and dust. They will fail but they must not be allowed to play this out.

We are beyond disgust. We are witnessing the end of an order indeed: America’s empire is flailing in its death throes. How many people will Trump take down with it?

Weighed down with dread, we have no words but these: someone, everyone, stop them!

Republished from Sh’ma Koleinu — Alternative Jewish Voices.

Trump may have backed down for now, but he’s shown how unhinged he is by threatening the death of a “whole civilization.”

I’m heading back to DC to try and get answers for the American people. Congress needs to return to the Capitol immediately and vote to end this war. https://t.co/vZLXb0anhq

— Senator Andy Kim (@SenatorAndyKim) April 8, 2026

Monsters of war – the men who have put the world at risk

APR editor — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:29:29 +0000

The war in Iran is in its second month. A war started by a criminal defendant, a convicted felon, and a blackmail network that explains everything Western leaders won’t say. Michael West Media reports.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Two men are mainly responsible for the war on Iran. And then there are those — such as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — who wilfully acquiesce to their murderous whims.

It’s the men. Not their press releases. Not their carefully managed public personas. Not the language their communications teams have stress tested for maximum palatability.

It’s the men themselves.

Their records. Their legal jeopardy. And the extraordinary, historically unprecedented fact that the two primary architects of a war now costing ordinary Australians their livelihoods are both, in their own ways, running from accountability while simultaneously running the world.

Benjamin Netanyahu
Netanyahu is not merely a controversial leader prosecuting a controversial war. He is a criminal defendant. An accused man.

A person who, under the laws of his own country, not the laws of his enemies, not the laws of international tribunals, he can dismiss as biased, stands charged with fraud, breach of trust, and bribery.

His trial has been grinding through Israel’s courts since 2020. It has not concluded. And critics, serious critics, within Israel’s own legal and political establishment, have made the case, with mounting evidence, that the prolongation of this war serves Netanyahu’s personal legal interests at least as much as it serves Israel’s security ones.

Think about what that means.

A man facing prison. A man whose political survival depends on remaining in power. A man for whom a ceasefire, a negotiated peace, a return to normalcy could mean the resumption of court proceedings that his wartime emergency has conveniently disrupted. A man whose far-right coalition partners have made clear they will collapse the government the moment the guns fall silent.

This man, this specific man, in this specific legal and political predicament, has been handed a blank cheque by Washington. Unlimited weapons. Diplomatic cover.

A US veto at the Security Council every time the international community tries to intervene.

And Anthony Albanese calls the objectives of his war appropriate.

ICC arrest warrant
The International Criminal Court did not call them appropriate. It issued an arrest warrant.

A warrant that sits unrequited and unenforced as Western governments, including Australia’s, conduct business as usual with a man the court has found reasonable grounds to prosecute for war crimes. This is not a technicality. This is not a diplomatic inconvenience. It is the most fundamental possible test of whether the rules-based international order that Australia constantly invokes as a guiding principle means anything whatsoever.

And Australia is failing that test, quietly, daily,

with a smile and a press release about shared values.

This is the casus belli we are never allowed to examine. Not the security rationale. Not the stated military objectives. The actual human being in whose name and for whose benefit this catastrophe is being prosecuted. And what that human being is running from.

Donald Trump
Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 carrying more legal and personal baggage than any president in American history.

A convicted felon. Civil judgments in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And something else, something the mainstream press, particularly in America and Australia, has handled with a caution so extraordinary it constitutes institutional cowardice — the Epstein files.

Jeffrey Epstein . . . not a lone predator, he was the centre of a network. Image: Michael West Media

Jeffrey Epstein was not a lone predator. He was the centre of a network. A procurement and blackmail operation, almost certainly intelligence connected, that ran for decades across the highest levels of American, British, and Israeli power.

The files released in dribs and drabs, fought over in courts, partially suppressed and heavily redacted, point toward a system of leverage that compromised some of the most powerful men on earth.

Trump’s name appears in those files thousands of times. His association with Epstein was long, documented, and by his own prior admission, enthusiastic. In a 2002 interview, he described Epstein as terrific fun, noting approvingly that he liked beautiful women, many of them on the younger side.

That statement was made publicly. It has not been retracted.

It has simply been absorbed into the general noise of a political culture that has lost the capacity for appropriate disgust.

But the Epstein connection is not merely a personal scandal. It is a geopolitical one.

Epstein’s operation did not exist in a vacuum. Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, convicted and imprisoned, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, the media baron confirmed after his death to have been a Mossad asset.

The intelligence dimensions of the Epstein network have been reported by journalists of unimpeachable seriousness across multiple continents. The suggestion that a blackmail operation of this scale, running through the power centres of American political and financial life for decades, had no connection to the intelligence services that specialise precisely in this kind of leverage is not a serious position.

It is wilful blindness.

The Mossad connection
Mossad is Israel’s foreign intelligence service and one of the most operationally aggressive intelligence agencies on the planet. It has assassinated scientists in foreign countries. It has conducted sabotage operations across the Middle East. It has run networks of influence, surveillance, and covert pressure in Western capitals for decades.

This is not conspiracy. This is its known, partially acknowledged, historically documented record.

What the Epstein network, the Mossad connection, the Maxwell lineage, and the drip feed of suppressed files collectively describe, if you follow the thread honestly and without flinching, is a Western political order in which deference to Israeli policy is not entirely or even primarily explained by shared democratic values and strategic alignment.

Some of it is explained by fear.

Some of it is explained by leverage.

Some of it is explained by the quiet, unspoken, never to be uttered in polite company reality that powerful men in Washington, London, and Canberra have made themselves vulnerable. To networks of kompromat, to relationships they cannot fully disclose, to the specific kind of coercive power that intelligence operations specialising in the exploitation of human weakness have deployed for as long as intelligence operations have existed.

This is why the charge of antisemitism is deployed so rapidly against anyone who raises these questions.

Not because the questions are antisemitic.

They manifestly are not, being questions about the conduct of specific governments, specific intelligence agencies, and specific individuals, not about Jewish people as a whole.

But because the charge works. It silences. It ends careers. It redirects the conversation. And the people with the most to lose from honest answers have every incentive to ensure the conversation never reaches those answers.

The International Criminal Court has issued its warrant. The Epstein files are dripping into the public domain. The Maxwell Mossad connection is confirmed historical record.

The leverage that may explain a generation of Western politicians who cannot bring themselves to say a single word of meaningful criticism of Israeli state conduct is no longer the province of conspiracy forums. It is the subject of serious investigative journalism on three continents.

And Australia’s answer, apparently, is to look away.

Anthony Albanese will not be the one to look squarely at any of this. He has already told us where he stands. On national television, he endorsed the war. He called it constructive. He offered the American justification back to an Australian audience as though it were Australia’s own sovereign conclusion.

It was not. It was obedience dressed as policy. And the men who benefit most from that obedience, a defendant in Tel Aviv and a felon in Washington, are laughing all the way to the next airstrike while ordinary Australians pay the bill, while journalists are prosecuted.

Tomorrow: How the Murdoch press is running cover for a war and pointing your anger at the wrong man entirely.

Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman, a Palestine peace activist, and a regular contributor to Michael West Media. This article is republished with permission.

Richard David Hames: When will we make war untenable for the power elites?

APR editor — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:08:22 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Richard David Hames

An Easter message. There’s no mystery about why wars start. They happen because someone, somewhere, decides that negotiation is more dangerous to them than to the people being bombed.

Look at what was happening this “Good” Friday. Iran. Gaza. The West Bank. Lebanon.

Thirty-six days of missiles and a Strait of Hormuz sealed shut while oil companies post record profits and defence contractors book forward orders through 2031. No one in those boardrooms is losing sleep over a negotiated settlement.

That would be the one outcome they cannot monetise.

The choice of war over negotiation is always deliberate. It’s what happens when the institutions built to make negotiation workable — the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the mechanisms of international law — are systematically defunded, vetoed into paralysis, or simply disregarded by those states powerful enough to ignore them without consequence.

When accountability is optional, war is always cheaper than compromise. For the people making the decision, not for the people paying for it in blood.

And here is what makes this moment different from others: we’re not even pretending anymore. Israeli ministers speak of erasure openly. American officials wave away civilian casualties with the language of collateral necessity.

Actions become shameless
The international community issues statements of concern and then approves the next arms shipment. The gap between what is said and what is done has closed — not because the words have become honest, but because the actions have become shameless.

Negotiation requires recognising the humanity of the other party. That’s precisely why it’s rebuffed. You can’t negotiate with someone you have spent 20 years or more dehumanising. Make them monstrous enough and war stops requiring justification. It becomes necessary.

But nothing about this is inevitable. Wars end when the people with the power to end them decide the cost of continuing exceeds the cost of stopping.

That calculation is being made right now, every day, by people who are not dying. The question is not when they will choose peace. It’s when the rest of us will make their continuing refusal untenable.

Richard David Hames is an Australian philosopher-activist, strategic adviser, entrepreneur and futurist, and he publishes The Hames Report on Substack. This article is republished with the author’s permission.

President Trump, don’t listen to your sycophants on Iran, this isn’t reality TV

APR editor — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 07:00:38 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Robert Reich

Mr Trump, may I have a word?

Bad enough for you to insist — in the face of all evidence to the contrary — that you “won” the 2020 election.

But it’s another thing for you to pretend — in the face of mounting deaths and injuries, ballooning expenses, and rising prices — that you won, or are winning, the war with Iran you began on February 28.

“Let me say, we’ve won,” you told a rally in Kentucky on March 11.

“I think we’ve won,” you said on the White House South Lawn on March 20.

“We’ve won this war. The war has been won,” you said in the Oval Office on March 24.

“We are winning so big,” you told a fundraising dinner on March 25.

“We’ve had regime change,” you told reporters just a few days ago. “The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead.” Iran has now moved onto its “third regime,” and American negotiators are now speaking to “a whole different group of people” who have “been very reasonable,” you said.

You’re making this up
You’re making all this up. In fact, you’re losing your war. And so is America and much of the rest of the world.

After a month, your war has already cost 13 American lives, cost American taxpayers more than US$30 billion, cost American consumers at least a dollar more per gallon of gas than they paid a month ago, pushed up food prices and mortgage rates, and pushed down the value of 401(k) retirement plans.

It’s mangled supply chains for industries that rely on items such as fertiliser to grow food or helium to make computer chips. It’s also wreaked havoc across the Middle East with at least 1574 civilians killed in Iran, including 236 children, and at least 50 killed in Iran’s attacks on other Gulf nations.

You assumed Iran would give up its nuclear programme. Wrong. After more than a month of bombing by the United States and Israel, you’ve most likely stiffened the regime’s resolve to produce a nuclear weapon.

In this respect, too, America is worse off — more endangered than we were in 2018 before you withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by former President Barack Obama. In that deal, Iran agreed to restrict its nuclear programme — reducing uranium stockpiles by 98 percent and capping enrichment at 3.67 percent, and allowing inspections — in exchange for relief from UN, EU, and US nuclear-related sanctions.

Iran now holds a stockpile of approximately 970 pounds of uranium enriched up to 60 percent purity, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. That’s close to weapons-grade. No one knows where it’s stored.

You thought winning this war would be as easy as abducting Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and setting up a puppet regime there. Wrong again. The old ayatollah is gone, but the new one and his regime are even more radical and hard line.

Embraced asymmetric warfare
You assumed America’s military might would weaken Iran’s military capacity. Wrong. They’ve embraced asymmetric warfare — using cheap drones and missiles and blocking the Strait of Hormuz — rather than take on America’s and Israel’s superior forces directly.

You thought the regime would soon cave. Wrong. It’s been over a month and they’re the ones playing the waiting game. They think they can withstand the mounting political and economic pressures better and longer than you and America can. They may be correct.

Reportedly, you’ve told aides you’re now willing to end the war even if Iran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz. Maybe this is your best option at this point. But it will allow Iran to decide in the future how much oil gets through and for whom, and could cause the economic damage to the US to grow exponentially worse.

Mr Trump, do you really believe you won this war? Do you really believe America is better off than it was when you began the war?

Maybe the people around you are telling you that you’ve won the war and we’re better off because you punish the bearers of bad news and reward those who tell you what you want to hear. Presumably you’re hearing the same fictionalised good news from Republicans in Congress, from sycophantic leaders abroad, from other assorted lackeys and suck-ups.

Or maybe you think that if you can convince enough people that you won and we’re better off, you will have won and America will be better off. Because for you it’s always about public perceptions of reality rather than reality itself.

No truth, only belief
Everything depends on hype, spin, exaggeration, and outright lies. For you there’s no truth, only belief.

Or maybe you think that if you keep saying you won or are winning, and America has come out on top, your magical thinking will in fact come true.

But this isn’t a game, and you’re not a magician.

This is real blood and guts. Real pain. Real deaths and injuries. Real price increases at the gas pump. Real hardships for real people — in America, in the Middle East, and elsewhere.

You can’t pretend, sir. This isn’t reality television. This is for real. And the reality is Americans are worse off now and less secure than we were when you started this.

Robert Reich is an American professor, writer, former Secretary of Labour, and author of The System, The Common Good, Saving Capitalism, Aftershock, Supercapitalism, The Work of Nations. He is also co-founder of Inequality Media. This commentary was originally published on his Facebook page and is republished under Creative Commons.

‘No kings’: What Americans can learn from other nonviolent civil activism movements

APR editor — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:12:51 +0000

ANALYSIS: Introduced by Robert Reich

From time to time, I post transcripts I’ve come across of particularly insightful conversations. Here’s one that’s particularly relevant to the US “No Kings” Day protests at the weekend.

Recently, The Conversation hosted a webinar in which executive editor and general manager Beth Daley interviewed John Shattuck, professor of practice at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Oliver Kaplan, associate professor at Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver and a visiting scholar at Stanford University.

Shattuck is the former president of Central European University in Hungary, where he defended academic freedom against a rising authoritarian government. Kaplan is the author of Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves. This interview has been condensed and edited for print.

READ MORE: ‘No Kings’ protests erupt across the US, with a Minnesota focus

BETH DALEY: What is an authoritarian regime, and what are their characteristics?

JOHN SHATTUCK: The authoritarian, often referred to as a “king,” is the ideal role from the point of view of the king, but certainly not from the point of view of the people. Authoritarian characteristics include centralised unlimited power, the opposite of democracy; no accountability and no rule of law; no independent courts; no checks and balances on how the king operates; rule by fear and coercion, and when necessary, in order to carry out the king’s orders, rule by by force.

There are no individual rights or civil liberties except those the king decides to allow those who are loyal to him to have, at least until he decides to take them away.

That’s a nutshell informal description of an authoritarian regime. A special threat today is that an authoritarian can emerge from a democratic election, and, indeed, a democratic election can be used to turn a weak democracy into an authoritarian regime.

But when this happens, it opens the door to challenge the authoritarian in a subsequent election if civic activism can defend the electoral process by which the authoritarian was elected.

BD: What are we seeing and not seeing in the US that other countries have gone through in terms of authoritarian government?

OLIVER KAPLAN: I think we are heading toward an autocracy, if not there already. In their 2026 report, the Varieties of Democracy Project writes that the US is no longer a liberal democracy and is moving into “competitive authoritarianism,” marked by executive overreach and erosion of judicial and legislative checks. The report notes that US democracy is being dismantled at a speed that is “unprecedented in modern history”.

We are seeing shifts in terms of concentration of power to the executive branch and a disregard of the rule of law, things like ignoring court orders and difficulty with holding the executive branch accountable. We are also seeing the militariSation of law enforcement, monitoring of US citizens, and what some refer to as the dual state — that the state is working for some people while causing more challenges for or oppressing other people.

One of the things we’re not seeing at full force yet is a complete shutdown of civic space. We’re able to hold this kind of conversation, and people are still able to dialogue and go out on the street.

There are some efforts at curtailing free speech, and I think there’s some self-censorship possibly happening. But there’s still this open space and a powerful mass movement growing in this country.

USA today:

7 million Americans in the streets today protesting for freedom.
3,000 cities and towns. Every single state. “No Kings” protests against the authoritarianism of the Trump. This is one of the largest demonstrations in American history.

pic.twitter.com/cLAwlXK69f

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) March 28, 2026

BD: John, you were on the front lines, particularly in Hungary as the head of Central European University. What did you see there that has parallels today to the US?

JOHN SHATTUCK: There’s certainly a parallel between Hungary and the US, even though the countries are very different in size, history and background. What I saw in Hungary when I became president of Central European University in 2009 was a weak, new democracy that was only established in 1990 after 70 years of fascism and communism.

I was in Hungary from 2009 to 2016 and, despite the differences, I could begin to see some parallels. Many people had grievances in Hungary about how their economy was operating, particularly after the global financial crisis that affected Hungary more than any other Eastern European country.

Then there was an urban-rural divide, the urban elite versus the rural majority in the country.

Along came a cynical populist-nationalist politician, Viktor Orbán. Orbán started manipulating these grievances, and did so to significantly divide Hungarian society. He attacked many of the institutions of democracy, which were increasingly unpopular because of people’s grievances.

He went after elites, and foreigners, and migrants, and the media. And he blamed all of them for the country’s problems. He then was able to ride these grievances into office.

Once in office, Orbán amended the constitution and laws relating to the Parliament. He undermined the independence of the media and the judiciary so as to centralise power. All of this happened while I was running an international university in Budapest, which remained independent because it received no funding from the Hungarian government.

We were able to resist the increasingly authoritarian regime over issues of academic freedom. The government tried to shut down our programmes of migration studies and gender studies, and tried to censor aspects of our history department.

These authoritarian attacks are similar to what we’ve seen happening in the US, and in fact, Viktor Orbán was greatly admired by Donald Trump, and a lot of the playbook that Orban has followed was mirrored in Project 2025 in the US under Trump.

BD: How do communities respond in different ways to authoritarian regimes?

OLIVER KAPLAN: Pro-democracy movements and protection types of movements at the local level often co-occur. For example, in Colombia there have been various leftist movements and political parties that have pushed for greater democratic opening while communities mobilise to keep people safe and help them cope with repressive conditions.

In places like Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala, communities built trust and support networks to provide aid, such as for people who needed food assistance. This provides space to independently operate and preserve the community.

The US has parallels, such as innovating early warning networks to get advance notice of risks and threats, by communicating using the Signal app. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, villages set up radio networks, and in Ukraine they have sophisticated early warning networks to get word of airstrikes and drone attacks.

Fact-finding and countering stigma are important, and in the US we’re seeing that in the form of the video recording and publicising of harmful actions. This has played out similarly in Syria with fact-finding to protect nongovernment organisations.

There’s also accompaniment where outside actors come in to provide support to communities. Around the world, church organisations play important accompaniment roles. We’re seeing clergy in the US step up and visit places that are at risk.

And then, there are protests, the most visible kind of action. In Minnesota, we’ve seen communities actually setting up community barricades, which has also happened in Mexico, Colombia and Northern Ireland. Communicating the nonviolent nature of these movements is important to avoid any pretext for additional crackdowns.

I think Americans have been taking similar actions to other places around the world in part because there are some similar background conditions: repression and strong social capital networks. Those two things come together to produce these strategies.

BD: Could you speak more about the need to build a clear narrative and a positive one?

JOHN SHATTUCK: There are two basic rules for how to resist authoritarianism that I’ve learned from experience: Build a diverse coalition and develop a unifying theme. You need a diverse coalition in order to appeal to a broad range of the public, and in order to do that, you need agreement on the goal and values of what you’re trying to accomplish.

You need a clear and unifying narrative. The narrative often involves economic issues and issues of corruption, since there’s often a great deal of corruption in authoritarian regimes.

Hungary will have its next parliamentary election in April in which Orbán will seek his fifth term as prime minister. The opposition has developed a broad coalition and a unifying theme, while Orbán is using the centralised instruments of government and media that he controls to try to manipulate public opinion.

The opposition coalition is headed by Peter Magyar, who was once a major supporter of Orbán’s government. Magyar’s name can be magical in Hungary — sort of like a “Joe America” in the US.

With Magyar as its head, the opposition is aiming to peel off supporters of the regime. It’s campaigning on economic grounds, with a positive message and on moderate terms. And most importantly, it includes parties from the left, right and center.

Poland has succeeded in doing what the Hungarian opposition is attempting. It managed to vote out an authoritarian government by putting together a broad coalition to defend the independence of the Polish judiciary. That became a coalition to elect parliamentarians in 2023, and that succeeded in changing the government.

BD: How important is the preexisting social fabric of a community to the success of a protest movement?

JOHN SHATTUCK: It’s important, but complicated. Hungary had a very weak civil society after 70 years of totalitarian fascism and communism. When I was there, the very word to “volunteer,” which we think of as the essence of community action and service, was seen to be a bad word in Hungarian because it was closely associated with collaborating with the regime.

In the US, we’re the opposite in a sense, although the US is now slipping on this. We have a long history of volunteerism, we have all these civil society organisations, we have a tradition of barn raising, people getting together with their neighbours and doing things in their communities. This is very much a part of the American spirit and a core value.

But today, I would say a combination of consumerism and economic individualism coming out of decades of economic deregulation has caused our civil society to fray. But the authoritarian challenge that we face now, and the way in which we are beginning to respond to it, is in fact bringing communities back together again.

I think what happened in Minneapolis is an example of that. And this may reflect a growing capacity to resist an authoritarian regime.

Republished from Robert Reich’s Substack, originally published by The Conversation. Republished under Creative Commons.

Jonathan Cook: Does the tail wag the dog? How both sides are missing the bigger picture

APR editor — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:53:09 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

The joint US-Israeli war on Iran has thrust back into the spotlight a divisive debate about whether the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog.

Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States?

One side believes Israel lured Trump into a trap from which he cannot extricate himself. The tail is wagging the dog.

The other believes that the US, as the world’s sole military super-power, is the one that writes the geo-strategic script. If Israel acts, it is only because it serves Washington’s interests as well. The dog is wagging the tail.

Certainly, the idea that the tail, the client state of Israel, could be wagging the dog, the military juggernaut that is the US, seems, at best, counter-intuitive.

But then again, there is plenty of evidence that suggests advocates for the tail wagging the dog scenario may have a case.

They can point to the fact that Trump launched this war of choice on Iran despite winning the presidency on an “America First” platform in which he promised: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Rushed into war
His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, openly stated that the administration was rushed into war, finding itself apparently unable to restrain Israel from attacking Iran.

Joe Kent, Trump’s top counter-terrorism official, noted in his resignation letter that the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Addressing the Israeli Parliament last October, Trump appeared to confess to being under the thumb of the Israel lobby. As he praised himself for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the illegally occupied city of Jerusalem, he repeatedly pointed to his most influential donor, the Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, before observing: “I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel, I must say.”

A video from 2001 shows Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s Prime Minister, caught secretly on camera, telling a group of settlers: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”

Former US president Barack Obama, who ran up against Netanyahu repeatedly as Obama tried and failed to limit the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements, thought the same.

In his 2020 autobiography, he wrote that the Israel lobby insisted that “there should be ‘no daylight’ between the US and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to US policy.”

Any politician who disobeyed “risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election”.

Obscuring the relationship
But any rigid, binary way of framing the relationship between the US and Israel obscures more than it illuminates.

I addressed this issue in my 2008 book on Israeli foreign policy, titled I srael and the Clash of Civilisations: Iran, Iraq and the Plan to Remake the Middle East. My conclusion then, as now, was that the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv was better understood in different terms: as the dog and the tail wagging each other.

What does that mean?

Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state. It must, therefore, operate within the “security” parameters for the Middle East laid down by the US.

In fact, part of Israel’s job — the reason it is such an important client state — is because it has, until now, been able to enforce those parameters on others in the region.

But the story is more complicated than that.

At the same time, Israel seeks to maximise its ability to influence those parameters in its own interests, chiefly by shaping military, political and cultural discourse in the United States, through the many levers available to it.

Mobilised by Zionist lobbies
Zionist lobbies, both Jewish and Christian, mobilise large numbers of ordinary people to support whatever Israel claims to be in both its and US interests.

Mega-donors like Adelson use their wealth to cajole and intimidate US politicians.

Think-tanks with murky funding write legislation on Israel’s behalf that US politicians wave through.

Legal organisations, again with opaque funding, weaponise the law to silence and bankrupt.

And media owners, all too often in Israel’s camp, mould the public mood to stigmatise as “antisemitism” anything that opposes Israeli excesses.

This makes for a very messy arrangement.

The trouble with the idea that the US simply dictates to Israel — rather than that the two are constantly bargaining over what constitutes their shared interests — becomes apparent the moment we consider the two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza.

Desire to ‘disappear’ Palestinians
Israel has long had a fervent desire to disappear the Palestinians, whether through ethnic cleansing or genocide.

It wants the whole of historic Palestine, and the Palestinians are an obstacle to the realisation of that goal. Should the opportunity arise, Israel is also keen to secure a Greater Israel that requires grabbing and annexing substantial territory from neighbours, particularly Lebanon and Syria — as it is doing again right now.

After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel seized on the chance to renew in earnest the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians it began in 1948, at the state’s founding.

It carpet-bombed Gaza, creating a “humanitarian crisis”, to force Egypt to open the floodgates into Sinai, where it hoped to drive the enclave’s population. Cairo refused.

As a result, Israel tried to increase the pressure by slaughtering and starving the people of Gaza. In legal terms, that constituted genocide.

But the idea that the US was deeply invested in Israel carrying out a genocide in Gaza, or directed that genocide, or had any particular interest in the genocide taking place, is hard to sustain.

Washington — first under Biden, then under Trump — gave Israel cover to carry out the mass slaughter of the Palestinian population, and armed and financed the genocide. But that is very different from it having a geostrategic interest in the mass slaughter.

Indifferent to Palestinians’ fate
Rather, the US is and always has been largely indifferent as to the fate of the Palestinians, so long as they are contained. They can be locked up permanently in occupation prisons.

Or ethnically cleansed to Sinai and Jordan. Or given a pretend statelet under a compliant dictator like Mahmoud Abbas. Or exterminated.

The US will bankroll whichever option Israel believes best serves its interests — so long as that “solution” can be sold by pro-Israel lobbies to western publics as a legitimate “response” to Palestinian “terrorism”.

What Israel could get away with changed on 7 October 2023. The US was prepared to approve Israel shifting from a policy of intermittently “mowing the lawn” in Gaza — short wrecking sprees — to the incremental levelling of the whole of Gaza.

In other words, Israel worked all its levers to persuade Washington that it was the right time for it to get away with genocide. It sold to the US the plan that Gaza could now be destroyed.

To present that as Washington’s plan is simply perverse. It was decisively Israel’s plan.

That doesn’t diminish in any way US responsibility for the genocide. It is fully complicit. It paid for the genocide. It armed the genocide. It must own it too.

Similar Iran war analysis
A similar analysis can be applied to the Iran war.

The US and Israel share the same larger policy towards Iran: they want it contained, weak, unable to exert influence. But they do so for slightly different reasons.

Israel demands to be regional hegemon in the Middle East, an invaluable client state with privileged access to Washington policymakers. Its supremacy and impunity, therefore, depend on Iran — its only plausible rival in the region — being as weak as possible and incapable of forging effective alliances with armed resistance groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Equally, Washington wants Israel unthreatened, leaving its ally free to project US imperial power into the Middle East.

But it has a more complex set of interests to consider. It needs to ensure that the Arab monarchies remain compliant, and it does so by both wielding a stick — threatening to unleash the attack dog of Israel on them should they disobey — and proffering a carrot — promising to shield them under its security umbrella against Iran so long as they stay loyal.

The ultimate goal is to guarantee unchallenged US control over the flow of oil and thereby the global economy.

In other words, the US has to weigh far more interests in how it deals with Iran than Israel does.

Effects on the global economy
Unlike Israel, Washington has to consider the effects of an attack on Iran on the global economy, to assess any impact on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and protect against rival powers like China and Russia exploiting strategic missteps.

For those reasons, Washington has traditionally preferred maintaining a degree of stability in the region. Instability is very bad for business, as is being demonstrated only too clearly right now.

Israel, by contrast, regards its struggle against Iran in existential terms. Many in the Israeli cabinet view it as a religious war. They are not interested in simply containing Iran – a decades-old policy they believe has failed. They want Iran and its allies on their knees, or at least in so much chaos that they cannot pose any kind of challenge to Israeli regional hegemony.

That point was highlighted by Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security adviser, this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. He cited recent comments to him by Israel’s former military intelligence lead on Iran, Danny Cintrinowicz, that Netanyahu’s aim is to “just break Iran, cause chaos”.

Why? “Because,” says Sullivan, “as far as they’re concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel.”

In other words, Israel wants to engineer instability in Iran, which is sure to spread instability across the region.

Those two agendas, as should be clear by now, are not easily compatible. Which is why Netanyahu has spent decades working every lever at his disposal in Washington to create an appetite for war.

Had war been self-evidently in US interests, his efforts would have been superfluous.

Israel deployed its lobbies
Instead, Israel has had to deploy its lobbies, marshal its donors and recruit sympathetic columnists to slowly shift the public mood to the point where a war was conceivable rather than patently dangerous.

And most importantly of all, Israel nurtured an intimate, ideological alliance with the neocons — hawkish, zealously pro-Israel US officials — who long ago gained a foothold in the inner sanctums of Washington.

Each recent administration has been a cat-fight over whether the neocons or more “moderate” voices would win out. Under George W Bush, the neocons dominated, leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s short war on Lebanon in 2006, and a failed plan to expand the war to Syria and then Iran.

I documented all of this in Israel and the Clash of Civilisations.

Under Obama, the neocons were forced to take more of a back seat, which is why his administration was able to sign a nuclear deal with Iran that held until Trump ripped it up in 2018, during his first term as president. Biden, as with so much else, dithered.

In Trump’s second term, the neocons seem to be firmly back in charge, again weaving their mischief. The result — an illegal war on Iran — is likely to be a strategic catastrophe for the US, and a potential, if short-lived, victory for Israel.

So isn’t this the same as saying the tail wags the dog?

Sole repositories of power
No, not least because that assumes the visible realm of US politics — the President, the Congress, the two main political parties — are the sole repositories of power in the system.

Even in this visible sphere, support for Israel has dramatically waned since the Gaza genocide. As the illegal war on Iran grows ever more costly, both in treasure and lives, support for Israel among US voters is going to fall off a cliff.

Israel is for the first time a deeply partisan issue, dividing Democrats and Republicans, as well as a generational divide between the young and old. It is even splitting the MAGA base Trump depends on.

Americans’ sympathies in the Middle East crisis. Source: Gallup World Affairs surveys

This political polarisation will continue to get much worse, ultimately freeing braver figures in US politics to start speaking out in franker terms about Israel’s nefarious role.

But power in the US isn’t just wielded at the formal, visible level. There is a permanent bureaucracy, with an institutional memory, that operates out of sight. We have gained brief glimpses of its covert operations from the work of Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s publishing platform for whistleblowers, and from Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed illegal mass surveillance by the US state of its own citizens.

Both suffered serious consequences for their efforts to bring a little transparency to a profoundly corrupt system of secret power. Assange was locked away in a London high-security prison for many years as the US sought to extradite him on trumped-up “espionage” charges, while Snowden was forced into exile in Russia to evade arrest and long-term incarceration.

That bureaucracy — sometimes referred to as the Deep State, or the military-industrial complex — doesn’t play or fight fair. It doesn’t need to. It operates in the shadows.

Curtailing Israel’s influence
Were it to so choose, it could undermine the Israel lobby, and thereby curtail Israel’s influence over the visible realm of US politics.

It could effectively do to the leaders of the lobby — AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist Organisation of America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, Christians United for Israel, and others — what it did to Assange and Snowden.

It could, for example, influence public discourse to begin questioning whether these groups are really serving US interests or acting as foreign agents. That would, in turn, free up space for the media and legislators to call for tighter restrictions on these groups’ activities, requiring them to register as such.

The permanent bureaucracy is doubtless capable of doing much darker, underhand things too.

The fact that it hasn’t chosen to do any of this yet suggests Israel’s goals are not seen so far to be significantly in conflict with US goals.

But that could be about to change. In fact, the current, all-too-public debates about Israel driving the US into a war against Iran — an idea already seeping into popular consciousness — may be the first salvoes in the battle to come.

If the war on Iran turns out to be a catastrophic misstep, as it gives every appearance of being, there will be a price to pay — and leading US politicians are likely to scramble to shift the blame on to Israel. It may be that they are already getting in their excuses.

The all-too-visible freedom Israel has enjoyed in Washington to buy, bully and silence could soon become a central liability. It will not be hard to argue that a system so clearly open to manipulation that the US could be bounced into a self-sabotaging war needs to be remade, to prevent any repeat of such a disaster.

This may be the biggest lesson Washington learns from the war on Iran. That it is time to stop the tail wagging so vigorously.

‘Israel First’ – ex-Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy on why Netanyahu led Trump into illegal Iran War

APR editor — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:01:34 +0000

Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by, for the first time in six years except for yesterday, Juan González, also in New York. It’s great to be with you again, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Thanks, Amy. And welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

As the US and Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran enters its 25th day, President Trump is claiming that Iran has begun negotiations with the United States, but the Iranian government has dismissed the claim as “fake news”, accusing Trump of trying to manipulate financial and oil markets.

Over the weekend, Trump threatened to, quote, “obliterate” Iranian power plants if Iran did not fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Monday night. But on Monday, Trump reversed course, extended his deadline to five days and repeatedly claimed the US was now in productive conversations with Iran.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “With Iran, we’ve been negotiating for a long time. And this time, they mean business. And it’s only because of the great job that our military did, is the reason they mean business. They want to settle, and we’re going to get it done, I hope.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Earlier in the day, President Trump claimed he might personally take joint control of the Strait of Hormuz with Iran’s next ayatollah.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “It will be jointly controlled.”

REPORTER: “By whom?”

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “Maybe me. Maybe me.”

REPORTER: “You want the United States to be in control of the Strait of Hormuz?”

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “Me and the ayatollah, whoever the ayatollah is, whoever the next ayatollah — look, and there’ll also be a form of a — a very serious form of a regime change.

“Now, in all fairness, everybody has been killed from the regime. They’re really starting off. There’s automatically a regime change.

“But we’re dealing with some people that I find to be very reasonable, very solid. The people within know who they are. They’re very respected.

“And maybe one of them will be exactly what we’re looking for. Look at Venezuela, how well that’s working out. We are doing so well in Venezuela with oil and with the relationship between the president-elect and us. And maybe we find somebody like that in Iran.”

AMY GOODMAN: Despite Trump’s claims of US-Iran negotiations, US Central Command says US forces, “continue to aggressively strike,” Iran.

Meanwhile, Iran has retaliated by striking other Gulf nations and Israel. Israeli officials said Iran has launched seven missile barrages since midnight, targeting Tel Aviv and other cities. The Israeli military said one of the missiles that hit Tel Aviv carried a 220-pound warhead. Israel’s Health Ministry said nearly 4800 people have been injured by Iran’s attacks on Israel since the war began.

We go now to London, where we’re joined by Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator under Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. His recent piece for Zeteo is headlined “Why Netanyahu Duped Trump Into the Illegal War With Iran.”

Well, Daniel Levy, thanks so much for being with us again. Why don’t you explain that headline?

DANIEL LEVY: Well, good to be with you, Amy and Juan.

Netanyahu himself and other Israeli leaders, although he’s been at the helm for much of the last three decades, have, during an awfully long period, told us Iran is at the precipice of becoming a nuclear power.

By the way, we should always remind ourselves, Israel is the only nuclear-armed state in the region. But they’ve been telling us, “It’s imminent. We have to act now.” And they’ve been trying to pull successive American presidents into that war, to launch such a military campaign.

They’ve never succeeded. You have had American presidents across the decades, from whichever party has been in power, who have created an extremely indulgent, permissive environment for Israel in the region, and in particular when it comes to Israel’s consistent war crimes against the Palestinians.

What you have not had is a president who could be led into this kind of a military operation. And we’re seeing right now, in almost the last month of this war, precisely why. But this president is made of different stuff, less serious stuff, apparently, and Netanyahu saw his opportunity.

But the reason, I think, why this was of such significance for Netanyahu is we are in a new era. It’s not an era of a Pax Americana with — alongside all that indulgence of Israel, there were still certain brake mechanisms. This time, Israel sees us in an era of what I would call a Pax Greater Israel.

This is about how far Israel can extend its dominion, how much of a hard-power, dominant hegemon it can be in the region, seizing parts of Syria or of Lebanon, trying to finish an eradicationist approach to the Palestinians. And crucially, to do that, you have to weaken Iran militarily, to remove some kind of deterrent.

You can only do that with the US, so you need to pull the US into this war. If that means further accelerating American decline and even accelerating Israel’s loss of support in America, then it’s a price to pay. It’s kind of “use it or lose it,” because those things are happening anyway.

In saying all of this, I don’t want to suggest that America has no agency in this. There are things to do with the Trump administration, the neocons, the people who still have positions of influence in the US that have brought them into this. But that’s what Netanyahu is trying to achieve, to achieve Greater Israel, domination in the region, including the weakening of the Gulf, which is intentional, at the expense of America bleeding further reputational, political, economic assets in this war.

Trump’s ‘Israel First’ Iran War Video: Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Daniel Levy, you’ve also written that, quote, “The idea that this is a war to serve American rather than Israeli interests resonates primarily in three spaces: the gullible, the true believers (especially of end times religious [thinking]), or those who are paid-up members of Israel’s echo chamber.” Could you elaborate?

DANIEL LEVY: Yes. I think there is a lot of attention being paid to this question of who does this serve. Now, you can make the case that you also have a US government that is locked into its own kind of logic of war.

You have, if I may suggest, a decline anxiety in the US. You have an attempt to reassert primacy and preponderance. I don’t think that is or can go well. You have Marco Rubio, for instance, telling the Europeans, “Join us in the next Western century of imperial domination.”

That can perhaps play out in the Western Hemisphere — the crime committed with the kidnapping of a leader in Venezuela, the illegal blockade on Cuba. But if you travel too far afield to find monsters to slay, and if you have an incoherent strategy and an incompetent administration implementing that strategy, then things are going to go very badly wrong, which was entirely predictable in this illegal war of choice launched by the US and Israel.

And therefore, if you look at this, and even if you factor in the attempt to assert American interest, this war would not have happened if Israel’s leader had not been there whispering in the president’s ear, making the case.

[There were] seven bilateral meetings in the first 13 months of the second Trump term between Trump and Netanyahu, two meetings in the eight weeks leading up to the launching of this illegal war, daily phone calls, we are told, now information coming out in The New York Times that the Mossad apparently bamboozled Americans with the idea that if you could decapitate some of the regime leadership, the Mossad could foment a coup on the streets, that you could arm Kurdish groups from the outside to take geographical parts of Iran to start dismantling the central state.

You really have to be, therefore, either extremely gullible, as I suggested, or a true believer that, well, this is high risk, but it’s worth it, because what maybe you’re ideologically committed to, the Greater Israel cause, maybe that comes from a place of evangelical dispensationalist belief in the end times, or you simply are part of an echo chamber whose wheels are greased very consistently.

And we see that play out over so many years in American politics. That’s what I’m suggesting. And I do think that the attempt to suggest this is more than Israel first, that somehow this serves America’s interest, are not going to go well, and Israel will pay a tremendous price for that over time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you also — there appears to have been a shift in the last few days in how the Israeli government permits damage within Israel from Iranian attacks to be publicised by the press, because, clearly, during the first two weeks of the war, Israel essentially prevented any kind of images, from the US media especially, going out to the world.

Now, in the last few days, it’s almost as if Netanyahu and the government want their own people and the rest of the world to see some of this damage. I’m wondering your thoughts about this. Has there been a change in approach or tactics by the Israeli government?

DANIEL LEVY: So, I’m not so sure. I think it’s an interesting question to dwell upon. But what one might be seeing is an inability, and therefore a degradation of credibility if Israel tries to claim that none of this destruction is happening — in other words, an inability to prevent those images from coming out — when those strikes are now causing very significant damage. I don’t want to exaggerate that, either. I don’t think that is what causes this unnecessary war to come to an end.

But what one perhaps has to look to is, if you remember, early on in the war, one of the real questions, as this became a war of endurance, almost a war of attrition, was: Could the US and Israeli side sufficiently deplete Iran’s missile-launching capacity before Iran both sufficiently degraded the interception capacity on the Israeli and US side — so they have to be a bit more selective in terms of what they use the interceptors for, because they can’t take everything out and they are going to run out — and also Iran apparently holding back some of its heavier kit, because in its strategy, it assumed this could go on for a long time, and it had to have a plan for week one, week two, week three? And so, I think, to the extent to which we’re seeing more images, it is likely because that equation hasn’t played well for the US and Israel, and because we’re seeing more damage being done.

I think you have a war where Israel has a strategy. It’s an extremely ambitious overreach strategy in terms of not regime change, but regime collapse, state collapse, implosion, the dismantling of the Iranian state, where Iran has a strategy of escalating horizontally, testing American endurance and holding out and winning that way.

But I think you’d be really hard pushed to find a coherent strategy on the US side.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a clip of President Trump speaking to reporters about US aims in negotiations.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: “No nuclear bomb, no nuclear weapon, not even close to it, low key on the missiles. We want to see peace in the Middle East. We want the nuclear dust.

“We’re going to want that, and I think we’re going to get that. We’ve agreed to that. … If this happens, it’s a great start for Iran to build itself back, and it’s everything that we want.

“And it’s also great for Israel, and it’s great for the other Middle Eastern countries.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, Daniel Levy, you are a former Israeli negotiator under two Israeli prime ministers. If you can respond to what he’s saying, and also to what Iran is saying, that the idea that there’s any negotiation going on is fake news intended to “manipulate financial and oil markets and to escape the quagmire in which America and Israel are trapped,” said the speaker of Iran’s parliament?

DANIEL LEVY: So, there are a couple of things going on here, and I want to try and disentangle those. First of all, the question of: Are negotiations taking place? And what I think is very clear is that there are channels of communication via third countries.

Those have been available all the time. Partly, one has to understand that countries in the region, who were not a party to launching this war nor to the decision to go to war, who, in fact, cautioned against this war, in the Gulf and elsewhere, they are feeling tremendous blowback and taking hits from this war, and they are keen to bring it to an end.

There may be some who, for some reason, still believe America can do the job and that they should trust America’s competence and coherence in attempting to do so. I think most are not in that camp. They know the cost is too high, and they are experiencing daily what it means to rely on America for your security, and the answer is not good.

So, there are a number of states, also beyond that — Türkiye has been super active, Pakistan, for instance, Egypt — who are maintaining open channels with both parties and obviously sending messages, because, by the way, the whole world is suffering from this — higher fuel, food, fertiliser prices, etc. So there are active channels. Are they talking directly? I don’t know. I doubt it. But I also think it doesn’t matter very much.

What matters is the question you kind of raise there, Amy, which is: Are these talks, first of all, intended to produce an outcome? Was this another American deployment of diplomacy as a ruse?

We saw in the lead-up to this war that America played with negotiations, attempted that as a distraction, but actually intended to go for the military option. So, is this trying to buy some time while the US waits for a third aircraft carrier, more of your taxpayer dollars, to be deployed in the West Asia-Middle East region?

Was this a Monday-morning pre-stock market intervention on the part of the president? Because if there’s one thing he does pay attention to, it’s that. So, was he trying to calm the markets, give himself a few more days, or is this a serious attempt to chart a path to deescalation?

If it is the latter, then that would have to include an acknowledgment that in negotiations you have to listen to the other side. You have to take into account their interests. If you go in with maximalist positions, often designed by the worst elements of maximalism in your administration and by the Israelis intentionally trying to make sure that talks cannot succeed, then — guess what — the talks won’t succeed.

So, if you think you can impose on Iran in these talks things that you couldn’t achieve in your military assault or things that they weren’t willing to accept beforehand, then the talks are doomed to fail.

The one thing that may be working to our benefit is not who might host these talks. It’s certainly not the fact that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff might be involved, because that would be very bad news indeed, given their record of failure, if they’re the only people.

But the one piece of good news is that the loose and perhaps nonexistent relationship between what Trump says and the realities out there in the real world, that relationship means that Trump can claim what he likes, because what we’re probably looking for is three victory speeches, given in Tehran, Jerusalem and Washington, DC.

They won’t align. They won’t match up. But they might allow for a cessation and then for some of these issues to be addressed afterwards.

But as long as that doesn’t happen, we still have to contend with the fact that Israel has been driving a lot of the escalatory logic in this war. It will continue to attempt to prevent a ceasefire. It’s not alone. There are certainly American sources trying to do that, as well.

Israel is still on the impunity high from its Gaza genocide, which has led us here. And we have to contend with the fact that each time you try and get a “mission accomplished” victory image, you might escalate, leading to a further cycle of escalation, and then that can collapse any putative path out of this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Daniel Levy, we only have about a minute left, but I wanted to ask you — while the war is continuing in Iran and Israeli forces are in Lebanon, the settlers in the West Bank continue to perpetuate violence against Palestinians, and the IDF continues to attack Palestinians in Gaza. I’m wondering your sense of how this has basically faded from the international view while the war against Iran continues.

DANIEL LEVY: Well, I wish I could say that it needed the war in Iran in order to shift attention away from this, in order for Israel to be able to continue to not be held accountable and to get away with these daily violations of international law and with these appalling atrocities against the Palestinians, but it didn’t take the war.

Israel is doing that, and it will continue to do that unless and until it is held to account, it is contained and deterred. And, of course, you also see 1 million displaced in Lebanon and the attempt, apparently, to reestablish a zone of Israeli domination there, still in control of territory in Syria, as well.

But I also want to challenge this notion that the problem in the West Bank is the settlers. There is no armed settler militia without the IDF. The settlers roam the West Bank with the active backing of Israel’s military.

Occasionally, they may call a handful of people to account and say, “No. Stop.” But most of the occupation and the entrenchment of a matrix of control and an apartheid regime, that is run not by lone settlers. That is run by the Israeli state. That is run by the IDF.

It is the IDF and the Israeli state that run that regime of control, that also, as you mentioned, despite the so-called ceasefire, are in control of about 60 percent directly of Gaza, carrying out daily military assaults, daily killings of Palestinians in Gaza, still not allowing the necessary humanitarian assistance or shelter into Gaza, and, in parallel, conducting the largest military intervention in the West Bank, the largest displacement and destruction, often focused on refugee camps, like Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur al-Shams, that we have seen since 1967.

I think this will ultimately end very badly for Israel and generate tremendous blowback. But in the meantime, it is again the Palestinians bearing the brunt.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Levy, we want to thank you so much for being with us, president of the US/Middle East Project, former Israeli peace negotiator under Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. We’ll link to your piece in Zeteo, “Why Netanyahu Duped Trump Into the Illegal War With Iran.” You can follow Levy’s writings on his Substack.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Eugene Doyle: Trump celebrates Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour

APR editor — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 03:00:33 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

You can’t make this stuff up. The President of the United States, while sitting next to the Japanese Prime Minister in the Oval Office, just celebrated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

When asked by a Japanese reporter on Friday why the US didn’t consult with allies before launching the surprise attack on Iran, Trump said: “One thing you don’t want is to signal too much. We went in very hard — and we didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise.”

Then, turning to Sanae Takaichi, he said: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan?” Moments before, sitting on the plush lemon chair in the gold-encrusted Oval Office, Takaichi had been smiling from ear to ear. Trump wiped the smile off her face with one question:

“Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?” By now the Prime Minister was squirming uncomfortably. Trump looked straight at her and said: “Okay, RIGHT? He [the journalist] is asking me, do you believe in surprise?

“I think you much more so than us. And we had a surprise, and because of that surprise, we probably knocked out 50 percent — and much more than we anticipated doing. So if I go and tell everybody about it, it is no longer a surprise.”

For more than 80 years the US has claimed a moral high ground on the basis of its rejection of “sneak attacks”. In one rhetorical flourish Trump exposed the jarring desolation of what the US now stands for.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech was delivered on December 8, 1941, following Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbour the day before.

Responding to ‘unprovoked’ sneak attack
Roosevelt, like President Pezeshkian of Iran today, was responding to an “unprovoked” sneak attack. President Roosevelt pointed out that negotiations were ongoing and, for him, the aggressor’s conduct was false, deceptive and below contempt:

“Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

As with President Pezeshkian of Iran today, Franklin Delano Roosevelt drew the obvious conclusion: the nation was facing an existential threat.

“The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.”

Last week, I interviewed US Ambassador (ret) Chas Freeman who emphasised that the Iranians fully understood that the US-Israeli war machine launched against them would not stop unless compelled to do so.

For the Iranians, the goal is nothing less than to drive the Americans out of the region. To understand the intensity of their determination simply hear the words of FDR from 1941:

“No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.”

I would remind US President Donald Trump that in referencing that other sneak attack he might have paused to ask: “Who won that war in the end?”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand, and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. This article was first published on his website www.solidarity.co.nz

Israel – the parasite state sabotaging peace in the Middle East

APR editor — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 01:47:41 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Marcus Alexander

In a stunning resignation that has sent shockwaves through Washington, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent has exposed what many have long suspected but few have dared to state publicly — Israel is systematically undermining peace in the Middle East to serve its own expansionist agenda.

Joe Kent, a 20-year Army Special Forces veteran and Gold Star husband who lost his first wife in a Syria suicide bombing, didn’t mince words. His accusation is simple yet devastating: Israel is intentionally sabotaging diplomatic solutions because peace threatens its strategic objectives.

The most compelling evidence supporting Kent’s claim is the targeted assassination of Ali Larijani, Iran’s National Security Adviser and chief nuclear negotiator.

According to Kent, Larijani wasn’t just another Iranian official — he was actively engaged in negotiations that could have de-escalated regional tensions.

“Larijani was eager to get us a deal,” Kent revealed in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

But instead of pursuing diplomacy, US-Israeli strikes eliminated him, along with his son and several staff members. The message could not be clearer — anyone willing to negotiate for peace becomes a target.

This wasn’t just another military operation. Larijani represented the pragmatic wing of the Iranian establishment — someone capable of conducting the sorts of talks needed to end conflicts.

By eliminating him, Israel ensured that the path to negotiation was closed, leaving only the path of escalation.

Iran’s National Security Adviser and chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani . . . assassinated by Israel, he represented the pragmatic wing of the Iranian establishment. Image: Wikipedia

Energy warfare masquerading as security
Kent’s second explosive claim involves energy infrastructure. He argues that strategic opportunities — particularly Qatar’s gas potential to stabilise global markets — have been deliberately targeted to increase tensions rather than reduce them .

The facts support him. On March 18, 2026, Israel launched a significant aerial assault on Iran’s South Pars gas field, which provides nearly 70 percent of Iran’s domestic gas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted Israel “acted alone” in this attack.

The result? Iran retaliated by striking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City — the world’s premier LNG hub — damaging approximately 17 percent of Qatar’s export capacity .

Global gas prices surged toward US$117 per barrel. The UK benchmark peaked at almost 183p per therm. Markets destabilised. And for what?

Here is the inconvenient truth, a stable energy market benefiting from Qatari and Iranian gas would reduce conflict incentives. By attacking this infrastructure, Israel ensured that economic interdependence — often the foundation of lasting peace — remains impossible.

Even President Trump distanced himself from the attack, stating the US “knew nothing about this particular strike” and describing it as Israel “violently lashing out”. When an American president feels compelled to publicly disavow his closest regional ally’s actions, something is fundamentally broken.

The ‘clean break’ strategy: 30 years of sabotage
Kent’s accusations didn’t emerge from nowhere. They reflect a consistent pattern dating back to 1996, when a group of neoconservatives — including figures who would later serve in the Bush administration — produced a policy paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”.

This document, prepared for Netanyahu, explicitly rejected the “land for peace” formula and proposed reordering the Middle East through military confrontations and regime change. It identified Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Iran as targets.

It called for “removing Saddam Hussein from power” and “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria”.

Three decades later, we’re living the consequences. The Iraq war cost thousands of American lives. Syria descended into a catastrophic civil war. And now Iran faces sustained attacks. All while Israel’s security — not America’s — remained the central objective.

Kent’s resignation letter directly connected these dots: “It is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby . . . This is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war”.

The human cost
Perhaps the most damning aspect of Kent’s accusation is personal. His wife, Navy cryptologist Shannon Kent, was killed in Syria in a suicide bombing. Kent now describes that conflict as “a war manufactured by Israel”.

Think about that. A Gold Star husband — someone who paid the ultimate price for American foreign policy — is telling us that his wife died in a war that served Israeli, not American, interests. If that doesn’t demand scrutiny, what does?

Why this matters now
Critics dismiss Kent as antisemitic or claim he is leaking classified information. But ad hominem attacks don’t address the substance.

Did Israel target a negotiator actively seeking peace? Yes. Did Israel attack energy infrastructure knowing it would destabilise global markets? Yes. Does Israel have a documented 30-year strategy of military confrontation over diplomacy? Yes.

The situation in Gaza further illustrates the pattern. As one analysis noted, Netanyahu’s “ceasefire” effectively granted Israel breathing space to consolidate political control while evading accountability. Within days, Israel’s Parliament passed a bill paving the way for West Bank annexation. This isn’t peace — it’s a pause for rearmament.

The parasite metaphor
A parasite feeds on its host, weakening it while appearing inseparable from it. Israel’s relationship with American foreign policy fits this description uncomfortably well.

American blood and treasure fund Israeli objectives. American credibility suffers when allies act unilaterally. American interests in stable energy markets get sacrificed for Israeli security concerns.

Joe Kent’s accusations deserve more than reflexive dismissal. They deserve investigation. Because if a Gold Star husband and former counterterrorism chief is correct — if Israel is indeed sabotaging peace for its own ends — then Americans have a right to know why their soldiers are dying and their markets are destabilised for another nation’s strategic objectives.

The description of Israel as a parasite may be harsh. But sometimes harsh truths are the only ones that break through comfortable lies.

Israel has positioned itself as America’s indispensable ally. Kent’s resignation suggests it may actually be the parasite draining American power while sabotaging any chance of Middle Eastern peace.

Marcus Alexander is an independent writer in Doha and contributor to Channel Media Network.

Israel caught in a permanent state of war mindset – peace is taboo

APR editor — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 02:31:12 +0000

INTERVIEW: C.J. Polychroniou and Idan Landau

Israel’s war on Iran is a direct result of a political culture that depends for survival upon a permanent state of war, says Israeli academic and left-wing activist Idan Landau in the interview that follows.

He observes that Israeli society on the whole has embraced a fascist mindset, “reflecting extreme paranoia and anxiety,” and thus intolerance for dissent.

Subsequently, peace is a taboo and there is total indifference to genocidal acts and human casualties. Moreover, there is very little hope for a different trajectory, argues Landau, “as long as the US and Europe continue to insulate Israel from the moral consequences of its actions.”

Landau is professor of linguistics and head of the department of linguistics at Tel Aviv University. He writes a political blog (in Hebrew) on Israeli affairs and has been imprisoned on several occasions for his refusal to serve in the Israel Defense Forces reserve.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Since the Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel, the Netanyahu government embarked on a genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, expanded Jewish settlements in occupied West Bank and thus encouraged settlers to escalate West Bank terrorist attacks, exchanged fire with Hezbollah and the Houtis, then attacked Iran in what has been dubbed as the 12-Day War, and finally persuaded US President Donald Trump to go to war with Iran.

What is Israel’s endgame in terrorising the Middle East, and how has permanent war impacted Israeli society and the Israeli psyche?

IDAN LANDAU: I think the whole point of permanent war — I agree this is the most appropriate concept to use here — is that there is no endgame. Permanent war, with ever growing economic, emotional and political costs, is exactly what keeps the Israeli right-wing in power; it feeds on anxiety, paranoia and visions of imminent destruction (interestingly, our own and our enemies’ destruction, equally vivid).

Not being able to concentrate on and fully understand what’s going on is also crucial; the Israeli public is extremely underinformed about key issues, like the fraudulent nuclear talks in Geneva, the far-reaching proposals by the Lebanese government, etc. The media — always complicit, these days criminal — bombards us with caricatures of our surrounding countries.

That said, I think there is one constant, never-changing endgame lurking behind all the upheavals: The expansionist project in the West Bank. Not just Smotrich but a dedicated section within the Likkud, of right-wing religious settlers, are working tirelessly on this project, actually from the first week after October 7.

Plans for resettlement of Gaza combined with increased settlement in the West Bank (specifically, the northern Samaria, surrounding Jenin and Tulkarem) were immediately aired and pushed forward by the settlers’ lobby together with their MK partners.

The surge we now see in ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank is inherent to the overall vision of this government, and it was stated as such even before October 7 — that only gave it a huge impetus.

The impact on Israeli society is perhaps the most depressing aspect of it all. Political discourse has been reduced to hollow slogans. Every single issue in foreign affairs in framed as either “existential threat” or “unavoidable use of military force.” There’s absolutely no room for talk about non-violent paths (“peace” is a taboo even on the left).

The Enemy is an undifferentiated mass of Hamas/Iran/Hezbollah/Houthis, in short, different guises of Amalek. Much of that, as I noted, is fueled by the deliberate absence of facts and evidence for rational conduct on the part of our enemies.

Israelis live in a peculiar state of mind: total disbelief in the possibility of normal life, clinging on to the very ideology that perpetuates this state of mind.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Israel has actual and perceived enemies. But is Benjamin Netanyahu alone the actual problem behind Israel’s permanent state of war? I mean, even most of Israeli opposition supported the genocide in Gaza and it’s doing the same thing now with the war against Iran.

IDAN LANDAU: Netanyahu is the most able consolidator of all the dark impulses of Israeli society, but of course he didn’t make up anything on his own. If you go back to Begin’s speeches in the 1970s-1980s, they also constantly invoked the Holocaust as the ultimate justification for whatever Israel does.

The Messianic drive to settle the greater Israel predates Netanyahu, as well as the overall brutal, racist degradation of Palestinians inside and outside Israel. You can go on and on — nothing is new here. At most, as you note, it is the subservience of the “opposition”; I don’t recall anything like it in the past.

If you look at the governments that went to wars in 1973 and 1982, they faced considerable opposition, within the Knesset and outside of it, on the very issue of whether the war was justified (in 1973, it was clearly preventable; in 1982, it was pure imperial vanity). None of that is left today.

Which is why the temptation of permanent war is so strong: You’re guaranteed to make the willful silence of the opposition also permanent.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: In Lebanon, the Israeli armed forces are using Gaza tactics, attacking hospitals and killing medical staff, while in Iran they have engaged in what has been rightly described as chemical warfare on account of strikes on fuel depots. Isn’t the country concerned at all about its blatant assault on international law and that it has turned into a pariah state in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of the people across the globe? What happened to Israel’s labor party which combined socialism with nation-building?

IDAN LANDAU: As to the Labour Party, I always say that one should not speak ill of the dead. A handful of members of Knesset (MKs) that are obsessed with displays of liberal values and with welfare legislation when genocide is in full force and Apartheid shifts from de facto to de jure.

The other “opposition” parties are either led by generals (Golan, Eizenkot) who offer zero alternatives to military dominance, or by right-wing neoliberals (Bennet, Lapid). The only representatives of left values in the Knesset are the Arab MKs.

As to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), my impression is that Israelis are unconcerned insofar as Uncle Sam is, and it sure looks like he is, thoroughly unconcerned. The Trump administration vindictively sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) judges presiding over the Israeli case, and quite explicitly stated that IHL does not apply to the US and its allies.

There’s a lot of duplicity in Israeli discourse regarding the so-called “Principle of Complementarity”; the official response to the ICC described the “independent and robust judicial system” of Israel, which investigates any suspicions for wrongdoings. Most Israelis simply think that the rules don’t apply to us since they don’t apply to Hamas (they do apply to both parties; I already said that Israelis are shrouded in disinformation).

But even the liberals that appeal to our own “independent and robust judicial system” look ridiculous in face of the massive cover-up we witness from the beginning of the genocide; the dropping of charges against the five torturers/rapists in Sde-Teiman is but the latest instance.

Hundreds of heinous crimes did not even yield any charges.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Courageous voices against war and violence can be heard here and there across Israeli society and peace activists have organised scores of demonstrations in cities like Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem to express their opposition to the war in Iran.

Are anti-war demonstrations really seen as a threat to national security by the Netanyahu government and even segments of the Israeli citizenry?

IDAN LANDAU: These things happen and they do lift our spirit. In honesty, I don’t think anyone views them as “a threat to national security,” that’s fascist talk. The public atmosphere is just incredibly intolerant, with or without the presence of the police, with or without any legal process.

Just try to voice your opposition to the war — any war, pick your favourite — out in the street, and you’re sure to be harassed and probably beaten by random pedestrians within 15-20 minutes. So I think it is a typical fascist all-embracing violent climate, reflecting extreme paranoia and anxiety.

The mere verbal expression of “sacrilegious” opinions is seen as a personal threat to our carefully maintained peace of mind; so tenuous and feeble, that it cannot even stand to face dissent.

Point it out to Israelis and urge them to make out what it means for their confidence in what their state is doing that they must violently banish any expression of doubt and criticism (this is now the position of many journalists as well!) — well, see if you get an answer.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: Israel censored reporting on the genocide in Gaza. Is the same thing happening now with the war in Iran?

IDAN LANDAU: Luckily, the IDF doesn’t control the entrance and exit to Iran. So we don’t have the brute force censorship, instead it’s the good old “filter and distort and leave out the context” censorship.

They would report civilian casualties only if forced (because it’s getting too much international media), and you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the “human shield” trick is now applied reflexively, before any facts are even known.

In this sense, as all human right organisations pointed out, the Gaza genocide has set a shocking new standard of indifference to civilian casualties: All targets are criminalised by association to your favourite Amalek (currently the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC), and we stopped bothering about substantiating this association with actual facts; declaring it so makes it so.

In this context, one can watch civilian suffering in Iran with a level of detachment and blame it all on the IRGC. We should remember, though, that the Iranian regime is no more scrupulous in its choice of targets in Israel — the war crimes are on both sides.

Yet I cannot say that Israeli media covers the wider civilian effects of the war on Iranian citizens in any serious way. Pretty much 95 percent of what we get are silly, heroic odes to our courageous pilots and genius cyber fighters.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU: In your view, is there a pathway towards peace in Israel? Is permanent peace even possible for Israel?

IDAN LANDAU: Ultimately there can’t be any other solution; wars eventually end, consuming nations. I just don’t think it will be “Israel” as we now know it that will see the fruits of peace.

It will be a totally different entity, somehow letting Jews and Arabs live together as equals. That’s not possible within the current regime. Sadly, the shift to non-violence only occurs after the level of death and suffering is insurmountable to both sides.

No one knows when that will be. As long as the US and Europe continue to insulate Israel from the moral consequences of its policies, it won’t change trajectory.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centres in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).

Idan Landau is an Israeli social justice activist and professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University.

Saige England: Journalists must stand up and report with the moral courage of abolitionists

APR editor — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:30:31 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Saige England

Every week, health prevailing, I march with our Palestinian friends and their supporters in Aotearoa New Zealand. And my country is one which — under Britain — was colonised.

Colonisation perpetrates injustices against indigenous people. This legacy is still felt by Indigenous people today.

All around the world we must dismantle our unfair systems. A fair system ensures that everyone has a flourishing start in life. But our systems are linked to Israel — and Israel demonstrates that colonisation is still practised.

“No peace without justice, no justice without right to return.” Image: SE

Israel headed by megalomaniacs ruling with a muscular thug army is proof that the Empire has not stopped because the Western Empire has supported this.

Far too many Western journalists report from the perspective of the abuser rather than the victims. They need to ask, “what if it was my child, my wife, my mother, my brother, my grandfather, suffering like this? What if I was forced from my home?”

Journalists must report from the perspective of people who are pleading for the right to breathe rather than reporting from the perspective of the landlord killing people when they resist eviction.

They must use their imagination to exercise empathy in reporting. Only then will they report the truth and only then will the real narrative emerge.

Colonisation unchecked
Colonisation is not checked, rather it is supported by countries engaged in Empire building.

Like South Africa under apartheid, Indigenous people are oppressed and if they resist they are dispensed with, in other words, exterminated.

But this system is enabled rather than disabled. The rampant megalomania is enabled by the US, Britain, Germany, and other nations.

Tens of thousands of children, women, and men have been robbed of life and the journalists I once worked alongside in conflict zones are complicit if they do not report this as a human rights atrocity.

We — journalists — must report on the evil that is the expansion of empire and we must report on it from the perspective of the victims not the perpetrators.

The extermination of Palestinians and expansion of Israel is clearly supported by the legs of the octopus — the countries that make up this Western Empire.

Standing by and reporting from anything other than the perspective of the victims is akin to standing by and watching slaves being bound, gagged and shipped under the name of empire.

Journalists must stand up and report with the moral courage of abolitionists. They must have the gumption to attack the rotten policies practiced in our own time.

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

Eugene Doyle: Will Israel and the US wreck the Gulf States along with Iran?

APR editor — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 23:40:41 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

The United States and Israel have, for decades, pursued the destruction of Iran as a sovereign state.

We are now in the opening days of what may be the final, decisive war to determine either the survival of the Iranian state or the expulsion of the US from the Arab lands and the creation of an entirely new security architecture for West Asia.

Sounds implausible? We live in truly unprecedented times and many scenarios are possible.

There are signals as to what may come next and to help identify them I spoke with US Ambassador (ret) Chas W. Freeman.

Whether intended or unintended, the US and Israel are in the process of severely damaging the economies of the Gulf States. By attacking Iran, they knew full well what the Iranians would do in response — after all, Iran had warned that any further attack on it would lead to a regional war.

Are we witnessing a brazen plan to destroy both Iran and seriously weaken the Gulf States, using Iran as a weapon to do the latter? Could this be a Machiavellian plan to throw a cluster bomb into The Great Muslim Reconciliation between the Sunni states and Shia Iran?

Will the war halt or accelerate the project to create an Islamic NATO which is based around last year’s Saudi-Pakistani defence pact? The Saudis have the dollars; the Pakistanis have the nukes and the troops.

Two women protesters with a “Hands off Iran” placard at Saturday’s Auckland rally against the Gaza genocide and the US-Israel war on Iran. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Permanent isolation of Iran
The permanent isolation of Iran was the centrepiece of the US-promoted Abraham Accords — designed to bring the Israeli regime into the circle of love and keep Iran out in the cold.

Anything that runs counter to this is a threat. The war comes at a time when Iran and the Gulf States had taken major steps to mend fences after decades of hostility.

The murder of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on orders of Donald Trump in 2020 was supposed to kill off a diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Soleimani and other officials were killed in a US missile strike at Baghdad airport without the permission of or notification to the Iraqi government. He was, according to Iranian, Saudi and Iraqi sources, including Iraqi PM Adil Abdul-Mahdi, heading for a meeting with his Saudi counterpart to broker a peace deal.

The assassination was successful but the US attempt to kill off the peace process failed.

US sabotages diplomacy
A week before the US and Israel launched their latest attack, Egypt and Iran announced that they had agreed to fully restore diplomatic relations and exchange ambassadors. It was the latest in a series of such moves to bring Iran in from the cold.

As the Middle East Institute pointed out shortly after, “Within days of the Israeli strike, [Pakistan’s] Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif visited Doha in a show of solidarity. Seizing the crisis as an opportunity to elevate Pakistan’s strategic presence in the Gulf and the wider Middle East, its government voiced support for the proposed formation of a joint Arab-Islamic security force.”

The quickly signed Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) got a lot of attention in West Asia and was soon dubbed an “Islamic NATO” — an alliance that could one day replace American boots on the ground.

The Gulf States were also slowly coming to the realisation that America was unreliable, Israel was a genuine threat and Iran might be useful as a counterbalance to the US and Israel. A Pakistani nuclear shield and conventional military backup was being discussed as far away as Ankara; there were even whispers Iran might be invited to join.

Now, back to that question of whether the US is, through its war on Iran, deliberately weakening the Gulf States as part of a strategy to keep the Muslim world divided. I asked US Ambassador (ret) Chas W. Freeman and he replied, “I think you give far too much credit to the United States, and more particularly, to Israel, in terms of devious planning to do these things in the Gulf,” Freeman said.

“We’re actually pretty stupid and clumsy at what we do. Look at what we’re doing with the Peshmerga and the Kurds. How stupid do you have to be to do that?”

Ambassador Freeman is highlighting what has been a recurring cycle in US foreign policy – strategic betrayal — in which it uses groups like the Kurdish Peshmerga or the freshly-minted Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan (CPFIK) to attack US enemies only to throw them under the bus the moment they have served their purpose.

Luring Iranian Kurds
The CIA and the White House have tried to lure the Iranian Kurds into the current battle, Trump blurting out how “wonderful” it would be and how the map of Iran would be redrawn. This will only fuel Iranian nationalism.

Ambassador Freeman is numbered among those who believe that the US-Israeli defence shield is running low on interceptors and Iran could strike back hard in the coming weeks. He also surmises that the Iranians will have secretly signalled to the Gulf States that a condition of the war ending — if Iran gets to set the terms — will be the removal of all US military from the Gulf States.

None of us can say with certainty what the respective breaking points for the belligerents are but I certainly believe Iran is very far from out of the fight that the US and Israel has forced on them.

“Prior to the US-Israeli attack, the Gulf Arabs were moving — in their usual incoherent and inchoate way — toward some kind of coalition with Iran to balance Israeli military hegemony in the region,” Ambassador Freeman told me.

“Now Israel and the United States have given an opening to Iran to pursue its long term objective, which is to remove the American presence from the Gulf. Iran has turned a vicious attack on it into a strategic opportunity to force the Gulf States to do a cost-benefit analysis.”

Chas Freeman is probably right: the US didn’t intend to shatter the Gulf States as one of its war aims. That leaves the more plausible explanation: the Americans and Israelis are simply demented and war-crazed.

Either way, the US-Israeli war machine must be stopped for the sake of humanity.

War on Iran: ‘It’s abominable, the lies that the American mainstream media is telling the people’

APR editor — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 07:12:52 +0000

Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: The US-Israeli war on Iran has entered its 11th day. Its impact is being increasingly felt across the globe. Al Jazeera is reporting residents of Tehran overnight experienced “some of the most intense bombardment” of the war.

At least 40 people were reportedly killed near the city’s Risalat Square.

In Lebanon, the death toll from Israel’s attacks are nearing 500. About 700,000 residents have been displaced.

Earlier today [March 10], Iran reportedly fired drones toward Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates, where a large fire broke out in an industrial area home to petrochemical plants. A suspected Iranian missile also hit a residential building in the capital of Bahrain, killing one person and injuring eight others.

On Monday, the Pentagon posted online a photo of a missile with the words “No Mercy” superimposed on it. An accompanying message read, “We have Only Just Begun to Fight.”

But soon after, Trump told CBS News, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” he said. Trump’s CBS interview led oil prices to drop and for global stocks to quickly rise.

But after the Wall Street markets closed, Trump told Republicans in Florida the US hasn’t “won enough.” At a news conference on Monday, ABC News reporter Selina Wang questioned Trump about the conflicting messages.

SELINA WANG: Mr. President, you’ve said the war is, quote, “very complete,” but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning. So, which is it? And how long should Americans be prepared for this war to last for?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I think you could say both. It’s the beginning. It’s the beginning of building a new country. But they certainly — they have no navy. They have no air force. They have no anti-aircraft equipment. It’s all been blown up.

“They have no radar. They have no telecommunications. And they have no leadership. It’s all gone.

“So, you know, you could look at that statement. We could — we could call it a tremendous success right now. As we leave here, I could call it, or we could go further.

“And we’re going to go further. But the big risk on that war has been over for three days. We wiped them out the first — in the first two days.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, President Trump said he had a good call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who reportedly proposed a, “quick political and diplomatic end to the Iranian conflict”.

We begin today’s show with retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell during the run-up and early years of the US war on Iraq. He’s taught national security affairs at both George Washington University and the College of William and Mary.

Colonel Wilkerson, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you respond to what has taken place over this last 11 days, starting with the diplomatic talks in Geneva between Iran and the United States? And as those talks were just wrapping up, US and Israel attacked Iran and killed the supreme leader there. Your response?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yes, and, Amy, for the second time, we violated international law in that respect, and just common human decency. And your comments at the opening of the show were spot-on, but not nearly broad and deep enough.

I come from an administration of George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney that committed war crimes, war crimes that Colin Powell and his lawyer Will Taft and I agonised over in trying to present some message to the American people about them. This administration has committed more war crimes in the last few days than I think any country since Adolf Hitler committed. And that is an incredible condemnation of this entire process.

We have bombed civilians relentlessly. We have bombed a school. We have bombed a hospital. We have struck facilities in the nature of Iran’s oil capacity that is now putting black poison all over 10-plus million people.

And we are essentially not bombing ballistic missile sites and bombing war materiel. We’re bombing people. We took a lesson from the IDF, if you will. We are bombing people, as, incidentally, they are still doing in Gaza and doing now in Lebanon.

These are all war crimes. And one wishes with fond hope that someday we might be called before the bar of justice and have to account for these war crimes. And what you just talked about is a crime also in the eyes of international relations and people who want to keep decent international relations ongoing in the world. We’re destroying that.

And on top of all of that — and this is the real serious problem here for America — Trump and Hegseth and Rubio and the other entourage of their national security complex have completely misjudged the nature of this war, as has, to a certain extent, Bibi Netanyahu.

This is a country as big as Western Europe, with 93 million people, probably 90 million of whom will fight us to the bitter death, who live in terrain that almost killed Alexander the Great. It is entirely inhospitable to military operations.

And Trump is talking about — actually talking about putting ground forces there. And the only way he will be able to claim any nature of victory is to do that. Only that will be the end of the empire’s presence in the Levant and the Middle East in general, because we will not be able to sustain that economically, physically.

We do not have the soldiers or Marines to do that. But that’s what he’s talking about. This is pure nonsense.

There was a column in Haaretz yesterday, and the title of the column, essentially, was “Trump will chicken out in this war, too.” I’m sorry, he’s not going to chicken out necessarily. That might be the tone and tint he puts to it. He’s going to be defeated, as are we.

“End of the Trump Presidency” – retired colonel slams war in Iran Video: Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Colonel, I wanted to ask you — we played that clip with Trump talking about all the damage that Iran has sustained, but there’s been very little acknowledgment by the US military or the White House to the enormous damage that has occurred to the US military footprint in the Middle East for decades. All of these bases and radar, multibillion-dollar radar, were established throughout the region. And what’s your understanding of the nature of the damage that has occurred to all of these bases, not just among the Gulf states, but also even in Iraq and other places of the Middle East?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yeah, that damage is enormous. And I think what you’re witnessing right now is the initial steps of the empire, the American empire’s retreat from the Levant and the Middle East in general.

I don’t think we’re going to be able to sustain our presence there after what’s going to happen here, particularly if we stay at this for a long time and really do take significant casualties. We’re already taking more casualties than people know about, because the media is not being apprised of it.

Yes, we had the ceremony at Dover, but there are people getting ready at Landstuhl, our throughput hospital in Germany, right now to accept multiple casualties coming in. They’ve stopped their civilian service and so forth at that hospital. And other things are being geared up, too, like Walter Reed.

I don’t think they have even a modicum of appreciation of what kind of casualties are going to result, though, especially if we put ground forces into Iran. And that is the only way, unless he just lies completely about it, that Trump is going to be able to assert any kind of real force with regard to this population.

And to your point, in Bahrain, they have taken out billions of dollars’ worth of US radar and equipment, including the vertical missile loading cranes, so now ships have to go all the way to Diego Garcia to load these weapons.

They have essentially obliterated our capacity to carry out combat actions from a number of places in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Al Udeid is actually under under threat now, too.

And this is all part of the warp and woof of our ability to carry out combat operations in the region. I’m not even sure our biggest facility for passing on troops, throughput facility, that we used in both Iraq wars — is in Kuwait. I’m not even sure that that’s up now and able to do anything.

So, how would you even get Marines or soldiers, God forbid, into Iran? That’s a huge problem. They will sink the ships that are coming to deposit those troops wherever they’re coming.

We have not really damaged their ballistic missile capability. And the media blackout on Israel is keeping the American people from seeing the enormous degree of destruction to Israel, the latest component of which was a riposte to Israel’s having struck their oil facilities, on Haifa, their oil facility port.

And Haifa is being taken down much the way Eilat was taken down by the Houthis, the Allah Ansar, in the Red Sea, when we failed to be able to reopen the Red Sea. And that’s the next step.

The Bab al-Mandeb will be closed once the Houthis have gotten into action full time again. And 60 percent of the world’s commerce passes through the Red Sea. It’s not oil and gas exclusively. It’s all manner of things — foodstuffs, commodities and such.

So, this is a war with long legs. Trump has completely misinterpreted it. The only one who’s interpreted it correctly is Bibi Netanyahu, and I think he’s ready to use a nuclear weapon, should it become as bad as it looks like it might right now, because Iran has not even began to shoot its most sophisticated missiles.

And now the second and third class of those missiles is getting through almost without opposition. Imagine what these Mach 3, Mach 4 missiles, with huge warheads that have maybe a hundred different other warheads they display all across an area, are going to do to Israel once they’re fired.

They’re still there, and they’re still ready to fire.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Colonel, I wanted to actually — you mentioned the media coverage of what is going on in Israel. It has been amazing to me that all of the major US media are based in Israel, in Tel Aviv, yet we are seeing the least amount of coverage of what is going on within Israel.

I want to quote from a piece, an online piece, that CNN reporter Oren Liebermann posted earlier this week. And he wrote — and I’m quoting — “Every reporter in Israel — and every member of the public — is subject to a military censor. On national security grounds, the regulation authorises the censor to prohibit reporting or broadcasting any material that could reveal sensitive information or pose a threat to the country’s security interests.”

And he goes on to say, “This is particularly sensitive during wartime, where the military censor has made clear that broadcasting any images that reveal the location of interceptor missiles or military sites hit by enemy projectiles is forbidden, especially in live broadcasts.”

Now, they say this on their website, but they never mention this on air. And none of the networks are mentioning on air that they are strictly prohibited from showing any actual, real damage. I’m wondering your sense of the responsibility of the US media, especially since they’re always showing us the results of the plumes rising in Abu Dhabi or in Saudi Arabia or even in Iran, but not the direct hits that are occurring within Israel.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I’ll tell you what I told the senior editor to The Washington Post recently. I think it’s abominable, the lies that the American mainstream media, both video and print, is telling the American people. And they’re putting us in jeopardy in a real substantive sense, because the American people have no way of judging just how foolhardy, how stupid, how unwise, how violative of international dictum and rule this war is.

And when it gets to the point — I think this is the end of the Trump presidency, actually, because when it gets to the point where the pressure is so great and some of this has to come out and casualties are manifest, then the American people are going to ask really important questions: Why did you lie to us? Why did you tell us what you were telling us? Why did you start this war of choice?

Iran was no threat to the United States of America whatsoever. Did you go to war for Israel? We have heard you went to war for Israel. These are questions that are finally going to get out there in the hustings and going to have to be answered by someone, probably your local congressman, the supine body that has done nothing to check this president, particularly in the war power.

And we haven’t even talked about that.

This is a complete violation of the Constitution of the United States. Just as Kofi Annan said about the 2003 Iraq War, it’s an illegal war. And he went on to say it was a violation of our own Constitution. And he was absolutely right.

But this pales — or, that pales in comparison with what Trump is doing right now, and what he is going to probably have to do in order to seem to correct his errors.

And I’m truly worried that this destruction of Israel is going to reach a point — I listened to Netanyahu recently speaking in Hebrew to his clan, to his group — Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and others like that.

At the end of his remarks in Hebrew, which was translated for me very reliably, I think, he essentially said that if it went south, if it went bad, he was prepared to show the Iranians something they had never seen before.

I think he meant a nuclear weapon. And I go back to 1973 when Golda Meir told a BBC reporter — you can check, it was printed in London the next day on the front page — that she would use a nuclear weapon, in response to his question, “Would you use a nuclear weapon?”

Because at that time, they were pretty hard-pressed in the 1973 war. And she said, “Yes,” without equivocation. I think we’re back at that point again, and for probably a far more dangerous situation.

AMY GOODMAN: I know you have to go, Colonel Wilkerson, but I just want to point out you were the former chief of staff of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who dragged his feet on supporting the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, but ultimately gave that speech, that he would call a stain on his career, at the UN.

It was critical for Bush, President Bush, that it was Colin Powell who gave this speech, because he was seen as the reluctant warrior. And he gave that speech saying there was evidence of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. Can you make a parallel to what we’re seeing today?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I can, but I think this is far greater a travesty and a tragedy. That was bad enough. And torture was the thing that broke my back, and ultimately it sort of broke Colin Powell’s back, too, because we realised that we had signed up not only to a war that was not necessary, we had signed up to a president of the United States for the first time in the nation’s history making public policy torture.

Other human beings being tortured was made presidential public policy. This is far worse, I think, and it’s been building for some time. It’s been building all since Trump was elected, and actually since his first administration. And I think it makes what we did — not to discount it, but it makes it pale by comparison, and it makes me deeply concerned about the future of this republic.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Army colonel, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by democracynow.org on 10 March 2026.

Sanitising atrocities by the US or Israel and finding excuses is in the Western media’s DNA

Pacific Media Watch — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 03:13:51 +0000

COMMENTARY: By John Minto

I came across this statement from an independent media source this week:

“The mainstream media is doing what it always does in wartime: manufacturing consent, sanitising atrocities and platforming war criminals.”

It came to mind immediately when I read The Times newspaper obituary for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which was reprinted in the Christchurch Press at the weekend.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was murdered by the US-Israel in the initial strikes of their illegal bombing and killing campaign in Iran — an assault that rips up international law and trashes the United Nations Charter.

The obituary was a straight piece of Western propaganda which did nothing to hide its blatant disinformation (deliberate misinformation). It may as well have come straight from an Israeli propaganda unit — it may well have for all I know — with its demonisation of the Iranian leadership.

The Times claimed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had “…approved the development of a clandestine nuclear weapons programme that could, if ever completed, threaten Israel’s very existence, destabilise the Middle East and imperil global oil supplies”.

This is an obvious lie. Israel’s Prime Minister — and well-known war criminal — Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying for 30 years that Iran is just a few weeks or months away from producing a nuclear weapon.

The fact is that all credible analysts, including inside US intelligence, agree Iran never decided to pursue nuclear weapons and the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) has never detected such a programme. In fact, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared nuclear weapons to be “religiously forbidden under Islamic law”.

The rest of the obituary is riddled with similar untruths and distortions in a ham-fisted justification of US/Israel’s assault on Iran. If The Times has set out to undermine confidence in Western media reporting on West Asia (Middle East) this would be an excellent example.

Platforming war criminals
How much Western media time and space has been given to Trump and Netanyahu in the past 11 days to spread lies and disinformation direct to Western audiences? And how much time has been given to the Iranian leadership, UN officials or international experts to debunk the US/Israeli justifications for war?

Meanwhile, the media have platformed Iranian New Zealanders, who oppose the Iranian leadership and support the appointment of the former Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, to lead the country.

The previous Shah’s rule was a brutal dictatorship where tens of thousands were murdered or imprisoned by the Shah’s secret police, the Savak. The Shah’s dictatorship was backed by the US and Western interests till its overthrow in 1979.

The new proposed Shah is no different from his father, posing with Netanyahu and celebrating the bombing and killing in Iran.

So why has our mainstream media given so much attention to Iranians here who celebrate death and destruction in Iran alongside people waving the Israeli flag — a symbol of genocide and apartheid — and inviting Destiny Church to join them. A real horror show!

And when it comes to women’s rights, why is the Western media so happy to denounce restrictions on clothing for women in Iran but ignore Israel’s denial of rights to Palestinian women in Gaza whom Amnesty International this week says face the erosion of health and safety in Gaza in a “deliberate act of war targeting women and girls”.

A pro-war protest with imperial Iran and Israeli flags outside the Stop Wars Aotearoa public meeting in Auckland last night. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Sanitising atrocities
And why has the Western media all but ignored the US/Israeli missile attack on the girls school in Iran killing at least 165 children? Imagine if this were an attack on a school in Israel or the US? Imagine the apoplectic outrage. Imagine the rush to sanctions and war?

This attack and murder of Iranian girls is sidelined for the same reason Israel’s genocide in Gaza killing tens of thousands of women and children is being downplayed.

Sanitising atrocities by the US or Israel and finding excuses, justifications or explanations for them is in the Western media’s DNA.

The Press and Western media take all their stories from Western sources such as Reuters and Associated Press news agencies and Western newspapers such as The Times and Daily Telegraph. They would never dream of including stories from Al Jazeera or any Palestinian news sources.

I would once have lamented the loss of mainstream media reporting on issues but it’s no longer possible to pretend it is in any way a force for good.

John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

Trump-aligned think tank proposes ‘Pacific Charter’, greater US involvement in the region

APR editor — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:11:48 +0000

By Kaya Selby, RNZ Pacific journalist

An American right-wing think tank is proposing a “Pacific Charter” that advocates for a greater United States presence in the region.

The Heritage Foundation, closely associated with the ruling Republican Party, wrote that China is “covetously” looking to the Pacific nations while they are vulnerable to major security threats, such as the transnational drug trade.

The think tank holds significant influence with US President Donald Trump, best encapsulated in its “Project 2025” platform that guided conservative policy leading up to the 2024 presidental election.

READ MORE: Other Trump and Pacific reports

Its latest report, A charter of Pacific values for a prosperous Pacific future, points out that Pacific nations are uniquely vulnerable at a difficult time, emboldening “outside forces” to take advantage.

Pacific countries are asked to “align” their policy agendas, while the US establishes a “Pacific Partners Commission” and installs a “Pacific Advisor” on their National Security Council.

“Broader intra-Pacific affiliations are being superseded by the interests of external actors, and the Pacific agenda is at risk of being shaped by powerful outside forces,” the report states.

Without Western involvement, it postulated that China, with its “willingness to use political leverage and intrigue to advance its narrow interest” would monopolise their hold.

‘Reaffirm fundamental ideals’
Rather than letting that happen, co-authors Allen Zhang and Brent Sadler proposed a non-binding Charter, not to “impose values and dictate outcomes” but rather to “reaffirm fundamental ideals and strengthen regional solidarity”.

It was noted this would pressure nations to resist the influence of Chinese cash, for example infrastructure deals. Further, the mood would be set for island nations and US defence forces to come closer together.

“The foregoing principles are frequently bypassed in favour of lucrative bilateral proposals … compromised when it is personally or locally expedient.

“When regional nations accede to a charter, they accept a standard of conduct beyond the mere expression of aspiration … overtime, states begin to rationalise strategic decisions against a set of baseline principles.”

The Heritage Foundation’s proposed Pacific charter published in ‘A charter of Pacific values for a prosperous Pacific future’. Image: Edited by RNZ Pacific

The White House has only recently turned its attention to Pacific countries in any public sense, hosting a business summit in Honolulu in early February.

Trump has also asserted his interest in critical minerals at the bottom of the Pacific ocean, leading to deep-sea mining talks with the Cook Islands and Tonga.

Jared Novelly, incoming US ambassador to New Zealand, said there was an “extreme opportunity” in the Cook Islands exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

French Polynesia urges Pacific to unite amid rising global tensions

APR editor — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 04:56:13 +0000

By ‘Alakihihifo Vailala of PMN News

French Polynesia’s President Moetai Brotherson says growing global instability is a reminder that Pacific nations must strengthen cooperation within the region.

Speaking to PMN News in an exclusive interview, Brotherson said the Pacific must focus on deeper partnerships with neighbours such as New Zealand to build resilience against external shocks.

“When we see the turmoil in the world, it’s a reminder to us, as all the Pacific Island nations, that our first and foremost vicinity is our region,” Brotherson said.

“We have to increase cooperation between ourselves to make us more resilient to outside crises.”

Brotherson has held the presidency since 2023 and previously represented French Polynesia’s third constituency in the French National Assembly from 2017.

He made the comments following discussions with New Zealand Foreign Minister Vaovasamanaia Winston Peters during Peters’ visit to French Polynesia.

Peters described the meeting as a unique opportunity to strengthen ties between Pacific neighbours.

“We had a very good, quite unique discussion,” he said.

‘Pretty special’
“Where in the world would you sit down like that, with a president, and have a friendly New Zealand-type discussion, or Pacific-type discussion? It’s pretty special.”

Peters said New Zealand must place greater importance on its relationships in the region.

“We underrate the value of this. Because when we talk about the Pacific, it’s not our backyard like we used to say decades ago,” he said.

“It’s our front yard. And the sooner we understand that, the better.”

Brotherson said the historical, cultural, and genealogical ties between the two nations provided a foundation for closer cooperation.

He said collaboration could cover areas such as climate adaptation, maritime and air connectivity, digital infrastructure, and economic development.

“We have many areas of cooperation that needed to be discussed, and these were the topics that were addressed during our meeting,” he said.

Geopolitical competition
The French Polynesian leader also raised concerns about the growing geopolitical competition in the Pacific, particularly between the United States and China.

“We don’t want to align with anyone. I mean, either China or the US,” he said. “We want to be able to discuss with everyone and to have relationships, be it cultural or economic relationships with everyone.”

The Pacific has become an increasingly contested strategic region in recent years, with China expanding its economic and infrastructure partnerships with several island nations.

The United States and its allies have also increased diplomatic engagement, development funding, and security cooperation.

Climate change remains another major concern, particularly for the low-lying atolls of the Tuamotu archipelago — the world’s largest chain of coral atolls, located in French Polynesia northeast of Tahiti.

The French territory consists of 118 volcanic islands and coral atolls across five archipelagos in the South Pacific. Comprising 78 low-lying atolls (like Rangiroa and Fakarava) spread over 3.1 million sq km, this destination is renowned for its remote, pristine lagoons, world-class scuba diving, and black pearl farming

“They are facing the same issues as Tuvalu or other Pacific island nations that are at the forefront of climate change and the sea level rise,” Brotherson said.

‘Salination of water’
“What we are seeing currently is a salination of the water lentils on those atolls, rendering life very hard. It’s not impossible.

“So water management is going to be a real issue in the upcoming years related to climate change but you also have the coastal erosion that we have to tackle.”

The President of the Government of French Polynesia and the Foreign Minister of New Zealand.

pic.twitter.com/z8QeiVsagB

— Winston Peters (@NewZealandMFA) March 8, 2026

For communities on these low-lying atolls, the impacts of climate change are already being felt through declining freshwater supplies, erosion, and pressure on traditional food sources.

Brotherson also reiterated his support for greater political sovereignty for French Polynesia. He said economic development and resilience must come first.

French Polynesia enjoys a high degree of autonomy under France, which retains control over defence, currency, and aspects of foreign policy.

Brotherson said the pathway toward greater sovereignty must be gradual and carefully managed.

He added that economic resilience will be key before any move toward full independence and said the territory could achieve political sovereignty within the next 10 to 15 years.

“It’s all about interdependencies, that’s how we’re going to build independence. When it comes to strengthening our economy, you know, we still have a lot of work to do on food security, on energy transition, and then we’ll be able to be more confident as a nation.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ and PMN News.

The reporting on Iran and Gaza the US-Israel war machine can’t control

Pacific Media Watch — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:51:35 +0000

Drop Site News

Right now, the United States and Israel are continuing their bombardment of Iran.

As the confirmed death toll climbs past 1330 and hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods are hit daily, the media apparatus that sold you the Iraq war and denied Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians for the last two years is now running the same playbook.

The Atlantic is laundering Netanyahu’s reputation as a “conflict-averse” leader while he tells the world this war lets him do what he’s “yearned for” for 40 years.

Bari Weiss is tweeting fire emojis at pro-war clips, falsely suggesting Iran has nuclear weapons, and devoting journalistic resources to tracking the Instagram likes of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife.

CNN is giving unchallenged airtime to International Criminal Court (ICC)-indicted Israeli officials claiming American soldiers have an “obligation” to die for Israel.

And that’s before the cable news network is taken over by Paramount, the Weiss operation run by the nepo-son of Larry Ellison, the single largest donor to Friends of the IDF.

The BBC, meanwhile, leads with nine dead in Israel while relegating some 180 children killed by the US in a girls’ school in Minab to a footnote.

This is what the legacy media machine looks like in wartime. It has always looked like this.

And it is exactly why we launched Drop Site less than two years ago.

On the ground reporting
While Weiss and CBS were manufacturing consent for this war, Drop Site has had reporters on the ground reporting the facts.

In just the last week:

Reza Sayah reported from Tehran on a double-tap bombing that killed over 20 people at a popular square during Ramadan, connecting the tactic to US strikes in Afghanistan, and Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza.
Drop Site correspondent reported from Minab, where a missile struck a girls’ elementary school and killed 180 children, and from Lamerd, where a sports hall full of teenage girls was bombed during practice.
We were among the first outlets on the ground verifying the strike in Minab as US and Israeli propagandists sought to deny and deflect.
We have consistently obtained exclusive information from senior Iranian officials who have contradicted claims by Trump, claims that have just as consistently fallen apart under scrutiny.
We exposed the fabricated CIA narrative about “tracking Khamenei for months” to his “secret location” — his secret location was his office, and he had refused to relocate.

Republished from Drop Site News. Subscribe to this independent news service.

The smallest coffins are always the heaviest. The US-Israeli killing of children must be stopped

APR editor — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:50:21 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

Three more schools and a major hospital have been bombed in Iran and more in Lebanon by the US-Israeli military, all within the first week of launching their latest war.

This is a pattern, not “collateral damage”. Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations Amir-Saeid Iravani said on March 7 that the US and Israel “recognise no red line in committing their crimes” against his country.

Densely populated parts of Tehran are being pounded by wave after wave of US and Israeli bombs. Shahid Hamedani School in Tehran was struck on March 6, the day of the funerals of schoolgirls (6-12 year-olds) killed in Minab, Iran.

UN officials have confirmed that the Minab attack killed 160 children and five staff.

The Palestinians, despite the genocide inflicted on them by Israel and the West, have never become used to the daily killing of children: “The smallest coffins are always the heaviest,” Palestinians say.

Israel has killed many times more women, children and babies than they have Palestinian resistance fighters. There is even a name for this depravity — the Dahiya Doctrine.

Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine and the law of proportionality
International media are reporting that Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, is suffering another brutal aerial bombardment from the Israelis.

Dahiya — al-Dahiya al-Janubiya — is home to 700,000 civilians living in high-density housing. The suburb lends its name to Israel’s policy of using massive, disproportionate force against civilians and infrastructure to weaken an enemy’s resolve.

It is, of course, a war crime to do so.

In the 2006 Lebanon War, Israel attacked Dahiya, a popular stronghold of the Hezbollah movement. The massive bombing campaign wasn’t to achieve a military objective; the target was civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Hundreds of children were among the dead.

I have a fabric reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica on my office wall. It has been coloured red, green black and white – the colours of the Palestinian flag — to draw the important parallel.

The governments of New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Canada and all the others, with rare noble exceptions like Spain, support this depraved criminality. We share values with the Israelis and the Americans, our leaders tell us.

The Principle of Proportionality is critical to protect children
The Americans and Israelis have a bloodlust and openly brag about their destructive abilities. Operation Epic Fury screams to the world: “war crimes”.

What should constrain US-Israeli violence is international law and the principle that there are limits to what is acceptable in “incidental” harm caused to civilians.

Proportionality is one of the foundational concepts in international law, along with other important injunctions like the prohibition of force against sovereign states. Under the Geneva Convention, before undertaking military action states are obligated to consider: Distinction (separating civilians from combatants), Proportionality, Precaution (taking care to minimise civilian harm), Military Necessity (i.e. don’t launch wars of aggression), and Humanity — prohibiting unnecessary suffering.

This is the exact opposite of the Dahiya Doctrine and the American Way of War — from Korea to Iraq by way of Vietnam. Over six million civilians were killed by the US in just those three conflicts alone.

Article 51 of the Geneva Convention
The principle of proportionality is codified in Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions, and affirmed as binding customary international law applicable to all parties in all conflicts. This is further affirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross’s Rule 14 which states:

“Launching an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.”

The West has torn up its copies of international law but we need to keep its spirit alive. New Zealand, Australia and most of the “civilised world” are signatories to various treaties that require them to enforce humanitarian law upon belligerents. Instead, our countries work day and night to support Israel and the US in their evil work. Evil is the appropriate word here.

I will give the last word to the Israeli commander who led the 2006 terror bombing of Dahiya, General Gadi Eisenkot, chief of Northern Command:

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it (villages) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity.

New Zealand ‘shameful’ over Iran stance, says Peace Movement Aotearoa

APR editor — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:15:48 +0000

Peace Movement Aotearoa

“One can oppose a hateful regime and, at the same time, oppose an unjustified and dangerous military intervention,” says Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

“I once again call for immediate de-escalation, respect for international law, and the urgency of resuming dialogue.”

While some governments around the world have easily managed to express their opposition to the unlawful military attacks by Israel and the US and their opposition to the Iranian regime, shamefully New Zealand has failed to follow their example.

Instead, the government has issued a statement that condemns only Iran; “acknowledges” the military strikes were “designed to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security”; and calls for “adherence to international law” — apparently blissfully unaware that the attacks comprise multiple breaches of international law.

In an interview on RNZ, the PM repeatedly responded to the question “Does New Zealand support these attacks or not?” by reading out “We think Iran is evil, we think it’s been repressing its own people.

“We think it’s been arming proxies and terrorist organisations. We think it has been developing its ballistic and nuclear programmes and years of diplomacy hasn’t actually paid any fruits.”

He also said more than once that New Zealand’s position was the same as Australia’s — the Australian PM has said they “support the United States acting to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons”.

Bizarre spectre
Which, aside from ignoring the US’s stated desire for forced regime change in Iran, raises the bizarre spectre of two nuclear-armed states attacking another state in case it might develop nuclear weapons — even though Iran is a state party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (#NPT), which Israel is not, and has opened its nuclear facilities to the #IAEA, which Israel has not. Indeed, the only state in the Middle East that does have stockpiles of nuclear weapons (entirely undeclared and unsupervised) is Israel.

New Zealand’s moral failure to condemn these military strikes, but instead to continue describing the Iranian regime as “evil” or “bad actors” as though that somehow makes armed attacks on a sovereign nation to assassinate its leaders to force regime change okay — regardless of civilian casualties — shows how far it has now moved from even the pretence of applying international law to the actions of its military friends and partners.

And what a missed opportunity to point out the urgent necessity for the elimination of ALL #NuclearWeapons — so much for New Zealand’s alleged commitment to a nuclear weapons-free world, and its promotion of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons #TPNW / #NuclearBan and the NPT.

Alternative Jewish Voices: Stop this Iran catastrophe!

APR editor — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:06:52 +0000

Alternative Jewish Voices — Sh’ma Koleinu

We, Alternative Jewish Voices, deplore Israel and America’s illegal war of aggression against Iran. We also condemned the repression of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but that does not justify this war.

International war will only bring — is already bringing — more civilian death and destruction. We support the right of the Iranian people to determine their own future.

America and Israel again attacked Iran in mid-negotiation, three days after Iran’s Foreign Minister, Sayed Abbas Araghchi tweeted: “Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”

No one has offered the slightest contrary evidence.

This war of aggression violates international and US domestic law. After the Second World War, the Nuremberg Tribunal called aggression “the supreme international crime”.

We see around us the world they were trying to avert: Israel has waged genocidal war on a trapped community and bombed six countries that were not at war.

This morning, Israel is occupying parts of Lebanon. Russia has invaded and pounded Ukraine for four years. Pakistan is bombing the cities of Afghanistan. US President Donald Trump doesn’t know what to grab next.

Imperial ambitions
We regard the attack on Iran as the latest enactment of longstanding imperial ambitions. How many countries has America tried to bomb into submission? How many times did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bomb the blockaded population of Gaza before America gave him the green light and the weapons to commit outright genocide?

This week, benefiting from the distraction of Iran, Israel has yet again sealed Gaza behind a total blockade. Aid agencies are again counting the days until they again run out of food.

Netanyahu boasts on camera that this war is “what I have yearned to do for 40 years”. Beware of men who prefer the risks of war to those of peace. Chaos and civilian misery are their signatures, but we share responsibility for their impunity.

Even after the horror of livestreamed genocide in Gaza, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon acquiesces to more war and speaks as if Trump and Netanyahu are trustworthy public officials.

Luxon’s appeasement disgraces us. We must not support this unfolding disaster, not materially and not out of the side of the Prime Minister’s mouth. We must say “No” in a bold, principled voice; joining states like Spain and Denmark.

As this fire spreads, we must also peer through the headlines and focus on the people of Iran, Gaza, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Civilians need protection, intervention and an end to the games of these warmongers.

We urge our morally vacuous government to stand with the civilians, the law and our future.

Alternative Jewish Voices – Sh’ma Koleinu is a collective of anti-Zionist Jews from the Far North to Dunedin. It has a liberatory Aotearoa Jewish identity, whether religious or secular or cultural. It is part of a movement for collective liberation, in Aotearoa and in Palestine.

US-Israel’s war of aggression – Epic Fury or Epic Screw-up?

APR editor — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:28:38 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

Western countries, including Australia and New Zealand, were quick to line up to support Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israeli blitzkrieg on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

They were effectively throwing international law into a cauldron of blood and mayhem. These same Western powers — and the Gulf Arab states that stand with them — may soon live to regret it.

In an article on February 21, I wrote, “A precision strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan liquefaction trains (that purify, cool, and compress the gas), for example, would drop a bomb into the world’s gas market.”

Should the Iranian state survive the terrifying onslaught, it has vowed to strike back in ways that could crash the global economy.

Early signs point to a long war
Two early signs of their potential to do so are the closure of all the civilian airports in the Gulf and the effective closure by Iran of the Strait of Hormuz.

The first one stops the daily movement of 500,000 international passengers through Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and other airports, the second cuts off the shipment of 21 million barrels of oil and gas a day (20 percent of global daily requirements).

The knock-on effects of a prolonged war are almost incalculable but as I pointed out in a recent article if Iran manages to resist the most powerful military in the world, the shockwaves will soon transfer to our own economies.

I thought that would be a measure of last resort but Iran struck the site with drones on March 3 and — should they choose — could destroy the facility entirely which would take years to rebuild.

Qatar immediately shut down Ras Laffan, the source of 20 percent of the world’s LNG. UK wholesale gas prices immediately jumped 50 percent.

Countries like Australia and New Zealand may end up on the losing end of a bidding war for oil, LNG and agricultural petrochemicals if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

One should remember that Iran has many thousands of short range missiles and countless mines sprinkled along its coastline which will be all-but-impossible to suppress.

“One should remember that Iran has many thousands of short range missiles and countless mines sprinkled along its coastline which will be all-but-impossible to suppress.” Image: www.solidarity.co.nz

Nuclear propaganda and mischaracterisations
For the moment, the assassination of the Supreme Leader may see champagne corks popping in Western capitals but, as I warned recently, a decapitation strike could lead a furious or desperate Iran to lash out, sinking a US aircraft carrier by using their hypersonic missiles.

There is also a non-trivial risk that the US and Israel could use nuclear weapons if things go sideways.

“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” the US president gloated on his Truth Social.

Ironically, Ayatollah Khamenei is in reality the man who has done the most to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa (religious decree) against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons in 2003.

Along with President Masoud Pezeshkian (who campaigned successfully on a platform on lowering tensions with the US) Khamenei was the target of a barrage of missiles this weekend. One Peace President trying to kill another Peace President.

So mendacious and incoherent is the Western empire that Trump can tout the total destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme one week and the next (on February 21) his negotiator Steve Witkoff can tell the world that Iran is “one week from the bomb”. Ponder that: for the past 20 years (more than 1000 weeks) Netanyahu has been pointing at his little bomb diagram.

I am in the camp of those who say this was never about nuclear weapons and most ludicrously nothing to do with democracy. 150 dead Iranian schoolgirls is a grim testament to that.

Advancing women’s rights or imperial ambitions?
The movements in Iran for women’s rights and political pluralism will be in no way advanced by this criminal attack by states currently committing genocide in Palestine. This is a forever war against a powerful sovereign Iran that acts as a major regional player capable of being a counter-balance to a supremacist Israel and the USA.

Arab leaders appear to have had second thoughts about the benefits of destroying Iran. Last week they expressed outrage after US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said he would be fine with Israel fulfilling both its Zionist project and its biblical promise (Genesis 15:18) of taking all the land stretching from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates, a land grab which would cover modern-day Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

“It would be fine if they took it all,” the US Ambassador told Tucker Carlson. Not a single administration figure took him to task for the statement which he tried unconvincingly to rewind.

We should all fear victory by the US and Israel. Violent, tyrannical and expansionist, they will see victory over Iran as a stepping stone to yet more crimes against humanity. We truly are in the throes of a Thucydidean world where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Unilateral violence must not trump law.

Lions versus parrots
The Spanish Prime Minister slammed the US and Israeli strikes on Iran. “We reject the unilateral military action of the United States and Israel, which represents an escalation and contributes to a more uncertain and hostile international order,” Sánchez wrote on X.

This marks Spain out as a rebel against a militant West that funds and fuels genocide, destroys country after country, kidnaps and kills leaders, kills negotiators in the midst of negotiations, and is the greatest killer of civilians — women, children, men and babies — in foreign lands in all the decades since the Second World War.

Cuba, itself undergoing a brutal blockade imposed by the Trump regime, made a valuable contribution: “President Miguel Díaz-Canel condemned the attacks, calling them “a flagrant violation of International Law and the UN Charter.”

Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated: “Strict respect for the principles of international law and the UN Charter must prevail, in particular the sovereign equality of States, non-interference in their internal affairs, the prohibition of the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, and the peaceful settlement of disputes.”

The New York Times expressed surprise at the bellicose position Australia took: “Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was among the few leaders who did not publicly urge restraint.”

They quoted Albanese saying: “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security.”

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, a Hollow Man if there ever was one, threw his copy of the UN Charter down the lavatory when he said: “We acknowledge that the actions taken overnight by the US and Israel were designed to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security.”

Compare those two quotes. Both PMs were clearly reading from cue cards supplied by Washington. Vassals.

We are truly living through Geopolitical Epsteinism: daily violations of the weak by a predatory axis headquartered in Washington. The West are behaving like tyrants on a rampage. We must be stopped.

How a US-Israeli attack on Iran could crash UK, German, NZ and Australian economies

APR editor — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:29:00 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

If Israel and the US attack Iran, the cosy worlds of Europe, Australia and New Zealand could be swept up in an economic catastrophe.

Should the Iranians survive a terrifying onslaught, they have vowed to strike back in a way that could crash the global economy. How they could quite possibly do this is the topic of this article.

The leaders of the Islamic Republic — love them or hate them — know that they face an existential threat; that the continued existence of a unified state called Iran is imperilled.

They also know that the collective West will not stand up for international law and the proscription on launching wars of aggression. Under these circumstances a state will sacrifice anything to survive, including hitherto unthinkable acts like sinking the USS Abraham Lincoln, the glory of the American war machine.

All the signs are pointing to a new Shock and Awe campaign by the United States.

The goal, as it was in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, is a fast knock-out. Mission Accomplished in a few weeks.

War, however, seldom goes entirely to plan — the Americans never expected they would spend 20 years in Afghanistan and waste trillions of dollars to move from the Taliban regime to . . . the Taliban regime.

Here is a selection of options open to the Iranians if they survive the initial onslaught.

Shut down all civilian flights for the duration of the conflict
Without firing a single missile, Iran can likely bring all flights into and out of the entire Gulf region to a shuddering halt. That’s 500,000 passengers per day.

More than 180 million passengers pass through Doha, Abu Dhabi and Dubai every year.

Simply issuing a warning that the entire Gulf region is an air combat zone will put the brakes on all major airlines, effectively severing the primary link between Europe, Asia and Australasia for as long as Iran hangs on.

Insurance companies would issue a cancel note on all policies (for airlines, passengers, airports, provisioners) for the entire region.

No airline will defy this interdiction. Would Qantas, for example, fly one of its A380s loaded with mums, dads and kids into a potential kill zone? The Iranians could underscore the seriousness by firing a couple of missiles onto runways or using EW (electronic warfare tools) to spoof or harass planes.

In an interview with @CBSNews , Iran’s FM Seyed Abbas Araghchi said uranium enrichment is Iran’s legal right under the NPT, reaffirming peaceful nuclear policy and commitment to diplomacy
More: https://t.co/XqHaDqxOfl https://t.co/3tGlg9SJKL

— Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran (@Iran_GOV) February 22, 2026

Shut down all oil and LNG shipments
Iran will likely mine the Strait of Hormuz 33 km (21 miles) wide, making it instantly uninsurable for any oil or LNG tanker to move into or out of the Gulf. Huge numbers of smart mines (that can recognise the acoustic signature of a tanker) will be deployed as well as hundreds of semi-submersible drone boats.

Spread out across the Gulf are thousands of short-range anti-ship missiles that will be virtually impossible to suppress.

With no tankers in, no tankers out from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Iran itself, the 21 million barrels of oil and LNG that passes through the strait every day will cease instantly.

The price shock will be greater than any previous oil spike. Smaller, out of the way places, like New Zealand could find themselves starved of diesel. According to a recent New Zealand government report our agricultural sector would crater within 90 days.

Once seeded into the Gulf, the mines could take months after the war has ended to clear.

Destroy Israel’s oil rigs and storage facilities
A high-value target for Iran would be the Leviathan and Tamar gas platforms in the Mediterranean. Iran, with saturation swarms of drones used in combination with high-velocity ballistic missiles, could likely break through the defences and devastate a pillar of the Israeli energy system.

Close the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to container ships and tankers
Iran, certainly for the moment, has the strike capability to close the Suez Canal.

Western countries have yawned with indifference and not lifted an eyebrow to support the Palestinians throughout the genocide or called out the US and Israel for violent attacks that have shredded the UN Charter.

Shutting the Canal, possibly for many months, will definitely get their attention. By severing this artery, Iran and its allies would transfer the shock wave of the war directly to the doorsteps of Western consumers and industry.

Combined, the Houthis and Iran have an arsenal of low-cost loitering munitions, anti-ship ballistic missiles and kamikaze boats that can enforce a blockade.

As with the Gulf’s airspace, simply by declaring a Maritime Exclusion Zone across the Red Sea, the Suez Canal route becomes uninsurable for the duration of the conflict, thereby forcing the re-routing of ships around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.

This adds two weeks to cargo shipments, ties up about 12 percent of global freight ships, harms modern just-in-time supply chains and spikes prices for countless products.

Attack Azerbaijan’s oil infrastructure
Very little attention has been paid to Azerbaijan and yet it could play a pivotal role in the denouement of the upcoming calamity. Azerbaijan, with Iran to the south and the Caspian Sea to the east, is a US-Israeli ally. It supplies Israel with 40 percent of its oil imports via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.

If Azerbaijan were to allow US or Israeli planes or militias to launch attacks from its territory, the Iranians might respond by destroying the pipeline and related oil facilities.

Destroy Qatar’s LNG facilities
After the US and EU largely cut off access to cheap Russian oil and gas, countries in Europe became heavily dependent on US and Qatari LNG.

This creates a vulnerability that the Iranians can use to devastating effect. A precision strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan liquefaction trains (that purify, cool, and compress the gas), for example, would drop a bomb into the world’s gas market.

Iran has invested heavily in improving relations with its Arab neighbours; this would be a measure of last resort. Qatar’s Al Udeid is, however, the largest US military base in the Middle East and the country has more than 10,000 US troops based there.

Any use of force emanating from Qatar would open Pandora’s box.

Destroy Saudi and other oil facilities
Iran and Saudi Arabia have invested a lot of energy in restoring relations since the US assassinated General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 as he was reportedly en route to meet the Saudis in Baghdad to advance peace talks (ultimately successfully facilitated in 2023 by China).

Iran will hold off attacking Saudi facilities directly but will do so if there is any attempt to break Iran’s blockade or should the Saudis allow US forces to launch attacks from their territory.

Destroy the Gulf’s fertiliser storage facilities
This would also be a strategy of last resort and risk a renewal of hostility between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Desperate people, however, do desperate things.

The Kingdom is the world’s second-largest exporter of phosphate fertilisers, providing roughly 20 percent of the global supply (and approximately 63 percent of New Zealand’s urea imports). Without necessarily knowing its origin, many Australian and New Zealand farms depend on this resource for food production.

Sink the USS Abraham Lincoln or other major ships
The US President may launch his war of aggression against Iran, for example, with a decapitation strike on the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Who should be held accountable if the USS Abraham Lincoln — the most heavily protected vessel in human history — with up to 6000 US servicemen aboard, with a nuclear reactor on board, bristling with some 90 aircraft and hundreds of different types of missiles, was sent to the bottom of the sea by a salvo of Iranian hypersonic missiles travelling at Mach 8 (about 10,000km per hour)?

According to international law, that would be Donald J Trump, the Nobel Peace Prize aspirant. How would Wall Street react?

Send thousands of missiles into Israel to devastate the economy
In 2025, we learnt that Iran, using its older missiles and a swarm of drones, could turn the Iron Dome into the Iron Sieve.

Have the Israelis been able to acquire sufficient air defence interceptors to stop what could be a blizzard of thousands of missiles and drones aimed at the key infrastructure of the Israeli economy?

Probably not. Will Iran be able to deploy them? Who knows.

Support from Iranian allies in the region
Will the powerful Iraqi Shia militias rise to support Iran and make life untenable for the Americans and other Western interests in Iraq? How will Ansar Allah (the Houthis) respond? Will Hezbollah risk joining the attack?

In truth, none of us know what will happen nor what the Iranians will be willing or able to do after an attack. Time and American violence will provide the answer.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war.

Caitlin Johnstone: More shockingly honest confessions from the Empire managers

APR editor — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:35:11 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

US Empire managers have been making some surprisingly honest admissions in recent days, with Senator Lindsey Graham saying the wars of the future are being planned in Israel and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling for a return to old-school Western colonialism.

During a Monday press conference in Tel Aviv after a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Graham said that “I’ve been coming here every two weeks whether I need to or not.”

Why is a South Carolina senator traveling to Israel every two weeks, rain or shine? The bloodthirsty warmonger answers this question in short order.

LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley

“The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel,” Graham said. “Because if you’re not one step ahead of the enemy, you suffer. The most clever, creative military forces on the planet are here in Israel.”

Sometimes, Senator Graham just puts it out in the plainest language:

“The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel.” pic.twitter.com/hs4MQGBK3n

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) February 16, 2026

Graham salivated about the possibility of a US war with Iran, acknowledging that such a war could absolutely result in American troops in the region being struck by Iranian missiles but saying the US should go to war anyway.

“Could our soldiers be hit in the region? Absolutely, they could. Can Iran respond if we have an all-out attack? Absolutely, they can,” Graham said, arguing that “the risk associated with that is far less than the risk associated with blinking and pulling the plug and not helping the people as you promised.”

During a speech at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the mask all the way off in an unsettling rant about the need to return to the good old days when Western powers dominated the Global South without pretence or apology.

“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” Rubio said.

“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”

This is insane.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio just gave one of the most explicitly pro-colonialist speeches I have seen in the 21st century.

The US empire wants Europe to help it recolonize the Global South.

Rubio praised Western colonialists for “settl[ing] new… pic.twitter.com/tl4NojNdmP

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 15, 2026

Rubio, a notoriously anti-communist gusano, is here admitting that socialism played a leading role in pushing back against the abusive colonialism and empire-building of the Western world in recent decades. A normal person would take this as a strong argument in favour of socialism, but Rubio says it like it’s a bad thing.

Rubio urged Europeans to join their white Christian brethren in the United States in re-conquering the brown-skinned communists and heathens who have been insisting upon their own sovereignty and the advancement of their own interests:

“Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past.

“And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe.

“For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.

“We are part of one civilisation — Western civilisation. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilisation to which we have fallen heir.”

MARCO RUBIO CALLS FOR RETURN OF COLONIALISM

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave one of the most overtly colonial speeches at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday, 14th February, where he reminisced about 500 years of Western colonialism and how it expanded to… pic.twitter.com/uZqC5Y4pwS

— Sovereign Media (@sov_media) February 16, 2026

It takes a special kind of psychopath to look back with fondness upon five centuries of unchecked Western colonialism and imperialism and then advocate a return to those horrific days. Mass genocides across entire continents. The African slave trade. The violent subjugation and enslavement of entire populations.

That is what Rubio is looking back on and sighing with nostalgia.

And this is of course to say nothing of the savagery his beloved “Western civilisation” is perpetrating in the present day. This is the civilisation of the Gaza holocaust. The civilisation that cannot exist without constant war, exploitation and extraction. The civilisation that is presently strangling Cuba to death and preparing for war with Iran. The civilisation that still to this day violently subjugates and robs the Global South. The civilisation of ecocide. The civilisation of Epstein.

Western civilisation is the most depraved and abusive civilisation that has ever existed. It doesn’t need a return to its prime, it needs to be stopped in its tracks and made healthy. This is obvious from a glance at the deranged empire managers this civilisation has been elevating to positions of leadership.

US designates two Micronesian leaders over corruption allegations

APR editor — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 05:00:44 +0000

RNZ Pacific

The United States has designated two high-profile public office holders from Palau and the Marshall Islands for “significant corruption”, the US Department of State says.

Palau’s Senate president Hokkons Baules has been designated “for his involvement in significant corruption on behalf of China-based actors,” while the former mayor of the Kili/Bikini/Ejit community in the Marshall Islands Anderson Jibas has been designated “for his involvement in significant corruption and misappropriation of US provided funds during his time in public office”, the department said in a news release.

The designations render Baules, Jibas, and their immediate family members ineligible for entry into the US.

According to the State Department, Baules abused his public position by accepting bribes in exchange for providing advocacy and support for government, business, and criminal interests from China.

“His actions constituted significant corruption and adversely affected US interests in Palau.”

Baules has dismissed the allegations, telling news media last April he was the target of a smear campaign aimed at ruining his name.

The department said Jibas abused his public position “by orchestrating and financially benefiting from multiple misappropriation schemes involving theft, misuse, and abuse of funds from the US-provided Bikini Resettlement Trust”.

Stolen funds
It added Jibas’ actions resulted in most of the funds being stolen from the Kili/Bikini/Ejit people who are survivors and descendants of survivors of nuclear bomb testing in the 1940s and 1950s.

“The theft, misuse, and abuse of the US-provided money for the fund wasted US taxpayer money and contributed to a loss of jobs, food insecurity, migration to the United States, and lack of reliable electricity for the Kili/Bikini/Ejit people.

“The lack of accountability for Jibas’ acts of corruption has eroded public trust in the government of the Marshall Islands, creating an opportunity for malign foreign influence from China and others.”

US laws allow the government to name foreign nationals and their close family if there is strong evidence they were involved in serious corruption or human rights violations.

The designations come at a time of intense strategic competition between the US and China over influence in the Pacific.

Both Palau and the Marshall Islands have Compacts of Free Association (COFA) with the US, which grant the US exclusive military access in exchange for economic aid.

“The United States will continue to promote accountability for those who abuse public power for personal gain and steal from our citizens to enrich themselves. These designations reaffirm the United States’ commitment to countering global corruption affecting US interests,” the State Department said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post guts staff in news cover ‘bloodbath’

Pacific Media Watch — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:00:43 +0000

The New Arab

The Washington Post, owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, began widespread layoffs this week that will drastically shrink the size of the storied newspaper and affect all departments, according to a recording of a company-wide call shared with Reuters.

The cuts will impact a third of all employees, according to the newspaper’s spokesperson.

The newsroom is losing “hundreds” of staffers, according to a spokesperson for the Washington-Baltimore News Guild union, which represents Post employees.

Executive editor Matt Murray informed the staff of the reductions, which will impact on the international, editing, metro and sports desks, and come just days after the newspaper, founded in 1877, scaled back its coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics amid mounting financial losses.

“For too long, we’ve operated with a structure that’s too rooted in the days when we were a quasi-monopoly local newspaper,” Murray said on the call, adding that “we need a new way forward and a sounder foundation.”

The Washington Post is undergoing wrenching changes to its readership and revenue. Other large city daily newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times, are struggling as consumers turn to social media for their main source of news.

One Post reporter, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the newly announced layoffs a “bloodbath”.

The impacted journalists include Amazon beat reporter Caroline O’Donovan, Cairo Bureau chief Claire Parker and the rest of the Post’s Middle East correspondents and editors, according to X posts from O’Donovan and Parker.

“The Washington Post is taking a number of difficult but decisive actions today for our future, in what amounts to a significant restructuring across the company,” the Post said in a statement.

“These steps are designed to strengthen our footing and sharpen our focus on delivering the distinctive journalism that sets The Post apart and, most importantly, engages our customers.”

Bezos bought the newspaper in 2013 for $250 million from the Graham family.

All departments impacted
News outlets have struggled for years to maintain a sustainable business model after the internet upended the economics of journalism.

The Washington Post last year made changes across several business functions and announced job cuts, saying then that the reductions would not impact on its newsroom. The newspaper had offered voluntary separation packages to employees across all functions in 2023 amid losses of $100 million.

Its 2025 paid average daily circulation was 97,000 in a city of more than 700,000 people, with roughly 160,000 on Sundays, representing a steep decline from its 250,000 average daily circulation in 2020, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media.

“If Jeff Bezos is no longer willing to invest in the mission that has defined this paper for generations and serve the millions who depend on Post journalism, then The Post deserves a steward that will,” the Washington Post Guild, another union that represents Post employees, said on X.

The Post’s White House staff said in a letter to Bezos last month that their most impactful coverage depended heavily on collaboration with teams at risk of job cuts and that a diversified newsroom was essential when the paper faced financial challenges.

Murray said on last Wednesday’s call that all Post departments are impacted on by the cuts.

‘Politics remains largest desk’
“Politics and government will remain our largest desk and will remain central to our engagement and subscriber growth,” Murray said.

Bezos said at the time he bought the Post that he would preserve its journalistic tradition and would not lead its day-to-day operations.

But there “will, of course, be change” over the coming years, Bezos added.

Don Graham, the publisher of the paper between 1979 and 2000 and son of the late legendary Post publisher Katharine Graham, posted on Facebook about the layoffs:

“I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors — and old friends — are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.

“I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940s,” Graham said.

Clashes with journalists
In recent years, The Post has clashed with some of its journalists, who have openly criticised Bezos after the newspaper decided not to endorse a candidate in the November 2024 US presidential election, leading to more than 200,000 people cancelling their digital subscriptions.

The newspaper, which appointed William Lewis as its CEO in early 2024, also revamped its opinion section last year, shifting its focus to “personal liberties and free markets.”

Bezos was among the several tech executives seen as making overtures to US President Donald Trump last year. Bezos was seated prominently at Trump’s inauguration, underscoring his shifting ties.

Trump was a critic of Bezos during his first term in office over what the Republican president called unfair coverage by The Post. Trump praised the tech billionaire in March 2025, saying Bezos was doing “a real job” with the publication.

FBI agents searched a Post reporter’s home on January 14 as part of an investigation into sharing secret government information, in a move that press advocates said threatened journalistic freedom.

“Today’s layoffs at The Washington Post are a devastating setback for the scores of individual journalists affected and for the journalism profession,” National Press Club president Mark Schoeff Jr. said in a statement.

Pacific Media Watch reports that critics, including the Al Jazeera Journalism Review, have condemned The Washington Post’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly regarding Gaza, exhibits a significant pro-Israel bias, structural linguistic imbalances, and the disproportionate omission of Palestinian perspectives.

Republished from The New Arab.

New Zealand holds out hope for halted PNG electrification aid project

APR editor — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:58:52 +0000

By Johnny Blades, RNZ Pacific bulletin editor

The New Zealand government says it hopes an electrification aid project that was halted in Papua New Guinea can still be completed if security improves.

Work on the Enga Electrification Project in PNG’s Enga province has stopped due to ongoing violence around the project area in Tsak Valley.

New Zealand spent NZ$6.7 million over the last six years on the project which aimed to connect at least 4000 households to electricity.

READ MORE: NZ pulls plug on $6.7m power project in Papua New Guinea amid tribal violence

It was part of combined efforts with the US, Australia and Japan to help 70 percent of PNG homes get connected by 2030, as agreed to in 208 when PNG hosted the APEC Leaders Summit.

However, contractors had to be withdrawn from the area after a surge in tribal fighting in August last year, according to a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

“Ending New Zealand’s involvement is a disappointing outcome, particularly given New Zealand’s longstanding and extensive efforts to deliver energy infrastructure in Enga Province,” the spokesperson said.

“New Zealand is working on a transition plan with partners in Papua New Guinea. It is hoped this will allow for the successful completion of the project if security improves.”

Northern lines installed
The ministry said 13.5 KM of distribution lines in the North of the project area were largely installed but were yet to be commissioned or connected to houses.

It said 12km of distribution lines in the south of the project area remained at various stages of construction.

Meanwhile, PNG’s Foreign Minster Justin Tkatchenko told local media that New Zealand would hand over equipment from the project to PNG Power Limited, a state-owned entity.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

PNG Power office, Southern Highlands, Papua New Guinea. Image: Johnny Blades/RNZ

The IDF in West Bank, the US in Afghanistan, or ICE? Take your pick

Pacific Media Watch — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 05:00:17 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Is this the IDF in Gaza or the West Bank, or the US military in Afghanistan or Iraq, or ICE in Minneapolis?

The answer is that this is ICE in Minneapolis.

But the fact that it’s hard to tell whether it’s the IDF or the US Army or ICE is the whole story.

Both the United States and Israel are imperialist and settler colonial projects which support each other.

The United States spends trillions to be a hegemonic power and tests its weapons in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. It also sends billions of dollars in aid and military equipment to Israel to suppress Palestinians and to be an outpost of Western empire in Southwest Asia.

Israel develops cutting edge surveillance technology and repressive tactics used against Palestinians that are then exported back to the United States and to many other countries.

The tactics of occupation and the blurring of lines between the military and the police in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine are all reflected in the appearance, weapons, and tactics of ICE.

And let’s not forget: Israel is still engaged in kidnapping, imprisoning, torturing, detaining, killing, and expelling Palestinians during the so-called Gaza ceasefire.

At least 477 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the ceasefire was declared on October 10, and the total death toll since the war on Gaza began in October 2023 is more than 71,000, mostly women and children.

Both US President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — wanted on an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for crimes against humanity — and their far right supporters are intent on ethnic cleansing and terrorising whoever remains.

Pacific delegates warn against US fast-tracking seabed mining

APR editor — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:10:45 +0000

By Mark Rabago, RNZ Pacific Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas correspondent

Pacific delegates in the United States Congress are warning efforts to fast-track deep-seabed mining could sideline island communities and cause irreversible damage to fragile ocean ecosystems.

The concerns were raised at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing in Washington last week, held a day after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) finalised new rules streamlining permits for seabed mining.

The changes allow companies to apply for exploration and potential commercial recovery through a single process, replacing regulations dating back to the 1980s.

READ MORE: Other deep-sea mining reports

NOAA says the update reflects advances in deep-sea science and technology and does not weaken environmental safeguards.

But Guam Delegate James Moylan said decisions made in Washington had real and lasting consequences in the Pacific.

“The ocean is how we live. It feeds our families, holds our history, and connects our people to generations before us,” Moylan said.

American Samoa Delegate Aumua Amata Radewagen warned seabed mining could threaten fisheries, which she described as the lifeblood of island economies.

Northern Marianas Delegate Kimberlyn King-Hinds said Pacific territories “don’t get the luxury of being wrong” on ocean policy, warning that damage to the seabed would be permanent.

Industry representatives told lawmakers the streamlined process would provide certainty without weakening environmental reviews, while scientists warned deep-sea ecosystems could take decades to recover, if at all.

For Pacific delegates, the message was clear — faster permitting must not come at the expense of island voices or ocean protection.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.