US defence industry struggles to manufacture basic artillery for Ukraine
By Ahmed Adel | June 10, 2024
The United States arms industry is not producing the basic ammunition required to sustain support for Ukraine and Israel, Bloomberg reported on June 8. This is an extraordinary situation since Russia’s arms industry is booming despite facing major Western sanctions.
According to the outlet, the US defence industry gave priority to the manufacture of high-tech ammunition and halted the production of basic artillery such as 155-millimetre ammunition, the most used in the wars that are being fought today. The US is also facing a shortage of basic products, such as gunpowder or trinitrotoluene (TNT), to produce these munitions and have had to turn to other countries, such as Poland and Turkey, to obtain supplies.
At some point an attempt was made to replace the 155-millimetre ammunition with higher-tech projectiles on the battlefront in Ukraine, but the effort failed because the new weaponry was neutralised by the Russian military.
“Higher-tech shells that were intended to replace the traditional 155mm munitions failed an early test in Ukraine, when their targeting systems were thwarted by Russia,” Bloomberg reported. “The prospect that future wars could resemble the grinding combat taking place there has stirred fears that the US arsenal could someday be stretched to the breaking point.”
“The writing has been on the wall for a while,” Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the independent and bipartisan Center for a New American Security, told Bloomberg. “It has just taken the war in Ukraine to really shock Pentagon officials and members of Congress out of their complacency.”
Since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, the Pentagon has divested or neglected facilities once used to manufacture everything from projectiles to gunpowder, focusing instead on transforming warfare with high-tech weaponry.
“What’s left is crumbling infrastructure, outdated machinery and a tiny workforce that can’t keep up with growing international demand,” the outlet highlights.
Before the special military operation in Ukraine, American production was 14,400 shells per month. Now, the US is spending more than $5 billion to overhaul aging factories across the country with the goal of producing 100,000 155mm shells a month by the end of next year.
As the agency stresses, it is a mobilisation that, due to its speed and breadth, is unlike anything since World War II.
As part of this effort, Congress has appropriated $650 million for a TNT production plant that will take two years to build, according to Doug Bush, the Army’s top weapons buyer. And Washington will have to finance purchases of whatever the renovated facilities produce, possibly for many years.
But, as Bloomberg noted, getting the money may also be the easiest obstacle to overcome.
“The US must bring old buildings up to snuff, build new ones, buy updated machinery and hire and train workers. Environmental regulations stand in the way. And the Pentagon will need to ensure that plants can be run safely — munitions-making is prone to fires, explosions and other accidents,” the outlet noted.
Bloomberg concludes, “Boosting munition production is a costly and time-consuming business, and the US is playing catch-up at a time of growing tension in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific region.”
Washington naively believed that the sweeping sanctions against Moscow would collapse the Russian economy and therefore its military operation against the Kiev regime. Instead, Russia not only overcame the sanctions but is now producing artillery shells at a rate that the West cannot keep up with.
It is recalled that Estonian Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur admitted in November 2023 that Russia was firing 70,000 rounds a day, meaning that an equivalent of a year’s worth of European production at the time was fired by the Russian military every 10 days. The crippling shortage of artillery was also referred to by Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov in January, who revealed that Ukraine was unable to fire more than 2,000 shells per day.
Due to a severe worldwide shortage of artillery shells, Western analysts admit Ukraine will likely be outgunned by Russia for at least the remainder of the year, but even with Kiev’s allies ramping up production, realistically Russia will hold the advantage for the duration of the war.
Even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said recently there were no reports of artillery shortages, in an interview on May 21 with Reuters, he called on Western allies to speed up aid, saying every decision they’ve made on military support for Ukraine has been “late by around one year.” Even in this most desperate stage of the war, from Kiev’s perspective, Zelensky cannot but be ungrateful and entitled, even when the West struggles to overcome its industrial failures, particularly since Russia’s military industry is a resounding success despite the sanctions.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Rigor mortis on the Western front: a brief comment on the EU Parliament elections
By Gilbert Doctorow | June 10, 2024
The results of the parliamentary elections across the 27 member states of the European Union have been published this morning. They are not complete and final, but they are highly indicative of how it all ends.
The front-page diagram of The Financial Times comparing the outgoing and incoming party affiliations of the deputies tells it all. Though the deck chairs on the Titanic have been rearranged, though the Greens have had losses, the Renew grouping of Macron and Belgium’s Guy Verhofstadt have had losses, the EPP had gains and the net result appears to be that the Center Right-Left coalition that held the European Parliament in its firm grip these past 5 years will continue to have a voting majority of more than 400 seats. This means that barring some accident, Ursula von der Leyen will be reelected and the awful, self-destructive, even suicidal policies of the EU with respect to Russia will continue for the coming 5 years, if there is no Continent-wide war as a result that wipes Europe off the face of the earth.
Here in Belgium, the good news comes from the north of the country. The anti-status quo Flemish parties N-VA and Vlaams Belang came in first and second, garnering almost a third of the seats in the Chamber of Representatives. My estimation of the results comes from applying the old Russian Marxist analytic tool: the worse, the better. The comfy life of our most prominent politicians is coming to an end. Prime Minister De Croo was compelled to resign when his party took a beating. Now he can resume the search for his next sinecure that began one week ago when he called upon Joe Biden in the White House. If only this discomfiture extends to the other incompetent lackeys of Washington that the MR Party has sent to the European Institutions, Didier Reynders on the Commission and Charles Michel at the Council, then I will break out the champagne.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024
Scholz and Macron belong to ‘ash heap of history’ – Medvedev
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron should abandon politics after their respective parties suffered damaging setbacks in the European Parliament elections, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev believes.
Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is projected to finish third in the key ballot, behind the center-right Christian Democrats and the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Macron’s Besoin d’Europe coalition is expected to win less than half of the votes received by the right-wing National Rally party associated with Marine Le Pen, prompting the French president to call a snap parliamentary election after preliminary results emerged on Sunday.
In a social media post on Monday, Medvedev claimed the outcome proves that Scholz and Macron are “respected by no one.” The former Russian leader linked the poor performance at the ballot box with the “idiotic economic and migration policy” pursued by the two leaders and their support for Ukraine “at the cost of [their] own citizens.”
“Time to retire. To the ash heap of history!” said Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, earlier called on Scholz and Macron to resign and to “stop victimizing the citizens of their states.”
Officials in Moscow have accused leaders of EU nations of betraying the interests of their populations in favor of US geopolitical goals. Responding to the Ukraine crisis in 2022, the bloc vowed to support Kiev militarily for “as long as it takes,” and imposed an array of economic sanctions against Russia. Most notably, Brussels has pushed EU countries to stop buying Russian natural gas.
Large consumers such as Germany have struggled to substitute cheap Russian pipeline fuel with other sources, including renewables and expensive liquified natural gas. American LNG producers have since taken over a large share of the European market. A hike in energy prices has forced many energy-intensive businesses to either move out of the EU or shut down entirely.
WHO Plans More ‘Health Promoting Schools’ — Critics Say More Vaccines, Less Parental Control Are Fueling the Plan
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 7, 2024
The World Health Organization (WHO) is expanding its “health promoting schools” initiative worldwide, citing flagging vaccination rates and the need to provide medical services to underprivileged children and combat alleged misinformation.
The COVID-19 pandemic is behind the latest push to expand its “Making Every School a Health Promoting School” program, the WHO said, citing “the largest disruption of education systems in history” and “the health effects of mass school closures” and other pandemic-related disruptions.
The agency said the initiative aims to “serve over 2.3 billion school-age children” worldwide.
But critics say that behind the WHO’s noble-sounding plan to expand health-promoting schools — also known as school-based health centers (SBHCs) — is an attempt to gain “a foothold in our schools,” to bypass parental consent and expand vaccination, data collection and surveillance.
Laura Sextro, CEO and chief operating officer of The Unity Project, a California-based health freedom and parental rights nonprofit, told The Defender that SBHCs are “very, very agenda-driven organizations within the school system.”
Sextro said SBHCs “will cover everything from sex education [to] radical gender ideology. They’ll be talking about driving vaccines … That is something that frankly parents should have the autonomy” over.
Valerie Borek, associate director and lead policy analyst for Stand For Health Freedom, said SBHCs will promote “vaccines, especially COVID, HPV, and influenza.”
“School-based health centers have no place in public schools,” said Sheila Matthews, co-founder of AbleChild: Parents for Label and Drug Free Education. Matthews alleged the centers allow “Big Pharma access to our children, who are a captive audience.”
Nigel Utton, a board member of the World Freedom Alliance and coordinator of its Education Charter, said the WHO can’t be trusted to support the health of young people. “If it did, no child in the world would live in unsanitary conditions, or be subjected to trafficking, poor nutrition or emotional intimidation within school systems,” he said.
“Instead, the WHO wastes enormous resources on forcing vaccination programs — injecting children with dangerous chemicals including animal proteins, heavy metals and other unspecified ingredients,” Utton added.
Critics also question the involvement of private interests in SBHCs, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — and Bill and Melinda Gates themselves — in promoting SBHCs and funding the WHO’s reports on the subject.
School-based health centers give ‘Big Pharma access to our children’
SBHCs aren’t new — the concept dates back to the 1970s. The WHO, UNESCO and UNICEF have actively promoted such programs since 1995.
SBHCs are intended to offer “primary care, mental health care, and other health services in schools,” particularly in underserved communities. This includes services such as immunizations and “well-child care.”
A 2020 paper in Health Promotion Perspectives, whose lead author, Manuela Pulimeno, Ph.D., is UNESCO’s chair on health education and sustainable development, said health-promoting schools help “integrate health educational goals in a holistic perspective at school” and have shown positive outcomes.
“To achieve this goal, health-related contents may be embedded in the school curricula as core discipline,” the paper states.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has endorsed SBHCs, stating they “improve access to health care services for students by decreasing financial, geographic, age, and cultural barriers.”
In the U.S., the School-Based Health Alliance promotes SBHCs. According to the alliance, about 3,900 SBHCs operate nationally, up from around 1,900 in 2012. A September 2023 study in JAMA Network Open called for “additional SBHC expansion.”
In 2022, the Biden administration issued $75 million in grants to states to expand SBHCs, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention incorporated SBHCs into its “Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child” model.
On a global level, “work is currently underway with early adopter countries such as Egypt, Kenya, North Macedonia and Paraguay to support governments in building a new generation of school health programmes,” the WHO said in a May 26 report.
WHO’s global standards for SBHCs include censorship and surveillance
In their report, the WHO developed eight “global standards” for SBHCs (page 3), in which school health services represent just one such standard. Other standards include school and government policies, school governance and leadership, school and community partnerships, schools social-emotional and physical environments and curriculum.
These are accompanied by 13 “implementation areas,” (page 17) calling for reinforcement of “intersectoral government and multi-stakeholder coordination,” strengthening “school and community partnerships,” curriculum development, “teacher training and professional learning” and monitoring and evaluation.
Critics say these proposals allow schools to implement vaccine programs. For instance, SBHCs have been linked to higher human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates, according to a 2022 report.
Merck, the maker of the Gardasil HPV vaccine, is a funder of the School-Based Health Alliance, whose board includes several members with ties to Big Pharma and vaccine-promoting organizations.
The Gardasil HPV vaccine is often administered to teenagers as part of school vaccination programs. In October 2023, a 12-year-old boy in France died days after collapsing and injuring himself minutes after HPV vaccination at his school.
In the U.S., several state and city government websites include vaccinations among the list of services SBHCs provide.
“Increased vaccine uptake is a mark of success for school-based health programs,” Borek said. “They’re considered an optimal place to promote and administer vaccines. In fact, schools and vaccine policy go hand in hand historically — vaccines didn’t have a strong foothold until schools mandated them for admission.”
Utton pointed out that “schools have been used to coerce and manipulate children into taking vaccinations against the will of their parents. Teachers have been indoctrinated, and those who have questioned the manipulative agenda have been ostracized.”
Borek said the “psychological pressure” a child experiences when a school authority figure recommends any kind of medical care creates a “fertile ground for pushing policy.”
SBHCs ‘will certainly be a tool to collect data’
Included among the WHO’s global standards for SBHCs are interventions in school curriculums and proposals to “embed school health content” in training for educators.
The 2020 Health Promotion Perspectives paper said the WHO calls for the incorporation of “health literacy” in “the core curriculum as children enter school.”
Critics told The Defender that changes like these could lead to the inclusion of non-health-related topics in school curricula under the guise of health education.
Virginie de Araujo-Recchia, a French lawyer and member of ONEST, France’s National Organization of Ethics, Health and Transparency, told The Defender that SBHCs may be “favored by the political powers in an attempt to achieve a fusion between education, citizenship and environmental causes.”
The WHO’s global standards for SBHCs also target “misinformation.” According to UNESCO, SBHCs “can … teach young people develop the critical thinking skills they need to reject harmful health-related myths and misconceptions,” noting that “This is a key in responding to pandemics like Covid-19 and HIV.”
The global standards call on schools to develop “versatile physical spaces that can be adapted to changing restrictions, as in managing the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The WHO’s global standards also contain provisions for increased data collection and surveillance in schools, with the 13th “implementation area” calling on schools to “Design, develop and share practices for collecting, storing and analysing data.”
This is linked to calls to provide “capacity-building in evaluation (e.g. data collection and analysis)” and investments “in feasible … interoperable systems for collecting and storing data from monitoring at all levels of the education and/or health system.”
According to Stand for Health Freedom, SBHCs are “completely unregulated” in the U.S.
For instance, it is unclear how HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) andthe Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act will be applied to SBHCs and students’ health information.
SBHCs “will certainly be a tool to collect data on anything from vaccine status to sexual preference,” Sextro said.
Children can become ‘health trainers of their parents’
The WHO claims SBHCs involve “all stakeholders, and particularly students, parents and caregivers.” The agency’s global standards call for “opportunities for parents … to participate meaningfully in the governance, design, implementation and evaluation” of SBHCs and their inclusion on “design teams” and governance boards.
But the WHO appears to contradict itself, excluding parents from the “system of global standards for health-promoting schools” and noting that the “target readership” of its SBHC-related documents is “mainly people in government.”
According to Nemours KidsHealth, the centers “only provide care to children with parents’ written permission.” However, the organization notes that this “permission” usually consists of “the option to sign a permission form at the beginning of each school year.”
A consent form for an Atlanta SBHC shared with The Defender says nothing about parents being notified before, during or after treatment. Last year, a Connecticut school board was sued for rejecting a government-funded school-based mental health clinic that aimed to treat teens without parental consent.
“The reason they’re doing this is because they don’t want parents to be able to exercise their rights, which is to … make medically informed decisions on behalf of their children. And so, they’re usurping the parents,” Sextro said.
“Parents need to be front and center in their child’s medical care,” Borek said. “These centers are cleaving that relationship by promoting medical assessments and treatment without the presence of a parent.”
A proposed bill in New Hampshire (SB 343) would require parents to be present when services are provided at an SBHC.
“Schools are clearly not the place to introduce school health centers,” de Araujo-Recchia said. “Our children are neither guinea pigs for mass medical experimentation nor beings to be sacrificed.”
Notably, UNESCO suggests SBHCs can help children “educate” their parents on health matters. According to the 2020 Health Promotion Perspectives paper, SBHCs can help children “become health trainers of their parents, relatives and friends, impacting positively the entire society.”
Gates ‘has a direct financial benefit’ from SBHCs
Earlier this year, Melinda French Gates announced a $23 million investment in the School-Based Health Alliance, alongside fellow billionaire MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
The Gates Foundation has also provided financial support for the publication of at least two WHO reports on SBHCs.
“The Gates Foundation and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance [founded and funded by Gates] fiercely promote childhood vaccination, and make a lot of money from it,” de Araujo-Recchia said. “This is not philanthropy at all, but a stranglehold and ideology,” citing the WHO’s partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation as another example.
Sextro said Gates “has a direct financial benefit and interest in promoting these school-based health centers, because they will directly promote everything from the pharmaceutical to the vaccine interest that he and the Gates Foundation have.”
The WHO’s global standards for SBHCs include calls for the delivery of “comprehensive school health services based on a formal agreement between schools (or local education departments) and health service providers.”
According to the School-Based Health Alliance, 21% of funding for SBHCs in the U.S. came from private foundations in 2022, while according to the AAP, “local hospitals [may] provide … financial support for SBHCs.”
The WHO “is mainly financed by private funds from companies or foundations owning pharmaceutical labs,” de Araujo-Recchia said. “The capital links between the mainstream media, digital giants, American financial giants and the WHO demonstrate real collusion.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Biden to Offer Saudi Arabia Treaty In Exchange for Official Ties with Israel
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | June 9, 2024
The White House is prepared to roll out a plan that will make Saudi Arabia a Japan-style ally in exchange for Ryiadh developing official ties with Tel Aviv. While the Biden administration has invested substantial effort to get the deal inked, it is likely dead on arrival because Saudi Arabia refuses to normalize with Israel unless Tel Aviv agrees to the creation of the Palestinian state.
According to American, Israeli, and Saudi officials speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Washington is prepared to sign an agreement to defend Saudi Arabia if Riyadh establishes regular ties with Tel Aviv. However, it would not be a peace agreement as the two countries are not at war.
Several hurdles must be cleared before the deal can be finalized, and it is unlikely that will happen. As Biden is seeking to make Saudi Arabia a treaty ally, it would need the approval of two-thirds of the Senate. Additionally, the deal would require Tel Aviv to end the onslaught in Gaza and take permanent steps toward a Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to take either step.
Despite the obvious obstacles to the agreement, the Joe Biden administration has pressed forward with negotiations. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan explained last month, “We should not miss a historic opportunity to achieve the vision of a secure Israel, flanked by strong regional partners, presenting a powerful front to deter aggression and uphold regional stability.” He added, “We are pursuing this vision every day.”
If it went through, it would make Riyadh Washington’s only treaty ally in the Arab world, a status that even Tel Aviv does not have. The deal would also give the US access to Saudi airspace. The treaty is also part of negotiations of a larger deal that would also see the US transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.
For President Biden, the deal could be politically problematic. As a candidate, Biden promised that he would treat Saudi Arabia as a pariah state for the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
To add to the potential domestic resistance to the agreement, there are widespread protests in the US against Biden’s support for Israel amid its war on Gaza. As the treaty is a bribe to Riyadh to accept official relations with Tel Aviv, Americans may object to becoming an ally with Saudi Arabia to secure Israel’s regional interests.
Blind and deaf: how Israel lost the north

By Indrajit Samarajiva | indi.ca | June 5, 2024
It’s fascinatingly boring how Hezbollah has decimated Israel’s “eyes and ears.” For months, the Lebanese resistance’s videos have been methodically mundane, blowing up this communication tower, that building, that listening station.
It seemed like a bunch of nothing, but it adds up. Hezbollah had a list of Israel’s intelligence gathering posts in the north and has spent months methodically eye poking them, like Odysseus and the Cyclops. Now – however big the Israeli military might be – they’re effectively blinded.

Map shows the new buffer zone in the north, as reported by Haaretz
As Hezbollah opens bigger and bigger gaps in the occupation state’s air defenses, they can fire larger missiles with more frequency into Israel, with better and deeper penetration. For Israel, this attrition is a compounding problem. Their air defenses are a connected system and the network is increasingly returning 404. Take for example, the destruction of the $230 million dollar SKYDEW blimp/spy balloon.
This balloon is designed to detect low-flying drones and missiles, especially important as this is the vector most used by the Resistance. SKYDEW can stay up much longer – and is relatively cheaper – than planes, and can ‘see’ much further than ground-based systems. It was also placed in a highly strategic area that allowed them to cover attacks from Syria, Iraq and, to a lesser degree, from Hezbollah, specifically on the port of Haifa. But now the party’s over. Look at the balloon now:

SKYDEW is now shriveled and useless – a big loss, which also signals a big breakdown. As the SKYDEW ‘Target Card‘ (from Hezbollah intelligence) says, it was “protected by an electronic monitoring and jamming system against drones and UAVs,” and “secured by three layers of missile interception systems: Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Hetz [Arrow].” That all got sliced through like the layers of an onion, leaving Israeli defenses naked.
The northern front is porous now, as Israeli settlers know better than anybody. To quote Moshe Davidovitz, head of the Asher regional council:
“Ten rockets fell in the center of the country and the media is in an uproar — the country is in turmoil,” he wrote. “But every day dozens of rockets are fired towards the confrontation line settlements and the Galilee, including anti-tank missiles and suicide drones, and the country remains silent. Once again, it’s proof that the north is not being counted.”
Hezbollah of course, has counted the north. They have a list of Israeli military targets and they go through them one by one. Take, for example, the Mount Meron Air Surveillance Base, one of the two main bases in the occupation state. This is what a senior Israeli air force official says about the base, in a 2016 article by Maariv:
“The air control system is crucial for the operational capability of the Air Force. Its main duty is to protect the occupied airspace. Through the control system, we activate all capabilities to protect the sky, including helicopters, aircraft, missiles, and other classified systems.”
And this is what Hezbollah intelligence released, as they were bombing it:
Firstly, the Meron Air Surveillance Base is located on the summit of Mount Jarmaq [“Mount Meron”] in northern occupied Palestine, the highest peak in occupied Palestine. Meron Base is the sole center for administration, surveillance, and air control in the northern part of the usurping entity and there is no major alternative to it. It is one of two main bases in the entire usurping entity: “Meron” in the north, and the second being “Mitzpe Ramon” in the south.
The Meron Base is responsible for organizing, coordinating, and managing all air operations towards Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Cyprus, and the northern part of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea. Additionally, this base is a main center for electronic jamming operations in the aforementioned directions and is staffed by a large number of elite officers and soldiers of the zionist forces.
Secondly, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance at 07:50 AM on Saturday, January 6, 2024, as a part of the preliminary response to the crime of assassinating the great leader Sheikh Saleh Al-Arouri and his martyr brothers in the southern suburb [Dahiyeh] of Beirut, targeted the Meron Air Surveillance Base with 62 missiles of various types, inflicting direct and confirmed hits.
Hezbollah has aired its attacks on Meron Air Base in countless videos now, and they have been relentless. It can get boring because the whole thing never fireballs, but each small hit adds up. Every time a hole in Israeli air defenses opens, the hole widens, because Hezbollah is damaging complex, interconnected systems.
Today, the Meron base can barely defend itself, let alone the region. Tel Aviv has responded by assassinating Hezbollah and allied leaders, but the resistance just name missiles after those martyrs and send more.
This is a battle of attrition and Hezbollah is paying attention while Israel is mindlessly lashing out. Completely distracted by its brutal military assault on civilians in Gaza, in the south, Israel has lost the battle for the north.
After months of this boring de-administrative work, Hezbollah has finally arrived at the good stuff. The occupation state’s northern air defenses today are like a ragged old mosquito net that the dog chased the cat through. It’s full of holes, and big ones. Hezbollah can increasingly fire at will, with increasingly accurate weapons. For example, here is Hezbollah taking down a SKYSTAR 330 by drone-striking its Battalion 869 operator.

In this case, Hezbollah targeted not the spy balloon itself, but the balloon controllers, in three locations at the same time. With the operators eliminated, the balloon drifted out of control, landing in Lebanon where some kids recovered it. This is the state of Israel’s eyes and ears in the north. They’re on the ground.
Iron ‘Done’
Israel has nothing worth calling an air-defense in the north anymore. The Iron Dome is done. Hezbollah can fire at will, and has for every single day for seven months now. Iraqi Resistance missiles are flying right over them, towards Haifa. Iran can overwhelm the entire national system whenever it wants. Israel can still offend the conscience, but they’re missile defenseless now. Even Hamas is hitting them, from within traumatized Gaza. It’s open season, and the settlers know it.
Israeli settlers openly bemoan their unsettled state all over the Hebrew press. Some were so pyrrhicly incensed they threatened to secede from the entire state and form the new State of Galilee. As The Jerusalem Post has said:
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the prime minister’s answer at the cabinet meeting to a question by Benny Gantz, as reported by N12. Gantz wondered if the residents would return to their homes on September 1, for the start of the school year, and Netanyahu replied, “What’s the worst that will happen if they return a few months after September 1?”
This is of course the worst that can happen. The entire premise of Israel’s decades of grooming international actors to accept and expect bad behavior from Tel Aviv is that they can do whatever they want. If the Iron Dome doesn’t work, Israel doesn’t work, and now the Iron Dome doesn’t work. It’s the Iron Sieve now. Holy warriors have poked it full of holes.

An Iron Dome battery targeted by Hezbollah
This is a huge problem because the Iron Dome is not just Israel’s physical defense mechanism, it’s their psychological defense mechanism. It’s what makes the whole colonial project believable, that they can bully everyone in the region and suffer no consequences. Belief in the ‘Iron Dome’ is belief in ‘Israel’ and neither is believable anymore. Thus the northern Jewish settlements have emptied out and they’re not coming back anytime soon. As the Resistance News Network (RNN) said (on May 29th):
930 settler houses in northern occupied Palestine have been damaged by Hezbollah rockets in 86 settlements since October 7th, according to the zionist Ministry of War.
In Al-Manara for example, 130 out of 155 houses were destroyed. Metulla has just 34 residents left in the settlement, at most. Kiryat Shmona, one of the largest (northern) settlements, has seen its population plummet from 24,000 to under 4,000, and 124 houses have been damaged within it.
This comes as over 200,000 settlers in the north are displaced by the resistance, having built their own refugee camp. Some want to secede from “Israel” and build their own state, while others, such as the settlement of “Margaliot” have severed their ties with the entity as of yesterday.
Perplexingly, the IOF reportedly plans to significantly cut down the number of soldiers it has on the northern border and nearby settlements, citing funding reasons, or perhaps to lessen the number of targets available to Hezbollah.
Let’s look at one example of Hezbollah eliminating one target, an Iron Dome battery. They systematically do this over and over. This report describes how Hezbollah first gets the battery to reveal itself by firing rubbish at it, then hits it with drones.
The exclusive footage reveals the monitoring and reconnaissance operations that enabled Hezbollah to uncover the positions of “Iron Dome” batteries stations near the settlement of “Kfar Blum” using a tactic called “fire luring.”
The footage shows Hezbollah launching munitions toward the sites and documenting the interception process carried out by the Iron Dome, which enabled Hezbollah to execute a high-precision qualitative operation.
The scenes at 4:25 show a successful targeting of the Iron Dome batteries, without them being able to detect, track, or thwart the attack. Published photos also reveal Hezbollah’s intelligence penetration of the Israeli soldiers in these newly established sites, and their ability to document the geographical details and size of the fortifications used.
Hezbollah has done this over and over, methodically hunting and seeking Iron Dome batteries one by one. Given that the rest of their surveillance equipment is decimated and they can’t see what’s coming, Israel is forced to then draw its military assets even further from the border. Otherwise this is what happens:

This is the moment Hezbollah hits the garrison unit of Barkat Risha with an Iranian Almas top-attack ATGM [Anti-Tank Guided Missile]. ‘Unlike Hezbollah and Hamas, Israel has not spent the past 20 years tunneling underground, so their troops are all exposed without the Iron Dome. Take also, for example, the IOF’s 769th Brigade Headquarters, or what’s left of it.

The colonial project will shrink rapidly without air defenses. When the soldiers leave, the settlers have to leave. This is not a strategic retreat, it’s strategic defeat. This is not a solution, just dissolution. But it’s all Israel can do. It hasn’t simply lost control of the north, it has lost control of the tempo of this war. Hezbollah can keep turning the heat up until Israel is cooked. Behold Kiryat Shmona (occupied al-Khalisa), which was literally in flames a few days ago:

This is directly because the Iron Dome is not intercepting drones and Hezbollah has fire control of the whole region. Hence it burns. Settlers now see a “welcome” board that has literally melted.

As Israel retreats further and further from its border with Lebanon, the collapse of the northern front also opens up the occupation state to attacks from Syria and Iraq, which can fly straight through. This is all causing massive psychological damage to Israel because the Iron Dome was their primary safety blanket.
Hezbollah has reported destroying over 1,650 pieces of intelligence, surveillance and target acquisition (ISR) equipment since 8 October, 2023. The Lebanese resistance had an actual strategy while Israel was wildly bombing ambulances and homes with no military value. Now Israel has lost northern Palestine and it’s not coming back.
‘Until genocide stops’: Colombia to suspend coal exports to Israel
Press TV | June 8, 2024
Colombia has said it would stop its coal exports to the Israeli regime as long as the latter sustained its months-long genocidal war against the Gaza Strip.
“We are going to suspend coal exports to Israel until the genocide stops,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro said in a post on X on Saturday.
He also posted a draft decree, which said that coal exports would only resume if the regime complied with a recent order by the International Court of Justice that mandated that Tel Aviv withdraw its troops from the Gaza strip.
Data provided by Colombia’s National Statistics Department shows that the exports were worth more than $320 million in the first eight months of the last year.
According to the Colombian government, the export ban will enter into force five days after the decree was published in the official gazette.
On May 1, the Colombian head of state said the country had decided to cut its diplomatic relations with the Israeli regime over the war.
“And we here in front of you, the government of change, the president of the republic informs that tomorrow diplomatic relations” with the Israeli regime “will be cut,” he said at the time, adding, “[We cut diplomatic ties] because of them having…a genocidal president.”
More than 36,801 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed in the war that began after Al-Aqsa Storm, a retaliatory operation staged by Gaza’s resistance groups.
NATO ‘crossed red line’ – Austria
RT | June 9, 2024
Ukraine’s Western sponsors have crossed a boundary when they allowed Kiev to use their weapons to strike at targets in Russia, Austrian Defense Minister Klaudia Tanner said in an interview to Die Presse published on Saturday.
Several NATO members have openly supported the use of Western-produced armaments for cross-border strikes against Russia in recent weeks, ostensibly in a limited manner. The West insists that it is still not a party to the conflict, and only supports Kiev’s efforts to stall Russia’s push into the Kharkov Region, which Moscow launched to move the line of contact away from the border to prevent further Ukrainian attacks on Russian civilians.
“A red line has been crossed,” Tanner stated when asked about the US, France and Germany’s permission to use their weapons in cross-border strikes. When the interviewer asked how else Kiev could stall the Kharkov operation, the Austrian Defense Minister replied that “as a militarily neutral state, it is not our place to judge.”
The Austrian defense chief added that at least she was “very pleased that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has clarified that NATO will not be sending troops to Ukraine.”
Stoltenberg claimed that the US-led military bloc has no plans to deploy ground forces to Ukraine in a press conference on Thursday. Despite this, French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Friday he was almost ready to finalize an international coalition to officially send Western military “instructors” to train Kiev’s forces in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has stressed that Moscow has long been aware that Western military personnel are already fighting in Ukraine, under the guise of “mercenaries” and “volunteers.”
Western-produced long-ranged armaments used by Kiev in cross-border strikes are also often controlled and serviced by these foreign troops, the Russian president said last month. And even if Ukrainians are pulling the trigger, the US and its allies are the ones providing Kiev intelligence on Russian targets, Putin noted.
Moscow has warned that Western-backed long-range attacks on Russian territories will amount to direct Western participation in the conflict, and that Russia can respond in kind. “We can respond asymmetrically,” the Russian leader said on Wednesday, suggesting that Moscow could supply similar weapons around the world, where they could be used against Western
Scott Ritter Silenced by Liberal Authoritarians
By Patrick Lawrence | ScheerPost | June 8, 2024
It is not difficult to be astonished these days, given how many things going on around us warrant astonishment. To pull something out of a hat at random, the Democratic apparatus has openly, brazenly politicized the judicial system—weaponized it, if you prefer—in its determination to destroy Donald Trump and now has the temerity to warn in the gravest terms that a second Trump term would mean… the politicization of American justice.
Again at random, in The Washington Post’s June 7 editions George Will tells us President Biden “has provided the most progressive governance in U.S. history.” Yes, he wrote that. Give in to your astonishment.
It is interesting in this case to note that, during the reign of Ronald Reagan 40 years ago, our George thought big government was bad, bad, bad. Now it is a fine thing that Biden is “minimizing the market’s role by maximizing the government’s role in allocating society’s resources and opportunities.” Apart from turning his own argument hourglass upside-down, this assessment of our swiftly declining president is preposterously, right-before-your-eyes false.
You cannot tell the AC’s from the DC’s these days. But this is not the half of it in the way of astonishing events, things done, things said and such like.
Last week, as many readers will have noticed, Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector and now a widely followed commentator, was about to board a plane bound for Turkey when armed police officers stopped him, confiscated his passport and escorted him out of Kennedy International Airport. Ritter was booked to transit through Istanbul for St. Petersburg, where he planned to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual gathering.
Here is Ritter recounting this incident in an interview with RT International:
I was boarding the flight. Three officers pulled me aside. They took my passport. When asked why, they said, “Orders of the State Department.” They had no further information for me. They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport.
No passport, no freedom to travel, no explanation. I have it on good authority that Ritter subsequently advised other Americans who were to attend the St. Petersburg events not to risk it.
I have had countless conversations over many years in which the question considered has been “Is this as bad as the 1950s?” The matter has been especially vital since the Russiagate fiasco began during the Clinton–Trump campaign season in 2016. It was in the ensuing years that the authoritarianism implicit in American liberalism from the first burst upon us like some weird grotesque out of a Dr. Seuss book.
I always urge caution when invoking comparisons between our corruptions and ideological extremes and those of the McCarthy era. Hyperbole and exaggeration never serve one’s understanding or one’s argument. But the confiscation of Scott Ritter’s passport on the instructions of Antony Blinken’s State Department seems to me a radical step too far. The liberal authoritarians now in command of the nation’s major institutions, the House of Representatives among the only exceptions, have just signaled they are quite prepared to act at least as undemocratically as the House Un–American Activities crowd, the FBI and the rest of the national-security state did during the 1950s to preserve their political hegemony.
When I think of confiscated passports I think of Paul Robeson, the gifted singer, the courageous political dissenter, the civil rights advocate — here he is singing his famous Water Boy — whose documents were seized in 1950 because he refused to indulge in the Cold War paranoia that was already prevalent. His performing career collapsed and he nearly went broke before a Supreme Court decision restored them in 1958. Or I think of all the screenwriters, novelists, poets, painters and activists whose papers were canceled while they were in Mexico — or in France or in Sweden or in England — to avoid HUAC and expatriation turned into exile.
And when I am finished thinking of these people, about whom there is a rich, inspiring literature, I think of how far America descended into a derangement we tend to look back upon in some combination of wonder, derision and contempt.
We can no longer look back in this fashion. The revocation of Scott Ritter’s passport, along with the destruction of the judicial system, the myth-spinning about our purported leaders and all the rest pushes this in our faces. Let us give this a moment’s thought to see if we can determine what is likely to be in store.
Why Scott Ritter, I have wondered these past few days. Of all the dissident commentators of too many stripes to count, why Scott? I reply to myself, “Because Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, a former U.N. arms monitor in Iraq and he enjoys big-time credibility as a patriotic American.” His voice, in short, is the sort that can carry weight in sectors of the voting public that may well prove key in determining the outcome in the Trump–Biden election this Nov. 5.
Viewed in this context, I take the full-frontal suppression of Ritter’s rights last week as very likely tied to the liberals’ political prospects, other than brilliant as they are at this point. Censorship, suppression of various kinds taking various forms, “canceling”—these are nothing new, of course. But I sense things may get a great deal worse from here on out.
This is a year of global elections, as has often been remarked. The Associated Press counted 25 major national elections in a piece published at the start of the year. Taiwan, El Salvador, Indonesia, Russia, Slovakia, India, Mexico: These are among the big ones that have already taken place. The European Union is holding parliamentary elections June 6–9, cited in liberal quarters as the most important in decades. When Americans vote Nov. 5, it will be in this context.
In many of these elections — not all but many — the core issues are variants on a theme. The liberal order, such as we have it, is cast as defending itself against the onslaughts of —take your pick — populists, authoritarians, here and there a dictator. This is certainly how liberal media encourage American voters to view the Biden – Trump contest. And it is for this reason I think we must all brace ourselves for what may turn out to be a very major disaster for what remains of American democracy — and by extension the West’s.
Cast your mind back to 1992, when the Soviet Union was no more, an incipient triumphalism was taking hold in the U.S. and Francis Fukuyama published his famous (or infamous) The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press). Fukuyama, then a middling bureaucrat at the State Department, made the case that liberal democracy had won out and would stand as the ultimate, unchallenged achievement of humankind. A sort of happy political monoculture was destined to prevail eternally across the planet.
However sophomoric you may find this thesis, and I find it almost juvenile in its silliness, it came to define the expectations of all righteous American liberals. There was the Bush II administration, a major setback for the liberal narrative, although at the horizon this was merely a variation on the liberal theme. Then came the Obama years. And the Obama years set up the Democrats for a kind of fateful consummation in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s ascendancy that November was incontrovertibly the surest of outcomes because it was… what is my phrase?… a matter of historical destiny.
This is why Clinton’s defeat landed so hard among the mainstream Democrats. It was more, much more, than a loss at the polls. Trump’s victory contradicted what had become a prevalent consciousness among American liberals. Biden’s win in 2020 was a kind of salvage job: It put the liberal narrative back on track. But something had happened in the years after Clinton’s November 2016 loss. Liberals had assumed an uncompromising ideological righteousness such that we can now legitimately call them authoritarians—soft despots in de Tocqueville’s terminology, apple-pie authoritarians in mine. The cause is upside-down to the Cold War cause, but these people are at least as dangerous as the McCarthyites, and, as I have suggested, maybe more so.
We learned something important during those years. Deprived of what they considered their right as conferred by the force of history, liberals demonstrated that they would stop at nothing in the cause of retrieving it. Even those institutions that must stand above the political pit if a democracy is to have any chance of working, notably but not only the judiciary, were intruded upon in the liberal authoritarian project. Nothing was off limits.
Here we are again. We are headed into another confrontation of the kind that set liberals on the path of destruction they began to walk in 2016. We are already seeing a new wave of preposterous, utterly unsubstantiated charges of Russian or Chinese interference. Trump will turn America into a dictatorship. Trump will go on a rampage of retribution. Trump—we hear this already, as noted—will corrupt the courts, our courts, the courts we have kept pristine.
The Scott Ritter affair astonishes me yet more than any of the other astonishing developments of late. I read it as a warning of how extreme things may get, what irreparable damage to the American polity may be done, if liberal authoritarian cliques determine that a broad campaign to suppress dissent will be necessary if Biden is to have a chance of winning a second term and they are to fulfill their end-of-history destiny.
Let me put it this way. Liberal media now routinely bait Trump to say whether he will automatically accept the outcome this Nov. 5. One would have to be naïve in the extreme to make any such commitment as things now stand.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
So Much for Lawfare? Trump Found Guilty and So What
By Peter Van Buren | We Meant Well | June 5, 2024
A New York jury convicted Donald Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with buying the silence of a porn star. He is the first American president to become a felon. The verdict is not unexpected from the deep blue Democratic enclave of Manhattan; the larger question is if lawfare will defeat Trump on November 5.
The jury found Trump faked records (hiding hush payments as “legal expenses”) to conceal the purpose of money given to the onetime attorney Michael Cohen. Trump was actually reimbursing Cohen for a $130,000 hush-money deal struck with porn star Stormy Daniels, to silence her account of an affair with Trump. The affair was in 2006, a decade before Trump was elected president. The falsification of business records took place in 2017, after Trump was already in the White House and thus could not have influenced the election. He was found guilty nonetheless.
For the jury to reach its unanimous decision of guilt on all 34 charges, the key was believing two witnesses over Trump.
There are only two people on earth who know if an affair actually took place between Stormy and Trump. Trump said no, Stormy said yes and the jury agreed with her, fully absent of any further actual evidence. Daniels benefitted greatly from her claims to having the affair, and violated a nondisclosure agreement she voluntarily signed and accepted money for, to achieve her goals. “Proving” the affair was the base upon which the rest of the case to find Trump guilty was made.
It is important to understand that having an affair and paying off someone to remain quiet about it are not crimes, even for a presidential candidate. Nonetheless, the prosecutor claimed in closing arguments Trump “hoodwinked the American voter” with a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election. In addition to those who may have benefitted from the plan, “all roads lead to the man who benefited the most: Donald Trump,” Joshua Steinglass told the jury.
But the witness whose testimony was fully believed by the jury, and whose testimony will see Trump receive a criminal penalty when he is sentenced on July 11 (four days before the Republican National Convention!) is Michael Cohen. In the total absence of physical evidence and in the face of Trump’s claims to the contrary, Cohen served as connective tissue for many disparate elements. It was Cohen who claimed Trump masterminded the plan to hide the payments to Stormy. It was Cohen who said the 34 checks and invoices, only nine of which were signed by Trump himself, were not for legal expenses as they were labeled but were to reimburse Cohen for paying off Stormy. Stormy’s name appeared on none of the 34 documents, a fact which instead of exonerating Trump became under Michael Cohen’s testimony the linchpin of the conspiracy to falsify business records. Todd Blanche, a lawyer for Trump, told jurors the case hinged on the testimony of Michael Cohen, whom he called “the greatest liar of all time.”
Nearly incredibly (Trump’s defense team called Cohen a “walking reasonable doubt”) the jury believed Cohen based on nothing but his good word. This is despite Cohen having gone to jail for perjury, been caught lying to Congress, being disbarred, and actually telling a lie during his testimony at the instant trial. It remains difficult to understand how a jury could objectively grant so much credence to Cohen in the face of his record of lying to his own advantage. Every critical element of the case came down to whether his word could be trusted. That is what convicted Trump. You might have thought Robert De Niro was leading the deliberations.
There’s more. For jurors to have found Trump guilty of all 34 counts, they must have concluded beyond a reasonable doubt not only that Trump falsified or caused the falsification of business records “with intent to defraud” but also that he did so with the intent to commit or conceal another crime. That second element — the intent to commit or conceal another crime — elevates the charges to felonies and got around the statue of limitations that usually governs misdemeanors such as false business records. To reach this conclusion the jury had to also believe Cohen that Trump’s primary intent in all this was election influence and not, as Trump claimed, to hide the affair from his family.
There are many questions surrounding the jury’s verdict, and the fact pattern of the case itself, all of which should come out in Trump’s inevitable appeal. With that in mind, the actual legal conclusion of this case is far into the future, almost certainly after the November 5 election. But that begs the more important question: does any of this matter to voters? This is lawfare, not justice, after all. “The real verdict is going to be November 5, by the people,” said Trump.
CNN, for example, concluded “Donald Trump, who built a mystique as the brash epitome of power, has never been more powerless to dictate his own fate. His reputation, future, and even perhaps the White House’s destiny, [was] placed in the hands of 12 citizens of his native New York City, proving that not even once-and-possibly future commanders in chief are above the law.”
So a victory for Democratic lawfare? Maybe not. Trump remains eligible to campaign for the presidency and serve if elected. None of the other lawfare shots is likely to conclude before November.
So does it matter? A majority of registered voters said a guilty verdict in Trump’s trial would make no difference in their vote in the 2024 presidential election. Across all registered voters, 67 percent said a guilty verdict would have no effect on their vote, while 17 percent say they would be less likely to vote for him and 15 percent say they would be more likely, according to the NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll released before the verdict. An ABC News poll earlier this month showed 80 percent of Trump’s supporters say they would stick with him even if he’s convicted of a felony in this case. Some say they would either reconsider their support (16 percent) or withdraw it (four percent.) Similar polls followed Trump’s defeat in New York courts over supposed real estate fraud.
And Biden knows it. A Biden campaign spokesman said Trump’s conviction showed “There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box. Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”
As in other Third World countries where the judiciary is used to smite political opponents, let us hope the people can see the truth, as they still hold the final card to be played. The Deep State has tried from day one to destroy Donald Trump — Russian collusion and dossier hoax, pee tape accusation, Mueller hearing and report, Emoluments Clause, various calls for extra-legal interventions and coups, Alfa Bank hoax, Impeachment I, Impeachment II, demands Mike Pence invoke the 25th Amendment, MSM blackout of Hunter Biden laptop story, Twitter purge of conservative accounts, FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Letitia James prosecution “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime” with no victims, no monetary loss but an effort to bankrupt Trump with civil judgment, Colorado attempt to remove Trump from state ballots over the 14th Amendment, and false statements Trump will “take revenge,” “demand retribution,” ensure a “bloodbath,” and “end democracy” (America’s last election if he wins.)
Trump meanwhile has characterized this trial, and the others, as unjust, rigged, lawfare pure and simple. He has kept the voters’ eyes not on who he is (his personal life has been baked-in to the vote long ago) but on what he represents to the electorate. As such, it is hard to see this guilty conviction, however unfair, as mattering too much come November.

