The Zionist Destruction of American Higher Education
By Ron Unz • Unz Review • March 31, 2025
We may be witnessing the ongoing destruction of one of the greatest pillars of postwar American global influence and hegemony.
Late last week an astonishing event occurred in American society, and video clips of that incident quickly went viral across the Internet.
A 30-year-old Tufts doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar from Turkey was walking across her Boston-area neighborhood on the way to a holiday dinner at a friend’s house when she was suddenly seized and abducted in the early evening by six masked federal agents of the Department of Homeland Security. The terrified young woman was handcuffed and taken to a waiting car, secretly detained for the next 24 hours without access to friends, family, or lawyers, then shipped off to a holding cell in Louisiana and scheduled for immediate deportation, although a federal judge has now temporarily stayed the proceedings.
Just one of the Tweets showing a short clip of that incident has been viewed more than 4.5 million times, with a much longer YouTube video accumulating another couple of hundred thousand views.
That very disturbing scene seemed like something out of a Hollywood film chronicling the actions of a dystopian American police state, and that initial impression was only solidified once media reports explained why Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the streets of her home town. Her only reported transgression had been her co-authorship of an op-ed piece in the Tufts student newspaper a year earlier sharply criticizing Israel and its ongoing attacks on the civilian population of Gaza.
Apparently, one of the many powerful pro-Israel censorship organizations funded by Zionist billionaires became outraged over her sentiments and decided to make a public example of her, so its minions in the subservient Trump Administration immediately ordered her arrest.
CBS News covered a local protest demonstration demanding the young woman’s release, and quoted the remarks of one of the participants:
“The university campus should absolutely be a place for the free and open exchange of ideas and the fact that someone can just be disappeared into the abyss for voicing an idea is absolutely horrifying,” said rally attendee Sam Wachman.
Now supposed that such a scene—for such a reason—had taken place on the streets of Russia, China, Iran, or any other country viewed with great disfavor by our government. Surely that incident would have quickly become the centerpiece of a massive global propaganda offensive aimed at blackening the reputation of the regime responsible. Audiences worldwide would have been forcefully told that the arrest demonstrated the terrible dangers of living in a society lacking the freedoms guaranteed by our own Constitution and our Bill of Rights. I don’t recall seeing any recent propaganda campaigns along these lines, so that suggests that such incidents are extremely rare in those countries.
But unfortunately that is hardly the case in today’s America. A day or two before that Tufts graduate student was snatched off the streets of her city, a 21-year-old Columbia University junior went into hiding to avoid a similar fate after federal agents raided her campus dorm to arrest her. As the Times reported, high school valedictorian Yunseo Chung had moved to the U.S. with her family from South Korea when she was 7, but her permanent residency was suddenly revoked for her public criticism of Israeli policy. She was ordered immediately deported back to a country that she barely even remembered.
This followed the storm of controversy unleashed earlier this month by the very high profile arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate student heavily involved in last year’s campus protests against the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Seized in an early morning raid on his campus student housing, which he shared with his wife, an American citizen eight months pregnant, he was taken off to detention, first in New Jersey and then transferred to a holding cell in Louisiana, once again with no initial access to his family, friends, or lawyers.
As a Green Card holder—a permanent legal resident of the U.S.—he was considered fully entitled to all the normal rights and privileges of an American citizen, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that his Green Card would be canceled and he would be deported based upon an obscure legal doctrine never previously employed for that purpose, eliciting a strong legal challenge in federal court. Moreover, his transfer from a New Jersey jurisdiction to a different one in the Deep South also seemed to violate normal legal procedures.
A week after that arrest, Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia doctoral candidate from India on a Fulbright Scholarship, hurriedly packed her bags and fled the country to Canada when she narrowly missed being arrested by federal authorities who raided her student housing. As the New York Times reported:
“The atmosphere seemed so volatile and dangerous,” Ms. Srinivasan, 37, said on Friday in an interview with The New York Times, her first public remarks since leaving. “So I just made a quick decision.”
A day earlier Rubio explained that he had already authorized the arrest and immediate deportation of more than 300 students around the country for their criticism of Israel, so these particular cases obviously represented merely the tip of a very large iceberg.
In past decades, the academic leadership of a top Ivy League school such as Columbia might have stoutly defended the students in its community. But any such resistance was broken when the Trump Administration suddenly pulled $400 million in annual funding. The demands included full cooperation with the arrest of any students critical of Israeli policies, the creation of a new internal security force to suppress any anti-Israel campus protests, and “receivership” for the university’s prestigious Middle Eastern Studies Program, presumably resulting in firm Zionist control.
Acting President Katrina Armstrong bowed to those demands, sacrificing the academic freedom of her faculty members and the personal freedom of her students. But faced with such enormous conflicting pressures, she then resigned on Friday evening, some seven months after her predecessor had resigned for roughly similar reasons.
That same day newspapers also reported that the top leadership of Harvard University’s equally prestigious Middle Eastern Studies Center had been dismissed, probably ensuring that after more than seventy years this independent academic organization would henceforth become firmly pro-Israel in its orientation. Last year, after Harvard’s previous president had strongly defended academic freedom before a hostile Congressional committee, she was quickly forced to resign.
As I casually examined the home page of the New York Times website on Saturday, I noticed five different articles reporting these striking blows to intellectual freedom at a number of our top American universities, and it’s quite possible that I may have missed one or two others.
- Columbia President Is Replaced as Trump Threatens University’s Funding
- Leaders of Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies Center Will Leave
- University of Minnesota Student Detained by Immigration Agents
- Targeting of Tufts Student for Deportation Stuns Friends and Teachers
- How Colleges Are Cracking Down on Students Now
For the last several generations, America’s elite academic institutions have been among the most prestigious in the world, drawing top students from across the globe and constituting a central pillar of our country’s soft power. Until last year, no previous case came to mind of an Ivy League president having been abruptly removed for political reasons. But over the last twelve months, four or five different Ivy League presidents have suffered that fate.
Similarly, I had never heard of any previous cases of peaceful college students being arrested by teams of masked federal officers, either seized from their dorm rooms in sudden raids or snatched off the streets of their local city.
Consider an ironic historical comparison. During the early 1950s the Rosenbergs were convicted and executed for their involvement in a Soviet spy-ring that gave our nuclear weapons secrets to Stalin. But as far as I know their arrest was handled in a very subdued fashion, with merely a couple of FBI agents quietly taking them into federal custody despite the capital charges that they faced. So apparently public criticism of Israel is today regarded as a far more serious and dangerous offense than nuclear espionage had been at the absolute height of the Cold War.
Indeed, the closest historical example that comes to mind were the notorious Palmer Raids of late 1919 and early 1920, which led to the deportation of several hundred immigrants. But these round-ups occurred in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and waves of terrorist bombing attacks across many American cities, with Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer narrowly surviving two separate assassination attempts, including a bombing that destroyed his own Washington, DC home. Meanwhile, most of the immigrants arrested and deported were relatively recent arrivals, generally anarchist or Bolshevik radicals who had declared their intent to overthrow the American government.
Perhaps there have been previous examples of college students arrested merely for writing campus newspaper op-eds advocating peaceful and perfectly legal positions. But I don’t recall reading of any such egregious cases in my introductory history textbooks so I tend to doubt it.
One rather strange aspect of the current situation is that no students seem to have been arrested for voicing public criticism of the American government or even President Donald Trump. Only criticism of the Jewish State of Israel or Jews themselves seems to provoke such severe legal repression. This brings to mind a very shrewd observation, widely misattributed to Voltaire:
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
Since World War II elite American universities have tended to attract the best and the brightest young men and women from around the world, thereby shaping the minds of so many future global leaders. So I suspect that these shocking news stories of harsh ideological crackdowns on academic freedom and sudden dramatic arrests by masked federal agents are already reverberating around the world, severely damaging one of the few remaining pillars of American geopolitical dominance.
Perhaps only small numbers of ordinary Americans have been following the sudden, desperate plight of these top students from Turkey, South Korea, or India, but I think that a very large fraction of the educated elites of those important American allies are fully aware of what has transpired, and they are utterly horrified.
Under the control of its pro-Israel masters, the leading figures of the Trump Administration seem determined to severely wound or actually destroy the foremost institutions of our globally-dominant system of higher education.
Indeed, even before the latest round of these striking incidents, the eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer had declared that the Israel Lobby posed the greatest threat to American freedom of speech, with his views strongly seconded by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and also former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi:
Although I was deeply shocked by these harsh Trump Administration attacks against freedom of speech and academic freedom, perhaps I should not have been. In many respects, they merely extended what had already occurred last year under his equally pro-Israel Democratic predecessor President Joseph Biden, as I had covered at the time in numerous articles.
For example, almost eleven months ago in early May 2024 I discussed the ongoing waves of university protests and the reasons behind their appearance, as well as the unprecedented crackdowns used to suppress them, a reaction so totally different than what had occurred regarding any previous campus political activism. Given the very harsh legal sanctions now imposed upon many of the participants, I think it’s worth revisiting that history at length:
From the years of my childhood I’d always been aware that political activism and protests were a regular feature of college life, with the 1960s movement against our Vietnam War representing one of its peaks, an effort widely lauded in our later textbooks and media accounts for its heroic idealism. During the 1980s I remember seeing a long line of crudely constructed shanties protesting South African Apartheid that spent weeks occupying the edges of the Harvard Yard or perhaps it was the Stanford Quad, and I think around the same time other shanties and protesters at UCLA maintained a long vigil in support of the Jewish Refuseniks of the USSR. Political protests seemed as much a normal part of college years as final exams and had largely replaced the hazing rituals and wild pranks of traditional fraternities, which were increasingly vilified as politically incorrect by hostile social censors among the students and faculty.
Over the last decade or so, the Black Lives Matter movement raised such nationwide protests by college students to new heights, both on and off campus, often involving large marches, sit-ins, or vandalism, and this may have been propelled by the increasing influence of smartphones and social media. Meanwhile, the mainstream media regularly praised and promoted this “racial justice movement,” which reached its sharp peak following the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. That incident triggered a massive wave of generally youthful political protests, riots, and looting that engulfed some 200 cities across America, the worst urban unrest since the late 1960s. But unlike that earlier era, most of our establishment media and political class fiercely denounced any suggestions that the police be deployed to quell the violence. Indeed, in many or most cases local law enforcement stood down and did nothing, even as some of their political masters loudly raised the outcry “Defund the Police!”
During those years many universities became heavily caught up in such controversies. Yale renamed its Calhoun residential college in early 2017 and the list of name changes due to the 2020 George Floyd protests is so long that it has its own Wikipedia page, a list that included some of our most storied military bases such as Ft. Bragg and Ft. Hood. Verbal or even physical attacks against the symbols and statues of America’s most famous presidents and national heroes became quite common and were often favorably reported in the media, with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Christopher Columbus all being vilified and denounced, sometimes with elite endorsement. A lead opinion piece in the New York Times called for the Jefferson Memorial to be replaced with a towering statue of a black woman while one of the regular Times columnists repeatedly demanded that all monuments honoring George Washington should suffer a similar fate. Many observers argued that America almost seemed to be undergoing its own version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution amid widespread claims that much of our entire historical past was irretrievably tainted and therefore had to be expunged from the public square.
Most of these political protests, especially those on college campuses, were widely hailed by those holding the media megaphones as signifying one of the greatest virtues of American democracy. The many elite defenders of such social and cultural upheavals argued that these events demonstrated the great strength of our society, which freely allowed the fiercest public attacks against our most sacred national icons and heroes. Americans accepted the sort of searing self-criticism that would surely be permitted almost nowhere else in the world.
That long history of permitting or even glorifying public protests against perceived injustices had naturally been absorbed and taken to heart by the young college students who began their classes in September 2023. Then within weeks, a remarkably daring surprise raid by the Hamas militants of long-besieged Gaza caught the Israelis napping and surmounted the high-tech defenses that had cost perhaps a half-billion dollars to construct. Many hundreds of Israeli soldiers and security officers were killed along with similar numbers of civilians, with most of the latter probably dying from the friendly-fire of Israel’s own panic-stricken and trigger-happy military units. Some 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians were captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners, with Hamas hoping to exchange them for the freedom of the many thousands of Palestinian civilians who had been held for years in Israeli prisons, often under brutal conditions.
As usual, our overwhelmingly pro-Israel mainstream media portrayed the attack in extremely one-sided fashion, devoid of any historical context, a pattern that had been followed for three generations. As a result, Israel received an enormous outpouring of public and elite sympathy as it mobilized for a retaliatory attack against Gaza. Within days, our own Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Israel declaring that he came “as a Jew” and pledging America’s unwavering support in that moment of crisis, sentiments completely echoed by President Joseph Biden and his entire administration. But the Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives were hidden in a network of fortified tunnels and rooting them out might produce heavy casualties, so Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisors decided upon a different strategy.
Instead of attacking Hamas, Netanyahu took advantage of the wave of global sympathy by unleashing an unprecedented military assault against Gaza’s more than two million civilians, apparently intending to kill huge numbers of them and drive the remainder into Egypt’s Sinai desert, allowing Israel to annex their territory and resettle it with Jews. Soon afterward, the Israeli government began distributing assault rifles to the Jewish Settlers of the West Bank, ordering some 24,000 of those automatic weapons for that purpose. Putting such armaments into the hands of religious fanatics would surely lead to local massacres and these might provide an excuse for driving all those millions of Palestinians over the border into Jordan. The ultimate result would be the creation of a racially-pure Greater Israel stretching “From the River to the Sea,” the longstanding dream of the Zionist movement. So if he were successful, Netanyahu’s place in Jewish history might become a glorious one, with his many venal sins and blunders easily overlooked.
As American airlifts supplied an unending flood of the necessary munitions, the Israelis began a massive aerial bombardment campaign against densely-populated Gaza and its helpless residents. Secure in their underground tunnels, relatively few Hamas fighters were killed, but Gaza’s civilians suffered devastating losses, much of it inflicted by two thousand pound bombs, almost never previously deployed against urban targets. Large portions of Gaza were soon transformed into moonscapes, with some 100,000 buildings destroyed, including hospitals, churches, mosques, schools, universities, government offices, bakeries, and all the other infrastructure necessary for maintaining civilian life. After just a few weeks, the Financial Times reported that the destruction inflicted upon much of Gaza was already worse than had been suffered by German cities after years of Allied bombing attacks during World War II.
Although Netanyahu was strictly secular, he played to his religious base by publicly declaring the Palestinians to be the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew God had commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Many other top Israeli leaders voiced very similar genocidal sentiments, and some of the more zealously religious Israeli soldiers and commanders probably took those statements quite literally.
This gigantic bloodlust was further inflamed as the Israeli government and its supportive propagandists began promoting outrageous Hamas atrocity-hoaxes such as beheaded or roasted Israeli babies, sexual mutilations, and gang-rapes. The notoriously pro-Israel global media credulously reported these stories, using them to deflect attention from the enormous ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians. To ensure that the coverage remained one-sided, the Israelis targeted independent journalists in Gaza for death, killing some 140 of them over the last few months, a figure as large as the combined total in all the world’s other wars over the last several years.
With Israel’s leaders publicly declaring their genocidal plans for their Palestinian enemies and Israeli troops committing the greatest televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world, international organizations gradually came under strong pressure to involve themselves in the ongoing conflict. In late December, South Africa filed a 91-page legal brief with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing genocide. Within a few weeks the ICJ jurists issued a series of near-unanimous rulings supporting those charges and declaring that the Gazans were at serious risk of suffering a potential genocide at Israel’s hands, with Israel’s own appointed judge, a former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, concurring in most of those verdicts.
But instead of backing off, Netanyahu’s government merely redoubled its attacks against Gaza, tightening the blockade of food shipments by banning the UN organization responsible for distributing them. The Israelis apparently believed that the combination of starvation, bombs, and missiles would be the most effective means of killing or driving out all the Palestinians.
In past decades, these horrifying events might have gone relatively unnoticed, with the overwhelmingly pro-Israel gatekeepers of our mainstream media ensuring that little if any of this distressing information reached the eyes or ears of ordinary Americans. But technological developments had changed this media landscape since video clips on relatively uncensored social platforms such as TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter now easily circumvented that blockade. Despite their decades of suffering and oppression, Gaza’s Palestinians were a fully modern people, well-equipped with smartphones, and the scenes they filmed were shared worldwide, quickly attracting huge audiences among the younger Americans who relied upon social media as their primary source of news.
For generations, college students had been heavily indoctrinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, endlessly told that they must never remain silent while helpless men, women, and children were brutally attacked and slaughtered. The images they now saw of devastated cities and dead or dying children seemed exactly like something out of the movies, but they were instead happening in real-time in the physical world.
A couple of years earlier, the Trump and the Biden Administrations had both jointly proclaimed that the Chinese government was guilty of “genocide” against its Uighur minority despite lack of any evidence that significant numbers of Uighurs had been harmed let alone killed. So by that standard, the total destruction of Gaza and the massive slaughter or deliberate starvation of millions of its people obviously constituted an enormous “genocide,” and within weeks student activists all across college campuses had taken up that cry and begun organizing public protests against the horrendous massacre that Israel was committing.
Three years earlier, a lifelong career criminal named George Floyd had died of a drug overdose while in police custody, and a single, highly-misleading video of his last moments had provoked the greatest wave of American public protests since the late 1960s. So it was hardly surprising that the widespread dissemination of hundreds or thousands of videos showing dead and mutilated Gazan children inspired a powerful protest movement. But this time, instead of being praised for their humanitarian commitment, those students—and the university administrators who allowed their protests—were ferociously attacked and punished as I described at the time:
With graphic images of devastated Gaza neighborhoods and dead Palestinian children so widespread on Twitter and other social media outlets, polls have revealed that a majority of younger Americans now favor Hamas and the Palestinians in their ongoing struggle with Israel. This is a shocking reversal from the views of their parents, which had been shaped by generations of overwhelmingly pro-Israel material across broadcast television, films, and print publications, and such trends are only likely to continue now that Israel is being prosecuted in the International Court of Justice by South Africa and 22 other nations, accused of committing genocide in Gaza.
As a consequence of these strong youthful sentiments, anti-Israel demonstrations have erupted at many of our universities, outraging numerous pro-Israel billionaire donors. Almost immediately, some of the latter launched a harsh retaliatory campaign, with many corporate leaders declaring that they would permanently blacklist from future employment opportunities any college students publicly supporting the Palestinian cause, underscoring these threats with a widespread “doxxing” campaign at Harvard and other elite colleges.
A few weeks ago, our uniformly pro-Israel elected officials entered the fray, calling the presidents of several of our most elite colleges—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—to testify before them regarding alleged “antisemitism” on their campuses. Members of Congress severely brow-beat these officials for permitting anti-Israel activities, even ignorantly and absurdly accusing them of allowing public calls for “Jewish genocide” on their campuses.
The responses of these college leaders emphasized their support for freedom of political speech but were deemed so unsatisfactory by pro-Israel donors and their mainstream media allies that enormous pressure was exerted to remove them. Within days, the Penn president and her supportive Board chairman had been forced to resign, and soon afterward Harvard’s first black president suffered the same fate, as pro-Israel groups released evidence of her widespread academic plagiarism to drive her from office.
I am unaware of any previous case in which the president of an elite American college had been so rapidly removed from office for ideological reasons and two successive examples within just a few weeks seems an absolutely unprecedented development, having enormous implications for academic freedom.
I’d think that most of these students were absolutely stunned at such reactions. For decades, they and their predecessors had freely protested on a wide range of political causes without ever encountering even a sliver of such vicious retaliation, let alone an organized campaign that quickly forced the resignation of two of the Ivy League presidents who had allowed their protests. Some of their student organizations were immediately banned and the future careers of the protesters were harshly threatened, but the horrifying images from Gaza continued to reach their smartphones. As Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL had previously explained in a leaked phone call, “We have a major TikTok problem.”
Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life…
These grim developments have naturally sparked a continuing wave of student protests condemning Israel for committing these monstrous crimes and our own Biden Administration for enabling them with money and munitions. Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is one of our highest-ranking mainstream academics, a very sober-minded scholar of the Realist School, and in an interview last week he expressed little surprise at these matters. After all, he pointed out, Israel was obviously an Apartheid-state currently committing a genocide before the eyes of the entire world so political protests on college campuses were only to be expected.
Throughout these last few months, pro-Israel partisans have regularly denounced the anti-Zionism of their opponents as antisemitic and insisted that it be suppressed. Back in February I had noted the ironic implications of their position:
This is certainly an odd situation, warranting careful analysis and explanation. The word “antisemitism” merely means criticizing or disliking Jews, and in recent years, Israel’s partisans have demanded with some success that the term should be extended to encompass anti-Zionism as well, namely hostility to the Jewish state.
But let us suppose that we concede the latter point and agree with pro-Israel activists that “anti-Zionism” is indeed a form of “antisemitism.” Over the last few months, the Israeli government has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza, committing the greatest televised massacre in the history of the world, with its top leaders using explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the Palestinians. Indeed, the South African government submitted a 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice cataloging those Israeli statements, prompting a near-unanimous ruling by the jurists that millions of Palestinians faced the prospect of genocide at Israeli hands.
These days most Westerners claim to regard genocide in a decidedly negative light. So does this not syllogistically require them to embrace and endorse “antisemitism”? Surely a visitor from Mars would be very puzzled by this strange dilemma and the philosophical and psychological contortions it seems to require.
It is rather surprising that the extremely “politically correct” ruling elites of America and the rest of the Western world are loudly cheering on the racially-exclusivist State of Israel even as it kills enormous numbers of women and children and works very hard to starve to death some two million civilians in its unprecedented genocidal rampage. After all, the far milder and more circumspect regime of Apartheid South Africa was universally condemned, boycotted, and sanctioned for merely the tiniest sliver of such misdeeds.
An important turning point may have come on April 17th when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, herself of Egyptian origins, was raked over the coals by a Congressional Committee for permitting anti-Israel protests on her campus. Her interrogators claimed that these were “antisemitic” acts and caused some of Columbia’s Jewish students to “feel unsafe,” a dire situation that seemingly trumped both freedom of speech and academic freedom.
Shafik may or may not have agreed with those arguments, but she surely remembered that just a few months earlier her counterparts at Harvard and Penn had both been summarily purged for giving the wrong answers, and she hardly wished to share their fate. So she firmly promised to root out all such public antisemitism at her university and soon afterward 100 helmeted NYC riot police were invited onto the campus to crush the demonstrations and arrest the protesters, mostly charging the latter with “trespassing,” a rather strange accusation given that they were enrolled students on the grounds of their own campus.
This sort of harsh and immediate police crackdown seems almost unprecedented in the modern history of college political protests. Back in the 1960s, there were a few scattered cases of police being called in to arrest militant protesters who had seized and occupied administrative offices at Harvard, paraded around with firearms at Cornell, or burned down a campus building at Stanford. But I have never heard of peaceful political protesters being arrested on the grounds of their own college merely for the content of their political speech.
Although the crackdown at Columbia demanded by those members of Congress was obviously intended to quell American campus protests, it predictably had the opposite effect. Scenes of burly, helmeted riot police arresting peaceful college students on their own campus went viral on social media, inspiring a wave of similar protests at numerous other colleges across the nation, with police arrests quickly following in most locations. By latest count, some 2,300 students have now been arrested at dozens of universities.
The actions by the Georgia State Police at Emory University seemed particularly outrageous, and a Tweet containing a clip of one of those incidents has already been viewed some 1.5 million times. A 57-year-old tenured professor of Economics named Carolyn Frohlin was concerned at seeing one of her own students being wrestled to the pavement and walked towards him only to find herself brutally thrown to the ground, hogtied, and arrested by a couple of hulking officers led by a sergeant. CNN anchor Jim Acosta was utterly shocked when he reported this story…
Even worse scenes took place at UCLA as an encampment of peaceful protesters was violently attacked and beaten by a mob of pro-Israel thugs having no university connection but armed with bars, clubs, and fireworks, resulting in some serious injuries. A professor of History described her outrage as the nearby police stood aside and did nothing while UCLA students were attacked by outsiders, with 200 of the victims then arrested. According to local journalists, the violent mob had been organized and paid by pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman.
I have never previously heard of organized mobs of outside thugs being allowed to violently assault peaceful American student protesters on their own campus, something that seems far more reminiscent of turbulent Latin American dictatorships. The closest example that comes to mind might be the notorious 1970 “Hard Hat Riot” in New York City in which hundreds of pro-Nixon construction workers battled similar numbers of anti-war protesters on the streets of lower Manhattan, an incident so infamous that it has an extensive Wikipedia page of its own.
However, a somewhat different but much closer and more recent analogy may exist. After Donald Trump launched his unexpectedly successful presidential campaign, right-wing, pro-Trump speakers invited to college campuses were regularly harassed and assaulted along with their audiences by mobs of violent antifa, with many of the latter apparently recruited and paid for the purpose.
This sort of very physical “deplatforming” was intended to ensure that their threatening ideas never reached impressionable college students and led conservatives to begin organizing their own groups such as the Proud Boys to provide physical protection. Violent clashes occurred at Berkeley and some other colleges, while similar antifa riots in DC disrupted Trump’s inauguration. From what I remember, most of the organizers and financial backers of these violent antifa groups seemed to be Jewish, so perhaps it’s not surprising that other Jewish leaders have now begun employing very similar tactics to suppress different political movements that they regard as distasteful.
Some years ago a former senior AIPAC official once boasted to a friendly journalist that if he wrote anything on a simple napkin, within 24 hours he could get signatures of 70 Senators to endorse it, and the political power of the ADL is equally formidable. Therefore it was hardly surprising that last week an overwhelming bipartisan 320-91 majority in the House passed a bill broadening the meaning of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the anti-discrimination policies of the Department of Education by codifying the definitions used in our Civil Rights laws to classify those ideas as discriminatory.
Although I haven’t tried to read the text, the obvious intent is to force colleges to expunge such noxious activities as anti-Israel protests from their campus community or face loss of federal funds. This represents a striking attack against academic freedom as well as America’s traditional freedom of speech and thought, and may also pressure other private organizations to adopt similar policies. In a particularly ironic twist, the definition of antisemitism used in the bill clearly covers portions of the Christian Bible, so the ignorant and compromised Republican legislators have now wholeheartedly endorsed banning the Bible in a country in which 95% of the population has Christian roots.
Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 6, 2024 • 6,800 Words
Until now, revocation of a permanent residency Green Card could only occur if its holder had committed a serious felony such as murder or rape, but the empowered pro-Israel partisans of the Trump Administration have now stretched that law to include criticism of Israel or Jews, arguing that such criticism undermined the vital American national goal of combatting antisemitism across the world. When combined with last year’s bipartisan Congressional enactment of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, this might set a legal precedent for actually criminalizing such political views, especially if these can be portrayed as “providing material support” to such officially-designated terrorist organizations as Hamas.
Perhaps despite the determined efforts of the ADL and similar organizations, this legal transformation will not occur. But then again I had never expected to see masked federal agents abducting university students for writing campus newspaper op-eds criticizing Israel.
Similarly, consider the mass arrests and long prison sentences of the January 6th protesters in DC. Nearly all of the defendants had been guilty of nothing more than trespassing and perhaps petty vandalism, but their severe punishment demonstrated that strong ideological and media pressure can successfully force American courts to stretch the law in extreme ways in order to severely punish individuals engaging in political activity that has been sufficiently demonized.
From a broader perspective, we have already seen developments that suggest American society and its political life have reached a very strange point.
Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are earnest young Jewish progressives who run the Grayzone, a webzine and YouTube channel of their own. In several articles last year, I noted their lengthy discussion of how the pro-Israel donor class had recently crushed any political dissent within the Democratic Party, contrary to the overwhelming views of its voter base.
In that same livestream, Blumenthal and Maté also focused on the methods used to keep American elected officials in line on this issue, noting that a few days ago Zionist billionaires spent an almost unprecedented $8 million to defeat Rep. Cori Bush in her own Democratic primary, angry that the black progressive member of “the squad” had called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Just a few weeks earlier, roughly twice as much money had been spent by similar individuals for very similar reasons to successfully eliminate her close political ally Rep. Jamaal Bowman.
Those two primary races were by far the most expensive in American history, and in their aftermath most members of Congress must surely realize that they only remain in office at the sufferance of AIPAC and its ideological allies. Although leading progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the role of big money in those primary races, she was obviously too fearful of pro-Israel donors to even mention whose big money had been involved. The Grayzone editors were far more candid and accurately characterized the dollars as being deployed by “the foreign agents of an Apartheid state.”
These incidents seem to suggest a rather peculiar situation. It appears that American elected officials will regularly be removed from office if they are deemed insufficiently loyal to a certain foreign country, hardly the sort of governmental framework usually discussed in our political science textbooks.
Despite their longstanding coverage of the Middle East conflict, I do not think that either of the Grayzone editors had ever contemplated the horrors currently being inflicted upon the suffering Palestinians, nor the totally slavish support for Israel expressed by the entire Biden Administration. These shocking developments prompted ideological reassessments and in May I’d described some ironic statements they had made in an earlier podcast:
This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.
They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.” Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.
By August, I noticed that they had begun explicitly using that incendiary term in their most recent podcast:
That particular article of mine proved quite popular so it’s possible that my remarks may have directly or indirectly found their way to those individuals. Whether or not that was the case, in their current podcast they mentioned that although they’d always dismissed “ZOG” as some ridiculously antisemitic expression, recent events had demonstrated its reality, and Americans were obviously now living in “one nation under ZOG.” I think this marked an important step forward in their understanding of our world.
Soon afterward, their Grayzone channel was temporarily banned from YouTube, and when it returned a week later, the two hosts nervously joked about the acronym they must carefully avoid uttering, using several rhyming words to enlighten their audience. I suspect that many other thoughtful Americans have also recently begun entertaining notions that they would have always previously dismissed as ridiculous.
But over the last six months, these unfortunate trends have merely accelerated. So a couple of weeks ago the initial Columbia University arrest prompted them to release a new Grayzone podcast that they entitled “Shalom, the Occupation’s Home.”
Blumenthal emphasized that Americans were “living under some kind of Zionist occupation” and the two hosts then joked about how useful it would be if someone could come up with a catchy, three-letter acronym to describe our national predicament. They did so again later in the same show as they described the overwhelming Zionist control over the American government.
Such cautious circumlocutions are quite understandable given the very real risk of YouTube deplatforming, but individuals who have long since suffered that fate can afford to speak much more boldly.
As I have emphasized, obvious factual reality produces a certain amount of descriptive convergence even across the most disparate ideological camps. Late last year a fierce right-winger named Stew Peters released a video documentary entitled “Occupied” on many of these same issues and other related ones, running close to two hours. Although it unfortunately contained quite a lot of misinformation, I’d say that at least 70-75% of the material was correct, and it included many video clips that I hadn’t previously seen.
Although it was originally freely released across the Internet, those copies no longer seem available for viewing, but apparently it can still be watched on his website by anyone who registers with an email address.
Last week I published a lengthy article summarizing the strong, even overwhelming evidence that Israel and its American collaborators had been responsible for the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers. One of the leading motives for those killings had been the determination of the Kennedys to break the growing political power of the nascent Israel Lobby.
- How Israel Killed the Kennedys
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 24, 2025 • 11,500 Words
Now six decades later, that same political force has metastasized to such an extent that it largely controls both of America’s major political parties and nearly all the members of Congress, and may now be on the verge of successfully eliminating our traditional constitutional rights, including freedom of political speech. When university students are snatched off city streets by masked federal agents merely for writing an op-ed in their campus newspapers, matters have clearly reached a very perilous state in American society.
Related Reading:
Germany’s CDU-SPD Coalition Eyes Stricter Online Speech Controls
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | March 31, 2025
Germany may soon tighten its grip on digital speech even further, as internal documents obtained by BILD from the ongoing coalition talks between the center-right CDU (led by Friedrich Merz) and the center-left SPD (headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz) point to an unsettling agenda: expanding the state’s authority to police so-called “disinformation.”
Behind closed doors, the prospective coalition appears to be crafting policies that would significantly broaden state influence over what can and cannot be said online — particularly on social media platforms. These proposals, originating from the coalition’s “Culture and Media” working group, show a clear intent to escalate pressure on platforms like X and intensify efforts to suppress content labeled as “fake news.”
The push is rooted in the belief, echoed in the coalition’s exploratory paper, that “disinformation and fake news” pose a danger to democracy. But the negotiating paper goes even further, declaring: “The deliberate dissemination of false factual allegations is not covered by freedom of expression.” This phrase, quoted by BILD, lays the groundwork for potentially sweeping restrictions on speech, raising serious alarms among legal experts and free speech advocates.
The document argues that a supposedly independent media regulatory body must be empowered to crack down on so-called “information manipulation,” as well as “hatred and incitement” — all under the vague condition that it adheres to “clear legal requirements.” But when the government or its proxies begin defining what qualifies as misinformation, the door swings wide open for politically motivated censorship.
Many will see this as a dangerous step toward criminalizing dissent. Legal scholar Volker Boehme-Neßler of the University of Oldenburg told BILD, “Lies are only prohibited if they are punishable, for example in the case of incitement to hatred. Otherwise, you can lie.” He also stressed that the boundary between fact and opinion is often blurry and contested: “It is not a simple question of what is a statement of fact and what is an expression of opinion. In most cases, courts interpret freedom of expression very broadly.”
The move mirrors broader concerns raised internationally. US Vice President JD Vance previously slammed Germany’s trajectory on both mass migration and censorship, warning that Berlin’s crackdown on dissent risks becoming self-destructive.
With political speech increasingly vulnerable to arbitrary classification as misinformation, critics worry that these new policies represent not a defense of democracy, but an erosion of one of its most fundamental pillars: the right to free and open debate.
Israel uses human shields in Gaza ‘at least six times a day,’ says Israeli officer
MEMO | April 1, 2025
British intel sought to silence West’s top Russia academic, leaks reveal
UK intelligence operatives groomed British politicians to silence skeptical academics
By Kit Klarenberg | The Grayzone | April 1, 2025
Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone reveal a high-level British intelligence plot to smear and silence British political scientists such as Richard Sakwa, who is widely regarded as one of the English-speaking world’s foremost authorities on Russia.
In a March 2022 email entitled “Russians in our Universities,” British military intelligence officer and former senior NATO advisor Chris Donnelly accused Sakwa of being a Russian “fellow traveller” who’d been “gradually breaking cover,” insisting the professor was “far too well-informed about Russian strategy to be called just ‘a useful idiot.’” Another email reveals Donnelly fantasizing about publicly exposing Sakwa for being “funded by Russian entities” – a claim the professor strenuously denies.
Donnelly fired off the emails just two weeks after the UK’s then-Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi pledged that the British government was “already on the case and is contacting [their] universities,” after being asked whether the UK government would intervene directly to stop anti-war academics from “acting as useful idiots for President Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine.”
The Grayzone has revealed Donnelly as a key figure behind a secret British military and spying cell dubbed Project Alchemy, which was created in early 2022 to keep Ukraine fighting “at all costs.” A core component of that effort was to silence journalistic voices and media outlets – including this one – deemed a threat to London’s control of the proxy war’s narrative.
The newly-exposed messages show that Donnelly was conducting similar operations in the academic world as well. Though Professor Sakwa has long challenged dominant Western narratives on Putin’s Russia, criticizing both NATO’s rampant expansionism and its refusal to include Moscow in the European security structure following the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, he was effectively disappeared from mainstream debates on the conflict since the Ukraine proxy war erupted.
The leaked emails strongly suggest the direct intervention of Donnelly, a known British intelligence asset, may have been responsible for marginalizing Sakwa. Messages show Donnelly contacted influential UK lawmakers to stamp out the “influence” of Sakwa, whom he called his “number one” target, while calling for the blacklisting of other academics who might expose inconvenient truths about the conflict in Ukraine.
Donnelly’s determination to silence the professor apparently extended beyond the duration of the conflict. In private, he fretted that once “fighting slows down” in Ukraine, “appeasers” would “start talking about lifting the sanctions,” and “the Sakwas of this world will be spearheading the effort to change Western strategy.” In other words, even when the war ended in failure for Kiev and its proxy backers, Connelly and his associates would remain determined to prevent any public reconsideration of the West’s relationship with Russia.
Sakwa “a redoubtable opponent” who’s taken “very seriously”
While recently smeared as a Kremlin apologist and “disinformation” peddler in certain quarters, Sakwa’s works have historically elicited glowing mainstream reviews. Even after the Ukraine proxy war erupted, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs journal positively appraised the professor’s recent books dissecting the Russiagate fraud, and the origins of the Ukraine conflict. Clearly, it was Sakwa’s credibility and formidable body of knowledge that made him a target of British intelligence following the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
In emails exchanged with James Sherr, a career think tank staffer who once headed the Russia and Eurasia program at the British government-linked think tank Chatham House, Donnelly expressed discomfort about the prospect of Sakwa’s ideas reaching impressionable Western audiences. Sakwa’s “knowledge of Russian politics is very high,” Donnelly warned Sherr, making him “a redoubtable opponent” whom the “majority” of British students and “junior/mid-level politicians” would likely take “very seriously.”
Sherr responded that he had “no doubt” Sakwa was “on the Kremlin payroll,” but insisted the academic criticized NATO expansion “not [for] money,” but “out of hatred of the United States.” If there was “hard evidence” that Sakwa was “funded by Russian entities, then this should be made known,” Sherr added, but even if footage existed of Vladimir Putin personally “writing [Sakwa] a cheque over dinner… the University of Kent will continue to employ him, and he will continue to be adored by those who adore him.”
Donnelly agreed with his friend’s false assessment, but was evidently undeterred from pursuing Sakwa, telling Sherr, “we can try!” He added that Andrew Monaghan, another academic who had long warned of the perils of military confrontation with Russia, hadn’t been heard from “for a while,” and asked Sherr: “who else should we be keeping an eye out for?” A day later, Donnelly posed the same question to his longtime associate Victor Madeira, an academic closely connected to former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove.
This followed another email by Donnelly to Conservative MP Bob Seely, a hawkish military veteran and then-member of parliament’s foreign affairs committee. Donnelly asked Seely whether he was “concerned about Russian influence in our Universities,” because “if so, I’ve got some interesting material for you.” Forwarding the unsolicited email to Madeira, Donnelly boasted, “l may have an opportunity to get this addressed,” and bragged that he would soon be discussing the subject with the then-chair of British Parliament’s education select committee.
“cells in the British governmental apparatus… which subvert the fundamental principles of British democracy”
In comments to The Grayzone, Sakwa said Donnelly’s actions were “extremely disturbing,” and suggested the emails indicate “there are cells in the British governmental apparatus who are working in ways which subvert the fundamental principles of British democracy, tolerance of divergent political views, and the encouragement of open debate and dialogue.”
The professor argues that “by traducing scholars and civic activists,” Donnelly and his collaborators “precisely undermine the values which they are ostensibly trying to defend,” and “practice guilt by association.”
“The assumption [that] questioning official policy on a particular issue must be motivated by mercenary concerns, in this case being in the pay of Moscow, is a dreadful manifestation of the McCarthyism we had hoped we put behind us with the end of the Cold War,” Sakwa adds.
“In fact, it demonstrates [that] Cold War II is potentially more dangerous than the first, with the attempt to blacken the reputation of critical voices, and thus assumedly weaken their public impact. This is not only morally and politically wrong in itself, but also damages the possibility of coherent, informed and dispassionate analysis, and thus weakens the coherence of intelligent policy-making in its entirety.”
When Sakwa retired from his university position in August 2022, he was unaware that British intelligence operatives had waged a plot to silence him for over a year. Now, however, the professor wonders whether an incident that occurred two months prior may have been related. That June, the Canterbury anti-war movement organized an event at which Sakwa was the guest speaker. “To our astonishment, about 20 Ukrainians and associates picketed the meeting, with banners condemning me and the organizers,” he told The Grayzone.
Rather than being turned away, the protesters were invited in – “minus placards,” Sakwa noted. However, “they then proceeded to try to disrupt the meeting,” until the event chair warned them “that if their anti-democratic behavior continued, they would be asked to leave.” Following the warning, the event continued in peace. Sakwa said “most” attendees felt his address “struck the appropriate balance between sympathy for the plight of the Ukrainian people, and political analysis of the situation.”
The incident likely would have ended there, but counter-demonstrators seized on leaflets calling for an official inquiry into the ever-mysterious Bucha incident which were distributed by another attendee. Ukrainian officials and their British backers charge that Russian forces carried out a massacre of innocent civilians in the city of Bucha, but have blocked attempts at UN investigation, and refused to release names of purported victims.
While Sakwa believes calls for such a probe to be “not unreasonable”, he said he had nothing to do with the leaflets’ production, and was unaware of their contents at the time. He only learned of their existence when one of the Ukrainian activists who disrupted the event accused him of condoning “conspiracy theories,” leading the University of Kent to open an internal inquiry.
“To the University of Kent’s credit, they dismissed any potential charge of misconduct, and defended the principle of freedom of speech. The institution lived up to its reputation for collegiality and the robust defence of academic freedom,” Sakwa says. “However, the initial charge was clearly malicious and malevolent, and demonstrates the danger of ‘Ukraine syndrome’ damaging the quality of civic life in England.”
Today, “Ukraine syndrome” remains alive and well in Britain as Prime Minister Keir Starmer proudly declares his desire to deploy troops and aircraft to Kiev to participate in hostilities despite UK military chiefs warning that London lacks the men and materiel to even consider such a mission. A depressing official review of the British Army has prompted the head of the Financial Times’ editorial board to conclude “their forces would struggle to fight a European war lasting more than a few weeks.”
While Richard Sakwa and other genuine regional experts warned over many years that transforming Ukraine into an anti-Russian bastion would lead to disaster for all involved, Western leaders turned instead to the paranoid pronouncements of spies like Chris Donnelly for guidance on how to respond to Moscow’s forcefully stated opposition to Ukraine joining NATO. And before the belligerent plans of Donnelly and his cadre could be discredited, they made certain that no one would be left to call them out.
Trump: ‘Very Bad Things are Going to Happen.’ Netanyahu Wants the U.S. to Destroy Iran.
By Dennis J. Kucinich | April 1, 2025
In my article, “The High Price of War with Iran: $10 Gas and the Collapse of the U.S. Economy,” I reminded readers of how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been behind the push for America to destroy Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Iran. I reviewed the severe economic consequences for the U.S. if it attacks Iran. Today, I cite the human health and atmospheric effects of a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear research facilities. The resulting nuclear fallout would bring a catastrophe unprecedented in human history.
Last week, President Trump said “very bad things are going to happen” to Iran, if that nation’s leaders do not sign a new nuclear deal. The President is right. He can make very bad things can happen to Iran.
But Iran is not the only country to which “bad things” are going to happen if Iran’s nuclear research infrastructure is destroyed by the U.S., as is revealed by a careful study of the spread of radiation created by the promised bombings.
America has been Netanyahu’s pawn for decades. Will the wealth, lives and security of our nation be sacrificed yet further to an agenda which brings only debt to our nation and death to innocents abroad?
The return of Donald Trump to the White House for a second term has enabled Netanyahu’s right-wing party to accelerate the pulverization of Gaza, expand settlements and to repel the Houthis pro-Gaza attacks on Red Sea shipping.
Netanyahu viewed Trump’s first election in 2016 as a new opportunity to topple Iran’s leadership. Trump, in partnership with Netanyahu, withdrew the U.S. from a multi-lateral agreement which limited Iran’s nuclear development in exchange for sanctions relief.
An attack by B-2 bombers on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would destroy the targeted sites, and unleash radioactivity endangering the lives of tens of millions in Iran and hundreds of millions beyond. Due to radioactive drift, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, eastern Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan also would be severely impacted.
In practical terms, given proximity to Iran, and the direction of the wind, high levels of radiation-induced illness, some fatal, and sharp increases in cancer and birth defects would occur. Radiation would contaminate and ruin food supplies, agricultural land, farm animals, and water resources hundreds and even thousands of miles from Iran.
The eastern regions of Turkey, northwestern India, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan would be exposed to moderate contamination. Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Egypt’s Sinai could be affected, depending on the wind.
Israel has long fanned existential fears by conjuring the threat of a nuclear attack by Iran, while being indemnified by the U.S. for its self-styled “defensive” aggression in Gaza, where at least 50,000 Gazans have been killed and over a million Palestinians driven from their homes.
While the widely publicized intent of President Trump to bomb Iran imperils Iran and neighboring countries, it also makes Israel vulnerable to a massive counterstrike from Iran and puts in the bullseye all U.S. troops in the region within 2,500 miles of Iran.
The attack B-2 bombers headed to Iran are designed to carry nuclear “bunker busters” as well as conventional 500 lb gravity bombs. The objective is to take down Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, which includes nuclear reactors and research labs. Nukes bombing nukes equals massive radioactive fallout.
“There will be Bombing.”
“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” Trump said in a telephone interview this past Sunday with NBC News. “It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”
Civics lesson: Official threats against another state are a violation of the UN Charter, Article Two, Section 4, which “prohibits the threat or use of force against …. any state.” Both Iran and the US signed and ratified that agreement nearly 80 years ago, in recognition of its organizing principle: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…”.
It is a war crime to aggress against another country. Under the US Constitution, no president has the right to unilaterally take our nation to war, absent an imminent threat to the United States. The Constitutional Convention placed the war power in the hands of Congress. This was in contrast to the British Crown’s expansion of war for empire.
The litany of reasons not to attack Iran is eerily similar to the reasons America should not have attacked Iraq: Iran is not a threat to the United States. Iran has not attacked the United States. Iran does not have the intention or the ability to attack the United States. That being the case, the opportunities for a false flag incitement are ripe.
Significantly, last week the U.S. Intelligence community, in its annual Global Threat Assessment, refuted Netanyahu’s oft-repeated claim about Iran building a nuclear weapon:
“We continue to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.
In the 16 years I spent in Congress, I was often one of the only members who rose to question the Bush Administration’s plans to attack Iran, time and again calling out the dangers of attacking nuclear research facilities and calling for diplomatic means to block Iran’s potential development of a nuclear weapon.
The agreement, arrived on July 14, 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plain of Action (JCPOA). It took the U.S. China, Russia, Germany, France, and the UK thirteen years to craft a workable agreement which limited Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to weapons grade. The agreement was a landmark for international cooperation. It put the spectral genie of Iran’s potential development of a nuclear weapon back in the bottle.
That did not satisfy Netanyahu, however. He longed for the toppling of the Iran regime, and continued to hype existential fears among Israelis. Trump cancelled the JCPOA, at Netanyahu’s behest, setting in motion a series of events which may lead the US to attack Iran soon.
From Deal Breaker to Deal Maker?
Scott Ritter a former UN Weapons Inspector and Marine intelligence specialist provides a detailed account of Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA, in his book, entitled Deal Breaker.
The JCPOA which Trump took down had blocked Iran’s production of enriched uranium (processed to increase the percentage of uranium-235 (235U) at the Natanz and Fordow nuclear facilities.
It blocked Iran’s development of weapons-grade plutonium and frustrated even covert attempts to produce fissile (capable of undergoing nuclear fission) materials used for nuclear weapons.
The President now is demanding Iran sign a new deal. He wants Iran to get rid of the weapon-making capability which he errantly enabled by cancelling the JCPOA.
Eight years after the cancellation of the JCPOA, President Trump is apparently demanding Iran voluntarily take down its nuclear infrastructure which provides nuclear power, nuclear research and yes, with no JCPOA, can, at this moment, enrich uranium to near–weapons grade.
The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has issued a fatwa (a religious ruling) against the use of nuclear weapons.
The new deal which the President is seeking, at best, could end up looking a lot like the JCPOA, and, at worst, puts him in the position of issuing a non-negotiable demand for Iran to voluntarily take down its nuclear infrastructure, or the US will do it militarily.
Iran has rejected direct negotiations with Washington under such circumstances. It has, however, maintained indirect communication with the U.S. through Oman as the President escalates the threat of a massive bombing attack.
B-2 bombers are in place, equipped with the most powerful weapons in America’s arsenal ready to be activated from Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, 2,400 miles southeast of Iran. The B-2 has the capacity to attack and return to Diego Garcia without refueling.
In someways this showdown with Iran was set in place on July 25, 2024, when Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed Congress. In a spell-binding speech for which he received over 50 standing ovations, Netanyahu skillfully aligned Israel’s and the U.S. policy on Iran:
“If you remember one thing, one thing from this speech, remember this: Our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory,” Mr. Netanyahu declared.
At this point, the measure of consequence needs to be assessed. The only difference between war games, preparing for war and actual war, is in the intent.
Israel intends to destroy Iran and needs the US to do it.
Joint US-Israeli Air Force war games have been held recently in preparation for an attack.
The U.S. has nineteen B-2 bombers. Each cost over $2 billion. Their unique flying wing design, with the plane wrapped in radar-absorbing materials help it avoid detection. The B-2s use sophisticated electronic countermeasures to jam or stymie opposition radar and missiles.
Iran is ill-equipped to defend against the B-2 bombers’ stealth warfare. At best the shortened detection range will limit Iran’s ability to lock onto the B-2 with surface-to-air missiles.
Each B-2 can carry sixteen, 2,400 lb., B83 thermo-nuclear gravity bombs, also known as nuclear bunker busters, which explode deep inside the earth. Each B83 bomb has the explosive capacity of 80 Hiroshimas which means each B-2 bomber is capable of delivering the destructive power of 1280 Hiroshimas.
Once the B83’s detonate they destroy underground structures and send shockwaves through rock. Earthquakes and massive ground displacement result, with radioactive debris being flung into the atmosphere.
There is a metaphysics at work here of bringing to oneself that which one fears. The United States is preparing to attack Iran because of Israel’s fear of Iran.
Trump: “It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”
The U.S. will first attack Iran’s underground missile cities at Khorramabad, and Panj Pellah, Bakhtaran, with nuclear bunker busters or Massive Ordnance Penetrators aimed at underground missile sites, to incapacitate Iran’s ability to retaliate.
The use of nuclear bunker busters will send nuclear debris into the immediate atmosphere, and it will be carried aloft by the wind.
Simultaneously, the U.S. will strike at the Fordow enrichment plant, buried deep in a mountain. A combination of 30,000 lb. Massive Ordnance Penetrators (GBU-57s) capable of burrowing 200 ft into the earth before exploding, and nuclear bunker busters, will be deployed, creating a multiplier factor in blast physics, collapsing tunnels and sending radioactive materials into the atmosphere and far beyond. Fordow is heavily fortified and may be able to withstand the initial attack.
The Natanz underground facility will be similarly struck, with radioactive matter breaking into the atmosphere.
The ground-level Bushehr Nuclear Power plant will be destroyed, its reactor vessel breached, the reactor core will meltdown, massive release of radioactive materials (cesium-137, iodine-131, strontium-90, and plutonium) will go into the atmosphere, and, depending upon the wind, and the weather, radioactive plumes will drift over other countries.
Countless civilians will perish from radiation poisoning and severe burns. Birth defects will be present for generations to come. Nuclear explosion refugees will be created. Chernobyl-type effects will require people to leave their homes, never to return.
Tehran’s Research Reactor, Isfahan Nuclear Tech Center, Arak Heavy Water Reactor, Natanz Surface Facility and the Parchine Military Complex are ground level and surface level structures which will be targeted and destroyed, either by nuclear weapons or so-called conventional weapons.
Iran Can Still Hit Back
Iran’s underground missile system is widely distributed. Faced with imminent destruction, Iran, at the first sign of an attack, will simultaneously launch multiple rockets from many underground sites, a “shower of missiles” numbering in the thousands.
These deadly projectiles can change trajectories and targets while in flight, making the vaunted missile defense of Israel less effective. While Israel’s 2000 lb. bombs, the type dropped on Gaza, are more precise, the Shabab-3 has the potential of inflicting much more significant damage over a larger radius of Israeli cities.
U.S. Troops in Region will Pay
Tens of thousands of US troops, Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Space Force are stationed within reach of Iranian missiles. They are under no threat unless Iran is attacked.
Iran’s short-range missiles, Fateh-110 and Zolfagher, can reach Saudi Arabia. Iran’s medium-range ballistic missiles, the Shabab-3, Emad, Sejjil, and Ghadr can travel up to 1,550 miles (2,500 km), to Israel. Its intermediate range missiles are capable of striking 2,485 miles deep into eastern and central Europe,
It is not in the interests of the United States to attack Iran.
The United States is risking becoming the most hated nation on earth, using nuclear weapons again, bombing nuclear facilities, creating radioactive consequences for potentially dozens of nations and tens of millions of people born and unborn.
America has been Netanyahu’s pawn for decades. Will the wealth, lives and security of our nation be sacrificed yet further to an agenda which brings only debt to our nation and death to innocents abroad?
During his campaign, President Trump stated repeatedly that he aimed to have a strong military to avoid war. Military strength must be matched by diplomatic strength. He must come up with a deal that avoids a U.S. war with Iran, without a foreign leader’s self-interested meddling. “Very bad things” do not have to happen if good people prevail. If America nukes Iran, our nation will never escape the fallout.
Russia offers mediation of talks between Tehran, Washington: Ryabkov
Al Mayadeen | April 1, 2025
Russia warned of United States airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, condemning US President Donald Trump’s threats to bomb Tehran unless a deal with Washington is reached.
“Threats are indeed being heard, ultimatums are also being heard,” Russia Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov told International Affairs in an interview published Tuesday, adding, “We consider such methods inappropriate, we condemn them, we consider them a way for (the US) to impose its own will on the Iranian side.”
Russia proposed mediation between Trump’s administration and Iran, following their strategic partnership deal earlier this year.
Ryabkov said that Trump’s threats to Iran only complicate the situation between the two countries, emphasizing that if the US administration follows up with its warnings and strikes Iranian nuclear facilities, the consequences could be catastrophic for the entire region.
“While there is still time and the ‘train has not left’, we need to redouble our efforts to try to reach an agreement on a reasonable basis. Russia is ready to offer its good services to Washington, Tehran, and everyone who is interested in this,” the deputy foreign minister stated.
Iran stands steadfast to US threats
Ali Larijani, a top advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, cautioned on March 31 that any US or Israeli strike targeting Iran’s nuclear sites would push Tehran to pursue nuclear weapons development.
He argued that attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities would backfire against US interests, warning, “Under such circumstances, we would have no choice but to reconsider our stance and potentially seek nuclear arms as a deterrent.”
Larijani warned that any military strike on Iran would only strengthen domestic resolve to fast-track nuclear weapons development, adding that due to Iran’s preparedness, such an attack would only delay the nuclear program temporarily – by no more than two years.
On March 31, the leader of the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic Republic of Iran, Sayyed Ali Khamenei, delivered a stern warning, asserting that any entity considering hostile actions toward Iran would be met with a severe and proportionate retaliation, while also stressing that efforts to provoke internal division would be decisively countered by the Iranian people, as they have shown in previous instances.
Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, the commander of the naval forces in Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), warned “foreign parties” against threatening Iranian interests, stating, “If foreigners attempt to attack us, pressure us, or endanger our interests, we will stand against them with full force.”
At the same time, he emphasized that “Iran does not seek war but will respond firmly to any aggression.”
Ukrainian drone strikes passenger bus – Donbass officials
RT | April 1, 2025
At least 16 people were injured in the Russian frontline city of Gorlovka when a Ukrainian kamikaze drone struck a bus early on Tuesday morning, Mayor Ivan Prikhodko has reported.
The incident marks the latest assault on the beleaguered residents of the city, which is located in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic. The mayor took to social media to share images showing the destruction.
The Russian Investigative Committee stated that Ukrainian forces deployed a kamikaze drone to target a bus near a central stop. The strike also caused damage to a nearby administrative building, the law enforcement agency added, describing the event as attempted murder.
Local health officials reported that five of the victims are currently in serious condition at local hospitals.
A regional watchdog that regularly posts updates on Ukrainian strikes in Donbass reported that several artillery shells landed in Gorlovka on the same day.
A similar drone strike targeted a passenger bus near Gorlovka in mid-March.
Last week, Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s ambassador-at-large overseeing investigations into alleged war crimes, highlighted a rising number of civilian casualties resulting from Ukrainian attacks on vulnerable locations such as Gorlovka. He suggested that this trend, occurring amid US-backed discussions for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, indicates Kiev’s intent to obstruct mediation efforts.
The administration of President Donald Trump is advocating for a negotiated ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia as part of its strategy to normalize relations with Moscow. While the Russian government has welcomed this shift in Washington’s stance, it has expressed deep skepticism toward the Ukrainian authorities, claiming that Kiev is not engaging in negotiations in good faith.
Here’s why the West has so far failed to start World War III
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | March 31, 2025
Under the title ‘The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine’, the New York Times published a long exposé that has made a splash. It is a long article advertised – with a lumbering clunkiness that betrays cramping politics – as the “untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.”
And it clearly aspires to be sensational: A revelation with a whiff of the famous Pentagon Papers that, when leaked to the same New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971, revealed what a mass-murderous fiasco America’s Vietnam War really was.
Yet, in reality, this time the New York Times is offering something less impressive by magnitudes. And the issue is not that the Pentagon Papers were longer. What really makes ‘The Partnership’ so underwhelming are two features: It is embarrassingly conformist, reading like a long exercise in rooting for the home team, the US, by access journalism: Based on hundreds of interviews with movers and shakers, this is really the kind of ‘investigation’ that boils down to giving everyone interviewed a platform for justifying themselves as good as they can and as much as they like.
With important exceptions. For the key strategy of exculpation is simple. Once you see through the rather silly group-therapy jargon of a tragic erosion of ‘trust’ and sad misunderstandings, it is the Ukrainians that get the blame for the US not winning its war against Russia, in their country and over their dead bodies.
Because one fundamental conceit of ‘The Partnership’ is that the war could have been won by the West, through Ukraine. What seems to never even have entered the author’s mind is the simple fact that this was always an absurd undertaking. Accordingly, the other thing that hardly makes it onto his radar screen is the crucial importance of Russia’s political and military actions and reactions.
This, hence, is an article that, in effect, explains losing a war against Russia without ever noticing that this may have happened because the Russians were winning it. In that sense, it stands in a long tradition: Regarding Napoleon’s failed campaign of 1812 and Hitler’s crash between 1941 and 1945, all too many contemporary and later Western observers have made the same mistake: For them it’s always the weather, the roads (or their absence), the timing, and the mistakes of Russia’s opponents. Yet it’s never – the Russians. This reflects old, persistent, and massive prejudices about Russia that the West cannot let go of. And, in the end, it is always the West which ends up suffering from them the most.
In the case of the Ukraine conflict, the main scapegoats, in the version of ‘The Partnership’, are now Vladimir Zelensky and his protégé and commander-in-chief General Aleksandr Syrsky, but there is room for devastating side swipes at Syrsky’s old rival Valery Zaluzhny and a few lesser lights as well.
Perhaps the only Ukrainian officer who looks consistently good in ‘The Partnership’ is Mikhail Zabrodsky, that is, the one – surprise, surprise – who worked most closely with the Americans and even had a knack of flatteringly imitating their Civil War maneuvers. Another, less prominent recipient of condescending praise is General Yury Sodol. He is singled out as an “eager consumer” of American advice who, of course, ends up succeeding where less compliant pupils fail.
Zabrodsky and Sodol may very well be decent officers who do not deserve this offensively patronizing praise. Zelensky, Syrsky, and Zaluzhny certainly deserve plenty of very harsh criticism. Indeed, they deserve being tried. But constructing a stab-in-the-back legend around them, in which Ukrainians get blamed the most for making the US lose a war that the West provoked is perverse. As perverse as the latest attempts by Washington to turn Ukraine into a raw materials colony, as a reward for being such an obedient proxy.
With all its fundamental flaws, there are intriguing details in ‘The Partnership’. They include, for instance, a European intelligence chief openly acknowledging – as early as spring 2022 – that NATO officers had become “part of the kill chain,” that is, of killing Russians who they were not, actually, officially at war with.
Or that, contrary to what some believe, Westerners did not overestimate but underestimate Russian abilities from the beginning of the war: In the spring of 2022, Russia rapidly surged “additional forces east and south” in less than three weeks, while American officers had assumed they would need months. In a similar spirit of blinding arrogance, General Christopher Cavoli – in essence, Washington’s military viceroy in Europe and a key figure in boosting the war against Russia – felt that Ukrainian troops did not have to be as good as the British and Americans, just better than Russians. Those daft, self-damaging prejudices again.
The New York Times’ “untold story” is also extremely predictable. Despite all the detail, nothing in ‘The Partnership’ is surprising, at least nothing important. What this sensationally unsensational investigation really does is confirm what everyone not fully sedated by Western information warfare already knew: In the Ukraine conflict, Russia has not merely – if that is the word – been fighting Ukraine supported by the West but Ukraine and the West.
Some may think the above is a distinction that doesn’t make a difference. But that would be a mistake. Indeed, it’s the kind of distinction that can make a to-be-or-not-to-be difference, even on a planetary scale.
That’s because Moscow fighting Ukraine, while the latter is receiving Western support, means Russia having to overcome a Western attempt to defeat it by proxy war. But fighting Ukraine and the West means Russia has been at war with an international coalition, whose members have all attacked it directly. And the logical and legitimate response to that would have been to attack them all in return. That scenario would have been called World War III.
‘The Partnership’ shows in detail that the West did not merely support Ukraine indirectly. Instead, again and again, it helped not only with intelligence Ukraine could not have gathered on its own but with direct involvement in not only supplying arms but planning campaigns and firing weapons that produced massive Russian casualties. Again, Moscow has said this was the case for a long time. And Moscow was right.
This is why, by the way, the British Telegraph has gotten one thing very wrong in its coverage of ‘The Partnership’: The details of American involvement now revealed are not, actually, “likely to anger the Kremlin.” At least, they are not going to make it angrier than before, because Russia is certain to have long known about just how much the US and others – first of all Britain, France, Poland, and the Baltics – have contributed, directly and hands-on, to killing Russians.
Indeed, if there is one important takeaway from the New York Times’ proud exposé of the extremely unsurprising, it is that the term ‘proxy war’ is both fundamentally correct and insufficient. On the one hand, it perfectly fits the relationship between Ukraine and its Western ‘supporters’: The Zelensky regime has sold the country as a whole and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives to the West. The West has used them to wage war on Russia in pursuit of one overarching geopolitical aim of its own: To inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia – that is, a permanent demotion to second-rate, de facto non-sovereign status.
The above is not news, except perhaps for the many brainwashed by Western information warriors from historian-turned-war-apostle Tim Snyder to lowlier X agitators with Ukrainian flags and sunflowers in their profiles.
What is also less than stunning but a little more interesting is that, on the other side, the term proxy war is still misleadingly benign. The key criterion for a war being by proxy – and not its opposite, which is, of course, direct – is, after all, that major powers using proxies limit themselves to indirect support. It is true that in theory and historical practice that does not entirely rule out adding some limited direct action as well.
And yet, in the case of the Ukraine conflict, the US and other Western nations – and don’t overlook the fact that ‘The Partnership’ hardly addresses all the black ops also conducted by them and their mercenaries – have clearly, blatantly gone beyond proxy war. In reality, the West has been waging war on Russia for years now.
That means that two things are true: The West almost started World War III. And the reason it has not – not yet, at least – is Moscow’s unusual restraint, which, believe it or not, has actually saved the world.
Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine the US fighting Canada and Mexico (and maybe Greenland) and learning that Russian officers are crucial in firing devastating mass-casualty strikes at its troops. What do you think would happen? Exactly. And that it has not happened during the Ukraine War is due to Moscow being the adult in the room. This should make you think.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
Merz against Germans and Europeans
By Ricardo Nuno Costa – New Eastern Outlook – April 1, 2025
The last session of the Bundestag under the Scholz government paved the way for the extraordinary injection of 500 billion euros into the German economy, with the votes of the CDU/CSU, the SPD and the Greens. Behind this special fund, which involved an amendment to the Basic Law, is an attempt to revive the country’s economy, which has been stagnating since it declared economic war on its biggest energy supplier, Russia, in 2022. More worryingly, the easing of the debt brake that has now been approved does not set any future limits, which could lead Berlin into a debt spiral. For now, a week later, there is already talk of additional spending of at least 350 billion euros on this package. The decades-long brand image of German ‘fiscal discipline’, of the transparency of its economy and of Germany as the continent’s safeguard of monetary stability is thus falling apart.
The new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who has always sold the image of being a ‘frugal’ and ‘rigorous’ politician and has vehemently opposed any change to the debt ceiling, is the mastermind and the one who will effectively direct the implementation of this fund over the next 12 years, thus being able, as head of government, to take out loans for public investments or direct payments from the federal budget. Calculated, the amount comes to a staggering 42 billion extra euros a year, almost a tenth more than the last federal budget. The money will flow into the German economy and generate opportunities, but at what cost?
Merz was for years the head of BlackRock Deutschland, the German branch of the world’s largest ‘shadow bank’, the asset manager BlackRock. In 2020, in order to run for the head of CDU/CSU), he formally stepped down from his position at the New York giant. Now, the opposition (and even members of the current grand coalition with the SPD) believe that the Chancellor wants to continue lobbying for the interests of his bosses on the other side of the Atlantic and combine Germany’s rearmament projects with an infrastructure programme from which BlackRock and the German arms giant Rheinmetall will make juicy profits at the expense of the public purse. MP and former parliamentary leader of the Social Democrats, Rolf Mützenich, accuses Merz of wanting to do business with foreign and security policy by keeping Germany under the thumb of the US military industrial complex. It was the best way he could find to ‘appease Donald Trump’, the SPD MP recently told Spiegel. So it’s clear that there’s no cut with the US, despite all the murmuring and outrage that Trump’s election has caused among a frustrated European elite, who blindly bet everything on Kamala Harris.
From austerity to debt
The Federal Republic, despite its reputation for austerity, is a champion of ‘special funds’. From the Marshall Plan to the country’s opaque and hurried reunification process, Berlin has always found ways to bypass legality or even the rules of the common market in order to keep its public accounts apparently healthy. The current special fund is by far the largest of the 29 previously approved. The Financial Markets Stabilisation Fund (200 billion in 2008), Covid (150 billion in 2020), the Armed Forces (100 billion in 2022) and the ‘energy crisis’ (200 billion in 2022) were the biggest. Through these extra budgets, Berlin has been hiding the true scale of its public debt and budget deficit for the last 20 years. Now things are clearer and many questions arise.
Germany is Europe’s largest economy, but it has been contracting for three years. The Berlin government actually has more liquidity than ever because it is taxing its citizens more than ever, but it needs to use these tricks to approve potentially unnecessary and exaggerated plans. In the current conditions of de-industrialisation, does Germany have the capacity to generate the physical wealth to get the economy growing again, or will the operation result in a setback that could aggravate the inflation already persistent since the special fund against Covid? Experts warn that the initiative will not have the capacity to generate economic competitiveness. Issuing debt for government programmes will do nothing to address this major shortcoming in the German economy.
Consequences for Europe
The approval of this fund further corroborates the idea that Europe as a whole – and not just the South, once vilely labelled the ‘PIGS’ – has, in fact, never left the crisis of 2007-08 and that its political classes (with Germany at the forefront) have insistently done the opposite of what they should have done.
How will France, Italy, Spain and the other Eurozone partners react to a move that could be considered ‘dumping’ between partners? Could this injection cause a new financial derivatives’ crisis?
Merz’s move had the immediate effect of boosting the European public debt market, causing the value of bonds to fall and their rates to rise. This dragged down Italian, Spanish, French and even Japanese bonds as a result. With the German state competing aggressively for new clients to finance its debt, it is forcing its European partners to follow suit. Discord is served. In other words, what Merz is doing is using his position as the Eurozone’s strong link by using the whole of Europe to pay for his businesses.
Does the new government in Berlin intend to finance its economy around sovereign bonds and a Frankfurt stock exchange with little more than a central European reach, and try to compete with the heavyweights of the global markets in New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai and Hong Kong? Is this realistic?
Merz’s plan coincides with the European Commission’s Readiness 2030 programme to issue another 650 billion euros in debt outside the Budget Pact and another 150 billion to be disbursed in European guarantees. The biggest debt issue since the ‘bazooka’ against Covid, which is still being paid for in the form of inflation. The project calls for states to allocate at least 1.5% of their budgets to defence, in order to launch a continent-wide arms industry and supposedly create jobs in the sector. No one has asked the states (let alone their people) if they want to live in a war economy. No one has said how these 650 billion will be paid back, or what guarantees the ‘European guarantees’ give a State.
The expansive policies of German governments since 2008 have been controversial, even within their own borders. The Federal Court of Audit harshly criticised the new fund: ‘The financial management of the federal government has thus been largely externalised,’ it accused. It warned that the financial package ‘could result in billions of euros in interest costs’. This will have catastrophic economic and social consequences for future generations.
Merz is betting on public spending, but in reality this is a kind of untimely neoliberal Keynesianism, as it will be financed by the US speculative banks, to which the new chancellor has always been closely linked. The whole process seems less than transparent, just to say the least.
Problematic social situation
For big businesses, the arms industry, construction companies, the speculator class and the financial sector, the injection of such a huge amount of money will have the effect of energising the economy for a while and improving some ageing infrastructure. But for the small citizens (the overwhelming majority of the population), the consequences of the current announcement will be devastating. Merz has already announced a ‘radical reform’ of pensions and social welfare benefits.
A good example of the state of public accounts in Germany is yet to be seen. Recently, the scandal broke at the hands of hundreds of thousands of small business owners across the country, who saw their businesses almost bankrupted during the lockdown campaign of the Merkel 4 and Scholz governments. In an extremely deceitful manoeuvre, the banks mandated by the state administrations have now (four years later) demanded that they return up to thousands of euros in ‘aid’ per head, which the state authorities granted them in compensation for the forced paralysis of trade. This is a simple transfer of wealth from the country’s small productive sectors directly into the pockets of the financial-technocratic class (banks, lawyers and accountants), with the public administrations acting as bait.
Social discontent is also being felt in the numerous strikes in various sectors, particularly public transport and airports.
In a recent joint interview, the directors of two popular publications, one linked to the left and the other close to the AfD, agreed to create a united front and promised to join forces against the current state of affairs. There will be larger demonstrations than during Covid, ‘authorised or not’, with encampments in city centres, ‘for as long as it takes’. The images of popular revolt from 15 years ago in Madrid and Athens will be repeated, this time in Berlin.
Ricardo Nuno Costa ‒ geopolitical expert, writer, columnist, and editor-in-chief of geopol.pt
Orbán counters FT article telling the EU to ‘solve its Orbán problem’
Remix News | April 1, 2025
The Financial Times’ piece entitled “It’s time for the EU to solve its Orbán problem” has elicited a stern response from Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán.
The piece determines that the EU must support Ukraine’s fight against Russia and provide it with arms to do so. And to do this, it must also somehow get Hungary on board, despite the country repeatedly reiterating its pro-peace stance.
Author Mujtaba Rahman states, “The EU’s ability to do this is directly compromised by Orbán, who has been hugely emboldened by Trump’s return. The Hungarian prime minister keeps in lockstep with Trump and Putin in the hope of winning favours from both.”
Rahman then lists “levers” the bloc can pull to essentially force Hungary’s hand, primarily through the withholding of cash the country desperately needs due to what the author calls Hungary’s “stagnant economy.”
“EU funds are therefore critical if Orbán is to boost investor confidence in the country’s economy. The European Commission has leverage and should use it,” the piece reads. Rahman also suggests simply suspending Hungary’s voting rights.
The article ends by stating, “The EU is now facing a Darwinian moment. It will either adapt or die. To protect Ukraine and its Russian ‘frontline’ states, it must face down Orbán.”
In a response posted on X, Orbán wrote, “The Financial Times is right about one thing: Europe has arrived at a Darwinian moment. They want to change the EU from a peace project to a war project. This is not evolution, this is decay. We must resist, even if they want to punish us.”
Germany to target ‘internal EU enemies’ – Politico
RT | April 1, 2025
The incoming German government plans to play a larger role in EU decision-making, including by punishing nations that dissent against the bloc’s foreign policy, Politico has reported. According to the outlet, a draft coalition agreement targets Hungary, which has defied EU decisions on issues such as the Ukraine conflict and sanctions against Russia.
Germany is set to have a new coalition government formed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democrats (SPD), likely led by Friedrich Merz of the CDU. The parties are currently finalizing agreements on key policy areas, including migration, climate, and EU relations. Merz is reportedly aiming to form the new government before Easter on April 20.
One of the documents reviewed by Politico outlines Berlin’s plans for a more assertive EU strategy. It proposes using the ‘Weimar Triangle’ – a trilateral alliance of Germany, France, and Poland, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency – to influence the bloc’s direction and strengthen Germany’s use of its voting rights.
The draft also states that Berlin plans to “defend” the EU against “internal and external enemies” by calling for punitive action against member states that allegedly violate principles such as the rule of law. Proposed penalties include withholding EU funds and suspending voting rights.
“We will take even more consistent action against violations,” the document states. “Existing protective instruments, from infringement proceedings and the withholding of EU funds to the suspension [of] membership rights such as voting rights in the Council of the EU, must be applied much more consistently than before.”
The coalition has also proposed the creation of a “comprehensive sanction instrument” to rein in perceived dissenters, including replacing the EU’s foreign policy unanimity requirement with majority voting to prevent countries from blocking decisions such as sanctions.
“The consensus principle in the European Council must not become a brake on decision-making,” the document states.
While Hungary is not mentioned by name, the draft agreement appears to be a clear reference to the country, which has long been at odds with EU policies, including over its approach to the Ukraine conflict and its sanctions policy towards Russia.
Budapest has argued that sanctions have been detrimental to the bloc’s economy, and has exercised its veto right on several motions to delay or dilute measures. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has repeatedly accused the EU of taking a “pro-war” stance and has pursued independent peace initiatives on the Ukraine conflict.
The EU has previously threatened to suspend Hungary’s voting rights. It withheld around €22 billion in funds earmarked for Budapest in 2022, citing rights and judicial concerns, but ultimately released about half of that amount last year.
How Bernie Sanders and the Democrats Made Elon Musk the Richest Man in the World
By Thomas Eddlem | The Libertarian Institute | April 1, 2025
Just before Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) started their ongoing series of rallies against Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, Sanders stopped by Face the Nation on CBS and hilariously exclaimed in feigned outrage:
“We’re looking at a rapid growth of oligarchy. We’re looking at a rapid growth of authoritarianism. And I fear that we’re looking at a rapid growth of kleptocracy as well. And I’m going to do everything I can to work with my supporters all over this country to stand up and fight back to make sure we have an economy that works for everybody, not just Elon Musk.”
All I could do is laugh, as Bernie Sanders specifically and the other Democrats generally are the ones who made the economy work so well for Elon Musk.
The $465 million Energy Department loan under President Barack Obama that saved Tesla from bankruptcy in 2010 emerged from the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which was adopted because Bernie Sanders and all the Democrats in the Senate voted for it (except Debbie Stabenow and a half-dozen conservative Republicans). Further, Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (which all the Senate Democrats voted for, including Bernie Sanders) included the $7500/EV subsidy that put $1.5 billion in Elon’s wallet. Nearly all Republicans voted against it.
And Musk’s Tesla gains more than $1 billion dollars annually from carbon tax credits passed by Democrats in California in the first decade of the century and which was expanded by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (which Sanders and all Democrats passed on a party-line vote in the Senate, and AOC and her Democratic colleagues voted for in the House).
The Washington Post reported on February 26 that Musk received some $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits in the past two decades, most from the federal government funded by Democrats (and some from Democrat-run California), often with strong Republican opposition. And most of these subsidies were realized during President Biden’s term.
Sanders complains constantly about Musk being a billionaire, but you don’t have to be a math major to understand that it’s a just smidge easier to become a billionaire when the government hands you $38 billion. Of course, Sanders and his touring sidekick Ocasio-Cortez work for a government that takes in $5,485 billion from people for almost nothing and somehow still runs a deficit of $1,781 billions every year. So maybe they don’t have the competency to pull that kind of math off.
Sanders and AOC seem to think it was the Republicans who fought for all those green energy subsidies and carbon swap programs. They seem to think the Republicans wanted to keep money flowing to NASA because of the GOP’s fond memories of JFK sending astronauts to the moon, and did not work to end the wasteful agency. But in reality it was Democrats who kept funding flowing to NASA, resulting in Space X scoring huge multi-billion federal space contracts.
If truth in advertising laws were being enforced, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s nationwide “Rally Against Oligarchy” would instead be labeled “Rally Against the Oligarchy We’re Building.”
I don’t think Elon Musk is a Nazi; I think he’s a highly talented tax dollar harvester. But if he is a Nazi, he is the Democrats’ Nazi. Democrats made him the richest man in the world and saved his businesses from bankruptcy with massive government subsidies championed by the Democrats. They need to own this, because they can’t deny it.
Instead, many of the same Democrats who voted for the politicians who made Musk the richest man in the world now think that a massive pogrom against Musk is a successful strategy to resist Trump’s policies and oppose “fascism.” Uh huh.
Nothing says “I’m opposing fascism” like spray-painting a swastika on a Tesla owned by a Jewish dude. Three quarters of all the swastikas being publicly painted across the world today are being painted by Democrats in America on Teslas, and the other quarter are being painted by the remnants of the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade that has been absorbed into the Ukrainian National Army, a group the Democrats back to the hilt with your tax dollars.
The world’s swastikas being painted these days are being scrawled or funded by the Democratic Party within a rounding error of 100% of the global total. For the first time in many years I went over to the Stormfront.org webpage (a page run by open neo-Nazis) and found them positively bitchy with suppressed jealousy about how Democrats have managed to spread their message so much further than the Mädelschaft of goobers who run that website.
Meanwhile, the captive media fact-checkers acknowledge, “At least 10 Tesla dealerships, charging stations and facilities have been hit by vandals,” along with the vandalization of hundreds of cars of [private] Tesla owners, but simultaneously claim there’s “no evidence of coordinated vandalism.” It’s got to sting when Democrats can pull off a slow-motion, global Krystallnacht against Tesla when the Schutzstaffel-wannabes have been so unsuccessful for so many decades. Meanwhile, Democrats get wild cheers from The Daily Show audience for their ongoing swastika pogrom.
I predict Stormfront’s next published story will be a worried report about the global shortage of swastikas, accompanied by a request for the Democrats to refund a quota of some of the swastikas back so American neo-Nazis can stop swastika rationing.
There’s a reason Elon Musk’s companies faced twenty different investigations by multiple government agencies under the Biden administration and most of those investigations just went away once Trump took office, and it wasn’t because of Elon’s criminal conduct. It was the criminal conduct of Washington and its lawfare. That’s part of the plan, too.
Elon backed the “wrong” party, according to the Democrats. They villainize Musk and the Koch brothers but not Bill Gates, John Kerry, and George Soros. Their vilification of billionaires is notably and risibly selective.
The latter are their bread-and-butter while the former fund their opposition. Washington politics long ago ceased to be an ideological battle, succumbing fully to a team sport.
We’re on a Highlander course for political parties in America: There can be only one.
In at least one sense, we’re already there; Trump and his cabinet are all 2004 Democrats, with a Kennedy in charge of the world’s largest welfare agency and no mandate to cut even a dime of welfare spending. That’s what the “conservative” Republican Party has become. America has a uniparty, and the media wants to make us choose either the Party of Caesar or the Party of Pompey, but both are on the same path to centralization of power in Washington.
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The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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