Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Seyed M. Marandi: Iran Rejects U.S. Deal – War Is Likely Imminent

Glenn Diesen | May 9, 2026

Iran’s SURVIVAL INSTINCT MORE INTENSE THAN EVER /Lt Col Daniel Davis

Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – May 9, 2026

Larry Johnson: Iran War Creates a New Middle East

Glenn Diesen | May 9, 2026

Larry Johnson is a former CIA intelligence analyst who also worked at the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism. Johnson discusses how the Iran War is putting an end to the former security architecture of the Middle East.

Read Larry Johnson’s Sonar21: https://sonar21.com/

Follow Prof. Glenn Diesen:

Support the research by Prof. Glenn Diesen:

Books by Prof. Glenn Diesen

May 9, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Comments Off on Seyed M. Marandi: Iran Rejects U.S. Deal – War Is Likely Imminent

46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims

Cracks in the facade of global climate science get wider as a significant group of experts chooses to break rank

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | May 5, 2026

According to a recent report by the German online TKP, a movement is gaining momentum within the scientific community that threatens to dismantle the official IPCC narrative from the inside out. This rebellion is led by 46 scientists, many of whom have direct experience working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who are now publicly challenging the foundational claims that have dictated global policy for decades.

The heart of their argument lies in the fundamental failure of current climate models.

These prestigious researchers – among them Dr. Robert Balling, Dr. Lucka Bogataj, Dr. John Christy and Dr. Judith Curry – contend that the IPCC has relied on simulations that are heavily biased toward human-induced CO2 while systematically ignoring or downplaying natural variables. By prioritizing political consensus over raw data, these models have consistently overestimated global warming, creating a gap between alarmist predictions and the actual temperature trends observed over the last several years.

The scientists suggest that the “climate emergency” is less a scientific reality and more an ideological construct designed to drive the Net Zero agenda.

Power natural factors ignorerd by IPCC

Furthermore, this group highlights the critical role of natural drivers that are often missing from the mainstream conversation. They point to solar activity, atmospheric water vapor, and complex cloud cycles as the true drivers of Earth’s climate. By looking back at historical periods like the Medieval Warm Period, they argue that the planet’s current warming is well within the bounds of natural variability and is not the unprecedented catastrophe it is often portrayed to be.

Culture of scientific suppression

Perhaps most concerning is the article’s depiction of a scientific community under pressure. The rebelling scientists describe a culture of suppression where dissenting opinions are sidelined through the loss of funding, career gatekeeping, and media blackouts. This internal collapse suggests that the “science is settled” mantra is no longer sustainable.

Dogmna coming to an end

As these 46 voices come forward, they signal a shift toward a more skeptical, data-driven approach that prioritizes objective reality over the prevailing political narrative, suggesting that the era of unquestioned climate dogma may be coming to an end.

May 9, 2026 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Comments Off on 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims

Coming Off Seroquel Alone

An Essay on the Practitioner Vacuum That Waits for Everyone Who Tries to Leave Psychiatry

Lies are Unbekoming | April 19, 2026

A reader wrote to me this week. Her question, in essence:

She knows someone trying to come off Seroquel safely. Does anyone know the deficiencies it might have caused? Are there books or functional doctors who work on that?

She is looking for a functional doctor. Someone to walk her person through the Seroquel taper the way a functional cardiologist walks a patient off statins, or a functional endocrinologist walks a patient off long-term steroids. She wants someone who understands what the drug has done to the body, can identify the depletions, can order the right tests, and can hold the patient’s hand through the worst of it.

That person does not exist. Not as a profession. Not as a network. Not in any country I have looked at.

The Assumption Hidden in the Question

Every other branch of medicine has a parallel network for patients who decide that what they have been prescribed is making them worse. Someone leaving conventional cardiology finds functional cardiologists, integrative GPs, nutritionists, lifestyle medicine doctors, chiropractors, osteopaths, and bodyworkers. The person leaving an oncologist finds clinics in Mexico and Germany, a literature on metabolic therapies, and dozens of practitioners whose practices are built around helping the patient leave the mainstream pathway.

These parallel networks are not perfect. They vary in quality. Some are captured by their own commercial pressures. But they exist. A patient can find them. A patient can book an appointment.

Now try the same exercise for someone on Seroquel. Or for someone six years into a benzodiazepine. Or two decades into an SSRI.

What they find is a peer forum, a free PDF from Denmark, and a book by a British psychiatrist whose own profession ignored the problem until he forced them to look at it. They find a small number of dissident practitioners, most of them retired or semi-retired, with waiting lists measured in months. They find a great many websites. They find almost no doctors.

My reader did not ask a strange question. She asked the normal question. The strangeness is that there is no normal answer.

What the Evidence Says About the Vacuum

The emptiness is documented in plain language by the clinicians who actually do this work.

Peter Breggin, who has been doing psychiatric drug withdrawal work for more than forty years, states it directly. It has become very easy for individuals to find clinicians who will prescribe psychiatric drugs, but it remains very difficult for patients to find help in reducing or withdrawing from them. He attributes this to a lack of peer support and training, which leaves most clinicians uncomfortable even responding to a patient’s request for reduction or withdrawal.¹

Peter Gøtzsche puts it more bluntly. Very few doctors know anything about withdrawal, and many make horrible mistakes. If they taper at all, they do it far too quickly, because the prevailing wisdom treats withdrawal as a problem only with benzodiazepines, and because the few guidelines that exist recommend tapering schedules that are dangerously fast.²

The largest survey of long-term users who tried to discontinue — Ostrow and colleagues, published in Psychiatric Services in 2017 — quantifies the vacuum. Of 250 adults with serious mental illness diagnoses who wanted to stop psychiatric drugs, 71% had been taking them for over nine years. Only 54% met their goal of completely discontinuing. Among those who attempted it, only 45% rated doctors as helpful during withdrawal. Sixteen percent began the process against their doctor’s advice. Twenty-seven percent did not tell their doctor, stopped seeing the doctor, or changed doctors. Self-education and contact with peers who had withdrawn were the most frequently cited sources of help.³

More than a quarter of the people who tried to come off went around their doctor or away from their doctor entirely. They were not helped by the profession that put them on the drug. In many cases they were actively avoided by it.

Gøtzsche documents something worse in Denmark. Researchers there tried to run a withdrawal trial involving patients on antipsychotics. The trial collapsed — not because the drugs failed to come off, but because patients were too frightened to participate. They had been told for so long that they would relapse without their medication that the prospect of stopping was, in itself, destabilising.² The profession had successfully convinced them that leaving was more dangerous than staying.

The Horowitz Exception

Mark Horowitz is a training psychiatrist at the NHS with a PhD in the pharmacology of antidepressants from King’s College London. He was prescribed an antidepressant in medical school. Fifteen years later, he tried to come off it following the standard guidelines his own profession had produced. He was blindsided by withdrawal symptoms so severe they forced him back onto the drug.⁴

Unable to find clinical support, he turned to an online peer community founded by Adele Framer — SurvivingAntidepressants.org — and discovered that the people there had worked out, through years of collective trial and error, what the psychiatric literature did not contain. The dose-response curve for these drugs is hyperbolic, not linear. Halving the dose at each taper step, as the official guidelines recommended, guaranteed a withdrawal crash at the bottom of the curve. The patients had figured it out. The profession had not.⁵

In 2019, Horowitz published this finding with David Taylor in The Lancet Psychiatry.⁵ In 2021, with Joanna Moncrieff, he set up England’s first psychiatric drug deprescribing clinic.⁴ In 2024, he and Taylor published The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines — the first clinical textbook on how to come off these drugs written within the British medical establishment.⁶

One clinician. One clinic. One book. For a problem that affects tens of millions of patients across every Western country.

Horowitz’s findings were accommodated only after the peer communities had been telling people the same thing for a decade, and after the evidence became too large to ignore. Joanna Moncrieff, Peter Gøtzsche, Peter Breggin, David Healy, and a small handful of others have done comparable work. They remain isolated. They have no referral network underneath them. They are not training a generation of younger clinicians to replace them.

The vacuum is not the temporary feature of a field that hasn’t yet matured. It is the product of active resistance from within the profession.

Why the Vacuum Is Structural

The parallel practitioner network that exists in cardiology, endocrinology, and oncology exists because those branches of medicine concede, even at their most conventional, that the body can heal. A functional cardiologist can hang a shingle because conventional cardiology admits that diet, exercise, stress, and sleep can reverse heart disease. The door is cracked open. The functional practitioner walks through.

Psychiatry does not open that door. Its official framework holds that the conditions it diagnoses are chronic, lifelong, and biologically driven. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, the American Psychiatric Association, and every major national equivalent tell patients that their “illness” requires long-term management, often lifelong, and that stopping medication invites relapse. The DSM categories are described as diseases. The drugs are described as treatments that correct an underlying dysfunction.

In this framework, no role exists for a practitioner who helps people leave. A practitioner who helps people leave is, by definition, someone who believes the drugs were not necessary in the first place, or are no longer necessary, or are causing more harm than the original distress. That practitioner is a heretic within the profession. Not a specialist filling a niche. A threat to the diagnostic framework itself.

The vacuum is not a gap in a functioning system. It is the absence that the system requires in order to continue functioning.

If the profession built a deprescribing subspecialty — trained practitioners, published guidelines, referral pathways, insurance codes — it would be admitting that a significant fraction of its patients never needed the drugs, were harmed by them, and can and should come off them. That admission would collapse the commercial and intellectual scaffolding of the field. The admission is not made. The subspecialty is not built. The patients are left to find their own way.

Gøtzsche puts it in one sentence. It seems, he writes, as if lifelong medication is tacitly assumed to be a good thing.² That is the explanation for the vacuum.

What the Reader Is Actually Asking For

When I translate my reader’s question into what it would take to answer it, the practitioner she is looking for would need to

  • understand what Seroquel has done to the body,
  • design a hyperbolic taper matched to this patient’s half-life and receptor profile,
  • order compounded doses or guide the making of them,
  • address the depletions that accumulate during years of antipsychotic exposure,
  • manage the return of sleep disruption, anxiety, and emotional intensity that follows removal of the drug,
  • and walk alongside for the twelve to thirty-six months this typically takes.

This is a real job. It is a needed job. It is nobody’s job.

No medical school trains for it. No residency offers it. No insurance code reimburses it. No malpractice carrier covers a psychiatrist who specialises in getting people off psychiatric drugs. No prescriber can build a practice around it without accepting the isolation and reduced income that come with practising outside the standard framework. No primary care doctor has the time, the knowledge, or the institutional cover to do it either.

The work exists. The workers do not.

The Reframe: This Was Never a Psychiatric Problem

The practitioner my reader is looking for does not exist because psychiatric drug recovery is not a psychiatric problem. The body’s task, once the drug is tapered off, is not a psychiatric task. It is a terrain task.

The drug was a toxic exposure — a sustained, daily, years-long exposure acting on a nervous system that was probably already carrying some combination of nutritional deficiency, accumulated toxic burden, disrupted sleep, chronic stress, and environmental insult before the prescription was ever written. Years of Seroquel add to that burden. They deplete the body in predictable ways: oxidative stress that consumes glutathione and antioxidant enzymes,⁷ mitochondrial damage, metabolic disruption producing weight gain, blood sugar dysregulation, and elevated lipids,⁸ and a cascade of effects on movement, cognition, and sleep architecture.

What the body needs, once the drug is being reduced, is not correction by a psychiatric specialist. It is removal of the toxic input and restoration of the conditions that allow repair — clean water, nutrient-dense food, mineral repletion, sunlight, sleep, movement, reduction of other ongoing toxic and stress inputs, and time.

The practitioners who support that work do exist. They are simply not labelled as psychiatric practitioners, because the work is not psychiatric. They are the terrain-oriented doctors, the New Biology practitioners, the functional medicine clinicians who understand mitochondrial recovery and mineral repletion, the nutritionists who work with detoxification, the bodyworkers who address the fascia and the lymph.

My reader asked whether there were functional doctors “on that topic.” The honest answer is that the topic, correctly named, is not psychiatric drug withdrawal. The topic is terrain restoration after a prolonged toxic exposure. That has practitioners. Those are the practitioners she needs.

The psychiatric part of the work — writing the taper prescription, adjusting compounded doses — is the smallest part, and it requires the least expertise. Any honest prescriber willing to listen to the patient and read the Horowitz guidelines can do it. The rest of the work, the terrain work, is what actually determines whether recovery happens.

A Practical Map

For my reader, and for anyone in her position, here is what the road actually looks like.

For the taper itself. Horowitz and Taylor’s Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines is the single most important book.⁶ Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal covers the clinical management in detail, including a case involving Seroquel.¹ Gøtzsche’s Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs is plain-language and principles-based.² Sørensen, Rüdinger, Gøtzsche and Toft’s A Practical Guide to Slow Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal is free as a PDF from deadly-medicines.dk.⁹ These four texts contain most of what is known.

For the prescriber. You are probably looking for any doctor — primary care, psychiatrist, or integrative — willing to write the taper according to the schedule you bring them. You are not looking for the prescriber to design it. You are looking for them not to obstruct it. This is a much smaller ask, and much more achievable, than finding a specialist. Compounding pharmacies produce the small custom doses that manufactured pills cannot.

For the peer community. SurvivingAntidepressants.org is the largest and most rigorous. Benzo Buddies covers the benzodiazepine side. Mad in America (madinamerica.com) hosts an enormous archive of first-person accounts, research summaries, and practitioner interviews. The International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (iipdw.org) and the Inner Compass Initiative (theinnercompass.org) are both worth knowing. Ostrow’s survey found that peer contact and self-education were the two most frequently cited sources of help during withdrawal, rated more useful than doctors.³

For the terrain work. The New Biology Clinic (newbiologyclinic.com), built around the framework of Tom Cowan, Andy Kaufman, and colleagues, addresses the underlying causes that mainstream medicine will not examine. Kelly Brogan’s A Mind of Your Own is written by a psychiatrist who now works from a broadly terrain-compatible orientation and addresses coming off psychiatric drugs directly.¹⁰ Competent functional medicine practitioners who understand mitochondrial recovery, mineral repletion, and the role of ongoing toxic exposures can carry much of the load, though their familiarity with psychiatric drugs specifically will vary.

For the depletions. Long-term antipsychotic exposure is associated with oxidative stress consuming glutathione and related antioxidant systems.⁷ The commonly reported associated depletions, drawing from the broader clinical literature, include coenzyme Q10, magnesium, B vitamins (particularly B12 and folate), vitamin D, zinc, and omega-3 fatty acids. These are worth testing and repleting. They are not a substitute for the terrain work. They are part of it.

None of this replaces the specialist network that does not exist. It is what is actually available, and it is what actually works when people succeed — which many do.

For a Six-Year-Old

Your body knows how to get better. It has always known.

When something is hurting it, the body’s job is to repair. It does this on its own, every day, all the time. It does not need a special doctor to do it.

What it needs is good food, clean water, sleep, sunshine, and time. It needs whatever was hurting it to slowly, carefully, stop being there.

The slowly and carefully part matters. You cannot rip a plaster off a wound that has grown into the skin. You have to loosen it a little at a time, and let the skin heal as you go.

That is the whole of it.

Closing

My reader asked for leads to help someone detox from Seroquel safely, and for functional doctors who work on that topic. I have given her the leads I have. I have also told her that the functional doctors she is looking for, in the form she imagines them, do not exist — and will not exist, because the framework that would need to produce them has structural reasons not to.

The absence of a specialist network is not the absence of a path. The path exists. It is slower and harder than it should be. It requires self-education, peer support, a cooperative prescriber, a terrain-oriented practitioner, and time. Many people walk it. Many get to the other side. Ostrow’s survey of those who succeeded found that 82% were satisfied with their decision.³ Few psychiatric interventions can claim that.

What psychiatry will not provide, the body provides — once the exposure stops and the conditions for repair are restored. The doctor she is looking for does not exist. The recovery she is looking for does.

Nothing in this essay is medical advice. It is research and analysis. Anyone reducing or stopping a psychiatric drug should do so with qualified support and adequate time, informed by the texts and communities referenced above.

References

  1. Breggin, Peter R. Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families. New York: Springer, 2012.
  2. Gøtzsche, Peter C. Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs. Ann Arbor: L H Press, 2022.
  3. Ostrow, L., Jessell, L., Hurd, M., Darrow, S. M., & Cohen, D. “Discontinuing psychiatric medications: a survey of long-term users.” Psychiatric Services 68 (2017): 1232–8.
  4. Horowitz, Mark A. Personal and professional biography. See markhorowitz.org and Simons, P., “Peer-support groups were right, guidelines were wrong: Dr. Mark Horowitz on tapering off antidepressants,” Mad in America, March 20, 2019.
  5. Horowitz, Mark A., and David Taylor. “Tapering of SSRI treatment to mitigate withdrawal symptoms.” Lancet Psychiatry 6 (2019): 538–46.
  6. Horowitz, Mark, and David M. Taylor. The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines: Antidepressants, Benzodiazepines, Gabapentinoids and Z-drugs. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2024.
  7. Salim, Samina. “Oxidative Stress and Psychological Disorders.” Current Neuropharmacology 12, no. 2 (2014): 140–147.
  8. Lieberman, J. A., et al. “Effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs in patients with chronic schizophrenia” (CATIE study). New England Journal of Medicine 353 (2005): 1209–1223.
  9. Sørensen, A., Rüdinger, B., Gøtzsche, P. C., and Toft, B. S. A Practical Guide to Slow Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal. Copenhagen, 2020. Available at deadly-medicines.dk.
  10. Brogan, Kelly. A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives. New York: HarperCollins, 2016.
  11. Gøtzsche, Peter C. Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom, 2024.
  12. Whitaker, Robert. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, 2nd ed. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2015.
  13. Davies, J., and J. Read. “A systematic review into the incidence, severity and duration of antidepressant withdrawal effects: Are guidelines evidence-based?” Addictive Behaviors 97 (2019): 111–121.

May 9, 2026 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Comments Off on Coming Off Seroquel Alone

Iran’s ‘threat’ to Western hegemony is not nuclear weapons

By Samuel Geddes | Al Mayadeen | May 9, 2026

US Secretary of State Rubio on Wednesday declared “Operation Epic Fury” concluded, the clearest indication so far that the US is writhing in the economic trap it sprung on itself. Being in a state of institutional paralysis, unable to accept the costs of ending the war while unable to tolerate its continuation, the Trump administration is attempting to find an equilibrium that allows hostilities to cease, while keeping as much as possible of its “maximum pressure” on Iran’s economy.

In precisely this vein, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in recent days has been unable to conceal his glee at the economic privation imposed on the Iranian people by his policies, attributing both the Riyal’s late 2025 collapse and the impending effects of the naval blockade on its oil production to “[Operation] Economic Fury.”

Since the inception of the Islamic Republic 47 years ago, the United States has weaponized its dominance in the global economy to impose one of the most comprehensive sanctions regimes ever implemented.

With each successive layer of economic siege deployed against the Iranians, US administrations and their surrogate regimes across the collective west, along with their propagandists in the media, painted this undeclared war as solely targeting “the regime.” The Iranian people themselves, they would have us believe, were never the intended targets.

This was, of course, only ever a rhetorical sleight of hand. The sanctions were “targeted” at the “regime” only in the sense that they were intended to make everyday life so unbearable that the Iranian public would blame their own leadership and overthrow it. The exact reason why they would primarily blame their own government, rather than Washington, London, Berlin and so-on, has never been rationalized. It is simply the economic strangulation of Gaza and Cuba that has been scaled up to the macro-level. Collective punishment of the entire population is the point, either to induce domestic rebellion, or to discipline them for not carrying out Western policy goals.

With the restarting of active war from February 28, Washington has reverted to implementing this strategy by its most direct means. Instead of choking off medicines to the health system, it simply bombed the health system itself, from critical national hospitals to the Pasteur Institute that produced domestic vaccines against the Covid pandemic. Instead of blacklisting Iranian students from foreign institutions, it bombs the Iranian universities that have been the engines of the nation’s indigenous industries, civilian, industrial and military since the siege began in 1980. Beyond merely sanctioning Iran’s industrial output, it is now robbing it of its revenues by attacking the steel plants of Isfahan and Ahvaz and the Asalouyeh petrochemical complexes.

The logical framing of these targets is that they are aimed at degrading Iran’s capacity to manufacture missiles, drones and its still non-existent nuclear weapons. By this reasoning, literally every economic sector, every potential source of revenue for the Iranian state is a target. It lays bare the true motivation not only behind the current war, but also behind the entire campaign of economic, political, and diplomatic coercion that the West has thrown at the country since its Revolution. It is not simply that Iranian nuclear program is unacceptable to Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and Tel Aviv, it is mainly the existence of an Iranian steel industry, pharmaceutical sector, ship-building capacity and space program. The very existence of an entrenched, self-sufficient and technologically progressing economy outside of the Western-dominated world system constitutes, by its nature, a systemic threat that cannot be tolerated. It must either be economically absorbed and dismantled from within or militarily destroyed.

It is a fear of the vastly enhanced economic and technological weight of an Iran unburdened by secondary sanctions, reaping tens of billions of dollars in taxes on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and fundamentally restructuring the security and economic architecture of the Gulf, that explains the Trump administration’s unwillingness to end the state of war, even as it pushes the global economy deeper into existential crisis every day.

Tehran’s incentive, and its ability to demand, maximal concessions to accept an end to war however will not decline over time, it will increase inversely to the US tolerance for economic pain. Thus, Washington is at some point going to make at least one existentially humiliating concession to extricate itself from the crisis it created. It might agree to suspend all secondary sanctions against the Islamic Republic, or accept Tehran’s demonstrated capacity to tax traffic through Hormuz or permanently evacuate its bases in the region. It might even do all of these.

The blockade might plausibly remain as a face-saving fiction- the US navy clearly dares not intercept Iranian shipments heading to China. Over time, alternate land and sea corridors will compensate for the disruption to Iranian shipping.

When Washington eventually does cave it will have achieved the exact opposite of its intentions in launching its aggression: a vastly more economically empowered Islamic Republic with the throat of the world economy in its hand.

Trump’s choices are limited to accepting a far more economically powerful Iran now or accepting it later after a catastrophic resumption of hostilities. Maybe then, he will have learned precisely why none of his predecessors acted as he has.

May 9, 2026 Posted by | Economics | , , , | Comments Off on Iran’s ‘threat’ to Western hegemony is not nuclear weapons

Iran warns UAE, Bahrain over alignment with US, Israeli interests

Al Mayadeen | May 9, 2026

Senior Iranian lawmakers issued sharp warnings to Gulf states on Friday, cautioning against supporting the US-backed resolution against Tehran and threatening consequences for countries aligning themselves with Washington and “Israel” amid escalating regional tensions.

Ebrahim Azizi, head of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, warned that governments supporting the resolution will face perpetual closure of the Strait.

In a post on X, Azizi stated, “We warn governments, including microstates like Bahrain, that siding with the US-backed resolution will bring severe consequences.”

“The Strait of Hormuz is a vital lifeline; do not risk closing it on yourselves forever,” he warned.

UAE insignificant in the broader war: Ruhollah Azad

Separately, Iranian parliament presidium member Rouhollah Motefakker Azad said the United States and “Israel” were facing inevitable defeat in their war with the Iranian people and resistance fighters.

“The defeat of the Americans and Zionists in the battle against the Iranian people and their fighters is inevitable, and signs of this defeat have begun to emerge on all fronts,” he said.

Motefakker Azad also warned the United Arab Emirates against becoming involved in the conflict, arguing that Abu Dhabi should avoid acting in support of Israeli and American interests. “If the UAE possesses strategic rationality, it will never place itself in a predicament greater than its size and capabilities for the sake of the interests of the Zionists and America, who have failed in this arena,” he said.

He added that Iran had demonstrated its ability to contain the actions of both the United States and Israel, dismissing the UAE as insignificant in the war.

“The Emiratis are advised to understand the rules of this war and refrain from entering an arena beyond their capacity and scale,” he said.

Military, public, diplomacy; main pillars of Iran’s strategy

Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref said on Friday that Tehran will continue its diplomatic efforts “based on logic and ethics,” while stressing that the country remains “very firm in defending its rights,” according to remarks made during a meeting with managers of the Mobarakeh Steel Company.

Aref said Iran’s strategy is built on three main pillars: the “military arena, the street, and diplomacy,” calling for national planning that reflects Iran’s status as a “major global power.”

He also urged faster progress on reconstruction, renewal, and upgrading of damaged industries, emphasizing the need to accelerate recovery efforts.

May 9, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on Iran warns UAE, Bahrain over alignment with US, Israeli interests

‘Little Sparta’: Why The UAE Attacked Iran for Israel’s Sake

By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | May 9, 2026

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been accused of launching direct strikes targeting Iranian civilian infrastructure, while escalating its anti-Tehran rhetoric and having lobbied the US to return to all-out regional war. Although on the surface of things, it would appear nonsensical for such a small and fragile country to commit itself to reckless actions of these kinds, the UAE is no ordinary Gulf State.

While presenting itself as an innovative nation, one that is dissimilar to its neighbors in that its focus is the creation of wealth, “unity” and “peace”, the UAE fosters an image of a wise and inviting leadership that caters to outsiders. Utilizing their immense oil wealth, Abu Dhabi’s rulers have managed to construct an image of themselves that is almost as artificial as Dubai’s Skyline.

Behind the “tallest building” and “deepest pool” in the world are not talented Emirati architects, hard labor, and meticulous planners; instead, there are foreign experts and modern-day slaves. Although the Emirati rulers may be the ones who own everything and their people the ones who reap the benefits, even their prized oil industry would be nothing without all the foreigners who did everything for them.

Interestingly, both their foreign intelligence operations and oil industry have been heavily influenced by Palestinians, specifically from the Gaza Strip, and other non-Emirati Arabs, who helped make their nation run. Many of their police patrol officers are not their own nationals either, while 80% of their armed forces are foreigners.

The “peace” and “unity” that they promote are simply a Zionist project to attack the resistance to Israel’s expansionist endeavors. Not only were the ‘Abraham Accords’ lobbied for by the UAE, with it using its influence in Sudan and Morocco to bring even more States on board, but their entire national project has also been centered around assassinating pan-Arab and pan-Islamic unity.

Not only does the UAE use “inter-faith” projects to normalize Zionism and Zionists amongst Muslims, it actively controls a host of Islamic influencers, sheiks, Quran reciters, and scholars, whose role is to target impressionable Muslims. These individuals are used to push sectarianism, especially against Twelver Shias, but even against fellow Sunni Muslims who refuse to comply with their views.

Across the region, the UAE, known amongst its war hawk allies as ‘Little Sparta’, pursues a bloodthirsty approach, especially across the Horn of Africa. In Sudan, it is the primary backer of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of warlord Muhammad Dagalo (Hemedti), a militant group accused of committing genocide. In Gaza, they are also accused of backing the Israeli-controlled ISIS-linked death squads, used to fight against the Palestinian resistance.

In Libya, they provided support to warlord Khalifa Haftar’s men, while propping up the Southern Transitional Council (STC) separatists in Yemen. They claim to oppose “Islamists” and “Islamic extremism”, while they actively promote Wahhabi Islam, with the political goal of encouraging the most malignant forms of sectarianism. Their only true opposition to ‘Islamists’ is a stance against the Muslim Brotherhood and all groups who dare to challenge Israel, and/or the United States in any way.

To demonstrate the depths of their hypocrisy, consider that the toughest fighters belonging to their STC proxy forces in Yemen were former Al-Qaeda and ISIS militants. In the name of combating the so-called “Islamist threat” of the Ansarallah government in Sana’a, the UAE decided to throw its weight behind hardline Salafist militants.

When it comes to the Iran conflict, the UAE optical illusion is also in effect. It played victim, feigned neutrality, while simultaneously pushing claims that it managed to intercept more Iranian missiles and drones than the Israelis did. In this way, it becomes both the hero and victim, but in an even less believable way than the Zionists, who clearly have more believable propaganda.

In reality, the UAE not only provided a launching pad for the illegal US-Israeli attack on Iran, but had even fully integrated its air defense systems with Israel following their normalisation agreement. They were providing the Israelis with information used to help them combat Iranian retaliatory strikes on their territory, while the Emirati-owned Wing Loong II UAVs were used to monitor Iranian airspace in support of the US-Israeli aggression.

While the US certainly used other Persian Gulf Arab States to attack the Islamic Republic, none were so enthusiastic as Abu Dhabi’s leadership. Oman is the only country in the region that did not allow for its territory to be used for offensive action against Iran, while Qatar began developing a more neutral tone, especially as the war progressed, the UAE went the opposite direction. Eventually, the Emirati anti-Iran rhetoric escalated to the degree that the Emirati rulers began labeling Tehran as terrorists.

Understanding why is crucial to comprehending the nature of the UAE as an entity in the Persian Gulf. Contrary to its propaganda, Abu Dhabi is the means through which Israeli and Western imperial power is harnessed.

The British, who helped form the “Trucial States” that would later band together under the leadership of Abu Dhabi and become the United Arab Emirates in 1971, referred to them as “pirates”. This legacy of being a disrespected puppet of the empire is something that holds true until this day, where the ultra-rich Emirati leadership enthusiastically does the bidding of their superiors.

In only 54 years, the regime along the Persian Gulf has managed to present to the world a model of what unfettered materialism leads to. A regime that operates off of oil money, which wouldn’t exist without foreign know-how and intelligence. It looks down on other Arabs, despite it needing them to function or to have become what it is.

It claims to represent a moderate and peaceful version of Islam, promoting Madkhali Wahhabi voices who promote it as a model of socially conservative religion and claim it represents a leadership that follows the virtues of Tawheed (monotheism) above all others. Simultaneously, Dubai is a representation of everything that Islam opposes socially, while the same pro-UAE preachers who want to excommunicate ordinary Muslims from their religion over the slightest disagreements will sit back as Hindu Temples are openly constructed.

It has been involved in aiding two genocides, perhaps a third if you consider the 400,000 deaths in Yemen to constitute a genocide also. Even today in Somalia, only it and Israel recognize and back the Somaliland separatist movement, which could contribute to major future bloodshed.

All of this is relevant to keep in mind as the UAE is as artificial and malignant to the region as the Israelis are. Both have utter contempt for the people surrounding them, refuse to acknowledge the limits of their power, and have major narcissism complexes. In the UAE, they have to monitor every square inch of their territory, censor everyone’s thoughts, killing, deporting or imprisoning anyone who refuses to go along with stroking their fragile egos.

Ultimately, the UAE is just as complicit in regional atrocities as are the Israelis, which is why it is no surprise that they decided to directly join the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran. Their mission is to conquer, dominate and destroy the surrounding region, in order to come out on top, working hand in hand with the Zionists to do so. Now that their tourism industry has been devastated and they have taken significant blows, that only reinforces the idea of aiding the Israelis in pursuing their expansionist endeavors.

Recent history alone has demonstrated that the UAE is willing to clash with neighboring Saudi Arabia, however irrational that idea may have been, and how quickly Riyadh managed to quash their separatist proxy project in Yemen. They also demonstrated in 2017 that they were willing to push Qatar to the breaking point, in order to demand on Israel’s behalf that they stop providing financial support to Hamas, as well as using Al-Jazeera to air coverage favorable of Palestinians.

The UAE is not a normal country; it doesn’t have thousands of years of history like neighboring Oman, it is an aggressive asset that cares only for expanding the power of its monarchy. Therefore, it is to be assumed that it will participate in continued attacks on its neighbors, while wearing the cloak of plausible deniability.

However, the Emiratis are likely to find out against Iran, what they quickly learned when they recently clashed with Saudi Arabia, they are not Israel and can’t behave as such without consequences.

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.

May 9, 2026 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on ‘Little Sparta’: Why The UAE Attacked Iran for Israel’s Sake

Iran Blames European Tanker for Oil Slick Near Kharg

Al-Manar | May 9, 2026

Iran dismissed on Saturday allegations it deliberately discharged crude into the Gulf and instead blamed a foreign tanker for the pollution near the Kharg Island.

Jafar Pourkabgani, a member of Iran’s parliament representing Bushehr, said claims that Iran dumped excess oil due to full storage tanks are “completely unfounded” and part of “psychological warfare.”

In a post on X, he attributed the slicks detected by satellite imagery to oil and ballast water released by a European tanker, describing the incident as a source of significant environmental damage.

Satellite analysis cited by The New York Times indicates the spill has spread over more than 20 square miles (52 square kilometers), making it one of the largest observed in the Gulf in recent months. UK-based monitoring firm Orbital EOS said the scale of the slick is notable amid heightened regional tensions following the Israeli-American aggression on Iran on February 28.

For its part, the Conflict and Environment Observatory noted that the origin of the spill is still unclear, warning that it is drifting southward and may not be effectively contained.

The incident has drawn attention due to its proximity to Kharg Island, the backbone of Iran’s oil industry, through which roughly 90 percent of the country’s crude exports pass. Located north of the Strait of Hormuz, the island is a critical artery for global energy supplies, amplifying concerns over both environmental risks and potential disruptions to oil markets.

May 9, 2026 Posted by | Environmentalism | | Comments Off on Iran Blames European Tanker for Oil Slick Near Kharg