“Busification” is a well-understood term in Ukraine and refers to the process in which young men are detained against their will, often involving a violent struggle, and bundled into a vehicle — often a minibus — for onward transit to an army recruitment center.
Until recently, Ukraine’s army recruiters picked easy targets. Yet, on October 26, the British Sun newspaper’s defense editor, Jerome Starkey, wrote a harrowing report about a recent trip to the front line in Ukraine, during which he claimed his Ukrainian colleague was “forcibly press-ganged into his country’s armed services.”
This case was striking for two reasons; first, that the forced mobilization of troops is rarely reported by Western mainstream media outlets. And second, that unlike most forced conscriptions, this event took place following the alleged commandeering of the Western journalists’ vehicle by three armed men, who insisted they drive to a recruitment center.
There, Starkey reported, “I saw at least [a] dozen glum men — mostly in their 40s and 50s — clutching sheafs of papers. They were called in and out of side rooms for rubber-stamp medicals to prove they were fit to fight.”
The process has drawn criticism after high-profile incidents where men have died even before they donned military uniforms. On October 23, Ukrainian Roman Sopin died from heavy blunt trauma to the head after he had been forcibly recruited. Ukrainian authorities claim that he fell, but his family is taking legal action. In August, a conscripted man, 36, died suddenly at a recruitment center in Rivne, although the authorities claim he died of natural causes. In June, 45-year-old Ukrainian-Hungarian Jozsef Sebestyen died after he was beaten with iron bars following his forced conscription; the Ukrainian military denies this version of events. In August, a conscript died from injuries sustained after he jumped out of a moving vehicle that was transporting him to the recruitment center.
Look online and you’ll find a trove of thousands of incidents, with most of them filmed this year alone. You can find videos of a recruitment officer chasing a man and shooting at him, a man being choked to death on the street with a recruiter’s knee on his neck. Many include family members or friends fighting desperately to prevent their loved one being taken against his will.
If videos of this nature, on this systemic scale, were shared in the United States or the United Kingdom, I believe that members of the public would express serious concerns. Yet the Western media remains largely silent, and I find it difficult to understand why.
In November 2024, Ukraine’s defense minister Rustem Umerov claimed that he would put an end to busification. It is true that Ukraine has been taking steps to modernize its army recruitment and make enlistment more appealing to men under the age of 25. Yet, there is little evidence that those efforts are having the desired effect. And after a year, busification only appears to be getting worse, yet remains widely ignored by the Western press.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War often reports on Russian force mobilization efforts but not on the dark and desperate aspects that lead to busification. You won’t find reports on this in the New York Times, as it conflicts with the narrative that with support from the West, Ukraine can turn the war around. It leans in instead on stories like Ukraine’s points for drone-kills game or the designer who cut the all-black suit that Zelensky now wears. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is softly banging the drum to recruit 18-year-old Ukrainians, despite this being a toxic political issue in Ukraine.
This is because busification is the tip of the iceberg. If the Ukrainians are finding it difficult to encourage young men to join the army voluntarily, then it is proving even harder to make them stay without deserting.
In January 2025, it was reported that around 1,700 troops of the Anna of Kyiv 155th mechanized brigade, trained in France and equipped with French self-propelled howitzers, had gone AWOL — 50 of them while still in France. In June 2024, a Ukrainian deserter was shot dead by a border guard while trying to cross into Moldova.
In the first half of 2025, over 110,000 desertion cases were reported in Ukraine. In 2024, Ukrainian prosecutors initiated over 89,000 proceedings related to desertion and unauthorized abandonment of units, a figure three-and-a-half times greater than in 2023. More than 20% of Ukraine’s one million-strong army have jumped the fence in the past four years, and the numbers are rising all the time.
Desertions appear in part driven by ever-greater shortages of infantry troops at the front line, which means soldiers rarely get rest and recuperation breaks. A lack of sufficient equipment is often blamed. And of course, the widespread and rising desertion rates from Ukraine’s armed forces only seem to provoke more violent recruitment practices and then civilian protests. On October 30 in Odessa, a group of demonstrators against a man’s forced detention overturned the recruitment minibus.
The growth of busification and rising desertions also track with a growth in support among ordinary Ukrainians for the war to end. Support for a negotiated end to the war has risen from 27% in 2023 to 69% in 2025. Likewise, support for Ukraine to “keep fighting until it wins the war” — a wholly deluded proposition — has dropped from 63% to 24% over the same period, according to Gallup poll results.
President Zelensky often claims that Ukraine’s military predicament is linked to a lack of guns, not a lack of people. Hoping to secure Western support to fight on for another 2-3 years, he’s quiet on whether he will have the troops or the political support to do so. For now, the message seems to be, “Don’t mention the press-gangs, in-detention killings, deserters and waning public support: just give me more money.”
A recent article in The Guardian, “Change course now: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head,” claims that the planet is in grave danger of passing climate “tipping points,” as it is now inevitable that 1.5°C warming will be breached. Although 1.5℃ of warming may be locked in if not already surpassed, the claim that it signifies a dangerous milestone is false. Not only is the tipping points narrative bunk, but there is no evidence that 1.5°C warming is any particular threat. The purported temperature threshhold was chosen arbitrarily and for political reasons rather than scientific ones.
The Guardian’s story focuses on comments made by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, who in advance of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, warned that it is “inevitable” that 1.5°C of warming will be breached, and it will result in “devastating consequences” for the planet. The Guardian says Guterres “urged the leaders who will gather in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém to realize that the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger of passing catastrophic “tipping points” in the Amazon, the Arctic, and the oceans.”
There is no scientific basis for any so-called tipping points, and claiming otherwise is just fearmongering for political gain.
Beginning with the Amazon rainforest, the location of the next climate summit in November, Guterres reportedly warned that it could become a “savannah,” or a dry grassland. There is no evidence for this absurd claim. Like Guterres’ previous “boiling oceans” comment, it is purely fanciful hyperbole lacking any basis in fact. Guterres is referencing a period of drought suffered by parts of the Amazon basin in recent years, but that drought has not been historically unusual, and the recent localized areas of drought have not been more severe than previous drought periods. As discussed in the Climate Realism post “Media Outlets Continue Spreading False Amazon “Record Drought” Claims,” the Amazon has experienced periods of heavy rain and extended drought in the past that were worse than those we see now. Historic records do not show any worsening of drought in the Amazon. The threat that impacts tree cover is deforestation and clear cutting, not climate change.
The Arctic is also not approaching any dangerous tipping point. Should warming continue, ice extent will likely shrink, but it has not been happening at nearly as fast a rate as alarmists claim. Arctic sea ice extent has been stable since about 2010, indicating a new ice extent regime, and there is no telling how long that will last. If the past is any guide, sea ice might begin expanding again, as it has waxed and waned historically.
Finally, the ocean tipping point Guterres is referring to is the claim that coral reefs will die out as a result of ocean pH changes and higher temperatures, but again, science and paleo-history shows that corals are resilient to changes that are much more extreme than the modest warming of recent decades. As discussed repeatedly at Climate Realism, the world’s oceans are not at risk of becoming acidic and coral reefs are expanding their range and setting records for growth.
It is true that the “1.5°C threshold” is likely to be passed. But that does not mean anything, certainly nothing catastrophic. The 1.5°C warming limit was already passed in 2024 because of the El Niño conditions—with no cataclysm. This should not be of concern to anyone, because that limit is not a scientifically established value. The Guardian fearmongered about it in the past, which Climate Realism addressed here, and seems to have learned nothing. The 1.5°C number was arbitrary; established by an 11 member German political advisory board containing only one meteorologist. It is not a hard scientific threshold the way the boiling point of water is, though alarmists inappropriately treat it that way.
Guterres’ comments are not based on science, data, or even history. He is simply attempting to worry the public, with The Guardian’s complicity, in order to gain political leverage for negotiations at COP 30 even as a growing number of countries are downplaying climate concerns in the realistic assessment that other issues are more pressing and fossil fuels, for now, remain vital to prosperity.
While western commentators ease their audience into a new reality – the eastern strategic town of Pokrovsk is about to fall into Russian hands – it’s interesting to see how they carefully backpedal and twist every morsel of information. It’s as though all of the information that was prepared and delivered to them is so out of touch with reality, that all is left now is to downplay the imminent Russian victory as hollow and meaningless.
It’s certainly true that a victory for Russian forces now in Pokrovsk is less strategic than it was a few months ago, but to write it off as insignificant is just one more lie that western media and commentators are guilty of delivering.
The analysis and reporting about Pokrovsk has to be deciphered, but when British journalists like Sam Kiley, who are there on the ground, talk about the victory cry from pro-Russian media as being “premature” it’s worth noting that nearly all such journalists have crossed the line of journalism for the preferred role of commentator. Kiley’s piece in the Independent is so peppered with the conditional tense that it has little or no credibility. And like all British hacks, he is cleverly removing the sweet taste of victory out of Putin’s mouth by going into the zone of spouting irrefutable so called “facts” which are naturally impossible to disprove. The main one, which gives you an indication that he also believes Pokrovsk is close to falling, is that he mentions that the gains the Russians made came through so many dead soldiers. This ol’ chestnut is repeated over and over again as British readers like to believe it’s true. Is it true? Has Russia lost a disproportionate number of soldiers on the battlefield? We will never know, so how in God’s name does Kiley?
Irrefutable claims, written as fact, are part and parcel of British reporting on the Ukraine war. Kiley might be comforted by the sensationally bad Times Radio which takes this dark art to a new level. Philip Ingram’s podcast with his friend former British Army Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is a shining example of what one ex-spook and one former colonel in the British army can do with MOD disinformation. Their podcast is so bad and bigoted, it leaves you wondering whether to laugh or cry as they both start off with the absurd argument that most of the reporting from Pokrovsk is Russian social media channels which exaggerate the scale of Russian gains and so, according to the hapless Bretton-Gordon, shouldn’t be taken seriously – before he blathers that if Russia were to take the town, it would take four years for them to do it.
He then goes on to conclude that not much is happening on the ground and that things are “opaque”. Ingram then chimes in to tone down the significance of the town, when it falls, but claims that the Ukrainians have had a success there, given what they both agree are causalities on the Russian side of a 1000 losses a day. Yet both of these numpties are reading from MOD/Mi6 data which only underlines the point that disinformation even for ex-soldiers having a go at podcasts is alive and well. While it is disturbing that Bretton-Gordon is so reliant on such data it is also off putting that he can’t even pronounce the name of the town itself correctly. Where does Times Radio find such amateurs?
For American media, even those who support Biden, the defeat of Pokrovsk is nigh and the narrative they offer contradicts the two podcasters outright. Perhaps if Times Radio Laurel and Hardy act were to actually do the legwork and interview people who are on the ground, even if it’s only the Ukrainians, their banta might have a slither of credibility about it and not leave the viewer cringing at how awful it is.
“The situation is difficult, with all types of fighting going on, firefights in urban areas, and shelling with all types of weapons,” one battalion commander told CNN, speaking on the condition of anonymity for security reasons.
“We are almost surrounded, but we are used to it,” he said. Another soldier, who also asked for his name to be withheld for safety reasons, told CNN the Russian military continues to press forward with large numbers of men.
“The intensity of their movements is so great that (Ukrainian) drone operators simply cannot keep up with the pace. The Russians often move in groups of three, counting on the fact that two will be destroyed, but one will still reach the city and gain a foothold there. About a hundred such groups can pass through in a day,” a soldier from the Ukrainian Peaky Blinders drone unit told CNN.
And so, the reporting on the British side lacks all credibility. And like all bad journalists, or pseudo journalists, the Times Radio also like to practice the deft art of omission. How did it simply pass these two that there are plenty of Ukrainian soldiers who will tell them that their MI6 taking points are BS and that it’s a shitstorm in Pokrovsk with Ukrainian losses also high? Would that not have scored them the propaganda points they crave?
In the UK, the reporting about Ukraine is so biased and manipulated by MI6/MOD disinfo that it is practically a Hollywood movie which the press is asking a gullible public to believe. Could this possibly be responsible for broad support for the war? Is a disinformation campaign actually driving the political dynamic, just as it did so many times before, not dissimilar to how many people in 2003 were happy that Tony Blair sent troops to Iraq, based on similar reports?
There is much of significance happening in Ukraine right now that is being reported either lightly or not at all by the mainstream Western media in an apparent attempt to harmonize their reporting with Kiev’s narrative in order to keep hopes high and economic and military support flowing.
Though the mainstream media has begun to report on the Russian encirclement of the Donetsk city of Pokrovsk, it is failing to report on how dire and how ominous the situation is. The reporting suggests that the battlefield situation is being stabilized, that the Russian losses are enormous, and that the loss of Pokrovsk would be strategically insignificant. None of those claims are true.
Russia’s chief of staff, General Valery Gerasimov, reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the Russian armed forces are “advancing along converging axes” and “have completed the encirclement of the enemy” in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad.” His Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksandr Syrskii, said the report does “not correspond to reality.” Ukrainian officials “insist,” The New York Timesreports, “that special units are clearing Russians out of the city.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky boasted that “in Pokrovsk, we continue to destroy the occupier.”
Though the Ukrainian armed forces may have temporarily pushed the Russian forces partially back, the Russian forces have retaken a large part of Pokrovsk and now control about 80% of it. The pincers that are steadily closing around Pokrovsk are now just a kilometer apart, a gap that is difficult and dangerous for Ukraine’s best paratroopers to escape through. Though Ukraine continues to deny the encroaching encirclement, admitting only that the situation is “difficult,” the narrative won’t change the reality on the battlefield. Ukraine’s Euromaidan Presssays that Pokrovsk now “risks becoming a graveyard for Ukraine’s finest.” The Kyiv Independentassesses that “saving the city from falling in the short term looks to be a daunting, and likely impossible task.”
The Western media also reports that Russia’s gains are coming at a greater loss. The Times reports that “Russia’s incremental advances have come at an immense cost. While Ukraine wants to hold on to Pokrovsk, military commanders argue that the large losses it is inflicting on the Kremlin’s troops there will hurt the Russian war effort more broadly.”
But the Times exaggerates Russia’s losses in the war more broadly by at least three times and shrinks Ukraine’s losses by the same amount. As far as Pokrovsk goes, analysts have noted that the attrition of Ukraine’s forces in the war have led to a situation in Pokrovsk where Russia’s forces are taking the fortified city without huge losses in troops or equipment.
And, according to the Times, “the military significance of losing Pokrovsk may be relatively small for Ukraine.” But the loss of Pokrovsk means not only the loss of a critical strategic hub for supplying Ukrainian forces in the east, but also the possible loss of control of Ukraine’s defensive line of linked fortification in Donetsk.
Perhaps even more lacking in Western reporting of the battlefield is that a number of military analysts have pointed out that singular focus on Pokrovsk misses the larger picture that that the Russian armed forces have entered or partially encircled several cities in Donetsk, threatening a larger encirclement of the area, and that for the first year in the war, the Ukrainian armed forces have been unable to launch any kind of offensive in 2025. Those two battlefield realities combine to create a larger context that is more ominous still. It suggests that Russia’s war of attrition has depleted Ukrainian troops to the point that they are no longer able to attack Russia or to defend themselves.
Ukraine’s desperate situation on the battlefield has led to two more underreported events. The first was the simultaneous explosions at oil refineries in Hungary and Romania. The fact that both refineries process Russian crude oil and that Ukraine and Europe seem to have shifted their strategy from defeating Russia on the battlefield to cutting off Russia’s oil revenue to drive them to the negotiating table, have led to speculation that Ukraine was behind the two acts of sabotage.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said recently that the explosion at Hungary’s oil refinery could have been caused by an “external attack.” The external actor is unlikely to be Russia. They lack the motivation to sabotage their own customers at a time when U.S. sanctions are attempting to strangle its exports of oil. That seems to leave, as a consensus among analysts suggests, Ukraine or its partners. Ukraine has offered no comment on the explosions, and the silence of the Western media adds to the suspicion. It is alarming that the mainstream media has not a word to say about seemingly coordinated attacks on two European countries that could have enormous consequences in the post Ukraine war world.
Ukraine’s desperation has also led to an underreported crisis at home. Ukraine is losing troops, not only to Russian attacks on the battlefield, but to desertion. As part of the solution, Ukraine has turned to forced mobilization in which men are abducted, often aggressively, against their will and bussed off to recruitment centers. From there, they find themselves on the battlefield with very little training.
Once on the front, troops have deserted in the thousands. Though little reported in the mainstream media, in the first months of 2025 alone, more than 110,000 Ukrainian soldiers deserted. As many as 20% of Ukraine’s armed forces have deserted. Since the war began, the number of desertions may be as high as 200,000, and it is getting worse by the month.
The Western media seems to be complicit in harmonizing with Kiev’s misleading message in order to keep Western morale up and Western arms flowing. But, though the narrative may be strong enough to mislead a public that trusts its newspapers, it will not be strong enough to alter reality. Ukraine is turning to more desperate measures in an attempt to address a dire situation on the battlefield in which they no longer have the manpower to go on the offensive nor to defend themselves and in which troops are deserting as fast as they are being killed.
On Monday, November 3, a group of Israeli soldiers stood outside the Supreme Court in West Jerusalem wearing black masks. They weren’t there to apologize; they were there to defend themselves.
The soldiers, accused of torturing and raping a Palestinian detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman prison, demanded “gratitude” for their actions.
“Instead of appreciation, we received accusations,” one said defiantly. Israeli media covered the scene while Western outlets mostly ignored it.
The same soldiers are part of a criminal case that Israeli prosecutors reluctantly opened in 2024 after video evidence surfaced showing Palestinian detainees stripped, beaten, and sexually assaulted at Sde Teiman.
One Palestinian man was hospitalized with seven broken ribs and a rectal tear, injuries consistent with violent sexual abuse.
The Times of Israelreported the indictment of five reservists for “severe abuse,” while other sources cited evidence of sodomy inside the facility.
Yet, in Western coverage, the word rape almost never appeared. Headlines spoke of “abuse” or “mistreatment,” as though sexual torture were a matter of workplace misconduct.
Contrast this silence with the wall-to-wall coverage of October 7, when Israel accused Hamas fighters of “mass rape.” Those claims, still unproven, became the moral foundation of Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Gaza.
In his latest interview with American journalist Candace Owens, political scientist Norman Finkelstein called the Israeli allegations “genocidal atrocity propaganda.”
After examining more than 5,000 photographs and fifty hours of footage from that day, Finkelstein said he found “not a single shred of evidence of even one rape.” Yet those unverified stories, repeated endlessly by Western outlets, were enough to cast an entire population as subhuman and to legitimize the killing of more than 68,000 Palestinians.
In December 2023, the New York Times published a sprawling investigation titled “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”
The article claimed Hamas fighters had systematically raped Israeli women during the attack. Its pages were filled with graphic descriptions and lurid imagery. The story relied on anonymous witnesses, unverified videos, and second-hand testimony, yet it was presented as conclusive evidence of mass rape.
Within days, it shaped international discourse. Then US President Joe Biden, European leaders, and prominent feminists invoked the Times’ story to condemn Hamas and morally justify Israel’s “retaliation”.
But when journalists and scholars began checking the evidence, the story fell apart. Forensic experts found no physical proof of rape. Several of the supposed witnesses cited by the Times contradicted one another or were later discredited.
In April 2024, more than 50 journalism professors sent a public letter demanding an independent review of the article’s sourcing and editorial process. The Washington Postreported internal dissent within the Times newsroom itself, where reporters said the piece had been “rushed” to meet political expectations.
Meanwhile, the Sde Teiman scandal, an Israeli atrocity supported by video evidence, medical reports, and judicial proceedings, has never received a fraction of the attention that the Times story did. This imbalance is not merely linguistic. It is structural, reflecting the hierarchy of human worth built into Western coverage of the war.
This is how “atrocity propaganda” works. It does not require lies to function, only selective truth. By repeating unverified claims of Hamas rape while downplaying verified Israeli sexual crimes, Western media transformed journalism into a weapon of war.
Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation.
Multiple mainstream media outlets published stories this week uncritically publicizing the claims of a climate change interest group, Climate Central (CC). According to CC, climate change has caused higher weather disaster costs in the United States this year than ever in history – or at least since 1980, which is as far as the records CC uses go back. These claims are false. While the costs of extreme weather events and wildfires were high in early 2025, there are no trends that indicate climate change is responsible. Rather, higher populations, increased development in disaster prone areas, poor water management, and human evil in the form of arson, were the cause of the abnormally high disaster costs.
The tenor of The Guardian, NBC, and other outlets covering CC’s disaster cost report was nearly universal. Climate change resulted in worse weather disasters and higher costs in early 2025 than ever before, a fact that would have been missed absent CC’s work since President Donald Trump cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program, which has previously monitored such costs.
Per The Guardian :
The first half of 2025 was the costliest on record for major disasters in the US, driven by huge wildfires in Los Angeles and storms that battered much of the rest of the country, according to a climate non-profit that has resurrected work axed by Donald Trump’s administration that tracked the biggest disasters.
In the first six months of this year, 14 separate weather-related disasters that each caused at least $1bn in damage hit the US, the Climate Central group has calculated. In total, these events cost $101bn in damages – lost homes, businesses, highways and other infrastructure – a toll higher than any other first half of a year since records on this began in 1980.
As NBC News wrote:
The first half of this year was the costliest ever recorded for weather and climate disasters in the United States, according to an analysis published Wednesday by the nonprofit organization Climate Central.
It is information that the public might never have learned: This spring, the Trump administration cut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program that had tracked weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damage. The researcher who led that work, Adam Smith, left NOAA over the decision.
To be clear, Climate Central is not an objective authority on the causes and consequences of climate change, or a neutral party regarding proposed solutions. Rather, it was created and exists solely to produce and promote material blaming human activities for causing climate change resulting in catastrophic consequences that threaten human life, and to promote government enforced solutions that limit fossil fuel use.
Leaving aside the motives of the organization that produced the report, the news coverage of the report was inaccurate from the start. The stories ignore the history of natural disasters in the regions that have been impacted this year, the demographic changes that have resulted in the higher costs, and, most importantly, the lack of any long-term discernable changes in weather patterns and the incidences and severity of extreme weather events for the areas affected.
Looking at where the disasters occurred in the first half of this year, from CC’s own tracking we find the weather events were tornadoes that occurred during typical tornado season stretching from Texas through the plains to the upper mid-west. This area of the country is commonly referred to as “tornado alley” because such events are so common there during the spring and early summer. So, nothing unusual there. What critically undermines the CC report and the media’s suggestion that the rising cost of tornadoes is due to climate change is the fact, as explored in Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, that neither the number, frequency, nor severity of tornadoes has increased as the Earth has slightly warmed.
Other events include flooding in areas of the country historically known for spring flooding as a result of snowmelt and severe spring snowstorms – many of the areas are popular riverfront towns or communities. Climate Realism has repeatedly debunked media claims that flooding is getting worse – data show it isn’t. If flooding is not becoming more frequent or severe, climate change can’t be causing higher costs related to flooding.
Finally, more than 60 percent of the $101 billion disaster costs that CC says resulted from climate change altered weather events are attributable to just a single event: the January 2025 wildfires that decimated a large swath of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles fires were horrific, of a kind not experienced there in recent history, but not unusual historically. The huge damage was a result of a combination of factors, good seasonal rainfall in recent years creating lush natural growth combined with and regular lawn and tree watering in wealthy enclaves, followed by a severe drought, creating conditions for a wildfire, and strong Santa Anna winds to drive a fire quickly across the landscape once started (once again a natural feature of the area). With these conditions, all that was needed was a spark, which a perverse arsonist provided. Once the fire started, winds drove it quickly across a tinder dry landscape and firefighters found a shortage of water in reservoirs as a result of political decisions made by the state government.
Los Angeles is not warmer than is was in the 1950s and precipitation has actually increased slightly in the region since 1895. Despite climate alarmists and advantage seeking, virtue signaling Democratic politicians attempting to blame climate change for the fire and its severity, the evidence indicates it had nothing to do with it.
If climate conditions haven’t change appreciably across the United States, in the sense that the more extreme weather patterns are emerging, the question is, why have costs related to weather disasters gone up so much in nominal dollars? Keep in mind that in inflation adjusted dollars as a percentage of GDP, the costs of natural disasters have fallen over time. (see the figure, below)
As should be obvious to any honest observer exercising the least bit of common sense, the reason for rising disaster costs is clear, the expanding bullseye effect. As Climate Realism has explored in dozens of articles previously, with more people moving into ecologically/climatically desirable locations, locations prone to natural disasters, erecting more homes, businesses, and related structures and infrastructure, property has gone up dramatically in value overtime. When a disaster like a wildfire (in this case an arson started wildfire) strikes, more people and property is impacted and related costs are higher. Climate Realism discussed this very point in articles linked, here, here, and here, to take but a few examples. Quite simply, when a hurricane hits Miami or Galveston now, there are more buildings and structures to destroy at those locations than there was 100 years ago.
One can acknowledge that CC is right, natural disasters are imposing higher costs in nominal dollars now than they did in the past, without jumping to the completely unfounded claim that climate change is the cause. Legitimate journalists and honest news outlets, as NBC News and The Guardian purport to be, should check their facts before parroting the false rantings of a climate lobbing group as the truth. Misleading, false alarm stories like these are perhaps why trust in the media is low and falling.
It’s that time of the great proxy war crusade against Russia again. Someone in the mainstream West has woken up to, if not the facts about the politics of Ukraine, then at least a quantum of disquiet.
The last major wave of the likes of the Financial Times, The Economist, and the Spectator suddenly noticing – all at the same time, as if on cue – that Ukraine has an authoritarianism and corruption problem (and then some) took place less than half a year ago.
Now it’s Politico – usually a steadfast party organ of Russophobia, Zionism-come-what-genocide-may, and servility to NATO – that feels vaguely troubled by the realities of the Kiev regime or, as the publication puts it, the “dark side” of Vladimir “I don’t like elections” Zelensky’s rule.
Not all of those realities, of course. That would be asking too much. Instead, Politico is homing in on one great scandal (out of countless ones) concerning one man and the anguish of a few “civil-society”-NGO types, both with good connections to the West. This time, the scandal concerns the obvious, shameless political prosecution of Vladimir Kudritsky, formerly a high-ranking and effective energy infrastructure executive and de facto civil servant.
Yet what about noticing the murder in Ukrainian detention of critical blogger – and US citizen – Gonzalo Lira? Or the vicious persecution of leftist war critic Bogdan Syrotiuk? Or the mean, indecent harassing of Christian clergy and believers for not saying their prayers in quite the right Ukrainian-nationalist-approved manner? Perish the thought!
In a similar spirit of extreme selectiveness, some Western outlets are now registering – a little and very slowly – the brutal realities of Ukrainian forced mobilization that feed the Western proxy war: Recently, a war – pardon, “defense” – editor of the ultra-gung-ho British tabloid The Sun has returned shell-shocked from NATO’s de facto eastern front, not because of the bloody and wasteful fighting but because the uncouth Ukrainians press-ganged his fixer.
In a similarly traumatic experience, Hollywood’s Angelina Jolie had her local driver snatched away at a Ukrainian military roadblock. Yet violent forced mobilization has been an everyday occurrence in Ukraine for years already. So much so that Ukrainians have chosen the term “busification” (from minibus, a popular vehicle for mobilization manhunts) as word of the year for 2025.
For quite a few of its victims, it ends up even worse than for those privileged enough to work for Western movie stars and British propagandists. Roman Sopin, for instance, who did not even resist, has just been beaten to death in a mobilization precinct in central Kiev, as an official medical assessment of his cause of death implies as clearly as anyone may dare under Zelensky’s regime.
But let’s get back to the few things Western media deign to notice occasionally: Already dismissed last year, Kudritsky is now facing the courts under transparently trumped-up charges. The reason is obvious to everyone. He has been too popular and far too vocal about corruption at the highest levels and the authoritarian power grabs of Zelensky’s presidential office in particular.
Kudritsky’s case – comparatively harmless, really – does raise many disturbing questions: why is it that the Zelensky regime has such a nasty record of abusing arbitrary financial sanctions and politically perverted legal processes, or lawfare? And haven’t we been told that this regime under its “Churchillian” leader is fighting for Western values of democracy and legality?
Are Zelensky, his sinister fixer-in-chief Andrey Yermak and their team preparing the ground for elections after a possible end of the war – that is, after losing it – by preemptively crippling domestic critics and rivals? Does this mean Zelensky, Ukraine’s most catastrophic leader since independence in 1991 (and that’s a high bar) is seriously considering not slinking away into exile but imposing himself even longer on his unfortunate country?
Or is all of this part of decimating whatever is left of Ukraine’s mangled society to continue the meatgrinder war for as long as the NATO-EU Europeans are willing to pay? If things go the way the bloodthirsty fantasists at The Economist want, then the West will shell out another cool $390 billion over the next four years. Apparently, they believe that waves of forced conscription in Ukraine will provide the human cannon fodder to go along with the Western funding.
Yet if Zelensky’s fresh authoritarian moves are really aiming at preparing for a postwar election next year, then that is a terrible sign, too. It would indicate not only that he is planning to damage Ukraine even further by his presence, but also that those postwar elections will be anything but fair and equal. In other words, in that scenario, Zelensky will try to stay around, and so will the authoritarian regime he has built.
To be fair to Zelensky, his authoritarianism has never been a response to the war, as his Western fans still believe, even when they are finally deigning to notice a little of his “dark side.” Zelensky was building an authoritarian regime – widely known and criticized in Ukraine back then already as “mono-vlada” – long before the escalation of February 2022.
Zelensky is not a benevolent leader who has been forced to adopt dictatorial habits by an emergency. In reality, if anything, he has exploited the emergency for all it was worth to indulge his lust for unlimited power and extreme corruption. So, trying to take his misrule into the postwar period is at least not inconsistent: it has never been tied to wartime.
But behind all of this, there is one great irony and one bigger question: The question is simple. If Politico really believes that going after Kudritsky with lawfare and frustrating the “civil-society”-NGO crowd is “the dark side” of Zelensky’s rule, what, if we may ask, is the bright side supposed to be?
Indeed, where is the better side of real-existing Zelensky-ism? Is it the humungous corruption? The Bakhmut-style military fiascos, the Kursk Kamikaze incursion, and now Pokrovsk? The fact that the media have been mercilessly streamlined? The raging nepotism that makes sure that the poor fight and the sons and daughters of Ukraine’s gangsterish “elite” go on holidays and party? The personality cult?
Or is it – and this brings us to the great irony – that Zelensky-Ukraine is allegedly in sync with “Western values”? And do you know what? It really is! But not the way that the propagandists of both Ukraine and the NATO-EU West want us to believe. What the Zelensky regime and its supporters in the EU really have in common is that neither care about either democracy or the rule of law.
Zelensky going after critics with individual financial sanctions to evade normal legal procedures and leave his victims not even a slim chance to defend themselves, for instance? That is exactly what Germany and the EU are now doing to the journalist Hüseyin Dogru, and not only to him. Zelensky using a perverted reading of the law to harass whoever does not submit or is a political danger to him? Bingo again. That as well is now EU practice, too. Ask, for instance, Marine Le Pen in France. Finally, widespread abuse of political office for self-enrichment and influence peddling? Bingo again: Less than a month ago, the Financial Times ran a detailed article on “scores” of EU parliament members who “earn income from second jobs in areas that overlap with their lawmaking,” raising “questions about disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.” How delicately put. And it sounds just like Ukraine’s Rada.
Here’s the real news: The “dark side” of Zelensky’s rule is all of Zelensky’s rule. And it is also what has become the new normal in an increasingly authoritarian and corrupt EU. Who has learned from whom? Kiev from NATO-EU Europe or vice versa? Either way, this is not a bug but a feature. And it must stop. Everywhere.
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.
A leading British “PR consultancy” working for the Israeli regime’s top arms producer has been found culpable of fabricating and planting a false media narrative linking Palestine Action to Iran, in what appears to be a coordinated effort to justify the group’s eventual proscription.
According to British news magazine Private Eye, a “trusted witness” said Georgia Pickering, head of the London-based PR firm CMS Strategic, which represents Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, boasted about planting a story in The Times alleging that the Islamic Republic was bankrolling the direct-action network.
The story appeared just days before the UK government moved to outlaw Palestine Action under its “terrorism” legislation in July.
The fabricated report, which claimed that the Home Office was probing Tehran’s alleged financial ties to the group, was later recycled by The Daily Mail and the GB News channel, amplifying suspicions and pressure against the movement.
However, when Private Eye reached out to the Home Office, officials said they did not recognize the claims, effectively disowning the narrative that had dominated headlines.
A spokesperson for Palestine Action dismissed the entire affair as “baseless” and “ridiculous”, while CMS Strategic publicly denied involvement in the article, despite Pickering’s private admission.
Further revelations highlighted that the smear campaign did not emerge in isolation.
Just two days before the story broke, the pro-Israeli lobby group We Believe in Israel claimed on social media that Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) was the “darker puppeteer” behind Palestine Action, despite offering no proof beyond vague references to “similar slogans.”
In the months leading up to the group’s ban, the same lobby orchestrated a “multi-front” campaign pushing for Palestine Action’s proscription, issuing two reports whose language was later echoed almost verbatim by Yvette Cooper, the then–home secretary, in her official statement outlawing the movement.
For years, Palestine Action has led a relentless grassroots campaign against Elbit Systems, targeting its factories and offices for producing weapons used by the Israeli regime in its assaults on Palestinians, including its war of genocide on the Gaza Strip that began in October 2023.
A recent article in The Hill, “Climate change is not a ‘con job’,” claims that catastrophic, human-caused climate change is killing reefs via ocean heatwaves. This claim is false. In reality, corals have existed for millions of years, through warmer and colder periods, and in the recent past, coral reefs have recovered from bleaching events and even die-offs, proving to species to be adaptive and resilient in the face of climate change.
The Hill article, from Rebecca Vega Thurber, the director of the UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute, is framed by Thurber’s annoyance that President Donald Trump says climate change is a “con job.” She claims her personal research experience refutes his comment.
Thurber explains that pollution from fertilizer runoff can kill corals, which is true, but goes on to assert that “every result we have collected, in every one of these well intentioned and carefully designed experiments, was waylaid by the increasingly frequent and severe heat waves that have arisen in the last decades.” She says their efforts to mitigate pollution were “overwhelmed by high water temperatures driven by climate change or worse, climate change killed our whole experiment.”
Thurber claims marine heatwaves in the French South Pacific hampered her work by “transform[ing] these normally bountiful reefs from habitats where there was once 60 percent of the seafloor covered with healthy corals to barren plains with less than 1 percent live coral.”
In point of fact, one long-term study from 2019 showed that rather than a “barren plain” French Polynesian reefs have an “outstanding rate of coral recovery, with a systematic return to pre-disturbance state within only 5 to 10 years.”
A second study from 2024, published in Nature, sought to understand why reefs bounced back so readily after major heat waves, concluding that:
Over the past three decades, there have been five main warming events that have caused mass bleaching around Moorea and Tahiti, in 1994, 2002, 2007, 2016, and 2019. Despite bleaching levels up to 100% for some coral species, reefs experienced as high as ~76% recovery following each event. […]
It is currently unknown what controls the ability of coral coverage to recover quickly at these locations. It has been suggested that reefs may develop an increased tolerance to higher SSTs following each bleaching event, and that the increased resilience would allow for a shorter recovery period with less die-off under subsequent SST extremes.
In short, the scientific literature does not support Thurber’s contention in The Hill that coral reefs are dying off in vast numbers. Interestingly, just a few years ago The Hillpublished an article with a different tone, discussing the fact that coral reefs were thriving “despite warming seas,” but the outlet seems to have forgotten this.
What Thurber and The Hill also neglected to mention was that recent mass die offs did not just coincide with heatwaves alone. Rather a spate of tropical cyclones and crown of thorns starfish outbreaks occurred over the same period resulting in multiple coral colony declines. Multiple stressors are harder on a species than any of those dangers would be alone.
Thurber mentions that Australian reefs are another part of her area of research, but she does not mention that 2024 was the third year in a row where the Great Barrier Reef had record breaking coral coverage.
Unfortunately, close study of reef die backs barely existed in the early parts of the 20th century and before, so short term records like single-event tied die-offs do not stretch into the pre-industrial period for comparison. As a result it is all too easy for alarmists to assert, for example, that marine heatwaves are unprecedented when there are only a few decades of satellite data to work from. Longer term studies, and a knowledge of how coral reefs around the world are built over time, show, in fact, that coral death is part of the reef construction process.
Coral reefs have survived much hotter periods than today, like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum which was 5-8°C hotter, as well as much colder glacial periods. One reason for this is that coral organisms are not immobile. Even if particular regions became too hot, which is highly unlikely in our lifetimes, corals could just migrate poleward, as research suggests they did in the past. Change like that might be uncomfortable for narrowly-focused researchers, but it is part of the Earth’s history.
The Hill did a disservice to its readers by publishing this article which served no other purpose than to frighten readers into ignoring Trump’s important point, that bad actors (particularly at the United Nations, where he made the comments) are using climate alarm to promote harmful leftist-favoring policies and enrich themselves. I am sure that Thurber is a “true believer” in the catastrophic warming narrative, but it does not help her case when essential facts are left out of the argument and when the multiple sources of data that do exist contradict her claims.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is misleading the public about a drone threat allegedly posed by Russia, Sahra Wagenknecht, the leader of the left-wing BSW party, has said. The chancellor did not hesitate to link recent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sightings across Germany to Moscow even though he had no evidence, she told the broadcaster ZDF on Thursday.
According to Wagenknecht, Merz was blowing the issue out of proportion, with the German media unquestioningly adopting his point of view, even though evidence pointed in the other direction.
“Mr. Merz goes on TV… and lies,” she said, adding that the chancellor made his statements after some of the incidents had either been proven to have no connection to Russia or turned out to have never happened at all. “It’s simply a vague suspicion, which has been largely refuted, and then discussed by the chancellor on public television.”
She was referring to the chancellor’s interview with the German broadcaster ARD earlier this month, when he said that “our suspicion is that Russia is behind most of these drone launches” and called the UAVs a “serious threat to our security.”
The interview came just days after the German police said that a drone incident at Frankfurt airport was caused by a local UAV enthusiast. Claims of drone sightings near a military base in northern Germany in early October were also refuted by the Bundeswehr, which stated that “there were no registered drone overflights” in the area, “contrary to the media reports.”
Several drone sightings were reported over critical German infrastructure earlier this month. One such incident led to dozens of canceled flights at Munich airport. The developments prompted some officials, including Merz, to claim the drone flights had been orchestrated by Moscow.
Moscow has repeatedly denied any connection to the incidents. Berlin has “no reasons” to blame Moscow for the recent drone sightings, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in early October, commenting on Merz’s interview with ARD. “Europe is full of politicians who tend to blame Russia for everything,” he said at the time, calling the accusations “baseless.”
On 7 March, Syrian security forces and affiliated armed factions perpetrated the massacre of more than 1,500 Alawite civilians, including many elderly, women, and children, in 58 separate locations on the Syrian coast.
Though the killings were executed by sectarian forces loyal to Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammad al-Julani), a former Al-Qaeda commander, the path to the massacre was paved by a covert Israeli strategy aimed at inciting an Alawite uprising.
Israel’s plan hinged on pushing Alawites into the “trap” of launching an armed rebellion, with false promises of external support, only to give Sharaa’s forces the pretext to carry out the mass slaughter of Alawite civilians in “response.”
Israel’s goal was consistent with its long-standing aim, articulated in the infamous Yinon Plan: to dismantle Syria and reshape it into “weak, decentralized ethnic regions,” following former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s fall.
Netanyahu goes to Washington
After 14 years of sustained support from the US, Israel, and regional allies, the extremist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – formerly the Al-Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front – seized control of Damascus in December 2024. Its leader, Julani, rebranded as Ahmad al-Sharaa, swiftly assumed the presidency.
On the very day of this power shift, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took credit for Assad’s fall and began a mass bombing campaign to destroy what was left of the country’s military capabilities.
However, toppling Syria’s government and destroying its army was not the end of Israel’s plan for Syria.
On 9 January, Netanyahu’s cabinet met to discuss organizing an international conference to “divide Syria into cantons,” Israeli news outlet i24 News reported.
“Any proposal deemed Israeli will be viewed unfavorably in Syria, which necessitates an international conference to advance the matter,” the outlet noted.
In other words, to be successful, Israel’s project to divide Syria needed to originate, or seem to originate, from Syrians themselves.
Less than a month later, on 2 February, Netanyahu visited Washington to present a “white paper” regarding Syria to US officials.
After Netanyahu’s visit, Reutersreported that “Israel is lobbying the United States to keep Syria weak and decentralized, including by letting Russia keep its military bases there to counter Turkey’s influence.”
The Times of Israel later commented that Israel was lobbying the “US to buck Sharaa’s fledgling government in favor of establishing a decentralized series of autonomous ethnic regions, with the southern one bordering Israel being demilitarized.”
Reports later leaked into political circles about a meeting two days later, on 4 February, between US officials and a representative of the most influential Druze religious leader in Syria, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, in Washington, DC.
Al-Jumhuriyareported that according to Syrian and American sources with direct knowledge of the meetings, discussions revolved around “a plan for an armed rebellion against the government of Ahmad al-Sharaa.”
The rebellion would reportedly include Hijri’s Druze forces from Suwayda, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from northeast Syria, and Alawite groups from the Syrian coast, but with “Israeli support.”
When asked about the meeting, Hijri’s representative confirmed to Al-Jumhuriya that it had taken place but stated that the proposal for a rebellion had not come from the Druze.
“The proposal originated from a state, not from any Syrian faction,” Hijri’s representative clarified, in a likely reference to Israel.
Inventing the insurgency: Meqdad Fatiha
Just two days later, on 6 February, an Alawite resistance group, the “Coastal Shield Brigade,” was allegedly formed.
A video announcing the group’s establishment claimed its fighters would respond to sectarian massacres carried out by HTS-led security forces against Alawites since December, including in the village of Fahel, where 15 former officers in the Syrian army were killed, and the village of Arzeh, where 15 people were killed as well, including a child and an elderly woman.
In both villages, former officers in Assad’s army had given up their weapons and completed a reconciliation process with the new authorities in Damascus, but were nevertheless murdered in their homes by militants linked to Syria’s new extremist-led security forces.
The Coastal Shield Brigades was allegedly led by Meqdad Fatiha, a former member of the 25th Special Forces and the Republican Guard of the Assad government.
Activists on social media circulated the video, which allegedly showed Fatiha declaring the establishment of the brigade from a base in the Latakia Mountains.
However, there was no evidence that the group was real. Fatiha’s face was covered by a black balaclava in the video, making it impossible to verify whether he was really the person speaking. This was odd, given that his appearance was already known from his Facebook profile.
The theatrics pointed to an intelligence fabrication – likely Israeli – designed to present the illusion of an organic Alawite insurgency.
A meeting in Najaf?
Just five days later, the narrative of an organized Alawite insurgency was reinforced by reports in Turkiye Gazetesi, an Islamist-leaning pro-government newspaper in Turkiye.
The report claimed that Iranian generals and former commanders in the Syrian army under Assad had met in the Shia holy city of Najaf in Iraq to plan a major uprising against Sharaa in Syria.
The scheme reportedly involved Druze factions, the Kurdish-led SDF, Alawite insurgents on the coast, Lebanese Hezbollah, and, improbably, ISIS.
Large amounts of weapons were allegedly being sent by land from Iraq and by sea from Lebanon to the Syrian coast, the report added.
“Some surprising events were expected to occur in Syria in the near future,” the Iranian generals allegedly in attendance said.
While “surprising events” did occur one month later with the massacre of Alawites on 7 March, the reports of the Najaf meeting are likely fabricated.
It is unlikely that a Turkish newspaper would have access to a detailed account of a secret meeting taking place between top Iranian generals and former Syrian officers.
It is also unlikely, and even ridiculous, that Iran and Hezbollah would be coordinating with their long-time enemy, ISIS, or with the US-backed SDF.
Kurdish-Syrian commentator Samir Matini amplified the narrative through widely viewed livestreams, pushing the idea of “surprising events” to come. The aim: to pin Israel’s plan on Iran and Hezbollah and create a smokescreen of chaos.
Sectarian killings fuel resistance
Amid the propaganda claiming a foreign-backed Alawite insurgency was being organized, Julani’s security forces stepped up attacks against Alawite civilians in the coastal region.
Syrian journalist Ammar Dayoub reported in Al-Araby al-Jadeed that Alawites were often targeted solely based on their religious identity, rather than because they were “remnants of the regime.”
Dayoub observed that “these violations have targeted people who opposed the previous regime, and young people who were only children in that period, as well as academics and women.”
In response to the sectarian killings, Alawites began to defend themselves.
One key event occurred on 8 January, when armed men linked to the Damascus government killed three Alawite farmers in the village of Ain al-Sharqiyah in the coastal region of Jableh. The men were working their lands across from the Brigade 107 base when they were killed.
In response, a local man named Bassam Hossam al-Din gathered a group of local men, arming them with light weapons. They attacked members of Julani’s internal security forces, known as General Security, killing one and abducting seven more, before barricading themselves in an Alawite religious shrine.
The General Security launched a campaign against them, swiftly killing Hossam al-Din and his group.
A former intelligence officer of the Assad government, speaking with The Cradle, says these killings motivated him and others to fight back:
“All this fueled enormous resentment in the area, which grew worse day by day. After Bassam Hossam al-Din’s death, some people here – including former government military personnel and civilians – began to gather.”
Crucially, they were “encouraged by reports and promises [of help] they received from outside.”
They were told they would receive support, including by sea, from the US-led international coalition, in coordination with the Druze in Suwayda and Kurds in northeastern Syria.
“They were given hope of escaping this miserable situation,” the former intelligence officer tells The Cradle.
In the following weeks, Alawites continued to clash with Syrian security forces in an effort to defend themselves from raids and arrests.
In late February, Alawite insurgents attacked a police station in Assad’s hometown of Qardaha, located in the mountains overlooking the coastal town of Latakia.
According to Qardaha residents and activists who spoke to Reuters, “the incident began when members of security forces tried to enter a house without permission, sparking opposition from residents.”
“One person was killed by gunfire, with locals accusing the security forces of the shooting,” Reuters added, further suggesting that local Alawite men were acting in self-defense.
What happened in Datour?
The simmering conflict escalated further on 4 March. Reutersreported that, according to Syrian state media, two members of the Defense Ministry had been killed in the Datour neighborhood in Latakia city by “groups of Assad militia remnants,” and that security forces had mounted a campaign to arrest them.
One Datour resident toldReuters there had been heavy gunfire in the early hours and that security forces in numerous vehicles had surrounded the neighborhood.
A security source speaking with the news agency blamed the violence on a “proliferation of arms” among former security and army personnel who had refused to enter into reconciliation agreements with the new authorities.
The source said that local Alawite leaders had, in some cases, cooperated with security forces to hand over former personnel suspected of committing crimes during the period of Assad’s rule in hopes of staving off “crack downs and potential civil unrest.”
Testimonies from residents of Datour collected by Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) indicated that security forces carried out random arrests in Datour and indiscriminately fired at civilian homes, resulting in several deaths, including that of a child.
The campaign was “marked by sectarian rhetoric and intense hate speech directed against the Alawite sect,” STJ added.
A source from Datour speaking with The Cradle reveals that Julani’s government used a prominent local Alawite family to create the proliferation of weapons needed to justify a crackdown.
The Aslan family had previously been close to Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s brother and commander of the army’s elite 4th Division, but quickly established good relations with the new government after it came to power in December.
It became common to see General Security members from Idlib spending time at the Aslan-owned businesses on Thawra Street at the entrance to Datour.
When residents complained to the General Security about criminal activity by the Aslan family, such as stealing money and confiscating homes, the General Security took no action against the family.
The source speaking with The Cradle says that on 4 and 5 March, members of the Aslan family distributed weapons to Alawite men in the neighborhood, encouraging them to take up arms against the General Security.
This was, of course, strange given the close relationship between the Aslans and the General Security, as well as because such a rebellion had little chance of success.
“Why would the Aslan family distribute weapons to fellow Alawites in Datour while knowing a rebellion would fail?” the source asks.
What happened in Daliyah?
On 6 March, a major clash erupted in the Alawite villages of Daliyah and Beit Ana, which lie adjacent to one another in the mountains of the Jableh countryside.
Sources from Daliyah speaking with The Cradle confirm that a large General Security convoy entered the village that morning to arrest a local man, Ali Ahmad, who had written posts against the Julani government on Facebook.
General Security members took Ahmad from his work at the local mini bus station and executed him at the entrance of the village.
The General Security members then entered the nearby house of a retired army officer, Taha Saad, in the adjacent village of Beit Ana, killing his two adult sons.
In response to the killings, local men from the village gathered light weapons and attacked the General Security members. After the General Security called for reinforcements, a convoy of 20 vehicles arrived to assist the government forces in the fight.
The sources in Daliyah speaking with The Cradle state that around 20 members of the General Security and 17 men from the village were killed in the gun battle.
As the clashes continued, Damascus sent helicopters to drop bombs on Daliyah and Beit Ana until a Russian plane forced the helicopters to withdraw.
Julani’s army escalated further by firing artillery at multiple Alawite villages in the mountain areas from the military academy in Rumaylah on the coast, near Jableh city.
A source from Jableh speaking to The Cradle says that the bombings made Alawites “go crazy,” especially because Daliyah is home to an important Alawite religious shrine.
The massacre and its beneficiaries
When the Russian plane appeared over Daliyah and Beit Ana, “People thought that this was ‘the moment,’ so they rose up on that basis,” stated the former intelligence officer speaking with The Cradle.
Alawite insurgents attacked General Security and army positions in various areas across the coast, including Brigade 107 near Ayn al-Sharqiyah, where Bassam Hossam al-Din’s group abducted the General Security members before being killed in January.
“There was no Meqdad Fatiha or anyone else from outside, no Iranians or any others. It was purely a popular force rising up against this situation,” the former intelligence officer explains.
However, they were emboldened by promises of outside help from the US-led coalition, the Druze, and the Kurds.
The clashes at the Brigade 107 base lasted all night, but the Alawite insurgents paused the attack early the next morning, on 7 March, thinking that coalition forces would come to their aid and bomb the brigade.
“They waited two hours, but no strikes came, no support arrived. Their morale collapsed, they realized it was all lies, just a trap,” the source goes on to say.
After the fighting stopped, disillusionment spread, and the Alawite insurgents attacking the base withdrew and returned to their villages.
Al Jazeera’s role
As the fighting still raged on 6 March, Al Jazeerarepeated the false reports from Turkish media claiming Alawite insurgents were receiving massive external support from Iran, Hezbollah, the Kurdish SDF, and even Assad.
The news outlet’s propaganda gave Damascus the pretext to mobilize not only formal members of military units from the Ministry of Defense, but also many informal armed factions who responded to calls from mosques to fight “jihad” against Alawites.
On the morning of 7 March, convoys of military vehicles filled with tens of thousands of Sharaa’s extremist fighters began arriving at the coast.
Because the Alawite insurgency was weak and disorganized, with no help from abroad, it was not able to provide any protection to Alawite civilians as the massacres unfolded.
Facing no resistance, Julani’s forces began systematically slaughtering any Alawite men they could find, as well as many women and children, in cities, towns, and villages across the coast, including in Jableh, Al-Mukhtariyah, Snobar, Al-Shir, and the neighborhoods of Al-Qusour in Baniyas and Datour in Latakia.
The massive scope and systematic nature of the massacres, involving such large numbers of armed men in so many locations, suggests pre-planning by Julani and his Defense Minister, Murhaf Abu Qasra – a former commander-in-chief of the HTS military wing.
A media creation
The mobilization of Julani’s forces was also aided on 6 March by new videos appearing online claiming to show Meqdad Fatiha and members of the Coastal Shield Brigade vowing to fight against the new government.
In one video, the man claiming to be Fatiha was masked (this time dressed like a character from the popular video game, Mortal Kombat, and standing against a blank background), making it impossible to know who he was and whether he was in the mountains of Latakia or in a television studio in Tel Aviv or Doha.
In a separate video, Fatiha was masked and dressed just like an ISIS militant beheading Christians on video in Libya in 2015, leading to speculation the video was fake and had been created using artificial intelligence (AI).
Another video was later released in which Fatiha appeared without a mask, saying that previous videos of him were indeed real, and not created using AI. However, the new video also appeared fake, his face, shoulders, and eyes moving in an unnatural way as he spoke.
During multiple visits to the Syrian coast, The Cradle was not able to find any Alawites who expressed support for Fatiha or believed his group was real.
The source from Daliyah states that, “No one here supports Meqdad Fatiha. We all believe he works for Julani. The Coastal Shield Brigade is fabricated.”
A former Alawite officer in Assad’s army from the Syrian coast tells The Cradle, “We only see videos of Meqdad Fatiha online. We believe he is just a media creation.”
After showing The Cradle his rotting teeth, the former officer remarks, “Do you think we are getting help from Iran or Hezbollah? I don’t even have money to fix my teeth.”
An Alawite woman whose husband and two grown sons were murdered on 7 March suggests to The Cradle that Fatiha is a fictitious person, only existing on Facebook and created by the authorities to justify the massacres.
“Who is he? Julani created him. It’s a lie,” she explains.
General Security fatalities
The mobilization of Sharaa’s extremist forces from across the country was also aided by claims that Alawite insurgents had killed 236 members of the General Security in attacks on 6 April.
Some General Security members were certainly killed, but Syrian authorities never provided any evidence for this large number, suggesting it was vastly inflated to heighten sectarian anger. When Reutersrequested the names or an updated tally, Syrian officials refused to provide them.
In one case, the pro-HTS “Euphrates Shield” Telegram channel published a photo collage allegedly showing General Security members killed by “regime remnants” during the fighting.
However, one of the fighters shown in the photos quickly posted a story on his Instagram with a “laugh out loud” emoji to show he was still alive, the Syrian Democratic Observatory showed.
Israeli ambitions
On 10 March, before the victims of the massacres had been buried, i24 News published a letter claiming to be written by Alawite leaders, asking Netanyahu to send his military to protect them.
“If you come to the Syrian coast, which is predominantly Alawite, you will be greeted with songs and flowers,” the letter stated.
It also called on Israel to unite against the “Islamic tide led by Turkiye,” while asking for help in separating from “this extremist state.”
When Israel secretly “greenlit” Julani’s massacre of Druze in Suwayda in July, the goal of dividing Syria was further advanced. Many Druze are aware of the covert relationship between Damascus and Tel Aviv, but, fearing extermination, feel they have little choice but to call on Israel for protection and to establish an autonomous region in south Syria.
Three weeks after the massacres of Alawites in March, an Israeli general quietly admitted that sectarian violence in Syria benefits Tel Aviv.
“This thing where everyone is fighting everyone, and there’s an agreement with the Kurds one day, and a massacre of the Alawites the second day, and a threat to the Druze on the third day, and Israeli strikes in the south. All this chaos is, to some extent, actually good for Israel,” stated Tamir Hayman while speaking with Israeli Army Radio.
“Wish all sides good luck (but) do it quietly. Don’t talk about it,” the general added.
In a recent report for the Libertarian Institute, I investigated Zionists’ role in creating the crisis point at which New York City now finds itself: caught between a colonial elite which has commandeered government and a progressive-socialist backlash to that elite which proposes to expand government. In this report, I will trace how, in response to the progressive-socialist threat to their power, Zionists and their allies are expanding government in new and frightening directions. The leading player in this operation, like in all good intelligence ops, is not a colorful or charismatic character. But she has all of the subtler qualities—connections, management prowess, presentational understatement—that the city’s minders look for in those who hold actual power.
Jessica Tisch, the New York Police Department Commissioner since 2024 who will definitely stay on if either Zohran Mamdani or Andrew Cuomo wins the mayoralty according to public statements made by both men, is the third generation of the billionaire Zionist family that has had prominent roles in shaping the city since the 1980s. Her grandfather, Laurence Tisch, bought CBS in the 1980s not long before his brother Robert bought the New York Giants, establishing the family, which had started in hotels and movie theaters, as the owner of two of the city’s landmark organizations. In the 1990s, Laurence Tisch was a member of The Study Group, the informal philanthropic Zionist gathering co-founded by Leslie Wexner and Charles Bronfman, which led directly and indirectly to the foundation of Taglit Birthright, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and various other projects for Zionist continuity. Laurence’s son and Jessica’s father, James Tisch, is the chairman of the Board of Leows Corporation, the family’s flagship business. James’ wife and Jessica’s mother, Merryl, was the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, responsible for supervising all educational activities in the state; and is the chair of the State University of New York Board of Trustees, responsible for supervising the state university system.
Within this context of a family involved in media, finance, philanthropy, and part-time politics, Jessica Tisch, who is now 44, charted her own specific path: from security to administration to the cusp of politics with the backing of money. She started in the NYPD in the decade of the September 11 attacks; continued in the department in the 2010s; moved in the first half of the 2020s to the Sanitation Department, arguably New York’s most important after police and fire. She has returned in the mid-2020s to the NYPD as its commissioner, while also widely being considered a potential future mayor. Like Mamdani, Tisch is a product, this time a direct one, of the decades of Zionist influence that preceded her rise. Like Mamdani, rewinding Tisch’s career shows how she is the capstone to a project of military policing that began in the 1990s and 2000s but that has sharpened under pressure into a full-blown project of social control.
That project began when crime rose in New York in the 1980s and 1990s in response to displacement and homelessness facilitated by WASPs, Zionists, and their allies co-opting city government to the benefit of finance and real estate. In response, Eric Breindel, the neoconservative Zionist editor of the New York Post who had extensive connections to Wall Street, arranged for the Post to back the then-longshot Rudolph W. Guiliani as a tough-on-crime candidate, delivering him Staten Island and so the city.
At the same time, Michael Steinhardt, the Zionist financier who was integral in the reinvention of Wall Street in the 1980s, became the major donor for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which in turn was the major backer of President Bill Clinton, who shepherded to passage in Congress as his main legislative priority the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This act provided newly elected Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton federal funds for law enforcement, with certain conditions attached that increased local spending on policing as well as the size of the NYPD. The NYPD’s budget increased from $1.7 billion to $3.1 billion between 1993 and 2000, also leading to increased city spending, since, under the terms of the Clinton crime legislation, to receive federal funds the city had to spend funds of its own.
During this period, “crime”—defined as everything from murder to unlicensed street vending—fell in response to across-the-board enforcement. After 2001, Raymond Kelly, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s police commissioner, pushed this practice to its limit with the aggressive practice of “stop and frisk” in minority neighborhoods: a daily distillation of the broader disenfranchisement the black and Latino communities of New York had been experiencing since the 1970s.
Kelly also made sure that the NYPD would benefit from post-9/11 funding of counter-terrorism measures, measures which hinged heavily on techniques for surveillance. And it was by channeling this new priority for social control that Jessica Tisch made her career beginning in 2000s. Fresh out of Harvard, she took “an analyst position available in what was then the counterterrorism bureau” of the NYPD. According to a recent profile in The New York Times:
“Kelly…did not normally meet with applicants for such entry-level jobs, but he ended up interviewing her. ‘Probably because she was a Tisch,’ he said, adding that he had been impressed with her three Harvard degrees.”
“Probably because she was a Tisch” seems like a fair assessment of why the supervisor of 55,000 employees took the time to meet a twenty-something about an entry-level position. But Kelly and Tisch also shared the promising ground of a professional focus: Kelly was committed to surveillance-as-policing, and Tisch’s main interest was data and surveillance. At the NYPD, she began “developing the Domain Awareness System, one of the world’s largest networks of security cameras, including handling contracts to build and expand it.” According to a description of this work in a recent profile of Tisch in New York Magazine, she was Domain’s driving force and Domain her career-maker:
“… Tisch, 27, was tasked with figuring out what to do with more than $100 million in unspent grant money from the federal Department of Homeland Security, which had just built a surveillance network to prevent another terror attack downtown. What if, she asked, the Domain Awareness System went citywide? And what if, instead of trying to stop a suicide bomber, the system tried to spot all kinds of crooks? What if it included the NYPD’s trove of arrest reports and criminal histories? When Tisch sent the privacy guidelines for the system to the lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, they retched…The bosses had the opposite reaction: ‘No, you’ve made it. Congratulations,’ the former colleague recalls them saying.”
Based on an initial grant of $350 million from the Department of Homeland Security and developed with Microsoft technology, the System consists today of “a surveillance network of more than 18,000 interconnected cameras—including those in the private sector—as well as law-enforcement databases.” The system, in one description, “assimilates data from several surveillance tools—license plate readers, closed-circuit television streams, facial recognition software and phone call histories—and uses it to identify people.” As these descriptions suggest, private corporations and nonprofits, for example Rockefeller University in Midtown East Manhattan, can buy in: providing their own cameras then linking them to the surveillance system run out of the NYPD. “And,” according to one report, “when Microsoft turns around and sells the technology to other cities, New York gets a cut.”
Tisch was not only one of the developers, if not the developer, of the system; she also so impressed Kelly with her tenacity dealing with the various technology sub-vendors put in play by the project that he moved her up through the ranks. (She also may have impressed Kelly with her access to funds; the nonprofit the New York Police Foundation, which her uncle chaired and where two of her family members still sit on the board, provided some of the early contributions for testing her surveillance system.) Within a decade, “she became the city’s first information technology commissioner… and within months she was in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, struggling to create a contact tracing system and then a vaccine distribution system.” Throughout this time, Tisch was working with at least one like-minded colleague from a similar background. This was fellow Harvard graduate Rebecca Ulam Weiner, the granddaughter of the Zionist nuclear scientist Stanislav Ulam of the Manhattan Project, whose view of her grandfather’s work is instructive:
“As someone whose job it is to keep secrets, I often wonder whether such an experiment [as the Manhattan Project] would be possible today, scientifically or socially.”
Fast forward to November 2024, and an embattled Mayor Eric Adams, whose allies in the black community have increasingly moved away from him even as powerful Zionists have edged closer, appointed Tisch Commissioner. He did this despite vocal concerns from civil liberties advocates that, in the words of one, “It’s really alarming to see a commissioner who built her career on the infrastructure of mass surveillance.” Weiner is Tisch’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, and has let it be known that her department “relies on a mind-boggling suite of assets that Americans might otherwise assume are controlled by the CIA, FBI, DHS, Secret Service, or other agencies.” These include:
“… a legion of intelligence analysts, counterassault and dignitary-protection teams, a flotilla of boats…surveillance aircraft, the nation’s biggest bomb squad, a counter-drone unit, a remote contingent of NYPD detectives… and a network of multilingual undercover operatives…”
Among this “remote contingent” is NYPD Detective Charlie Benaim, “[whose] office could be any squad room in Brooklyn, but for years [has been] an Israeli police station near Tel Aviv,” where “Benaim’s been feeding an endless stream of information, in real time, to his bosses back at One Police Plaza.” According to Weiner, Benaim’s function is “asking the New York question, when something is happening, what would it look like it if it were to happen in New York City, and more importantly than that, how do you prevent it?” A new model for Benaim in answering these questions, apparently, is the Hamas uprising of October 7. This suggests either that the NYPD expects a coordinated attack from foreign operators; or that New York’s security leaders see the city as potentially under siege by its own displaced and ghettoized underclass and plan to respond accordingly.
Telling in this regard is the fact that Tisch’s top priority as commissioner is “doubling down on data-driven policing and surveillance,” an aim which has “sparked fierce criticism from watchdog groups that New Yorkers are living in a surveillance state.” According to New York Magazine, Tisch’s proposed reforms fall along four lines. First, she wants to expand actual surveillance capacities by expanding the city’s camera network “to include more privately owned cameras.” Second, she wants to extend the contract of one of Domain’s less reliable components, “the ShotSpotter gunshot-detection system” which “may result in confirmed shootings only less than 15 percent of the time, according to the comptroller’s office,” a fact which Tisch dismisses, “arguing that something is better than nothing.” Third, she wants to use data collected “to surge police resources down to a single block,” allowing for the department to deploy overwhelming force to tackle individual incidents in small areas. (This means essentially treating city policing as counterinsurgency warfare, and it’s not too different than the LAPD tactics that led to the abuse of Rodney King and the fallout that followed.) Finally, “perhaps the biggest change is that she wants to use those same systems and processes to fight ‘chaos,’ not just crime,” meaning that minor noise disturbances or unusual behavior could qualify for police enforcement via surveillance and surges. (Again, this is a retread of the 1990s: “Giuliani-style crackdowns, only with better gear.”)
More instructively still, she feels this way despite at least one recent controversy suggesting that her policies have adverse effects on the very communities historically at the blunt end of militarized policing. According to The New York Times, in an August report, the NYPD used Domain Awareness System’s facial recognition software to identify and arrest for indecent exposure in April a 230 pound 6-foot-2 black man, Trevis Williams. The arrest was made even though a witness said that the offender was about 160 pounds and 5-foot-6 and even though “location data from [Williams’s] phone put him about 12 miles away at the time.” According to the Times, the fact that “a facial recognition program plucked his image from an array of mug shots and the woman identified him as the flasher was enough to land Williams in jail.” This is despite the fact that “other police departments… require investigators to gather more facts before putting a suspect identified by facial recognition into a photo lineup,” and despite advocacy from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union to “ban… the use of facial recognition by the police because of the risk of misidentification.”
“In the blink of an eye, your whole life could change,” Williams told the Times about his experience, adding that he still gets panic attacks since his April arrest and subsequent imprisonment. The Times investigation did not report asking for a comment from the NYPD or its Commissioner. Nor did it report that, as early as 2019, 11,000 cases per year were being investigated by the NYPD with the help of facial recognition software.
Despite collateral damage from her policies, positive media profiles of “Commish Tisch” and her subordinates have been plentiful since her accession. In an April 2025 report in The News section of The New York Times, the paper had the following to say about her: She has “an unlikely and remarkable career”; is “the daughter and granddaughter of two strong women, neither of whom came from money”; “learned hard work by example”; is “talkative and purposeful, but circumspect”; is a “no-nonsense technocrat” and “incredibly competent”; commands “a huge amount of respect”; is “very businesslike,” “[takes] no guff,” and should run for mayor. New York Magazine, the city’s go-to venue for fashion and culture commentary, had run an equally complimentary profile in March of 2025 that included the same political prediction.
And, the month before New York Magazine’s profile of Tisch, Vanity Fair ran a profile of Tisch’s deputy Weiner titled “NYPD Confidential.” Headed by a black-and-white photo of Weiner flanked by members of her squad that seemed ripped from a promotional poster of Captain America, the article’s text gave its subject an equally marquee treatment, describing her as “laser focused,” “unfazed,” “poised, cultivated, pin-sharp, convivial, boundlessly curious, charmingly profane,” and “a lightning-quick study” who had “a wicked sense of humor.” All three of these profiles also emphasized, as The New York Times’ editorial board regularly emphasizes, a recent rise in crime in the city without honing in on its obvious causes: financialization, gentrification, and displacement.
The Times is owned by the Sulzberger Family, whose members are ambivalent about Zionism but who have deep connections to Zionists. (Their executive editor, Joseph Kahn, is the son of a committed Zionist corporatist and runs in the billionaire Zionist milieu; their editorial page is dominated by Jewish Zionists of all political persuasions; and the former head of the Sulzberger family wealth office now heads Bill Ackman’s.) Vanity Fair is still owned by the Newhouse Family, which, as I reported in my recent investigation on the rise of Zionist power in New York, was vital to that project thanks to its ownership of Conde Nast. New York Magazine is dependent for its scoops on access to the city’s financial and philanthropic elite, many of them Zionists—its recent profile subjects include not just Jessica Tisch butBarry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg and Bill Ackman. The message from these media venues seems clear: the Zionist financial powers of New York are squarely behind Jessica Tisch, and want their readers to know it.
It is not, in this context, a coincidence that the Times ran an article soon after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary citing anonymous sources to report that Mamdani was being urged to keep Tisch on if he wins the mayoralty as a “steady pair of hands.” It is also not a coincidence that this story came during a period when Dan Loeb and Bill Ackman, younger Zionist financial-philanthropic operators, were attacking Mamdani as soft-on-crime almost daily and shifting their funding focus to Mamdani’s Independent mayoral competitor, Mayor Eric Adams, to the point of personally vetting Adams’s campaign manager before the position was filled. What this suggested at the time was a pincer movement, in which attacks by Loeb and Ackman pressured Mamdani into keeping Tisch on as a sign of faith in the establishment and détente with Zionism.
And, in late October, with Mamdani still attacked by connected Zionist players for purportedly making Jews feel unsafe despite the fact that he has attracted significant Jewish support, this is exactly what occurred. On October 22, Mamdani announced, four days after Andrew Cuomo had announced the same, that he would ask Tisch to stay on should he win the election. The reported terms on which this “ask” was made are not encouraging when it comes to Mamdani’s leverage over Tisch if he is elected mayor. Details in The New York Times painted a scenario in which Mamdani had publicly (and factually erroneously) made Tisch the poster child for safety in the city without extracting any concessions from her camp in return. According to the Times,
“… Mr. Mamdani confirmed his decision during the final televised debate before the Nov. 4 election. ‘Commissioner Tisch took on a broken status quo, started to deliver accountability, rooting out corruption and reducing crime across the five boroughs,’ Mr. Mamdani said at the debate. “I’ve said time and again that my litmus test for that position will be excellence’… Ms. Tisch’s allies have signaled for months that she would want to stay in the job regardless of the election’s outcome. [Mamdani] campaign officials declined to detail any conversations between the candidate and the commissioner, but said they were confident she would accept. Delaney Kempner, a spokeswoman for Ms. Tisch, referred a reporter back to an earlier statement from the commissioner stressing that ‘it is not appropriate for the police commissioner to be directly involved or to seem to be involved in electoral politics.’”
Tisch’s strategic mix of aggressive behind-the-scenes lobbying and Olympian public detachment sends a message: as New York Magazine put it less than twenty-four hours after Mamdani made the announcement, she is “the Heiress Who Could Make or Break the Socialist Mayor.” Not long after this article ran, Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democratic leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, ended five months of ostentatious non-endorsement of Mamdani with a statement endorsing Mamdani—specifically praising his willingness to keep on Tisch. Already, then, thanks to a series of private maneuvers and public feints, Tisch has been placed in the driver’s seat: the establishment’s cooperation with Mamdani is clearly conditioned on Mamdani’s continued acceptance of her.
One difficulty of critiquing moves like these is that the conflation of “Jewish power” and New York is an old trope, in part because New York has been since the early twentieth century a Jewish city. So it should be emphasized, as I have emphasized in my previous report on this topic, that New York’s problem is not a problem of Jewish power. It is a problem of government-tied financialization at the hands of a small number of WASPs and then a small number of Zionists, and it has come at the expense of the people who live in the city, among them many Jews. Now, with a direct threat to Zionists’ influence in the person of Zohran Mamdani, the operation is out front. Zionist financiers have sent one of their own to occupy the most powerful security position in the city, and they are intent on keeping her there. If they fail to install their ally Andrew Cuomo in the mayoralty, which will give Tisch carte blanche, the prospect of them working to sabotage a Mamdani mayoralty in the lead-up to a Tisch For Mayor campaign in 2029 is a very real one.
They will likely do this much like they managed the securance of Jessica Tisch’s job: with media attacks meant to maximize pressure on Mamdani; followed by private assurances to Mamdani that the attacks will stop if concessions follow. These public-private feints, in turn, will push Mamdani into concessions which will make him lose face with his base, isolating him between an unfriendly establishment and a disillusioned electorate. (This trend is already occurring, albeit at the edges, after Mamdani’s public commitment to keeping Tisch, whom many Mamdani voters see as a threat to civil liberties.) Tisch’s allies will manage these plays with the help of The New York Times and other organs of influence (the Conde Nast publications, New York Magazine, the New York Post) which by their own admission are pining for technocratic government predicated on what they call “effective management.”
But there is another equally bad outcome that could accrue should Mamdani win the mayoralty and Tisch stay on as police commissioner. This is the fusion of the most dangerous potential aspect of socialism, total government direction of the economy, with the most dangerous potential aspect of Zionism: total techno-military colonial control. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see how, under a de facto power-sharing agreement between Mamdani and Tisch (Mamdani in charge of domestic welfare, Tisch in charge of security) the worst impulses of both systems will merge to create a city government which is totalistically involved in every aspect of its citizens’ lives, Singapore transfused with Sweden. This outcome for a city which for a century has been read as a triumph of American individualism would be, to understate the case, a seismic shift.
I try not to write about anyone who has died because if it was my family member I would not want to read any speculations about their death. However, in this case I feel that justice has not been given a chance and therefore it needs highlighting. ... continue
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