Bernie Sanders Is A Ghoulish Zionist
By Caitlin Johnstone | September 18, 2025
Bernie Sanders finally issued a statement acknowledging the indisputable fact that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza after two years of adamantly refusing to do so. The statement begins as follows:
“Hamas, a terrorist organization, began this war with its brutal attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages. Israel, as any other country, had a right to defend itself from Hamas.
But,”
Dude goes two years refusing to call a genocide a genocide, then issues a statement which begins by placing blame for the genocide on the victims of said genocide. He also lumps the hundreds of IDF troops slain in the attack in with “innocent people”, ignores the large percentage of the death toll that would have been killed by Israeli troops under the Hannibal Directive, and babbles about Israel’s “right to defend itself” against an occupied population.
The rest of the statement is standard liberal Zionist fare, acknowledging the horror of the situation in Gaza while blaming it all on Benjamin Netanyahu and not the murderous apartheid state which would be doing what it’s doing with or without Netanyahu. It’s just progressive-sounding Israel apologia accompanied by a denunciation driven by the inability to escape finally calling this thing what it is.
This is the face of what passes for the “left” in modern US politics. Absolutely ghoulish.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described Gaza as a “real estate bonanza” on Wednesday, saying Israel is in talks with the United States negotiating how the two countries will divide up the enclave.
“We are checking how this becomes a real estate bonanza — I’m not joking — and pays for itself,” Smotrich said, adding, “I’ve begun negotiations with the Americans, and I’m saying this seriously, because we paid a lot of money for this war. We need to work out how we share percentages on the land. The demolition phase, the first stage of urban renewal, we’ve already done. Now we need to build.”
It’s absolutely incredible how often Smotrich and his buddy Itamar Ben-Gvir will just come out and admit that Israel is doing the thing everyone says it’s doing. If this information had come out as a WikiLeaks drop or something it would have been a bombshell revelation, and this guy is right here just bloody saying it.
There’s another report from Haaretz about the horrific things Israeli soldiers say they’ve been doing to civilians in Gaza, including descriptions of the murders of children.
Whenever I read these accounts I can’t help thinking about how there are westerners joining the IDF to participate in this genocide. People travel to Israel to massacre civilians and then fly back home to their real countries and resume their lives as though nothing happened, like they went backpacking in Europe or something. And now they walk among us in our communities, and we’re supposed to be fine with it.
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Netanyahu says he has been invited to visit with President Trump for the fourth time this year. At this point they should just save on jet fuel and move him into a room in the White House.
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Trump is repeatedly bombing civilian vessels under the ridiculous justification that drug traffickers are “terrorists”, without even providing evidence that they are drug traffickers. Trump has now admitted to the US bombing three Venezuelan boats on these completely evidence-free grounds.
When Yemen was attacking ships to enforce a blockade against a genocide, Trump declared them all terrorists and massacred hundreds of civilians. Now Trump is attacking civilian boats and calling them the terrorists.
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Ask a scientist when the universe began and they’ll tell you 13.8 billion years ago.
Ask a Young Earth creationist when the universe began and they’ll tell you six thousand years ago.
Ask a Zionist when the universe began and they’ll tell you October 7, 2023.
When does murder get ignored? When the victim is white and the killer black
A black man kills a white woman in an American city, and the mainstream media gives it zero coverage. Imagine if the races were reversed.
By Henry Johnston | RT | September 8, 2025
The US mainstream media tends to operate by encouraging a certain prefabricated outrage. Sensationalized narratives are cultivated along predictable tracks. But no less egregious is what the media chooses to ignore. Few events of late have better exposed the ideological underpinnings of the media – and of the elite whose narratives it plugs – than the recent brutal and shocking murder of a young Ukrainian woman on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina.
On August 22, a career criminal, Decarlos Brown Jr., casually walked up behind 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was seated on a train minding her own business, and stabbed her three times in the neck in cold blood, killing her. He sauntered away, still clutching the knife dripping blood.
The mindless and savage attack was captured on surveillance footage, but Charlotte’s Democratic Mayor Vi Lyles pushed for it not to be released, ostensibly out of respect for the victim’s family. But the footage did eventually surface, and the story spread like wildfire. But this was a wildfire that couldn’t reach the impervious redoubt of the mainstream media – even after Elon Musk gave it the push into viral territory by chiming in on an End Wokeness thread pointing out the stunning media silence.
In fact, not a single major legacy outlet – the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Reuters, CNN, Wall Street Journal, and others – picked it up. One would think that, by sheer chance, one of these esteemed outlets would have bucked the trend. But that didn’t happen because, as Matt Taibbi once brilliantly pointed out,
“Reporting is done in herds, no one wildebeest can break formation without screwing things up for the others. So, they’ll all hold the line, until they all stop holding the line.”
As of this writing, it seems the media herd is starting to reluctantly skate to where the puck is going. And that means that some version of the story, however sanitized, will soon appear everywhere.
So what exactly has given this story its irresistible momentum? Let’s start with the blatant double standard about reporting interracial crime. A white victim and a black perpetrator, as was the case in this instance, is usually a circumstance that tips the scales in favor of silence. When an instance of black-on-white crime cannot be avoided, the respective races of the individuals involved are not mentioned, and the tone is more along the lines of “aww shucks, what a tragedy.” When the racial roles are reversed, the media coverage is extensive and sensational, and the race angle is established immediately and runs throughout the ensuing coverage like an electric wire.
Given such highly distorted media coverage of interracial crime, one would be forgiven for assuming that it is blacks who are perpetually in mortal danger of racist attack by whites in the US. This view was a large part of the impetus behind the Black Lives Matter movement. However, the actual statistics on interracial crime, which are not easy to find, show otherwise. Buried inside this Department of Justice (DOJ) report from 2020 is a rather remarkable admission: “[In 2019], there were 5.3 times as many violent incidents committed by black offenders against white victims (472,570) as were committed by white offenders against black victims (89,980).” Such stark wording was not repeated in subsequent reports under the Biden DOJ, but there is no reason to believe anything has changed in the streets.
Zarutska’s murder certainly comes at a time of record-low American trust in the mainstream media. Instances of misreporting and factual disasters have become such a recurrent theme as to not require individual examples. The media’s efforts at narrative formation have also become so heavy-handed that identifying the establishment cause being promoted in almost any piece of reporting is now a parlor game.
But – and I venture into very risky terrain here – the uproar over this senseless killing also points to a deeply ensconced taboo slowly starting to unravel: Many white Americans are tired of being denied the right to display even the slightest and most tentative hint of the type of racial solidarity that other groups are extended so liberally. It is a story being played out on a different stage with different actors in Great Britain.
There’s another angle here, and it is one that has already been remarked upon in numerous places. The victim was a citizen of a country that the US has spent enormous treasure and effort ostensibly defending since 2022. The roughly $130 billion in aid that Washington has coughed up for Kiev comes out to some $3,500 per Ukrainian citizen. Certainly enough for a bodyguard on train rides.
And yet the silence from the pro-Ukraine crowd has mirrored that of the media at large. This certainly confirms what has been abundantly clear throughout the war and remains so today: Ukrainian deaths that don’t advance a Western elite media narrative are dismissed and ignored. But this lack of reaction also casts in sharp relief the reality that pro-Ukraine sentiment in the US is largely a cause bundled in with the rest of the progressive agenda, underpinned by the uniform mouthpiece of a jaded media. The Ukrainian flags one sees out and about rarely reflect a principled stance but rather deference to elite cues.
It will be said that all sides have merely assumed their positions on the barricades to score political points on this deeply human tragedy. We will all be accused of coming to praise Caesar rather than to bury him. This young woman’s death is indeed a human tragedy and a particularly painful one. But to see it as only a tragedy is to dismiss its larger context and to refuse to draw any conclusions. That is willful ignorance.
When a tragedy unveils such a confluence of two deep ideological biases, what it does is reveal the contours of the magnet moving underneath the pattern of American life.
Henry Johnston is a Moscow-based editor who worked in finance for over a decade.
No conflict over shared values
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | September 4, 2025
EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas has partly blamed the US for the bloc’s losing political leverage in Gaza. “If America is supporting everything that the Israeli government is doing, then the leverage they have is there; the leverage we have is in another place,” Kallas said at the annual EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) conference on Wednesday this week.
Yet Kallas’s focus on the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is too narrow to put the EU completely at odds with the US. The US and the EU have diverged on the distribution and accessibility of humanitarian aid, but the EU, like the US, is largely silent on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
When Israel announced its intention to obliterate Gaza, the EU brandished its so-called principles and stood by Israel’s security narrative. It was only after the humanitarian deprivation became impossible to ignore that the EU pretended to shift its stance and focus on humanitarian aid without focusing on ending the genocide. How is the US impeding EU leverage in Gaza if the ultimate aim is Israel’s colonial survival?
It is true, as Kallas stated, that the EU is not united on its stance regarding Gaza. Several EU countries debated whether to apply the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Calls for a weapons embargo have not been heeded. The hype building up to the EU discussing whether it should partially suspend Israel’s participation in the Horizon Europe research programme died down the minute no consensus was reached and failed to even state that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. All the report stated was “indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations under Article 2 of the EU-Israeli Association Agreement.” Since, according to the EU, there are only “indications”, why should Israel be punished? And since this is another rehashed version of US rhetoric regarding Israel, how is the EU impeded by the US from using its leverage? The EU is not even impeding itself – Israel’s survival remains a top priority for the bloc.
The EU made the most of ridiculing the first presidency of Donald Trump, attempting to make inroads by pitting itself against the US on several stances, while still failing to act. The US “deal of the century” was particularly magnified as the two-state diplomacy suffered a setback. With the Biden administration, under whose presidency Israel received the green light for genocide, the EU was in agreement. A change of presidency in the US will no longer be a convincing argument for Kallas to use. In varying degrees of colonialism and imperialism, the EU and the US are aligned.
In the latest EU meeting held in Copenhagen, there was no consensus once again over “initial punitive action” against Israeli start-ups. Almost two years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the EU is still trying to figure out which section of Israel’s economy it can symbolically target in its politics of pretence. Several governments are now speaking of taking initiatives on a national level – also belatedly. Both the US and the EU do not want to punish Israel; they are happy to stand by and let Israel complete its colonial project. “Shared values”, after all, are hard to come by.
The reek of desperation hangs over Albanese’s Iran conspiracy theories
By Samuel Geddes | Al Mayadeen | August 31, 2025
The Australian Prime Minister and his government are resorting to increasingly laughable measures to deflect public anger at their continued support for “Israel”.
A day after “Israel” had committed yet another massacre against journalists in Gaza, luring them with a strike on a hospital before eliminating them in a “double-tap” maneuver, the Labor government of Australia announced a major imminent foreign policy measure.
For a brief, fleeting moment, it appeared as though Anthony Albanese had listened to the demands of hundreds of thousands of protesters marching almost constantly throughout the country and was going to impose sanctions on the Israeli entity or even expel its ambassador over the Gaza slaughter.
Instead, the PM and his foreign minister, Penny Wong, engaged in a kind of public humiliation ritual, in which they asserted that Iran had “attacked” Australia by sponsoring the firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue and a Jewish delicatessen in Sydney through a convoluted web of criminal intermediaries.
Based on this “intelligence” provided by the national spy agency ASIO, the PM then announced the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador and his staff and the proscription of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, an institutional part of Iran’s political system, as a “terrorist organization”.
When questioned live on national television on the specifics of what he was claiming, Albanese cut the figure of a lying schoolboy caught in the act, refusing to disclose any level of detail beyond the assertions themselves.
Scarcely a day has gone by, and already members of the Israeli government are crowing that they were involved in pushing Australia to take this action. Whether the Mossad was a source of the “intelligence” provided to the Australian Prime Minister is unclear, but to this and almost every other query for the specifics of the claims underpinning this major foreign policy shift, Albanese has steadfastly refused to comment.
The public reaction to the government’s assertions, at least online, has been less than charitable. Elementary questions of why, amid the full spectrum of military, economic, and political pressure on the country, Iran’s leaders would choose to pay local vandals in Australia to firebomb a Melbourne synagogue and a Sydney deli, are curiously uninteresting to much of the country’s media, which is all too willing to accept the government’s assertions at face value.
What benefit would Tehran possibly achieve by doing this, in Australia, of all places? The only other country possibly more removed from the Islamic Republic’s circle of concern, at least physically, might be New Zealand.
Of course, many will, and already have, concluded that this charade has less to do with any actual facts than it does the government’s ham-fisted attempts to deflect growing public outrage at its obstinate refusal to impose sanctions on “Israel” or even censure it for its genocidal behavior.
For nearly two years, since Oct. 7, 2023, the foreign minister, Penny Wong, has made it a near-daily ritual that each successive Israeli atrocity, rather than being condemned, is deemed merely a source of “concern” to the government.
Albanese himself, when the question of sanctions against “Israel” is raised, clearly seems to resent even having to address the issue, at one point rhetorically questioning what sanctions Australia should impose, seeming blissfully ignorant of his obligations under the Genocide Convention.
The government’s total disengagement stands in marked contrast to the Australian public, which has kept up one of the most consistent routines of public protest in support of Gaza, anywhere in the world. Just weeks ago, despite attempts to ban it, a protest spanning the Sydney Harbour Bridge drew global media attention. Just the following week, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets around the country.
As of this week, tens of thousands of university students are voting in a nationwide referendum on whether to condemn the government for its inaction and to demand diplomatic expulsions and sanctions against Israel.
In May, the Australian Labor government was returned to power in a landslide election victory. The Liberal party, the official right-wing opposition, is widely considered unable to win back government even in the next election three years away, facing potentially as much as a decade in the wilderness.
Given its lack of any political rival, the government’s obstinate ignoring of public opposition to genocide hardly seems motivated by electoral calculations. In the face of an unstable Trump administration bringing the US alliance into question, it is more content to fall back on politicized narratives of “national security” written by the intelligence community rather than reacting dynamically to a changed world.
Whatever the real reasons for this government’s industrial-scale obfuscation, it speaks to a profound moral rot at the heart of its politics, rather than it needs to invent excuses to expel an ambassador, but cannot bring itself to expel that of an entity committing the defining slaughter of the century in real-time.
Borrell calls for European action in Gaza even though he did nothing as top diplomat
By Ahmed Adel | August 28, 2025
The former EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, laments the inaction of Brussels in the face of the ongoing “massacre” in Gaza and warns that its growing “discredit” will ultimately disqualify the bloc from implementing policies to defend human rights. However, the former diplomat, like the government of his home country, Spain, has only spoken out in support of Gaza and not taken any concrete actions.
“Someone would have to take legal action to make the European institutions do what they should do, and since it seems they don’t want to do it, there’s something called the courts of justice to take the case of inaction there,” Josep Borrell told the media at the August 25 opening of the Quo Vadis Europa course, which he directed at the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) in Santander, northern Spain.
Borrell, who headed EU diplomacy from 2019 to 2024, admitted that Brussels is doing “literally nothing” about the massacres perpetrated by the Israeli army and the induced famine.
“They say yes, maybe they’re going to make a proposal to establish some kind of sanction, but then they don’t do it,” he said.
The former diplomat also denounced the EU’s failure to fulfill its political and administrative obligations under the founding treaty of the bloc.
Borrell’s statements came in a context dominated by the resignation two days earlier of the Dutch ministers of Foreign Affairs, Interior, Education, and Health, along with four other secretaries of state, due to “resistance within the Cabinet” to taking action against Israel.
Led by Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp, ministers from the center-right NSC party had decided to ban the import of products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. However, the other two parties in the governing coalition, the liberal VVD and the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), believe the measure goes “too far.”
It also raises questions about why Borrell would make these statements during a summer school year and not utilize the influence and connections he supposedly has to lead a campaign to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement. In fact, he should have made them during his term.
The first report by the UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, was released in March 2024, while Borrell concluded his term in November of that year. The report was titled “Anatomy of a Genocide,” in which she convincingly documented that a genocide was being committed in Gaza.
In 2024, a series of European committees and associations defending Palestine submitted a report to Brussels, requesting the termination of the association agreement with Israel. The report argued that Article 2 of the agreement, which pertains to respect for human rights, was being violated. In other words, Borrell was obviously aware of the situation he is now denouncing.
On the same day Borrell spoke, Israeli forces attacked the Nasser Hospital in Gaza with a double bombing, killing at least 14 people, including four journalists and several rescue workers. Spain immediately condemned the attack, calling it a “flagrant and unacceptable violation of international humanitarian law.”
In his message of condemnation on X, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares stated that the “war in Gaza” must end and that “Spain works every day to achieve this.”
The reaction is illustrative of the way the EU and its national governments conduct themselves – issuing condemnations and more condemnations on social media, but taking no action to impose sanctions on those responsible for the famine.
Borrell’s statements serve as a kind of facelift for the Spanish government, which is also distinguished by its tendency to issue statements but not take effective measures. In fact, the Hague Group meeting to take effective measures was held in Colombia in July. Spanish representatives were present, but they did not speak out.
It is also worth noting that, unlike the Dutch Cabinet ministers, no Spanish minister has considered resigning for similar reasons. Ministers from Sánchez’s governing partner, the Sumar coalition, did not even seriously threaten to leave the government, despite the arms sales contracts with Israel remaining in effect.
Meanwhile, Borrel’s words about the need for “judicial action” are at odds with reality. Legal initiatives are already underway. For starters, South Africa filed a complaint against Israel for genocide with the International Court of Justice. Spain is not an effective party to the complaint and is not undertaking many of the actions it could be taking. In this way, Madrid evidently behaves in the same way as Borrell, just using rhetoric but not taking any actual action.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Are Democrats More Neocon Than Republicans Now?
By Jack Hunter | The Libertarian Institute | August 25, 2025
Last week as Donald Trump met separately with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine head Volodymyr Zelensky to potentially seek an end to the years long war between their countries, Democrats have been very upset.
That peace might happen. They are worried Ukraine might have to make concessions to Russia to reach an agreement, including land.
Never mind that it is Ukrainians who are dying. Never mind that most Ukrainians themselves want to end this war. According to a recent Gallup poll, 69% of Ukrainian respondents want a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, while only 24% said they still want to fight “until victory.”
Democratic voters sitting in the United States, with no imminent bombs or bullets to worry about, insist that this war go on for as long as it takes, and are being loud about it. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) agrees with them. This doesn’t seem to faze Democrats.
This opposition to Trump’s diplomacy seems to be the consensus of many Democrats, shown in spades all over media this week.
This is a position shared by Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY). This is the position of Bill Kristol. This is the position of virtually every neoconservative hawk in either major party and has been since this conflict started, that Ukraine must “win” at all costs.
Even at the cost of more Ukrainian lives.
Let me be clear about the definition of “neoconservative” I’m using here. I’m not just talking about the narrow and few band of post war, ex-Trotskyites of the Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz variety who stood for a number of things, including the pursuit of a hyper aggressive American foreign policy. I’m talking about Senator Graham, Kristol, the late John McCain, talk host Mark Levin and any other figure on the right who has been rabidly pro-war and hateful toward Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and any other prominent antiwar Republican leader of the last thirty years.
I’m talking about the Republicans who use “isolationist” as a pejorative slur for non-interventionism.
I tend to “neoconservative” as carefully here as those people use “isolationist.”
There have always been neocons in both major parties. But this week it has seemed Democrats have outweighed Republicans on this front. There is no poll on this. There is no hard data. I’m just observing.
President Trump has said he wants the killing to end between Ukraine and Russia. Cheering him on in this effort is Congresswoman and MAGA booster Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and many other GOP members. Also, pundit Tucker Carlson and former Trump aide and talk host Steve Bannon, whose audiences are large and full of MAGA supporters who also endorse Trump’s pledge to end America’s “endless wars.”
There are still plenty of GOP neocon members of Congress and voters within the base, but Trump’s Republican party is a very different one than George W. Bush’s when it comes to hawkish foreign policy.
On the other side, there are progressives like Ro Khanna (D-CA) who have expressed in the past wanting to see Trump help achieve some kind of diplomatic peace.
This week, Khanna has been silent on this, and who could blame him? Because Democrats by and large seem upset that Trump could achieve some sort of deal. They even got mad when Trump shook Putin’s hand during the summit.
Embracing war by avoiding diplomacy is key to neoconservatism. It’s why hawks got so mad in the mid-1980s when President Ronald Reagan met with Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev. It’s why neocons were absolutely irate when Trump met with not only Putin but North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and even Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney, got her and her father Dick Cheney’s endorsement and slammed Trump for “bowing down” to dictators, sending a signal to her neocon friends that she would not be engaging in that kind of diplomacy.
Now the people who voted for Harris are reflecting the same sentiment. Trump’s diplomatic efforts have them fuming.
During the 2012 presidential election, Republican nominee Mitt Romney said that Russia was the United States “No. 1 political foe.” President Barack Obama mocked Romney at the time, saying in a debate, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for twenty years.”
Romney was clearly representing the neoconservative Bush-Cheney foreign policy legacy that still resonated with so many Republicans at the time, and Obama, the anti-Bush message that had delivered him the White House in 2008. Obama did not remotely live up to that promise, but this was roughly the dynamic in the 2012 election.
Politics change and history happens, but it is feasible today that there are more Republicans, in Congress and in the base, who think constant U.S. hyperventilating about Russia, even now, is overblown and Americans should be more concerned about their own country first.
It’s also feasible that there are more Democrats, in Congress and in the base, for whom Trump and Putin are considered one in the same and those folks are more laser focused on hating both men than any other concern, including the health and security of their own country or any other (Ukraine).
When Barack Obama was a rockstar in 2008, Democrats prided themselves on being the complete opposite of Bush-Cheney neoconservative Republicans. In 2025, it appears that more Democrats than not now staunchly side with Bush-Cheney neoconservatives regarding the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
What changed? That might be a longer discussion. But it wasn’t neoconservatives.
TikTok bars calling Israeli forces ‘terrorists’ after hiring ex-soldier
Press TV – August 24, 2025
TikTok updated its content guidelines to prohibit labeling Israeli forces as “terrorists,” shortly after appointing a former Israeli soldier and self-described “proud Zionist” to oversee its so-called “anti-Semitism” policies.
TikTok appointed Erica Mindel as its new Public Policy Manager for Hate Speech 15 days before the ban was announced, according to users on X.
They also pointed out that the guidelines previously prohibited “all racial supremacy” but have now been narrowed to exclusively address “White supremacy.”
According to her LinkedIn profile and job description, Mindel is tasked with shaping the company’s hate speech policy and serving as TikTok’s internal and external expert on anti-Semitism.
Mindal spent two and a half years in the Israeli military as a madrichot shirion – an instructor in the occupation army – and also worked with the US State Department.
“I am a proud American Jew,” she once said.
She was hired following pressure from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a notorious Zionist lobby group in the US. She is based in New York City and is reported to earn an estimated £280,000 annually.
Her two-and-a-half years as an Israeli military instructor, coupled with her work for US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, suggest that her role is aimed at censoring pro-Palestinian content while amplifying Israeli narratives amid the ongoing genocidal war on Gaza.
The move comes as the Israeli regime persists in its systematic oppression of Palestinians by worsening the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Disturbing images and videos depicting emaciated children, relentless bombardments, and widespread destruction continue to surface on social media platforms, shedding light on the dire situation faced by Palestinians in the region.
Backed by the US, Israel launched its onslaught on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after Palestinian resistance fighters waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the Zionist entity in response to the regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
The Israeli military has so far killed more than 62,600 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
Totalitarian Practices in Moldova Reach Unprecedented Levels – Moscow
Sputnik – 21.08.2025
The use of totalitarian methods in Moldova has reached unprecedented levels, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.
“Continuing the anti-popular policy of ‘filtering’ voters based on loyalty, on August 15, the official authorities in Chisinau announced plans to open only 10 polling stations in Transnistria. For comparison, during the 2024 presidential elections, 30 polling stations were organized there. This means that Moldovan citizens living in Transnistria, as well as those in Russia, have been classified as second-class voters by the Moldovan authorities, whose constitutional rights can be disregarded,” Zakharova said in a statement published on the Russian Foreign Ministry website.
She added that Moscow is receiving numerous complaints from the residents of Transnistria, who do not understand the reasons for their discrimination compared to the Moldovan diaspora in EU countries, for whom the best possible voting conditions are created.
“We expect that the observation mission of the OSCE ODIHR, which started last week, will give an objective assessment of Chișinau’s selective approach to its citizens. The authorities’ disregard for the interests of a significant part of Moldovan society is provoking an increase in protest activity, which is being harshly suppressed,” Zakharova emphasized.
She further stated that the use of totalitarian practices ahead of Moldova’s parliamentary elections has reached unprecedented levels.
“The Maya Sandu regime is turning the republic into a ghetto, where political repression, censorship, and the division of citizens into first, second, third, and other classes have become the norm. We are confident that, against the backdrop of the shameful silence of relevant international bodies, the Moldovan people will soon make their voice heard. While patient, they are not patient enough to allow another four years of suffering and abuse of themselves and their country,” she concluded.
Who enabled the process of “Greater Israel”?
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | August 14, 2025
In a recent interview with i24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated he is “on a mission of generations” for “Greater Israel”. Meanwhile, the international community is still bleating about the two-state paradigm. The Arab League spoke out against Israel’s “aggressive and expansionist tendencies”. But in the midst of all this, who is listening to the Palestinian people?
The concept of “Greater Israel” is not a novelty. Early Zionist ideology, even before the atrocities of the 1948 Nakba, already envisaged a complete colonial process. Netanyahu is just availing himself of the opportune moment to remind the entire world what Zionist colonisation is all about, but this statement cannot be treated as a surprise.
It was the international community that decided upon the 1947 Partition Plan, despite the concept of “Greater Israel”. The same international community legitimised the Nakba’s colonial atrocities by recognising Israel – a settler-colonial enterprise on ethnically cleansed Palestinian land. It ensured the Palestinian right of return would be flawed to give priority to Israel’s expansion plans, and coerced Palestinians into the humanitarian paradigm – recipients of aid with no rights.
Israel may have carefully crafted its narrative, but it also exposed its intentions along the way. The international community has no excuse. During the same time the two-state paradigm was deemed obsolete, Netanyahu was boasting about how Palestine was no longer a priority in diplomatic relations and no longer a precondition that would jeopardise normalising relations with Israel. This is relatively recent history. Had the international community really wanted to eradicate colonialism, it could have taken action before 1947. But former colonial powers invested in a new colonial power that has now been committing genocide for almost two years, under the pretext of eliminating Hamas. And while Netanyahu feels he can unveil the entire truth about Israel and its genocide, the international community is still focused only on humanitarian aid and the two-state compromise – none of which ultimately give Palestinians political rights.
Can the international community admit all its complicity with Israeli settler-colonialism, expansion and genocide since the time it started to indulge the Zionist colonial ideology? How about admitting that the humanitarian paradigm has aided Israel more than it helped Palestinians? Or that the two-state compromise was a stepping stone for Israel to unleash genocide in Gaza and eventually declare “Greater Israel”?
The international community only ever took on board what aided its diplomatic engagement with Israel; hence the focus on Hamas, humanitarian aid, the two-state paradigm and forced displacement. Keeping all these slivers isolated enabled Israel to gradually prepare for prominent announcements of its ultimate colonisation plans. “Greater Israel” requires ethnic cleansing on a larger scale. Genocide fulfils that prerequisite. The international community is concerned about Palestinians starving to death but not Palestinians torn to shreds and blasted apart by bombs. The international community chooses which part of genocide to weakly condemn, just as it chose which parts of settler-colonialism to speak out against without any repercussions. Feigning ignorance now is just adding to the hypocrisy.
READ: Netanyahu says he is on historic mission for greater Israel
Preconditions, symbolic recognition and the ongoing erasure of Palestine
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | August 12, 2025
September seems to be the month several Western countries have chosen to symbolically recognise the State of Palestine. The countdown to the hypothetical recognition, if it happens, will likely generate more attention than recognition itself. This is what Western diplomacy is all about, after all, when it comes to Palestine. The illusion of action.
Australia is one recent example. Almost two years since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese surmised that “the war” has dragged on for far too long, and that it is time to recognise the State of Palestine, based upon “the commitments Australia has received from the Palestinian Authority.”
According to Australian media, the PA guaranteed that it would “recognise Israel’s right to exist, demilitarise and hold general elections,” as well as exclude Hamas from future governance. While Australia would not be the only country seeking such guarantees, the fact is that the PA is guaranteeing that recognising the State of Palestine will not move beyond symbolic recognition.
Not only is Israel fast encroaching upon what remains of Palestinian territory – the latest being the plans to occupy Gaza. The PA is giving guarantees that do not allow a state to emerge from symbolic recognition. Democratic elections do not ban electoral rivals, as the PA plans to do with Hamas. Neither should democratic elections include the elimination of opponents as happened with Nizar Banat in 2021. Recognising Israel is validating, normalising and accepting colonial plunder and the entire colonial enterprise, including genocide. Demilitarisation leaves a colonised population with no options for defence.
For Albanese, however, “This is an opportunity to deliver self-determination to the people of Palestine in a way that isolates Hamas, disarms it and drives it out of the region once and for all.” He added, “The international community is moving to establish a Palestinian state, and it is opposing actions which undermine the two-state solution.”
Albanese’s statements do not even sugarcoat the surface of the international community’s complicity in Israeli colonisation of Palestine and genocide in Gaza. Recognising the state of Palestine without a real emergence of a Palestinian state does not help to establish a Palestinian state. The international community has, for decades, approved of Israeli international law violations that undermined the two-state compromise, which has been declared obsolete several years back. What the move does is merely extend a life line to the defunct diplomacy which the international community adopted to force Palestinians into subjugation to colonisation, giving Israel time to plan its next steps and normalise the outcome. Nothing can save international diplomacy after the role it played in maintaining Israel’s genocide in Gaza, especially pathetic demonstrations of symbolic recognition of a state that cannot function as a state due to Israel’s colonial enterprise and the diplomatic support colonialism received from former colonial powers.
When Western countries discuss their reasons for their symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state at a time when Palestinians are experiencing genocide and further territorial loss, what is “recognition” a euphemism for?
The verdict of history: How political calculations betrayed Gaza
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | August 6, 2025
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released a comprehensive report on 27 July describing the Israeli war on Gaza as genocide. However, the delay in publishing such an indictment is troubling and adds to an existing problem of politically motivated decision-making processes that have, in their own right, prolonged the ongoing Israeli war crimes.
The report accused Israel of committing genocide, a conclusion reached after a detailed analysis of the military campaign’s intent, the systematic destruction of civilian life, and the government-engineered famine. This finding is significant because it adds to the massive body of legal and testimonial evidence affirming the Palestinian position that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide.
Moreover, the fact that B’Tselem is an Israeli organization is doubly important. It represents an insider’s indictment of the horrific massacres and the government-engineered famine in the Strip, directly challenging the baseless argument that accusing Israel of genocide is an act of antisemitism.
Western media were particularly interested in this report, despite the fact that numerous first-hand Palestinian reports and investigations are often ignored or downplayed. This double standard continues to feed into a chronic media problem in its perception of Palestine and Israel.
Claims by Palestinians of Israeli war crimes have historically been ignored by mainstream media or academia. Whether the Zionist militia’s massacre of Tantura in 1948, the actual number of Palestinians and Lebanese killed in the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982, or the events resulting in the Jenin massacre in the West Bank in 2002, the media has frequently ignored the Palestinian account. It often gains a degree of validation only if it is backed by Israeli or Western voices.
The latest B’Tselem report is no exception. But another question must be asked: why did it take nearly two years for B’Tselem to reach such an obvious conclusion? Israeli rights groups, in particular, have far greater access to the conduct of the Israeli army, the statements of politicians, and Hebrew media coverage than any other entity. Such a conclusion, therefore, should have been reached in a matter of two months, not two years.
This kind of intentional delay has so far defined the position of many international institutions, organisations, and individuals whose moral authority would have helped Palestinians establish the facts of the genocide globally much earlier.
For example, despite the ICJ’s historic ruling on 26 January 2024, that determined that there are plausible grounds for South Africa’s accusation of Israel of committing genocide, the court is still unable, or unwilling, to produce a conclusive ruling. A definitive ruling would have been a significant pressure card on Israel to end its mass killing in Gaza.
Instead, for now, the ICJ expects Israel to investigate itself, a most unrealistic expectation at a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises his extremist ministers that Israel will encourage the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
The same indictment of intentional and politicised delays can be attributed to the International Criminal Court. While it issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister on November 21, 2024, no concrete action has been taken. Instead, it is the Chief Prosecutor of the court, Karim Khan, who finds himself attacked by the US government and media for having the courage to follow through on the investigation.
Individuals, too, especially those who have been associated with ‘revolutionary’ politics, the likes of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, have been reluctant to act. On 22 March 2024, Ocasio-Cortez refused to use the term genocide in Gaza, going as far as claiming that, while she saw an “unfolding genocide,” she was not yet ready to use the term herself.
Sanders, on the other hand, who has spoken out repeatedly and strongly against Netanyahu, describing him in an interview with CNN on 31 July as a “disgusting liar,” has had repeated moral lapses since the start of the war. When the term genocide was used by many, far less ‘radical’ politicians, Sanders doubled down during a lecture at a university in Ireland. He said that the word genocide “makes him queasy,” and he urged people to be “careful about it”.
These are not simply lost opportunities or instances of moral equivocation. They have had a profound and direct impact on Israel’s behavior. The timely intervention of governments, international institutions, high courts, media, and human rights groups would have fundamentally changed the dynamics of the war. Such collective pressure could have forced Israel and its allies to end the war, potentially saving thousands of lives.
Delays born of political calculation and fear of retribution have given Israel the critical space it needed to carry out its genocide. Israel is actively exploiting this lack of legal and moral clarity to persist in its mass slaughter of Palestinians.
This must change. The Palestinian perspective, their suffering, and their truths must be respected and honored without needing validation from Israeli or other sources. The Palestinian voice and their rights must be truly centered, not as an academic cliché or political jargon, but as an undeniable, everyday reality.
As for those who have delayed their verdict regarding the Israeli genocide, no rationale can possibly absolve them. They will be judged by history and by the desperate pleas of Gaza’s mothers and fathers, who tried and failed to save their children from the Israeli killing machine and the world’s collective silence or inaction.
The real Russiagate scandal blows away Watergate for crimes and treason by U.S. establishment
Strategic Culture Foundation | August 1, 2025
So the hoax is finally officially acknowledged. “Russiagate” – the mainstream narrative, that is – is now described by American intelligence chiefs as a fabrication that was concocted to overturn the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
Tulsi Gabbard, the current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and CIA director John Ratcliffe have both accused former President Barack Obama of engaging in a “treasonous conspiracy” to subvert the constitutional process. It’s not just Obama who is implicated in this high crime. Other former senior officials in his 2013-17 administration, including former DNI James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and head of the FBI James Comey, are also implicated. If justice is permitted, the political repercussions are truly earth-shattering.
The potential impact is not confined solely to the violation of U.S. laws and the democratic process – bad enough as that is. The Russiagate scandal that began in 2016 has had a lasting, damaging effect on U.S. and European relations with Russia. The frightfully dangerous NATO proxy war incited in Ukraine, which threatens to escalate into a full-scale world war, was fueled in large part by the hostility generated from the false claims of Russian interference in the U.S. elections.
The allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a subversion campaign against the 2016 U.S. election and colluded with Donald Trump to get him elected were always specious. The scandal was based on shoddy intel claims to purportedly explain how Trump defeated his Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton. Subsequently, the scandal was hyped into a seemingly credible narrative by U.S. intelligence chiefs at the direction of then-President Barack Obama as a way to delegitimize Trump’s incoming first-term presidency.
Years before the recent intelligence disclosures, many independent journalists, including Aaron Maté, and former intelligence analysts like Ray MacGovern and William Binney, had cogently disproven the official Russiagate claims. Not only were these claims false, they were knowingly false. That is, lies and deliberate distortions. Russia did not hack emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee to discredit Clinton. Clinton’s corruption was exposed by a DNC internal leak to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks whistleblower site. That was partly why Assange was persecuted with years-long incarceration.
A large enough number of voters simply despised Clinton and her warmongering psychopathy, as well as her sell-out of working-class Americans for Wall Street largesse.
Furthermore, Moscow consistently denied any involvement in trying to influence the 2016 U.S. election or attempts to favor Trump. Putin has said more than once that Russia has no preference about who becomes U.S. president, implying that they’re all the same and controlled by deeper state forces. Laughably, too, while Washington accused Moscow of election interference, the actual record shows that the United States has habitually interfered in scores of foreign elections over many decades, including those of Russia. No other nation comes close to the U.S. – the self-declared “leader of the free world” – in sabotaging foreign elections.
In any case, it is instructive to compare the Russiagate farce with the Watergate scandal. Watergate involved spying by the White House of President Richard Nixon against a Democrat rival in the 1972 election. The political crisis that ensued led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974. The U.S. nation was shocked by the dirty tricks. Several senior White House officials were later convicted and served time in jail for crimes related to the affair. Nixon was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and avoided prosecution. Nevertheless, Watergate indelibly disgraced U.S. politics and, at the time, was described as “the worst political scandal of the 20th century.”
Subsequent cases of corruption and malfeasance are often dubbed with the suffix “gate” in a nod to Watergate as a momentous political downfall. Hence, “Russiagate.”
There are hugely important differences, however. While Watergate was a scandal based on factual crimes and wrongdoing, Russiagate was always a contrived propaganda deception. The real scandal behind Russiagate was not Trump’s alleged misdeeds or those of Russia, but the criminal conspiracy by Obama and his administration to sabotage the 2016 election and subsequently to overthrow the Trump presidency and the democratic will of the American people. Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s most senior intelligence chief, has said that this amounts to “treason,” and she has called for the prosecution of Obama and other former senior aides.
Arguably, the real Russiagate scandal is far more criminal and devastating in its political implications than Watergate. The latter involved illegal spying and dirty tricks. Whereas, Russiagate involved a president and his intelligence chiefs trying to subvert the entire democratic process. Not only that, but the U.S. mainstream media are also now exposed for perpetrating a propaganda heist on the American public. All of the major U.S. media outlets amplified the politicised intelligence orchestrated by the Obama administration, claiming that Russia interfered in the election and that Trump was a “Kremlin stooge.” The hoax became an obsession in the U.S. media for years and piled up severe damage in international relations, a nefarious legacy that we are living with today.
The New York Times and Washington Post, reputedly two of the finest exponents of American journalism, jointly won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for their reporting on Russiagate, the official version, that is, which lent credibility to the hoax. In light of what we know now, these newspapers should be hanging their heads in shame for running a Goebbels-like Big Lie campaign to not only deceive the U.S. public but to subvert the democratic process and poison international relations. Their reputations are shredded, as well as those of other major media outlets, including ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.
Ironically, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for its reporting on the Watergate scandal. The story was made into a best-selling book, All The President’s Men, and a hit Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing the roles of intrepid reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post were acclaimed as the finest in U.S. journalism for exposing Watergate and bringing a crooked president to book.
How shameful and absurd that an even greater assault on American democracy and international relations in the form of Russiagate is ignored and buried by “America’s finest”. That the scandal is ignored and buried should be of no surprise because to properly reveal it would shatter the foundations of the U.S. political establishment and the sinister role of the deep state and its mainstream media propaganda system.
