Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Bahrain faces scrutiny for opposition crackdown after detainee killed

Al Mayadeen | April 3, 2026

A Bahraini man detained during last month’s missile strikes on the kingdom has died in custody under contested circumstances, sparking renewed scrutiny of the country’s security practices amid wartime tensions.

Mohammad al-Mousawi, a Bahraini national who was detained as Bahrain came under attack from Iran, disappeared for several days before his family was contacted and asked to retrieve his body from a military hospital, relatives said. They reported that his body bore multiple injuries, including slash marks, bruising, and wounds on the soles of his feet.

His death has quickly become a flashpoint in the country, with critics accusing authorities of reverting to tactics used to suppress protests during the 2011 uprising.

Bahrain, which hosts the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, has detained dozens of individuals since the outbreak of the war, including people accused of:

  • filming strikes and demonstrations,
  • expressing support for Iran against US-Israeli aggression
  • alleged espionage.

“They want to make sure nobody challenges the state’s narrative and silence any voices not telling the story of the war how they want it to be told,” said Sayed Ahmed al-Wadaei of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, a London-based advocacy group.

Bahraini Interior Ministry dismisses clear evidence

The Interior Ministry claimed al-Mousawi had been arrested on suspicion of spying for Iran, an allegation his family denies. Authorities also dismissed circulating images of his injuries as “inaccurate and misleading,” while insisting that the country is acting to protect national security.

In a statement, the government rejected accusations of sectarian discrimination, saying all actions were carried out in accordance with the law and that independent bodies are responsible for investigating claims of abuse.

Al-Mousawi had previously spent around 11 years in prison as part of a 21-year sentence on charges widely regarded as false, including accusations of arson and alleged membership in a “terrorist cell”. His family and rights groups have clarified that these charges are false and fabricated.

Severe abuse evident on al-Mousawi, Bahrain denies the obvious

A relative and a close family friend said Mohammad al-Mousawi disappeared on March 19 after attending prayers with two companions who also remain missing. Both spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, citing fears of reprisals. Rights groups have long accused Bahraini authorities of carrying out enforced disappearances.

On March 27, the family said they were called to collect his body. A relative who viewed it at the morgue reported signs of severe abuse, including injuries consistent with whipping using cables, as well as apparent electrocution and cigarette burns.

The Associated Press reviewed images of the body that showed marks consistent with accounts from five witnesses who said they saw it in person, all speaking anonymously. Bahrain’s Interior Ministry said al-Mousawi had been held by the National Security Agency, whose arrest powers were restored in 2017 after being revoked following the 2011 unrest.

The Ministry dismissed the images as “inaccurate and misleading,” while a military hospital attributed the death to a heart attack. His family said he had no known preexisting conditions. Ahmed Banasr of Physicians for Human Rights said the injuries were consistent with blunt force trauma, noting that wounds on the soles of the feet suggested abuse rather than a fall or fight.

Bahrain’s long record of repression, violence seeps into al-Mousawi’s case

Human rights organizations say the detention and death of Mohammad al-Mousawi mark a new phase in Bahrain’s long-running crackdown on opposition, which peaked during the 2011 protests. That year, the ruling Al Khalifa family suppressed mass demonstrations with support from Saudi and Emirati forces.

“It remains to be seen how far the government will go in its crackdown on people,” said exiled Bahraini activist Maryam al-Khawaja, whose father is imprisoned in Bahrain. “What we are witnessing now is certainly far more severe than in recent years,” she added.

Since the start of the war on Iran, at least 41 people, including migrant workers, have been arrested on accusations of publishing images of Iranian strikes. Some face charges of “treason”, which can carry penalties ranging from life imprisonment to the death penalty. In one case, 21-year-old Hussein Futeil and a friend were detained after posting videos of themselves waving a portrait of Iranian leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei during a protest outside the US Embassy.

According to his father, Naji Futeil, the two briefly reappeared after hours of questioning before Hussein later informed his family he faced five charges, including misuse of social media, incitement of hatred, and treason. Rights advocates say the cases reflect a broader effort to silence opposition, with Sayyed Ahmed al-Wadaei stating authorities aim to ensure no one challenges the state’s narrative.

April 3, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Comments Off on Bahrain faces scrutiny for opposition crackdown after detainee killed

The Most Important Bet You’ve Never Heard Of

Corbett | March 31, 2026 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Have you heard of the bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. You know, the bet about whether commodity prices would rise or fall in the 1980s? If you’re like most of the population, you haven’t. That’s because this wasn’t some mere wager about economics, this was a contest between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Spoiler: the forces of good won. And that’s why we’re not taught about this bet in the public indoctrination system. Let’s fix that. Today on The Corbett Report, James fills in the missing pieces about the most important bet you’ve never heard of and what it tells us about the value of human life.

Video player not working? Use these links to watch it somewhere else!

WATCH ON: ARCHIVE / BITCHUTE / ODYSEE / RUMBLE / SUBSTACK/  or DOWNLOAD THE MP4

TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES

April 2, 2026 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Comments Off on The Most Important Bet You’ve Never Heard Of

Iran To Target Military Industrial-Tech Complex That Facilitated Gaza Genocide

The Dissident | March 31, 2026

The Iranian IRCG has put out a statement threatening to target the facilities of companies in the Middle East which are part of America’s war profiteering machine, primarily the tech companies.

In a statement, the IRCG said, “Our repeated warnings about the necessity to stop terrorist operations were ignored, and today, following your terrorist attacks and those of your Israeli allies, several Iranian citizens were martyred” adding, “Since the main element in designing and tracking assassination targets are American ICT and AI companies, in response to these crimes, from now on the main and effective institutions involved in terrorist operations will be our legitimate targets” and “We advise the employees of these institutions to immediately leave their workplaces to preserve their lives. Also, residents of areas around these terrorist companies in all countries of the region, within a one-kilometre radius, should leave their homes and workplaces and seek safe places”.

The list of targeted companies included:

Cisco
HP
Intel
Oracle
Microsoft
Apple
Google
Meta
IBM
Dell
Palantir
Nvidia
J.P. Morgan
Tesla
GE (General Electric)
Spire Solutions
G42
Boeing

All of these companies play an integral role in the U.S./Israeli war machine in the Middle East and have been needed to facilitate not only the war in Iran but the genocide in Gaza.

The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, meticulously documented many of these companies’ crucial role in facilitating the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.

The following is the role each of these companies played in the genocide in Gaza as documented by Albanese.

HP

Albanese documented that, “Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) maintained the database and its Israeli subsidiary is still providing servers. Hewlett Packard (HP) has long enabled the apartheid systems of Israel, supplying technology to the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the prison service and police.Since the 2015 split of the company into Hewlett Packard Enterprises and HP Inc., opaque business structures have obscured the roles of their seven remaining Israeli subsidiaries”.

Microsoft

Albanese documented that, “Microsoft has been active in Israel since 1991, developing its largest centre outside the United States. Its technologies are embedded in the prison service, police, universities and schools – including in colonies. Microsoft has been integrating its systems and civilian tech across the Israeli military since 2003, while acquiring Israeli cybersecurity and surveillance start-ups.”

She added that Microsoft, “grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities” adding that, “Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Their Israel-located servers ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight. In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word”

Google

Albanese documented that, “As Israeli apartheid, military and population-control systems generate increasing volumes of data, its reliance on cloud storage and computing has grown. In 2021, Israel awarded Alphabet Inc. (Google) … a $1.2 billion contract (Project Nimbus) largely funded through Ministry of Defense expenditure to provide core tech infrastructure.”

IBM

Albanese documented that, “IBM has operated in Israel since 1972, training military and intelligence personnel – especially from Unit 8200 – for the technology sector and start-up scene. Since 2019, IBM Israel has operated and upgraded the central database of the Population and Immigration Authority, enabling collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, and supporting the discriminatory permit regime of Israel.”

Palantir

Albanese documented that, “The Israeli military has developed artificial intelligence systems, such as ‘Lavender’, ‘Gospel’ and ‘Where’s Daddy?’ to process data and generate lists of targets, reshaping modern warfare and illustrating the dual-use nature of artificial intelligence. Palantir Technologies Inc., whose tech collaboration with Israel long predates October 2023, expanded its support to the Israeli military post-October 2023. There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making. In January 2024, Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv ‘in solidarity’; in April 2025, Palantir’s Chief Executive Officer responded to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza by saying, ‘mostly terrorists, that’s true’. Both incidents are indicative of executive-level knowledge and purpose vis-à-vis the unlawful use of force by Israel, and failure to prevent such acts or withdraw involvement.”

The biography “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State” of Palantir’s co-founder Alex Karp revealed that “The company’s technology was deployed by the Israelis during military operations in Lebanon in 2024 that decimated Hezbollah’s top leadership” as well as “Operation Grim Beeper, in which hundreds of Hezbollah fighters were injured and maimed when their pagers and walkie-talkies exploded” adding that, “Its software was used by the Israeli military in several raids in Gaza”.

Other Companies Role In The Genocide

Other companies on Iran’s target list played an integral war in the Gaza genocide as well.

  • Journalist Alan Macleod reported that , “While Oracle has signed multiple lucrative contracts with the Israeli national security state” its owner, Larry “Ellison himself has personally bankrolled the Israeli Defense Forces, giving tens of millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF, an organization that purchases equipment for the Israeli military. This included a $16.6 million pledge (the largest single donation the group has received) to build a new training facility for soldiers defending what he called ‘our home.’” He added that, “Oracle sees itself as an activist organization, one whose goal is the advancement of the Israeli colonization project. Safra Catz, the company’s Israeli-American CEO, bluntly explained that any employees uncomfortable with supporting a genocide should simply quit.”
  • Analyst Murad Jandali documented that , “Apple has close relations with ‘Israel’ and supports it on several levels, as Apple has its own research and development institution in the occupied Palestinian territories, specifically in northern Tel Aviv” adding, “It is noteworthy that last October, Google, Apple, and Waze had disabled live traffic updates for the areas of ‘Israel’ and the Gaza Strip at the request of the Israeli army, prior to the start of the military operation in the Strip, according to Bloomberg.”
  • The Netherlands-based financial research group Profundo uncovered that “a small number of investment banks have played a crucial role in helping Israel meet the ‘significant funding needs’ arising from its war on Gaza by providing significant underwriting services to the Israeli state” and that “The research finds that Israel issued sovereign bonds between October 7th, 2023 and January 2025 with a total value of $19.4 billion and reveals the seven banks that underwrote these bonds for the Israeli state” one of which was JP Morgan Chase.
  • Leaked documents from the Zionist Tony Blair Institute included plans to turn Gaza into an “‘Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone’ on the Gaza-Israel border where US electric vehicle companies (like Tesla) would build cars for export to Europe” after the end of the Gaza genocide.
  • In December of last year , “the U.S. government awarded Boeing a contract with a ceiling of $8.58 Billion for what the Pentagon describes as the ‘F-15 Israel Program.’ The contract covers the design, integration, instrumentation, test, production, and delivery of 25 new F-15IA aircraft for the Israeli Air Force, with an option for an additional 25 aircraft.”
  • The BDS movement has noted that “Cisco’s complicity in Israel’s crimes of apartheid and genocide is well documented through its illegal operations in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), discriminatory policies, long-standing partnership with the Israeli military, and serial acquisitions of Israeli companies complicit in human rights violations. Cisco knowingly provides Israel with technology that is deployed in its grave human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.”

The tech companies have also been integral in the U.S. war on Iran. As Responsible Statecraft noted , “the U.S. military has employed Palantir’s Maven, which uses AI to classify targets and recommend weapons systems for strikes. Anthropic’s Claude is embedded in Maven’s system, helping prioritise targets and draft automated legal justifications for each strike.”

Through targeting the U.S. military industrial tech complex, Iran is not only responding against the infrastructure that fuels the Iran war, but the infrastructure fuelling the Israeli genocide in Gaza and repression of Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank.

March 31, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Iran To Target Military Industrial-Tech Complex That Facilitated Gaza Genocide

UK’s New Pandemic Plan Would Turn Big Tech Into a Mass Location Tracking Network

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | March 30, 2026

Britain’s new £1 billion ($1.3m) pandemic strategy treats a future outbreak as a “certainty” and proposes building a contact tracing system that would feed on real-time location data harvested with the help of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.

The plan, published by the Department of Health and Social Care, also calls for PPE stockpiles, new emergency legislation, and a biosecurity research hub in Essex.

But the centerpiece that deserves the most scrutiny is the contact tracing proposal, which would create a surveillance architecture designed to track the movements of millions of people, ready to switch on at a moment’s notice.

The UKHSA will run the new system, which the strategy document says will use “live location data” and artificial intelligence to provide “a more rapid, large-scale detection and alert system during pandemics.”

The agency plans to “explore options to work with ‘big tech’” to build it, with deployment targeted for 2030. The government is pre-building a location surveillance system in partnership with companies whose entire business model depends on harvesting as much personal data as possible.

The strategy doesn’t name which companies, what data-sharing agreements would look like, or what happens to your location history once the pandemic ends.

The UK government has already tracked its own citizens through their phones without telling them. A 2021 report by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors (SPI-B) revealed that government-funded researchers tracked one in ten people in Britain via their mobile phones in February of that year, without the users’ knowledge or permission.

Researchers used cell phone mobility data to select over 4,200 vaccinated individuals, then monitored them through 40 call data records with corresponding location observations. The data was used for behavioral analysis, tracking radius of movement on vaccination day, whether people visited businesses during opening hours, and whether they went straight home afterwards. None of this was made public at the time.

When the tracking came to light, a spokesperson for Big Brother Watch said citizens would be “disturbed to discover they were unwittingly tracked and subjected to behavioral analysis via their phones.”

“No one expects that by going to get a vaccine they will be tracked and monitored by their own Government,” the spokesperson said. “This is deeply chilling and could be extremely damaging to public trust in medical confidentiality. Between looming Covid passports and vaccine phone surveillance, this Government is turning Britain into a Big Brother state under the cover of Covid. This should be a wake up call to us all.”

The government’s defense was that the data was collected at cell tower level, not the individual level, and that it was “GDPR-compliant” data provided by a company that “collected, cleaned, and anonymized” it.

A government spokesperson said “the mobile phone location data used is GDPR-compliant and has been provided from a company that collected, cleaned, and anonymized the data” and that “the data is at cell tower rather than individual level and the researchers were granted access to the dataset under a research contract with ethical approval provided to the researchers from the University of Oxford, working on behalf of SPI-B.”

That defense tells you everything about how the government thinks about location surveillance. It tracked millions of people and called it ethical because a private company “anonymized” the data first. It monitored the movements of vaccinated individuals and called it acceptable because the tracking happened at cell tower resolution rather than GPS precision. The distinction between “cell tower level” and “individual surveillance” is thinner than the government wants you to believe.

Cell tower data can still reveal where you live, where you work, and what you do on a given day, especially when cross-referenced with other datasets. The fact that a private company sat between the government and the raw data doesn’t change what happened: people went to get vaccinated, and their government secretly tracked where they went afterwards.

That history makes the new strategy’s contact tracing plans look less like pandemic preparedness and more like the next step in normalizing population-level location surveillance.

The 2021 tracking was done covertly, without legislation, using data purchased from a private company. The new strategy proposes formalizing this kind of capability, building it into permanent government systems, and enlisting “big tech” to run it at scale. What was done secretly during Covid is now being written into official policy.

During the pandemic, the UK’s first attempt at a centralized contact tracing app collapsed under its own privacy problems. The government’s original NHSX app tried to store user data on a central server, a design so invasive that Apple and Google refused to let it run properly on their operating systems.

March 31, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Comments Off on UK’s New Pandemic Plan Would Turn Big Tech Into a Mass Location Tracking Network

Can we please stop calling Israel the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ now?

By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 30, 2026

The murder of three Lebanese journalists brings the U.S./Israel war with Iran to a new level of depravity and desperation. But journalists are to blame for this.

It’s hard to fathom what is more shocking about the news of three Lebanese journalists being targeted by Israel’s IDF and killed while working: the actual murder of the journalists or the lack of hue and cry by western media who are partisan to both the practice of murdering journalists and to how the stories of them being killed are framed.

Israel for a long time has had an extraordinary hold on western media which largely operates like a PR platform for its objectives. Journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza and so have to resort to the Stockholm Syndrome working relationship with the IDF’s press office which gives them distorted ’facts’ about what’s happening on the ground, omits critical information and in some cases actually feeds them fake news, lock, stock and barrel. We are told journalists cannot enter Gaza for their own safety, which is as preposterous as it is comical, as Israel has an impressive track record by now of targeting and assassinating journalists.

The murder of three Lebanese journalists though has raised the stakes of Israel’s war with Iran and shown us how desperate the government is, as it struggles to cope with the country being slowly reduced to rubble by Iran’s missiles pounding it every day. The war now seems to be less about the scoresheet of who hit what and more about forcing journalists at gunpoint to write up false ’news’ or, in the case of many major western outlets like the BBC, simply not report on Iran’s strikes on the ground. In this environment, of course, public opinion cannot be allowed to go rogue and hold both the U.S. and Israel to account, as what we are seeing on our TV screens is entirely distorted and bears little or no resemblance to reality.

The murder of the three Lebanese journalists will be seen as a great victory by the IDF as it will send a chilling reminder to all journalists in Lebanon that they have to follow the script, or they will be targeted. But it also marks itself as a milestone in war reporting in general, in that now there is no more ambiguity about journalists being seen as legitimate targets on the battlefield, and this will have a knock-on effect around the world as journalists fail to detach themselves sufficiently from armies, governments and regimes, and when they put on a flak jacket marked ’press’ they present themselves as partisan and therefore a regular target just like the soldiers they are with.

Corruption also is at the heart of this sad story. Both Netanyahu and Trump are either being investigated for corruption or will certainly be on a grand scale when they leave office. They simply cannot leave office, and their only way of staying in power is to create mayhem and chaos for media to feast on while the spotlight is turned off them temporarily. New footage has been recently released of Netanyahu being interviewed by police officers who are investigating him on graft allegations surrounding expensive gifts that are given to him by those who seek favours from his office. This is believed to be the tip of the iceberg, though, and when police officers dig deeper they will find larger, more significant examples of corruption. Bibi will certainly serve a prison term if investigators are allowed to work freely and the judiciary system is allowed time to process the case. But in this period of war, it is expected that his case will be stalled. The invasion of Lebanon, which has provoked Hezbollah to hit targets within Israel, served its purpose perfectly to take the state of emergency in Israel to a new level where such proceedings are expected to be left to settle as dust. Trump on the other hand seems to have distracted U.S. media away from reporting on the thousands of pages of details about him having relations with children which, one would have thought, would have affected his support from his own base.

Both men desperately need to control the media narrative, and so murdering journalists and telling other media that those who were killed were working for Hezbollah and using the press as a front is straight out of the Donald Trump Art of the Lie handbook. Trump is telling so many lies at the moment on an hourly basis about what is happening in Iran that journalists cannot complain about being targeted for reporting on facts if the vast majority of them simply replicate everything that comes out of his mouth as fact, more or less. This is where the war is. If we don’t ask difficult questions and report what Trump and Netanyahu are saying or claiming as false, it’s easy to understand just how much power they think they can wield over journalists who largely play along with the false reporting simply due to fear of being targeted. Literally.

The losses, just as one example, of U.S. military hardware is pure fiction. According to Trump, warships are out of action due to poor maintenance and fighter jets just keep falling out of the sky due to friendly fire. It’s a Hollywood movie script which a lot of journalists are helping him to develop each day. But the fact is that there are no U.S. journalists who are reporting the plain facts. The Straits of Hormuz has been taken over by Iran, the U.S. has almost no missiles left, its two aircraft carriers are limping home due to strikes, oil prices have risen which has given both Iran and Russia huge amounts of money to spend on their own wars, and Iran has emerged stronger, richer and a bolder new nuclear power which it wasn’t before. As a cherry on top of that spectacular failure by Trump and Israel, the U.S. has lost both its influence in the region and soon its petrodollars. I once wrote a week before the war that fake news will play a huge role in any war that Israel carries out with Iran and we should expect more journalists to be murdered, especially if the land invasion goes ahead and Trump will have to lie about the numbers of dead American soldiers. What I predict is that a second invasion somewhere will be staged just for the cameras which will be fed to journalists as ’handout’ video while the real battle surges forward with record casualties. Trump’s experience in reality TV and Israel’s already remarkable track record of video manipulation will play an empirical role, with the Lebanese journalists’ murder just encouraging them that anything is possible now with journalists.

March 30, 2026 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , | Comments Off on Can we please stop calling Israel the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ now?

FTC Warns Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe Over Political Debanking

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | March 29, 2026

Four companies that collectively control how most Americans buy and sell things received warning letters this week from FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, threatening enforcement action if they deny customers access to financial services based on political or religious beliefs. The targets are Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe.

The letters didn’t name a single specific violation, and they didn’t need to. The track record is already public. PayPal has frozen accounts of several political commentators.

Stripe cut off payment processing for President Trump’s campaign website after January 6, 2021. Both companies have spent years making unilateral decisions about who deserves access to the financial system, hiding behind vague terms of service that give compliance teams almost unlimited discretion.

“Full participation in commerce and public life necessarily requires that law-abiding individuals can access, and freely participate in, our financial system,” Chairman Ferguson wrote.

“It is inconsistent with American values to deny law-abiding individuals the ability to run their legitimate businesses and feed their families because they attracted the ire of rogue American officials, overzealous activists, or, more worryingly, foreign governments seeking to control public discourse,” he continued.

“That is why President Trump’s August 7, 2025, Executive Order on debanking makes clear that it is unacceptable to debank law-abiding citizens due to ‘political affiliations, religious beliefs, or lawful business activities.’”

Ferguson’s letters lean on Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices.”

The logic is that if your terms promise equal access and you cut someone off for their politics, that’s deceptive. “As an American citizen, I abhor and condemn any efforts to debank or otherwise deny law-abiding consumers access,” Ferguson wrote, citing Trump’s August 2025 executive order on debanking.

He told Visa and Mastercard they’re responsible not just for their own conduct but for member banks on their networks. “Equally concerning is the conduct of payments providers and payment networks that turn a blind eye when their financial institution members debank consumers for these reasons,” he wrote.

PayPal declined to comment. Visa and Mastercard didn’t respond. Only Stripe pushed back: “At Stripe, we do not restrict access to our services based on political viewpoints or affiliation.”

Ferguson’s letters describe payment services as “essential for Americans’ participation in everyday commerce, and, directly or indirectly, for the exercise of core rights and freedoms.” It treats access to payment infrastructure not as a privilege companies can revoke at will, but as something closer to a necessity.

The real question is whether letters become action. The FTC opened no investigations and announced no penalties.

March 30, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Comments Off on FTC Warns Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe Over Political Debanking

Pro-Palestinian French member of European Parliament denied entry to Canada

MEMO | March 29, 2026

Rima Hassan, a French member of the European Parliament of Palestinian origin, said late Saturday she was denied entry to Canada hours before her scheduled flight, Anadolu reports.

“I was prevented from traveling to Canada: a troubling obstruction to parliamentary work and freedom of expression,” Hassan wrote on X.

Hassan is affiliated with France’s left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI).

The party said Hassan had been invited to speak at two conferences in Montreal and that her initial electronic travel authorization had been approved by Canadian authorities.

However, she was informed by email late Friday, on the eve of her departure, that her application was under review, the party said.

Hassan said Canadian authorities requested extensive personal records just hours before her flight to reassess her travel authorization, describing the move as a “disproportionate request” unrelated to the stated grounds.

According to LFI, the review cited an alleged failure to disclose a prior visa refusal or denial of entry to another country, as well as an alleged failure to report a criminal offense, arrest, formal investigation or conviction.

The party said these issues relate to matters “directly linked to her political engagement in support of the Palestinian people.”

It added that the concerns stem from a 2025 denial of entry to Israel involving an EU delegation that included Hassan, as well as complaints for “apology for terrorism” that did not result in charges.

LFI also claimed that pro-Israel lobbying organizations had been working in recent weeks to prevent Hassan’s visit to Canada.

“The revocation of her travel authorization is part of a concerning trend of restricting the freedom of expression and movement of political representatives, as well as part of a broader pattern of censorship targeting democratic debate,” the party said.

The statement added that representatives of LFI and Canada’s New Democratic Party strongly condemned the decision, calling it “a serious infringement on the exercise of a parliamentary mandate and on freedom of expression.”

March 29, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Comments Off on Pro-Palestinian French member of European Parliament denied entry to Canada

Battle for Hungary: EU attacks on Orban are a sign of worse things to come

By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | March 28, 2026

About a century ago – between those two World Wars which Europeans have generously given to the history of humanity – there was a joke about Hungary: It was a monarchy without a king and a landlocked country ruled by an admiral. It was funny because it was true.

Nowadays, though, we have proudly advanced. Now, we have a whole European Union, with 27 member states and 450 million people, run by an unelected German who really serves the US and has, a bit like Siegfried or Brunhilde, a special “shield” (about which more below) to protect a “democracy” administered and defined by an non-transparent, privileged, and aloof nomenklatura of equally unelected bureaucrats.

Contemporary Hungary, meanwhile, is, by the sober standards of reality, by no means a perfect but a perfectly normal country, that is, neither better nor worse than most of the rest. No longer a weird monarchy with a gaping hole at the top but a run-of-the-mill Western-style capitalist democracy, it has a feisty prime minister for a leader instead of an admiral without a coast. That prime minister, Viktor Orban, is a typical if especially canny and successful professional politician, who combines a knack for crowd appeal, demagoguery included, with deft political power plays.

It is true, if electoral districts need re-designing in Hungary, the party in power is likely to favor its own chances, just like they do in the EU’s big “daddy” the US, for instance. Likewise, if you are doing business in Hungary, being close to the party – or parties –in power tends to be better for your company. But that’s no different in, again, the US (with the caveat that there the current president and his extensive clan are now taking an extra large cut for themselves). Or, indeed, in Germany and France. The latter, as it happens, has just reached a new low in Transparency International’s annual corruption index.

Hungary may not have unbiased mass media, as its critics indignantly charge. But then, who does? Certainly not Germany, Britain, France, or, for that matter, the US. As a matter of fact, it is the EU and the German authorities which are currently obstinately misusing a sanctions regime designed for foreign policy purposes – and not working, but that’s another matter – to circumvent ordinary legal procedures, trample on civil and human rights, and punitively destroy the existence of individual dissidents and critical journalist.

Hungary’s elections may suffer from that media slant and some sharp administrative practice, too. But that again, is at least equally true of all major states in Europe and of the US as well. Indeed, say what you will about voting under real-existing Orbanism, it has not featured the brutal, EU-driven manipulation we have recently seen in Romania and Moldova.

And there is also nothing comparable in Orban’s Hungary to the extremely suspicious (to say the least) manner in which the last German elections featured a statistically bizarre accumulation of “mistakes” that eliminated the New-Left BSW from parliament.

Since it seems likely that a correct – or clean – result would make Germany’s current ruling coalition impossible, the implications of this case of deeply flawed elections at the very center of the EU are most disturbing: at this point, Germany may have an electorally baseless government, the German parliament’s refusal to permit a clearly necessary recount is either more foul play or indistinguishable from it, and Berlin’s political course – domestically and abroad – would be principally different under a government that would have to rely on the correct election results.

And let’s not even mention minor details, such as that Hungary’s mixed election system (combining first-past-the-post districts and national party lists) is far more representative than that of that “cradle of parliamentary democracy” and police-state-for-Zionism Great Britain.

In view of the above, you would expect, if anything, Budapest going after Brussels as well as some other individual EU member states to demand better democratic behavior. But this is the alternative-reality world of the EU’s sectarian “elite,” where genocidal Israel is only defending itself, “Europe is the values of the Talmud” (perish the thought its history may have a little more to do with first Christian and then Enlightenment ideas), the US is a good and reliable ally, and four white, blonde women serving the same radical Centrism proudly constitute “diversity.”

Hence, in topsy-turvy land, it is, obviously, once again the EU that is charging Hungary with flunking the test of “democracy.” That, in and of itself, might not be important: words are cheap. The problem is that, as before in Romania and even Moldova – not even a member state – the EU Commission has long passed from mere talk, at which it excels, to mean action, which makes everything only worse. Indeed, the EU’s meddling in Hungary has recently escalated.

The catalyst for this escalation is the upcoming Hungarian election. To be held on April 12, domestically, back in Hungary, the outcome will merely decide if Orban can stay in power – which he has been without interruption since 2010 – or will be replaced by the opposition’s new hope, Peter Magyar, a former Orbanist himself. Yet there are good reasons Politico has called these “the EU’s most important elections” this year despite the fact that Hungary is a small country of less than 10 million citizens.

For one thing, Orban is the primus inter pares of a group of very inconvenient sovereigntist rebels inside the EU, which also includes Slovakia’s leader Robert Fico, the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babis and, occasionally but with special weight, Bart de Wever from Belgium, which is an EU founding member. Orban’s toppling would not only weaken this loose group of leaders that still remember that they are supposed to serve their countries first but also make for a chilling object lesson in what happens to those frustrating Brussels too much.

Especially, if they resist the Commission party line on three topics: the relationship with Russia, the Western – now entirely EU-financed – proxy war waged against Moscow by means of Ukraine, and, last but not least, money, in particular money to be wasted – or not – on Kiev’s Zelensky regime. In all three areas, Orban has been Brussel’s main irritant, consistently arguing for normalization with Russia through diplomacy, a quick negotiated end to the proxy war, and an end also to the pathological inter-dependence with Zelensky’s ultra-corrupt and extremely dangerous regime.

Recently, this Hungarian resistance has led to repeated clashes with both the EU establishment and Kiev. Zelensky has publicly threatened Orban with violence in the worst Mafia style; Budapest has taken action against extremely suspicious transports of tens of millions of euro and dollars as well as bullion to Kiev; Hungary and Ukraine have been sparring over Kiev’s attempts to block the Druzhba pipeline; Budapest has been blocking yet another massive “loan” (never to be paid back) for Zelensky and his crew, and, most recently, Orban has called on Kiev to immediately withdraw its agents and operatives from Hungary.

And, by the way, you may suspect Orban of seeking an electoral boost. But even if that is the case, it makes no difference to the fact that aggressive subversion is exactly what the Zelensky regime does. Ask the Germans how things with their pipelines went. The braver ones might dare answer.

As we live in modern, online times, the shape much of the escalating EU meddling on the side of Orban’s opponents in Budapest and Kiev has taken is a nasty combination of social media manipulation at scale, illicit surveillance and spying, and the targeted dissemination of what is meant to be compromising information.

A smelly affair features a Hungarian journalist who has produced a source-free report alleging massive Russian interference in the elections, while spending his free time facilitating an EU country’s intelligence service eavesdropping on Hungary’s foreign minister. Some interference indeed. The hypocrisy would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

In Brussels, meanwhile, under the overall umbrella of the “European Democracy Shield” (EDS) initiative and the Digital Services Act (DSA), a so-called Rapid Response mechanism has been activated to – so the official brief tells us – combat disinformation and foreign influence. Yet, in reality, this is a set of compulsory measures that permit the Commission’s dependent auxiliaries to police social media platforms, suppress content in favor of Orban and, thus, promote his rivals.

What makes all of this particularly dreadful is not simply that it is so almost comically Orwellian: The “European Democracy Shield” is really a shield to protect the EU’s unelected bureaucrat rulers and their ideologized technocrats from democracy as a recent report has correctly argued. Its tools, from so-called “fact-checking” to systematic denunciation by “trusted flaggers” to “prebunking” – that is AI-based preventative propaganda campaigns – amount to a box of horrors.

Yet what is even worse is that all of this is only a small part of a much larger and long-term strategy that has been gathering steam for a decade already. The “European Democracy Shield” and the DSA exist in a large, constantly pullulating eco-system of narrative control that also includes, for instance, a “Defense of Democracy Package,” a “European Democracy Action Plan,” and a Digital Markets Act. Attached to this weaponized spearhead for manufacturing Brussels consent is an extensive – and very expensive – train of so-called civil-society organizations and NGOs that provide both censorship assistance and indoctrination.

Hungary, put simply, is a harbinger of more and even worse to come, of what Brussels wants for our future. The EU ‘elites’ are displaying an unbroken will to power over what we are allowed to think, say, and vote for. That is why – whether you like or dislike Viktor Orban – and I heartily dislike him because of his outrageous siding with genocidal Israel – you should certainly greatly dislike and resist the methods that the EU is fielding to stop him. Because they are coming for all of us.

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.

March 28, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , , , | Comments Off on Battle for Hungary: EU attacks on Orban are a sign of worse things to come

German journalist threatened with homelessness as German court upholds EU sanctions in landmark free speech case

‘Socio-economic death sentence’ 

Remix News – March 27, 2026

The Frankfurt am Main District Court in Germany has recently upheld a German bank’s decision to maintain the suspension of accounts belonging to Berlin-based journalist Hüseyin Doğru, who is known for his pro-Palestinian news coverage. The ruling rejected an urgent application by the journalist, who is currently facing the threat of homelessness due to EU sanctions. The court’s decision means Dogru remains without the necessary funds for rent or basic daily needs.

The legal battle surrounding Hüseyin Doğru has sparked intense political debate in Germany, with critics describing the case as a “socio-economic death sentence” and a dangerous precedent for press freedom. Certainly, these EU sanctions, which can freeze bank accounts, can be used to effectively target dissident journalists across the EU in the coming years.

According to the German court order, there was no right that would entitle Doğru, who has a Turkish background but also has German citizenship, to continue using his bank account while under sanctions. Berliner Zeitung reported that the judge determined that the situation lacked the “prerequisite for intervention in the urgent procedure” because “Doğru has no enforceable right to have the bank release the transfers it has requested.”

The impact of this ruling on Doğru’s personal life is severe. Expressing his concern for his family’s future, Doğru stated, “The risk of ending up on the streets with three children is a concrete threat.”

The paper notes that his “authorized €506 per month makes it impossible to support a family of five. Moreover, he cannot freely dispose of even that amount. The situation could become existential.”

While German law technically allows for a monthly subsistence allowance — cited in late 2025 as €506 — Doğru’s lawyers have had to repeatedly sue banks just to gain access to this minimum amount. His attorney, Alexander Gorski, described these tactics as a “war of attrition” designed to make social and economic participation “factually impossible.”

He also noted the extreme difficulty of maintaining a normal life under these conditions, remarking that “paying bills is practically impossible for me.”

Doğru has been on an EU sanctions list since May 2025, with Brussels arguing that his pro-Palestinian journalistic work incites “ethnic, political, and religious discord” and therefore, he allegedly supports “destabilizing activities by Russia.” Notably, he filmed a number of the occupations of Berlin universities by pro-Palestinian activists.

Doğru has denied these allegations, pointing out that he ended his previous employment with a Russian-funded outlet following the invasion of Ukraine and has publicly criticized the conflict.

Remix News already covered developments in this story at the end of January of this year.

At the time, Doğru, a left-wing journalist, said: “Not only I, but also my wife and my three children are effectively being sanctioned.”

“The sanctions themselves stipulate that I am entitled to access to essential funds. The fact that my bank is nevertheless blocking these funds violates applicable law in my view,” he continued.

The basis for the sanctions was his alleged connections to Russia, but the Berliner Zeitung indicated that so far, no proof has been presented to confirm this accusation, and more importantly, there was no trial or evidence provided to support this accusation.

“Brussels justifies the measures by saying that he is using his pro-Palestinian journalistic work to stir up ‘ethnic, political and religious discord’ and thus allegedly ‘destabilizing activities that support Russia.’ The EU has not yet publicly provided any concrete evidence of a connection to Moscow,” wrote the paper at the time.

There are now fears that the extraordinary case may be a sign of where the future is headed, where an authoritarian EU can censor and financially ruin dissidents and journalists with no oversight or judicial review. Notably, similar sanctions could also be deployed against others, such as Roger Köppel, the Swiss editor-in-chief of the weekly Die Weltwoche.

In a formal inquiry from the newspaper Junge Welt, the German Ministry of Economic Affairs clarified the severity of the “provision ban.” They stated that a sanctioned individual may receive “no economic benefit whatsoever,” including wages. This interpretation effectively bars any German company from hiring Doğru, as paying him would constitute a criminal offense.

An MP of the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD) Macit Karaahmetoğlu, defended the government’s position in the case and the sanctions, noting it was established to target those undermining “the security, stability, independence and integrity” of the EU. He emphasized that the German government “actively worked to establish and strengthen” this specific regime to counter hybrid threats.

Legal experts and journalists, however, have compared Doğru’s situation to “internal exile.” Since he is a German citizen, he cannot be deported, but the sanctions have stripped him of his identity card and barred him from all forms of employment.

Even friends and family who would like to donate money to Doğru could be targeted with criminal charges.

March 27, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Comments Off on German journalist threatened with homelessness as German court upholds EU sanctions in landmark free speech case

Hamas official rejects Mladenov Plan linking disarmament to Gaza reconstruction

Palestinian Information Center – March 27, 2026

GAZA – Hamas political bureau member Bassem Naim has firmly rejected proposals by former UN envoy Nikolay Mladenov that link resistance weapons in Gaza to administrative and security arrangements, including the deployment of international forces and reconstruction efforts.

Naim said the plan reflects bias toward Israel and contradicts previous agreements and international resolutions, accusing Mladenov of attempting to reshape the framework in line with Israeli interests while ignoring ceasefire violations and the lack of guarantees for implementation.

He warned that tying humanitarian needs such as reconstruction and easing the blockade to disarmament is unacceptable, stressing that such proposals come at the expense of Palestinian rights.

According to Naim, ongoing Israeli violations since the ceasefire have killed more than 750 Palestinians and injured around 1,800, while reconstruction materials remain restricted and crossings largely closed.

A leaked document outlining the proposal suggests a step-by-step approach linking disarmament to humanitarian progress, alongside a transitional governance plan based on a single authority and a single weapon framework.

Naim argued the plan imposes significant obligations on Palestinian factions without ensuring reciprocal commitments, raising concerns over expanded international intervention in Gaza.

The remarks come as the Israeli attacks on Gaza continue to cause massive casualties, displacement, and widespread destruction across the territory.

March 27, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Comments Off on Hamas official rejects Mladenov Plan linking disarmament to Gaza reconstruction

Israel systematically torturing Palestinians in custody: UN special rapporteur Albanese

Press TV | March 22, 2026

A UN expert says that the Israeli regime systematically tortures Palestinians on a scale “that suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent.”

In a report released on Friday, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, said that since October 7, 2023, when the Israeli regime began a genocidal war on Gaza, Palestinians in custody “have been subjected to exceptionally ruthless physical and psychological abuse.”

Entitled “Torture and genocide”, the report “examines Israel’s systematic use of torture against Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territory since October 7, 2023.”

“Torture in detention has been used on an unprecedented scale as punitive collective vengeance,” the report said.

Brutal beatings, sexual violence, rape, lethal mistreatment, starvation, and the systematic deprivation of the most basic human conditions have inflicted profound and lasting scars on the bodies and minds of tens of thousands of Palestinians and their loved ones,” the report stated.

Torture has become integral to the domination of and punishment inflicted on men, women and children, both through custodial abuse and through a relentless campaign of forced displacement, mass killings, deprivation and destruction of all means of life to inflict long-term collective pain and suffering, it warned.

Since October 2023, abduction of Palestinians in the occupied territory had “escalated dramatically,” with more than 18,500 people arrested, including at least 1,500 children, the report added.

About 9,000 Palestinians were still in detention, while more than 4,000 have been subjected to enforced disappearance, it said.

Israel’s detention system “has descended into a regime of systemic and widespread humiliation, coercion, and terror,” according to the report.

Albanese demanded Israel “immediately cease all acts of torture and ill-treatment of the Palestinian people as part of its ongoing genocide” and urged all countries “to do everything in their power to stop the destruction of what remains of Palestine” as every delay “worsens irreversible harm and further entrenches a system of cruelty.”

She urged the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to request arrest warrants for hawkish Israeli ministers Israel Katz, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

She said she had gathered written submissions about these atrocities, including at least 300 testimonies, and is due to present her report to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) on Monday.

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli regime has killed at least 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than 172,000 others, most of them women and children.

March 22, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Comments Off on Israel systematically torturing Palestinians in custody: UN special rapporteur Albanese

How the US-Israeli aggression against Iran is affecting the war in Ukraine

By Dmitri Kovalevich | Al Mayadeen | March 22, 2026

In the second half of March, the US and Israeli aggression against Iran is taking its toll on Ukraine. Retail stores are updating their prices daily, while the government is unable to keep gasoline prices in check through threats against sellers, as operators simply hide their product, creating artificial shortages.

Following the rapid deindustrialization that accompanied ‘independent’ Ukraine’s secession from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the only remaining productive industry in the country is agriculture, specifically, the production of grain and corn for export. Ukrainian authorities now face a harsh choice: supply fuel to agrarians at the start of this year’s planting season, or divert dwindling fuel supplies to meet the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal, supplying the Armed Forces of Ukraine remains the priority, in order that the proxy war by Western powers against the Russian Federation may continue.

He stated on March 1: “The war in Iran has triggered a global fuel crisis. Our key task is to supply the army. Sowing is the second priority. After that come businesses and people.”

European fuel suppliers have reduced their supplies to Ukraine in order to meet demand in their own markets. Fuel shipments from Poland have been suspended for one week, while Romania and Moldova have also temporarily halted fuel exports. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán already halted sales of diesel fuel and gasoline to Ukraine in February due to Ukraine’s disruption of the Druzhba pipeline from Russia.

As a result, Ukraine may be forced to seek fuel in more distant markets… and pay much higher prices for it. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Western imperialist powers cannot sustain two wars at once—one against Russia, the other against Iran.

Danylo Getmantsev, head of Ukraine’s legislative committee on tax policy, says that Ukraine could face serious fuel shortages as early as April if the war with Iran drags on. “According to analysts of the Ukrainian fuel market, the situation with a shortage of fuel and lubricants may arise in our country in April,” he said in early March. To counter this, Getmantsev proposes exploring opportunities to establish a strategic reserve of petroleum products in partner countries.

Andriy Gerus, head of the energy committee of the Ukrainian legislature, noted earlier in March that due to Russia’s shelling of oil depots, Ukraine has no remaining strategic fuel reserves. “Everything is operating on a just-in-time basis; there are no remaining stocks of cheaper resources, so any price change in Europe quickly translates into a price change in Ukraine.” He explains that fuel in Ukraine will always be more expensive than in Europe.

Legislator Oleksandr Dubinsky, currently in jail accused of treason, believes that due to the war against Iran, the economic situation in Ukraine has become critical, much like it was in February 2022 at the start of the war. “Society and the army are exhausted. Exchange rates, energy costs, and prices have risen. The budget deficit is widening. At the same time, uncertainty is growing,” Dubinsky explains.

Nevertheless, according to Dubinsky, officials in Kiev believe that Ukraine is seen as too important in the global game to be allowed to fail, so money for its survival as a Western vassal will be found regardless of the widespread corruption that has further overwhelmed the Ukrainian economy beginning in 2022.

Legislator Yuriy Boyko says that if oil reaches $200 per barrel, everyone will feel the impact. “In that case, the planting season will be at risk, and prices for goods will rise sharply. Ukrainians aren’t well-off to begin with, so we can’t let that happen,” the lawmaker says.

Another legislator, Mykhailo Tsymbaliuk, has stated that high gasoline prices are already affecting the country’s military capabilities. According to him, the fuel being allocated by the Ministry of Defense is insufficient for the armed forces, causing grave problems. Even evacuations of wounded soldiers are being compromised. “The skyrocketing price of gasoline has become a serious warning sign for the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” the lawmaker warns.

Ukraine’s European supporters will continue for some time to divert fuel resources away from their own needs in order to supply the Ukrainian Armed Forces with gasoline, even at the expense of their own citizens. However, with every passing week and month that the war with Iran continues, the cost of such assistance will rise sharply for them.

In March, Ukrainian lawmakers told Ukrainian media that European governments are urging them to assure Ukraine keeps fighting Russia for another year-and-a-half to two years. “The Europeans have told us ‘Keep fighting for another year and a half to two years; we’ll provide the money you need’”, reports the publication Zerkalo Nedeli on March 12.

Under such pressure, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy has tasked the political leadership in the national legislature to continue functioning for several more years without an electoral mandate. The last national election Ukraine took place in April 2019, with a five-year mandate. It featured the banning of political parties deemed to be sympathetic to dialogue and good relations with Russia, a feature of the system that took power in February 2014 following a violent coup spearheaded by neo-Nazi paramilitaries.

To so many Ukrainians, the urgings and hidden threats by the leaders of ‘civilized Europe’ mean they will continue to be abducted from their own streets for two more years by the recruiters of Kiev’s compulsory military service.

None of the possible scenarios cited by Ukrainian military experts envisage a Russian defeat or the recapture of territories lost by Ukraine. In other words, the sole result of scenarios for continued war being urged is continued destruction of the Ukrainian population, all politely funded by European/NATO-member governments.

This approach speaks volumes about the overall strategy of Kiev and its Western allies. Theirs is a ‘strategy’ of holding out for a while longer without any long-term expectation of peace, hoping for some ‘black swan’ event (‘extremely rare and unpredictable’) that will drastically change the geopolitical situation. In other words, Western imperialism and its Ukrainian stooges are pinning their hopes on a miracle that might save them all.

Ukraine’s European ‘allies’, in truth, currently lack the funds to continue the war in Ukraine. They are negotiating a €90 billion loan for the country, but as mentioned above, European Union member Hungary is currently blocking this proposal.

Meanwhile, on March 18, Ukrainian media, citing a US State Department report, reported that USAID auditors have uncovered irregularities in the oversight of the more than $30 billion in direct budget support to Kiev since February 2022. There are a great many corruption scandals festering in Ukraine, but none have acted as grounds for refusing further loans and financial aid, despite the evidence that much of that could be embezzled.

Zelenskyy told the BBC during a visit to Britain on March 17 (which included a warm welcome by the British monarchy) that the war in Iran raises ominous forebodings about Ukraine’s future. Yet as Ukrainian media has noted, Zelensky is a firm supporter of that war.

In a speech to the annual Munich Security Conference on February 14, Zelensky called for measures to “immediately stop” Iran, without any delay. “Regimes like the one in Iran must not be given time. When they have time, they only kill more. They must be stopped immediately.”

Then, on February 27, he told an interview with Sky News that he supported an operation to depose the Iranian leadership.

Ukraine’s European allies are currently concerned with how to win back Donald Trump’s favor and persuade him to continue funding the Zelensky-led government in Kiev. Finnish President Alexander Stubb fears that negotiations on Ukraine are approaching a “moment of truth” that could force Kiev to formally cede territory in the Donbass region to Moscow. (Populations there voted in 2022 and before that to secede from coup Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.)

Europe, Stubb says, finds itself in a difficult position due to reductions in direct US aid to Ukraine. He proposes an odd trade-off to resolve this dilemma, namely, an ‘exchange’ of military assistance by Ukraine to the US and “Israel” in the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for continued assistance to Kiev’s war. That includes a proposal that the European Union agree to provide the US with military assistance to unblock the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for increases in direct US supplies to Ukraine.

But this is wishful thinking. The European Union member-countries of NATO lack the military capabilities required to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. They do have experience (gained during the Ukrainian crisis) in buying time and ‘bogging down’ the crisis in the Middle East through numerous rounds of fruitless negotiations with Iran. The essence of the EU approach would see the Iranian side fulfilling certain conditions in the here and now, while the West and its allies promise to ‘do something’ to normalize relations, but at a later time.

During the war in Ukraine, we witnessed endless negotiations in this vein under the ‘Minsk-1’ and ‘Minsk-2’ agreements in 2014 and early 2015. Then there was the ‘grain deal’ of July 2022, whereby the Russian navy would allow Ukraine to export grain from Black Sea ports. In all these cases, Ukraine and the West failed to fulfill their part of the commitments.

Oleg Yasinsky, a Ukrainian political analyst now living in Chile, commented on March 19 about the resistance of the Iranian people to aggression and the tradition of deception to which the West has consistently resorted during negotiations following military failures. “Once upon a time, the ancestors of today’s democratic world leaders negotiated with Indigenous peoples as they plundered and conquered them. At peace-signing ceremonies with the indigenous peoples of Patagonia, poison-laced whale carcasses were served at the table, while in the cold mountains of North America, smallpox-infected blankets and clothing were given as gifts to original peoples.

“Today, from Minsk for Russia to Geneva for Iran, the peacemaking traditions of the ‘civilized world’ have not changed one bit in all this time. Therefore and unfortunately,” he concludes, “missiles are the only real negotiators today.”

Zelensky is now desperately traveling around the world seeking to regain attention for his government as Iran becomes the main topic of global media. He is ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ of war against Iran in efforts to render some valuable service to Western imperialism and prove his continued usefulness. He has offered Ukrainian troops to guard “Israel” and Western military bases in the Gulf and in Cyprus. Alas for him, Trump has dismissed his obsequious ‘servant,’ going so far as to say that “Zelensky is the last person from whom we would need help.”

According to Odessa-based anarchist Vyacheslav Azarov, Ukraine is scrambling to align itself with the dominant theme in international politics and position itself as a useful part of the crisis exploding in the Middle East. Demands for additional support to Kiev are being delivered from this new vantage point. However, in the end, Kiev may simply end up with “additional airstrikes accompanied by the friendly shrieking of minor allies who have no real influence” and a large, new adversary in the form of Iran.”

Zelensky’s humiliating traveling and messaging does not go unnoticed in Ukraine. But the pompous president, who sees himself as a sage colonialist in the style of Winston Churchill and is continuously applauded by the governments of European countries, turns out to be a frightened servant, fearing that his ‘masters’ may abandon him. The war waged by Western imperialism against the Iranian people has once again underscored the weakness and dubious value of Zelensky’s government, whose image the West has artificially inflated for years through its media.

March 22, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on How the US-Israeli aggression against Iran is affecting the war in Ukraine

« Previous Entries