Israel’s Game
Anti-Zionist activists protest on 2nd Avenue outside the Israeli Consulate General in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, U.S. on August 21, 2026. [Selçuk Acar – Anadolu Agency]
By Dr Hassaan Bokhari | MEMO | September 6, 2026
A few days ago, a very interesting article appeared in the Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post. It was written by AJ Jaff, whose profile describes him as “a recognised expert in international security, crisis management, and geopolitical risk”. The “expert” began the article by acknowledging that the 6-month-long air war on Iran has failed to defeat Iran. Then, he provided some “out-of-the-box” ideas for the US to consider if it wants to “achieve its objectives” and win the war. According to him, the war will only be won when Iran’s institutional coherence is broken, resulting in its Balkanization.
I will discuss Mr Jaff’s “out of the box” ideas in a bit, but first, I want to analyse the “expert” himself a little. Two things quickly popped up. First is how he began his article. The first sentence is: “The Pentagon reportedly asked outside analysts this month for creative ideas on Iran.” The hyperlink in this sentence redirects the reader to another article in The Jerusalem Post that cites a CNN report saying that the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, has been privately looking for an off-ramp in the Iran War. How quaint! While the Pentagon is asking for ideas to wrap up the war, Mr Jaff, the expert, stepped up with ideas to escalate the war! It appears that Mr Jaff (and the Zionists) have very different ideas and even objectives than US Generals about the same war. No wonder Pete Hegseth (a committed Zionist) has been firing so many of them!
Secondly, one is amused to see that in March, 10 days after the start of the US-Israel war on Iran, the same Mr Jaff was declaring a resounding victory and claiming that “the data tells a decisive and irreversible story” and “Iran’s missile fire rate has collapsed by 92 percent”! After reading that article now, most readers might laugh heartily and dismiss Mr Jaff, the “expert,” as an idiot. However, that would be an incorrect assessment. On the same day as Mr Jaff’s gaffe’s appearance in The Jerusalem Post, an article of mine elucidated the Israeli strategy as one giant bluff whose aim was to lure the USA into a destructive war in the Middle East by plunging it into a sunk cost fallacy. The Israeli plan was to lure the USA in with the dreams of an easy victory like the First Gulf War or the Maduro kidnapping, but it knew all along that those dreams would prove to be hollow, and their sole purpose was to bring the USA into the war. Then, in the next phase, with the dreams of victory proving illusory, the USA was to be baited with the sunk cost fallacy trap so that it would blunder into further escalation in pursuit of Israeli objectives. Mr Jaff’s seemingly absurd somersaults follow this pattern perfectly.
Now let’s turn our attention to Mr. Jaff’s “expert recommendations”. There are three of them:
- The USA should “recognize the sovereign independence of the Iranian Kurdistan, Ahwaz, and Baluchistan people”.
- To raise the one million troops required for a victorious ground invasion of Iran, the USA should launch an enlistment scheme based on debt forgiveness (estimated at 40,000 to 1,00,000 US Dollars per person) for 24-36 months of service per person.
- The US should strike a deal with China that would involve softening the US stance on Taiwan and ensuring China that even after Iran’s destruction, China would continue to receive an uninterrupted supply of Iranian oil in exchange for China’s abandonment of Iran.
Before analysing these ideas, one must first take a moment to marvel at the arrogance and ignorance of the Zionists.
The Zionists have played the victim and the superior/invincible race roles simultaneously in a way that lends itself to a diagnosis of severe dissociative disorder.
This pathological psyche has led them to the delusion that the foremost purpose of the world and everything in it is to accommodate their ambitions. As I have argued elsewhere, this psyche is leading them to their self-created and inevitable destruction as well.
Now, let’s take these ideas one by one. The first idea is simply advocating the balkanization of Iran (just the newest version of the Yinon Plan). The implications are very interesting, though. By supporting Kurdish and Baloch (not Baluchi as written by Mr. Jaff, a mistake that only lays bare how little he knows about Balochistan!) separatism, the US could kill three birds with one stone in the service of Israel. Kurdish and Baloch separatism are grave threats to the integrity of Turkiye and Pakistan, respectively. Very cleverly, the Zionist Mr Jaff is pointing the way for the next wars to be launched by the USA in Israel’s service. The Zionists know that Iran’s balkanization wouldn’t ensure Israel’s survival. They are aiming at the complete destruction of the whole region stretching from Morocco to Pakistan, an Israeli goal correctly identified by the Pakistani liberal thinker Eqbal Ahmed more than 40 years ago!
The second idea is about finding the meat for the meat grinder of forever wars envisioned by Israel. With antipathy toward Israel consistently on the rise in the USA, how can American youth be convinced to become cannon fodder in the Wars of Israeli Ambitions? The answer, according to Mr. Jaff, lies in luring them with the promise of debt forgiveness. Most young Americans are riddled with debt in the exploitative capitalistic financial system (run by whom?) of the USA. Mr Jaff wants their debts written off in return for their blood, sweat, and tears spilled on the battlefields of the Middle East. However, the question arises: who will pay the bill of “debt forgiveness” for this indentured slave army? Will the big capitalists pay? Of course not. The state will pay.
In other words, the US taxpayers will pay billions of dollars so that their sons and daughters can be killed or crippled far from home in wars that have nothing to do with the American people’s welfare.
The third idea is the most “brilliant” one. It’s also the one that should ring alarm bells for even the most obtuse section of people in the USA. Mr. Jaff proposes to bribe China with oil and concessions on Taiwan to abandon Iran. It hasn’t occurred to him that for men like General Dan Caine, China represents a much bigger threat to the USA than Iran! It also peddles the fallacy that Iran is another Venezuela! Such a bizarre, arrogantly ignorant notion can only come from Zionists! In his obsession with what the genocide-dependent state of Israel needs to survive, Mr Jaff has ignored the basic fact of geography that Iran lies closer to China than Venezuela is to the USA! He has also conveniently failed to specify what concessions the USA should make on Taiwan. Unfortunately for Mr Jaff and the Zionists, the Chinese leaders (unlike many in the USA) don’t prioritise Israeli interests over their own country’s.
As I am engaged in analyzing Israel’s “game plan”, one other important factor must be mentioned: Gaza. In the last few days, clear statements have come from Israeli ministers showing their intention to depopulate Gaza completely. Israel’s ultimate goal has always been to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that started with the Nakba in 1948. Since the start of the Gaza blockade in 2007, Israel had been following a policy of making Gaza uninhabitable while concurrently using it as a weapons testing laboratory through periodic aggressions/wars. This policy of slow genocide was abandoned after the 7 October attacks. The goal then became to “clear” Gaza through a “fast genocide” within a few months. However, unexpectedly stubborn Palestinian resistance coupled with the categorical refusal of regional countries (especially Egypt) to accept Palestinian refugees has so far prevented this. The recent pressure from Israel on the USA to give it a green light for forcible expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza shows that Israel hasn’t lost sight of its genocidal goals in Palestine for one minute, even during the Iran War. If Palestinian refugees are forced into Egypt, it will provide an added bonus for Israel by destabilising Egypt.
A summary of the comprehensive Israeli strategic plan is as follows: Israel wants a massive US ground invasion of Iran with more than a million soldiers to destroy the Iranian State and balkanize the country with the help of Kurdish and Baloch separatists. This will, in turn, bring the “Grand Israeli War” to its next phase: the destruction of Turkiye and Pakistan. The latter will be denuclearized after internal instability brought upon by economic, political, and military crises resulting in an implosion of the State, leaving Israel’s ally India as the sole power in the subcontinent. Simultaneously, Israel plans to depopulate Gaza and South Lebanon while destabilising both Syria and Egypt to an extent that new civil wars erupt there. To achieve these lofty aims, Israel wants the USA to put its strategic tussle with China on hold and offer significant concessions on vital issues like Taiwan to keep China neutral. This will free up the USA to deploy its full military might in fighting Israel’s wars and divert limited but critical military resources in bulk to the Middle East from the Pacific. With the whole of the Middle East in ashes, Israel can replace the USA as Saudi Arabia’s “security guarantor”, gain control over all 3 Muslim Holy Mosques (in Makkah, Medina, and Al-Quds) to be used as blackmail against any future attempt by Muslims to confront it, and create a Greater Israel that is not dependent on US aid. Afterwards, Israel can easily discard the USA in favor of a modus vivendi with the new global hegemon (China) as the former’s power wanes through wars and strategic overextension.
This Israeli “game plan” is clearly fantastic, unrealistic, and wildly overambitious. However, like the Nazis, Israelis see themselves as an embattled and desperate “superior race” that has to risk it all on a grand throw of the dice. In its post-7 October psychosis, Israel has lost whatever rationality or sense of proportion it previously possessed. Like Hitler, Israel’s leaders fail to see their predicament: they might win some victories in this war, but each victory will open up new threats, which will result in fatigue as the costs of war mount and geographic and demographic factors overstretch both Israel and the USA. In his seminal work, “Israeli Exceptionalism – The Destabilising Logic of Zionism”, Professor Shahid Alam explained this brilliantly: “The tragedy of Israel is not fortuitous. Driven by history, chance, and cunning, the Zionists wedged themselves between two historical adversaries, the West and Islam, and by harnessing the strength of the first against the second, they have produced a conflict that can only grow deeper over time. In this conflict, Israel’s triumphs are temporary, are indeed illusory, since they evoke a deeper, wider response from the societies that suffer the devastation of its triumphs. In the long run, in the time scale of history, by relentlessly pressing its advantages, Israel only ensures that its adversaries will slowly build the defenses that will eventually rise to match Israel’s military might and its expansionist ambitions.”
Blinded by the imperatives of genocidal Zionist ideology, it would be foolish to expect the recognition of this reality from the Israelis.
However, the USA and the Muslim World urgently need to recognize “Israel’s Game” to minimize the damage to be suffered by them. Had Hitler been stopped at Munich, the Second World War might never have happened. Had Israel’s genocide in Gaza been stopped in November 2023, we wouldn’t be seeing the Iran War and the Hormuz crisis today. If Israel isn’t stopped now, we will see not just Iran, Palestine, and Lebanon, but Turkiye, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, and the Gulf countries engulfed in flames of war as well.
As Israel plans to fight this war to the last US soldier, it would behoove the USA to realize that playing Israel’s game will result in polarization and decimation of American society (just like the Vietnam War put an end to Lyndon Johnson’s vision of “Great Society), the loss of its military dominance in the Pacific, and the loss of its global economic primacy. Today, it is imperative that all of the Muslim World in general and Turkiye, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt in particular start squarely backing Iran in thwarting external aggression. The recent Mecca Pact between Pakistan, Turkiye, and Saudi Arabia can only be meaningful if it clearly declares Israel as the greatest threat to peace and operationalizes the military and economic power of these countries to combat Israeli aggression in Gaza, West Bank/East Jerusalem, Lebanon, and Iran. Only through the defeat of Israel’s genocidal state and the birth of an independent Palestinian State can peace and security be ensured for the Middle East. If these countries present a united front against Israeli aggression, not only will they be backed by the likes of China and Russia, but they will also compel the USA to recognize Israel for the dangerous strategic liability it is. “America Firsters” will do well to remember Nietzsche’s saying: “The most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do.”
Is America preparing a tactical nuke for Iran?
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 6, 2026
The escalation trap is getting worse for Trump and his cabal of sycophants, as what was once a discussion which was linked to existentialism – the nuclear option – is now being dialled down to any kind of military option. Just a bigger bomb. The more Trump loses, the more Iran hits U.S. assets and allies in the Middle East, the longer the straits remain closed, and the higher gasoline and diesel costs reach in the U.S. – the more the idea of a ‘tactical’ nuke dropped on Iran becomes normal and even preferred.
But Trump is also getting madder. He is literally losing his mind, and his condition has worsened in his second term in office to the point where he is losing touch with any kind of reality. Before February 28th, the U.S. economy was not in bad shape. A lot of fundamentals were holding out. But now everything is spiralling out of control, and quite apart from blue-collar workers being hit with gas pump prices being well above $4, now diesel is being hiked – which only means that the cost of food, among other goods, is going to rise significantly, as trucking firms pass on the bill to producers, who pass it on to the consumer.
And as things start to get out of control, take a cursory glance at who is running Trump and who stands to gain if a nuclear bomb were used. It’s the same people who walked away from 9/11 laughing until their sides hurt. Israel. The Zionists are now pushing for the tactical strike option, as any escalation in the region – no matter who gets killed or whose country gets wiped out even of water – is not their worry or concern. These days, Netanyahu’s coterie can argue even more that Iran is probably making a nuclear bomb, as the one institution that Trump could turn to – the IAEA – can’t enter Iran and do its inspections. And so the default conclusion is that the U.S. president is going to be bullied again into making a cataclysmic error of judgment in hitting Iran.
The Zionists have been busy on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, it’s hard not to see how their money is now reaching Nigel Farage’s far-right party, which has just been hit by another dodgy funding scandal – presenting the leader of the party as bereft of any political morals of any creed in preference for filling his pockets with dirty cash. The Zionists control UK media, and it’s interesting to see how Farage gets a pretty easy time despite the graft scandals burying him. In the U.S., it’s a similar story. For a while now, J.D. Vance has been quite critical of how Zionists are shaping U.S. politics both internationally and even domestically, and has always been quite vague about how the U.S. should move forward in Iran. But now those who have crossed a threshold and are in the pockets of Israel’s lobby are going for him.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley recently accused him of not taking a clear stance on Israel – slamming him for trying to “be both.”
“Right is right. Wrong is wrong. In life, you must choose a side. You are either with the Tucker Carlson wing of the country or you are with the pro-Israel wing of the country,” she wrote on social media. “You can’t be both.”
Haley, a former GOP presidential candidate who isn’t overburdened with a high IQ, couldn’t even hide who was directing her and even giving her reference material to attack Vance – leading some to wonder if Israel’s lobby just writes her social media posts.
She continued her post with a quote from Nobel Prize-winning writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who said in his 1986 acceptance speech: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
Meanwhile, America’s trust around the world seems to have been eroded to almost nothing. Recently, the Netherlands just pulled out its gold reserves it used to keep in the U.S. The move followed Germany a few weeks ago, which did the same. EU leaders just don’t trust Trump and can see the de-dollarisation trend gaining ground while U.S. debt continues to mount. Trump can’t do anything, of course, as his immature ideas about governance have produced a series of policies which haven’t served the country’s interests but merely backfired – reminding many that he doesn’t have one or two failed businesses under his belt like many successful entrepreneurs, but scores, which would suggest that he doesn’t really understand business at all. A nuke, he might believe, would be a reset in the Middle East and perhaps a huge distraction away from terrible numbers back home. But the precedent it would set to Russia and China would only make Iran an even greater winner than it already is in the region. Trump simply has no idea what he is doing – and all the people who could advise him have been fired.
“We Are Being Drawn Into a War We Don’t Want to Fight”: What Jordan’s Alliance with Washington Is Costing It
By Muhammad Hamid ad-Din – New Eastern Outlook – September 6, 2026
The growing public discontent with the presence of American troops in Jordan, fueled by the regional conflict and Iran’s strategy, is putting the country’s government in a serious crisis of trust, forcing the authorities to choose between a strategic alliance with the United States and the internal stability of the state.
Some 4,000 U.S. troops, bases used for strikes against Iran, Iranian missiles crossing Jordanian skies, and American soldiers killed on Jordanian ground—all raise an increasingly urgent question: has the strategic alliance with Washington become a threat to the very existence of the country?
A Letter That Could Not Be Ignored
More than 200 Jordanian politicians, cultural figures, tribal leaders, and retired military officers did something extremely rare in Jordan—they publicly challenged their own government. In an open letter to the authorities, they demanded the withdrawal of foreign troops from the country, the cancellation or revision of the security agreement with the United States, and its submission to parliament for review.
“We affirm that their presence exposes Jordan to security, political, and economic risks that serve no national interest, and increases the likelihood of our country being dragged into a regional conflict in which it has no part,” the appeal stated.
The initiative was led by former minister and lawmaker Amjad Khazza al-Majali. Among the signatories were former secretary-general of the Islamic Action Front, Salem al-Falahat; 90‑year‑old political activist Sufyan al-Tell; retired military figures including Ali al-Habashneh; and former secretary-general of the Jordanian Communist Party, Saud Kbeilat.
The diversity of the signatories—from leftists to Islamists, from tribal chiefs to secular intellectuals—prevented the authorities from dismissing the letter as the work of a single political faction. But it would be an exaggeration to claim that it reflects the views of all Jordanians; on such sensitive matters, the kingdom simply does not conduct opinion polls, and open disagreement with the authorities has always been a risky undertaking here.
When an Ally Becomes a Target
Jordan has long been one of the United States’ main military partners in the Middle East. Some 4,000 American troops are stationed on its territory. However, the war between the U.S. and Iran, which resumed after the collapse of the June ceasefire, has turned that presence from an abstract diplomatic arrangement into a tangible threat.
Iranian missiles and drones aimed at Israeli or American facilities regularly cross Jordanian airspace. Some strikes hit installations used by U.S. forces. As a result, American soldiers are being killed—and this is no longer just news from another continent, but events occurring on Jordanian soil.
As The Jerusalem Post noted, the Iranian strikes against Jordan were a calculated move: Tehran sought to “sow discord within Jordan and create governmental chaos.” Professor Ronen Itzhak commented on the situation as follows: “This is exactly what Iran was trying to achieve by launching missiles at Jordan. Its goal is to pressure the Jordanian population into demanding the removal of the American presence.”
And Iran is succeeding. Every new attack reinforces the position of critics of the U.S. presence: the alliance with Washington is costing Jordan in direct security losses.
Storm in Parliament: Condolences to “Child Killers”
A particularly telling episode occurred in the Jordanian parliament in late July. Deputy Ali al-Khalayleh proposed sending official condolences to the U.S. Congress over the deaths of American servicemen on Jordanian soil.
The proposal sparked a storm. Other legislators fiercely attacked al‑Khalayleh. They called the United States “the biggest supporter of Israel, which has committed a massacre in Gaza,” and branded American soldiers “child killers.” “The Jordanian people are above such condolences,” their opponents declared.
What made the situation especially delicate was that al‑Khalayleh himself had earlier described the U.S. military presence in Jordan as “a walk with shepherds.” Now he was proposing that parliament express formal condolences to Washington—and he was jeered by his colleagues.
What matters is that opposition to American policy in parliament came not from fringe activists, but from elected representatives within an official political institution. This indicates that discontent with the U.S. alliance is penetrating the highest levels of Jordan’s political system.
Trump’s Double Game
U.S. President Donald Trump, for his part, also fanned the flames. After the deaths of American soldiers in Jordan, he effectively blamed Jordanian forces for incompetence. “If we had different air defense operators, this would not have happened,” Trump said, hinting that the Jordanians had failed to provide adequate protection for U.S. troops. “When you let others do your work… sometimes things go wrong,” the president added.
For Jordanian critics of the American presence, these words were yet another confirmation of their position: Washington itself does not consider Jordan a safe place for its troops and is ready to shift the blame for their deaths onto local authorities.
The Jordanian government, by contrast, could have used the same attacks as proof of the need to strengthen air defense in cooperation with the United States. But amid growing public dissatisfaction, that argument sounds increasingly weak.
Iran Plays on the Divide
Iran’s strategy in this conflict is anything but subtle, yet at the same time highly professional. Tehran consistently draws a distinction between the Jordanian people and the Jordanian government. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) issued a direct appeal to Jordanians, stating that Iran is “not hostile to Jordan” and that its grievances are only with the American military presence.
“America is using bases on Jordanian soil to wage aggression and commit massacres against our people. It is our legitimate right to strike the aggressor wherever he launches his attacks,” the Iranian military declared. And in the view of many analysts, Tehran has a point on this issue.
Moreover, Iranian propaganda went further: the IRGC claimed that information about the location of U.S. troops in Jordan had been provided by Jordanian civilians and military personnel themselves and expressed gratitude to the Jordanian people for their cooperation.
In this way, Iran is trying to deepen the rift between the authorities and society, using the Palestinian cause as a lever. Support for Palestine is deeply rooted in Jordanian society, and the war in Gaza and Washington’s backing of Israel have only intensified anti‑American sentiment. That is precisely why Iranian statements fall on fertile ground.
Media Blockade and Information Gap
Paradoxically, despite the significance of the letter and the many prominent signatories, major Jordanian media outlets did not publish it in full. Critics of the government saw this as evidence of severe restrictions on political and media space in Jordan. Analysts argued that the limited room for dissent means that the level of opposition visible in the media is likely lower than the actual discontent in society.
As a result, the letter was disseminated mainly through social networks and foreign media. The Jordanian government, for its part, sought to frame the conflict not as a geopolitical problem but as a matter of national security. Official statements emphasized border defense and Jordan’s refusal to take part in the war.
However, in the age of social media, traditional methods of managing information are working less and less effectively. Citizens see videos online, read international reports, and compare them with official statements. The growing gap between the official version and what people see with their own eyes is undermining trust in the authorities.
The Price of Alliance
Jordan’s economy was already under severe strain due to inflation, unemployment, and declining purchasing power. The conflict dealt an additional blow to the tourism sector, which accounts for up to 18% of the country’s revenues. In the first half of 2026, income from tourism and Jordanian expatriates fell by 12%, from American tourists by 25%, and from European tourists by 28%. At the same time, the United States provides Jordan with about $1.65 billion annually in economic and military aid.
King Abdullah II’s government finds itself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the alliance with the United States brings billions in aid and security guarantees. On the other hand, that same alliance turns the country into a target, undermines internal stability, and erodes citizens’ trust in the authorities.
As Professor Itzhak noted, “The King of Jordan has the sovereignty to make independent decisions in accordance with the constitution, so it is unlikely that he will change the country’s policy.” But the question is how much longer Jordanian society can endure being held hostage to a geopolitical game in which it has no voice.
The open letter from Jordanian public figures is not just a protest against foreign troops. It is a symptom of a deep crisis of trust between the authorities and society, between the government’s strategic calculations and the real interests of its citizens. War, the Palestinian question, the American military presence, and national sovereignty have become tightly interwoven—a knot that Amman is finding increasingly difficult to untie.
Traditional methods of managing public opinion are working less and less effectively in the age of social media. Jordanians are no longer passive recipients of official messages—they actively seek out alternative sources of information and compare them with government statements. And this growing comparison may prove to be the biggest challenge for the Jordanian government, because in today’s world, controlling the flow of information is far harder than controlling the country’s borders or its airspace.
Muhammad Hamid ad‑Din is a prominent Palestinian journalist
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Trump Slaughters Wedding Guests, Zelenskyy Threatens Airliners
By Kevin Barrett | September 6, 2026
When Zelenskyy threatened to shoot down civilian airliners last week, Putin called it “state terrorism.” Putin is right, of course. But the expression he used, “state terrorism,” is a repetitiously redundant pleonasm.
Virtually all terrorism is state terrorism. So appending the word state in front of the word terrorism isn’t really necessary.
Case in point: Trump’s slaughter of Iranian schoolgirls, female volleyball players, and wedding guests. Such acts fit the definition of terrorism: politically-motivated attacks on civilians. The purpose of attacking civilians is to inspire fear or terror among them, so they will react in ways that further the terrorist’s political plans.
Terrorist Trump and his Israeli owners have made no secret of the fact that they intend to attack civilians and especially civilian infrastructure in Iran—which even the mainstream media acknowledges is a war crime—in hopes of spreading so much pain and misery and death that the Iranian people rise up against their government. But as Caleb Carr explained in his post-9/11 book The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians, such “punish-the-civilians” policies rarely work. Hitler’s buzz-bombs didn’t convince the British to rise up and overthrow Churchill, nor did the British and American firebombings of German cities cause the Germans to revolt against Hitler. On the contrary, such terrorist policies typically backfire: the people punished worst are dead, while the survivors feel selected by God or fate or destiny to unite behind their nation’s leadership and fight even more furiously against the foreign terror-mongers attacking their country.
And Iran—where a powerful cult of martyrdom is built into the majority religion—is the last country on earth that anybody is ever going to successfully terrorize into submission. Iran’s war on terror, specifically its war on Zio-American terror, is genuine, and likely to be far more successful than the ersatz US equivalent.
Civilian Casualty Ratios Keep Rising
The West likes to think it is growing increasingly civilized. But its wars grow ever-more barbaric and terrorist. In World War I, about half of the slightly over 20 million deaths were civilians. In World War II, just one generation later, nearly two-thirds of the 60 million deaths were civilians. The Vietnam terror war waged by the USA probably killed far more than the two million official death count, with more than three-quarters of the victims civilians. Likewise, the official death counts in the 9/11 wars against Iraq and Afghanistan—and the covert wars on Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, and of course Palestine—are almost certainly far too low, while the civilian-to-military casualty ratio just keeps getting higher, and is probably in the 80% or higher range. (For high-end casualty estimates that counter the official undercounts in these wars, read Gideon Polya.)
Let’s ask Gemini, which obviously comes with a pro-state bias, who the real terrorists are. Hey Gemini: How many civilians have died in all the wars beginning with World War I, and what percentage were killed by non-state actors?
Gemini: An estimated 110 million to 140 million civilians have died in all wars globally starting from World War I (1914) to the present day, with the vast majority—roughly 95% or more—killed by state actors (governments and their official militaries) rather than non-state actors.
Given Gemini’s bias, we can safely translate “95% or more” as “99%+.” I rest my case: Virtually all terrorism is committed by governments.
But that’s not the way the government’s propaganda apparatus sees it. They want you to believe that the world is a scary-scary place full of evil (non-government) terrorists plotting to bomb you or shoot you or crash your airliners or blow up your buildings. And they want you to run to the real terrorists—the government—for protection.
That’s why they chose 9-1-1 as the date code for their big 2001 psy-op. When you’re terrified and panicked and faced with senseless violence, who do you call? You call the government in hopes they will save you. The three digits 9-1-1 subconsciously represent the trust populations place in their “big mommy and daddy,” their government, to get them out of serious trouble. Specifically, the terrorist perpetrators of 9/11 wanted panicked Americans to volunteer their persons and/or their tax money, not to mention their fervent ideological and emotional support, to their Israeli-occupied government so it could “protect them from further such attacks” by invading the Middle East and destroying Israel’s enemies.
It was in fact Israel’s agents who blew up the Towers after flying remote-controlled planes into buildings. Through Epstein-style blackmail, financial control, and media domination, Israel infiltrated the US government like a parasite hijacking the brain of its host, sending Uncle Sam on a state terrorism spree whose only major beneficiary was the malignant Zionist entity itself.
But even people who imagine that 9/11 was done by al-Qaeda—the same al-Qaeda that the US created and has supported since its inception in the Afghan war against the USSR, the same al-Qaeda whose Syrian chief Trump recently invited to the White House and playfully sprayed with perfume—and who further imagine that al-Qaeda is a non-state entity as opposed to a US-Israeli front—ought to take a hard look at the statistics to get a sense of how nonexistent a threat “non-state terrorism” really is. As I wrote in Questioning the War on Terror:
Statistically, there are good grounds for wondering whether we should bother to worry about terrorism at all. Roughly 3000 Americans have been killed by (allegedly non-state) terrorists during the past century. In other words, a whole century’s worth of terror victims equals three days’ worth of cigarette fatalities, a week’s worth of deaths from bad medical treatment, or a month’s worth of automobile deaths. Shouldn’t we worry far more about cigarettes, doctors, and automobiles than about terrorists?
And how does your chance of being killed by terrorists compare with your chance of being struck by lighting? It turns out that lighting is a vastly greater threat. There are on average about 1000 lightning victims per year in the USA, whereas the average number of terror victims per year—a number wildly skewed upward by the fluke of 9/11—is still only about thirty.
Are terrorists at least more dangerous than… bathtubs? Nope. It turns outthat your chances of drowning in your bathtub are more than ten times as great as your chances of being killed by a terrorist.
Should we declare war against lightning bolts and bathtubs? Should we install PA systems in our bathrooms reminding us that the threat level of bathtub drowning has been raised to orange? Should we create a new Department of Bathtub Security (DBS) empowered to do sneak-and-peak warrantless searches of our bathrooms to make sure that we’re using no-slip bathmats? Should we invade and occupy countries that we falsely blame for bathtub deaths? Would this be any crazier than what we’re doing now, allegedly due to the equally insignificant “terrorist threat”?
So the whole notion of terrorism as a supposedly non-state phenomenon is a scam, a hoax, and a psy-op. Grossly exaggerating the alleged threat posed by non-state terrorists is itself a form of state terrorism, in the sense that the state is using propaganda to terrorize its population for political purposes.
Imagine a sadistic criminal who ties up and tortures his victim, all the while insisting that his actions are motivated by a desire to protect the victim from an imaginary bogeyman. That criminal is the government, the victim is its population, and the imaginary bogeyman is the supposed threat of non-state “terrorists.”
War for a Multipolar World: The Real War on Terror
The covert World War III being waged today appears, on the surface, to be between the Zionist-oligarch-occupied world-domination-seeking West, on the one hand, and the partisans of the multipolar-world, led by China, Russia and Iran, on the other. But beneath the surface, there is a philosophical-ideological war. It isn’t as obvious as the capitalism-vs.-communism Cold War clash, but it’s real nonetheless.
The ideological dimension of World War III can be expressed as follows: Should governments gain legitimacy through terror, or through competent administration in service to the public good?
While no government perfectly embodies either ideal, Israel and its occupied USSA come close to being pure terror states. Both governments purport to be protecting their populations from “terrorist threats” and derive much of their perceived legitimacy from that purported protection. 9/11, and 10/7 (“Israel’s 9/11”) were the sacrificial spectacles that undergird the grossly mendacious ideological foundations of both terror states. Both terror states, built on foundations of state violence and lies, are having trouble maintaining public confidence.
China, for its part, does maintain popular consensus in part through somewhat mythologized but largely accurate accounts of its suffering at the hands of foreign aggressors, from the Opium War and the Century of Humiliation through the brutal Japanese occupation and subsequent US war on China through Korea. But its government primarily derives legitimacy not through violence and sacrifice, but through competent administration in the public interest.
If we ask Western-biased Gemini to contrast public confidence in the respective US and Chinese leadership, we find that worldwide China’s government inspires far more confidence, and that domestically:
United States: Public confidence in U.S. leadership and future direction faces continuous polarization, heavily influenced by shifting political administrations, domestic divisions, and foreign policy friction with traditional allies.
China: Domestic sentiment inside China reflects steady confidence in national economic power, technological growth, and rising global standing, which sustains government legitimacy and popular backing for Beijing’s international posture.
When Covert World War III finally ends with a multipolar victory, insha’allah, let us hope and pray that Chinese-style “competent administration” rather than Zio-American “terror lies in service to Girardian sacrifice” becomes the basis of a reasonably virtuous world authority capable of enforcing international law and punishing the real terrorists.
Seyed M. Marandi: U.S. Intel Warns Iran Is Preparing a MAJOR Escalation
Dialogue Works | September 5, 2026
US approves $5 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia as it renews aggression against Iran
Press TV | September 5, 2026
Washington has approved a potential $5 billion arms package for Saudi Arabia that would sharply expand the kingdom’s precision-strike capabilities as the United States escalates its war of aggression against Iran.
The deal includes more than 10,000 guidance kits designed to convert conventional bombs into extended-range, steerable precision weapons.
The State Department cleared the sale on Friday. The package also covers more than 10,000 general-purpose bombs requested by Riyadh, both 500-pound (230 kg) and 2,000-pound (900 kg) variants.
These guidance systems would turn unguided “dumb bombs” into accurate munitions capable of striking targets at greater distances with far higher precision.
Washington claims the transfer serves US foreign-policy and national-security interests by strengthening Saudi Arabia, which it calls a major non-NATO ally and an important contributor to political stability and economic development in the Persian Gulf.
The State Department said the weapons would enhance Saudi Arabia’s ability to conduct airborne strikes against current and potential regional threats, improve the kingdom’s defensive capabilities, and increase compatibility between Saudi systems and those used by US forces and other Persian Gulf partners.
Boeing, the Virginia-based US defense contractor, has been designated the principal contractor for the potential sale.
The approval comes as Washington expands arms transfers and military cooperation across the Persian Gulf while renewing its illegal war against Iran.
On February 28, the United States and Israel launched another round of aggression against Iran, eight months after carrying out unprovoked attacks on the country. Iran swiftly retaliated with barrages of missiles and drones against Israeli-occupied territories as well as US bases and interests across the region.
A ceasefire took effect on April 7. On June 18, the presidents of Iran and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding to end the war and begin a 60-day diplomatic process to resolve outstanding differences.
Renewed US strikes have once again triggered Iranian retaliation.
JD Vance Falsely Claims the US Does Not Murder Civilians
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | September 5, 2026
Vice President JD Vance is doing a poor job of paving over the war crimes of the Trump administration. On September 1, he declared Iran is lying about the US bombing of a wedding celebration in Kuhestak, southern Iran, that killed five, including a child, and injured at least 60 people. “What I can say with 100% confidence is that unlike the IRGC, the United States never targets civilians in combat,” Vance said, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. “We never will do that. We never have done that.”
Since World War II, civilians have accounted for approximately 60–75% of deaths in major wars involving the United States.
James A. Lucas writes “that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.”
Although the aforementioned figure includes all fatalities, including those of military personnel, the vast majority of these deaths are civilian. According to official estimates, approximately 1.5–3 million civilians were killed during the Korean War, while military casualties stand at roughly one million. The US military conducted a “scorched earth” bombing campaign in North Korea. In addition to military targets, the US bombed cities, villages, industrial facilities, and dams.
Mi Young Lee, a Korean filmmaker, discovered a wealth of declassified material while conducting research for the documentary Scorched Earth (Chotohwajagjeon). Among the findings previously unreleased are pilot mission reports that provide documentation or corroboration of accounts of bombings and strafing runs. For instance, these reports detail attacks on North Korean refugees attempting to cross the Imjin River on January 1, 1951.
The US conducted a number of massacres during the Korean War, including the No Gun Ri (Nogeun-ri, South Korea) massacre that killed around 400 civilians. This war crime was perpetrated by the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, of the US Army. JD Vance is obviously unaware that the No Gun Ri massacre was ordered by the US military. Survivors and military veterans reported that they were told to “fire on everything, kill ‘em all.” The majority of victims were women, children, and the elderly.
US forces dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea, destroying nearly every major city and town. General Curtis LeMay estimated the US. “eventually burned down every town in North Korea… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off… twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure.”
During the Vietnam War, more than 2 million civilians were killed, in contrast to approximately 1.1 million military fatalities among North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, along with the deaths of South Vietnamese, US, and other allied military personnel. However, this is likely an underestimate, as other sources put the number of civilian deaths at more than 4 million.
Is it possible JD Vance never heard of the My Lai massacre? On March 16, 1968 members of Charlie Company from the US military killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, predominantly women, children, and elderly men, in the village of Sơn Mỹ located in Quảng Ngãi province. The official count provided by the U.S. Army is 347, while a memorial in Vietnam records 504 names.
During Operation Speedy Express conducted between December 1968 and March 1969, US military operations resulted in the deaths of thousands of Vietnamese, with subsequent estimates indicating that a significant number were civilians. The Pentagon documented approximately 10,899 enemy fatalities, yet only 748 weapons were seized, suggesting that many of those killed were non-combatants.
The CIA’s Phoenix Program, between 1965 and 1972, designed to assassinate Viet Cong, killed an estimated 26,000–41,000 people, many of them civilians. This program has faced significant criticism due to its high number of civilian casualties and its methods, which involved torture.
More than 150,000 civilians lost their lives due to US bombing campaigns in Cambodia. The bombings in Cambodia resulted in the destruction of numerous villages and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The legacy of these wars continues today, as unexploded ordnance continues to injure and kill people across the region.
During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the US used “precision bombs” against the Amiriya air raid shelter in western Baghdad, murdering more than 400 civilians. It was the largest single case of civilian casualties that occurred during Operation Desert Storm. In addition to attacking civilians directly during the war, the US targeted the Iraqi electrical grid, water treatment plants, bridges, roads, schools, and other civilian infrastructure, leading to an unprecedented number of civilian deaths.
Sanctions imposed on Iraq during George H.W. Bush’s illegal war, and continued by President Bill Clinton, “were deeply cruel and inhumane. People could no longer acquire basic food products or medical supplies. This led directly to starvation, chronic child malnutrition and other severe health conditions, and death. Conservative estimates indicate that at least two million people died as a direct result of the sanctions,” notes the Transnational Institute in the Netherlands.
Prior to the War on Terror, the US killed an estimated 500–1,000 Somalis during the “Black Hawk Down” operation in 1993, including women and children, along with armed fighters. The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, conducted primarily by the United States, killed approximately 500 civilians over a 78-day period. The bombing of a passenger train at Grdelica Gorge killed at least 10 people, and a convoy of ethnic Albanian refugees targeted near Gjakova killed 73.
According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, an estimated 241,000 people died as a direct result of George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Among the fatalities, 71,344 were civilians who lost their lives on both sides of Afghanistan’s extensive and permeable border with Pakistan. Specifically, at least 47,245 civilians have perished in Afghanistan, while 24,099 have died in Pakistan. Bombing and ground operations killed thousands in Kandahar, Sangin and Lashkar Gah, during the Kunduz hospital airstrike, and drone strikes in Kabul, and elsewhere.
In Iraq, between 2003 and 2011, between 200,000 and over a million civilians were killed by the United States (estimates vary depending on the source and methodology). The US “shock and awe” campaign and subsequent fighting killed thousands.
JD Vance believes, or was told, the US does not strike wedding parties, and yet, in May of 2004, a US airstrike on a wedding celebration at Mukaradeeb, a small village in Anbar Province near the Syrian border, killed 42 civilians, including 11 women and 14 children. The United States military has refuted claims that a wedding was struck, asserting that the site was a valid military target and that insurgents were eliminated. Generals of the US military declined to issue an apology for the incident
In Haditha, Iraq, US Marines killed 24 unarmed civilians, including women, children, and an elderly man in a wheelchair, after a roadside bomb killed a Marine. In Baghdad on July 12, 2007, a US Apache attack helicopter murdered Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Footage of the killing was later made public by WikiLeaks.
“The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, the most violent conflicts in which the U.S. government has engaged in the name of counterterrorism since September 11, 2001, have taken a tremendous human toll,” reports the Costs of War project at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs. “Indirect deaths are estimated to be 3.6-3.8 million, bringing the total death toll, including direct and indirect deaths, to 4.5-4.7 million and counting. Precise mortality figures remain unknown.”
Moreover, as of May 2023, more than 7.6 million children under five in post-9/11 war zones suffered from acute malnutrition, while in the same period over 38 million people in from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria were displaced, either abroad or within their own countries.
Unbeknownst to Vance, a US drone strike in December 2013 targeted a wedding procession in al-Bayda province, Yemen, resulting in the deaths of between 12 and 17 people, predominantly civilians.
As per a Pentagon evaluation, US military actions in 2025 resulted in the deaths of 153 civilians and injuries to 243 others, all linked to three US airstrikes in Yemen during April 2025. Central Command determined that these strikes were “more likely than not” to have caused civilian casualties. Furthermore, an additional 15 incidents in Yemen were still being evaluated as of February 2026.
The United States has carried out numerous drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone strikes in Pakistan alone are estimated to have killed between 400 and nearly 1,000 civilians, including approximately 160 to 200 children, from 2004 to 2018.
Between 2018 and 2019, Amnesty International and Airwars documented numerous coalition strikes in eastern Syria, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of civilians, frequently in single-family homes. In 2019, it was reported that the US military admitted carrying out a war crime during a Baghuz airstrike in Syria that killed dozens of people.
The incidents mentioned above account for a small portion of the overall civilian fatalities linked to US military operations. Cumulative estimates for the post-9/11 War on Terror indicate that the total civilian death toll ranges from approximately 387,000 to 801,000. The Costs of War project at Brown University has recorded that more than 432,000 civilians lost their lives directly due to US-led conflicts up to 2021. “An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting,” the project concluded.
The Trump administration is notorious for twisting facts and promulgating outright lies and falsehoods about everything from the economy to its illegal war against Iran. Despite Vance’s seeming ignorance about the shameful multiplicity of war crimes administered by the US military since the end of the Second World War, there is a mountain of evidence that reveals the United States is not the untarnished and honorable paragon of virtue and restraint Vance and his boss make it out to be.
6-Week-Old Amish Infant With Fatal Genetic Condition Died From Measles, Coroner Confirms
By Henrick Karoliszyn, DSW | The Defender |September 4, 2026
A 6-week-old Amish infant with a neurological genetic disorder died from measles, Lancaster County Coroner Stephen Diamontoni said today. Lancaster Online first reported the death and Diamontoni’s comments.
The baby girl, born with Amish lethal microcephaly, a condition that typically causes infants to die within six months of birth, died on Aug. 18, the coroner said.
“Those children are sick from birth and actually are placed on palliative care from the time of birth,” Diamontoni told Lancaster Online today. “They typically only live 5 or 6 months of age and the majority of those children die as a result of a respiratory infection of any kind, because their brain is very small and they don’t have the capacity to fight those infections well.”
The infant’s death “was not unexpected,” Diamantoni said. He said the Clinic for Special Children in Leacock Township handled the case. When reached for comment, the clinic refused to comment, citing privacy laws.
Diamantoni said he did not know if this was the second “measles-associated” death initially reported on Aug. 25 by Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Lancaster County Commissioner Josh Parsons said today in a statement that the county still could not confirm the death of the infant as “measles-associated.”
Parsons said state officials provided little information beyond saying the 6-week-old — and a newborn whose death the coroner confirmed on Aug. 25 — were both “unvaccinated.”
Parsons questioned that characterization, noting that a 6-week-old infant would not ordinarily have had an opportunity to receive a routine measles vaccination.
“If this is the second [‘measles-associated’ death] case, the ‘unvaccinated’ label would again be deceptive.”
The newborn, also Amish, died during childbirth. The infant tested positive for measles, but according to the coroner, she died of a ruptured spleen — not of measles.
Parsons said that if the newly identified infant is the second case that was announced Aug. 25 by the state, officials should have provided additional context while protecting the family’s privacy.
“There are obviously significant relevant facts that should have been discussed about the case,” Parsons said, adding that those facts could have been presented “in a careful,” accurate and honest way without identifying the infant or family.
“That was not done,” he wrote on X. “The opposite was done. The few facts revealed were done so in a deceptive and inflammatory manner.”
Parsons also said the delay in notifying the coroner’s office prevented his staff from conducting what he described as a full, routine investigation, including a review of physical evidence.
“Much of the debate and invasion of privacy could have been avoided by state officials being honest and forthright at the beginning of this, rather than forcing the people of Lancaster County to track down information a piece at a time,” he said.
RFK Jr. ‘undermined public health,’ says Shapiro
After today’s statement to the press about the 6-week-old infant, Shapiro continued relaying on X that both cases were the “first two measles-associated deaths in 35 years.”
The Pennsylvania Department of Health uses the term “measles-associated” when there is laboratory or epidemiological evidence of the virus.
Shapiro criticized U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying:
“Instead of listening to the real doctors and public health experts, RFK chose to sow doubt, play politics, direct the CDC not to acknowledge these deaths, and even accuse me of fabricating these tragedies. That led to a firestorm of conspiracy theories that denied these families’ pain, invaded their privacy, and undermined public health.
“It’s long past time for RFK to stop playing games with people’s lives, report these deaths accurately on the CDC dashboard, and heed the guidance of actual medical experts so people get accurate information to discuss with their trusted health care providers and can best protect themselves and their children against this deadly disease.”
Shapiro used his initial announcement of the deaths on Aug. 25 to criticize the Trump administration’s approach to vaccination policy and public health messaging.
“When the information we see coming from the federal government, in some cases, isn’t driven by facts and by science, it makes it even more confusing for parents, and that has a serious impact,” Shapiro said.
Kennedy responded on social media by accusing Shapiro of announcing the deaths with “giddy delight” for partisan purposes. He called the governor’s announcement “unseemly” and accused him of using the COVID-19 playbook, which includes “the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decision not to include the deaths in its national count has only added to the dispute.
“CDC has a responsibility to ensure its reporting accurately and transparently reflects what is known and what remains unconfirmed,” a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told The Defender. “The two measles-associated deaths announced by Pennsylvania have not been confirmed based on the information currently available to CDC.”
The CDC said the current data reflect “the best available information and our commitment to transparency and telling the American people the truth.”
The measles outbreak continues
Meanwhile, the measles continues to spread in Pennsylvania and beyond.
The U.S. has recorded its highest number of measles cases in 35 years.
As of today, 577 people in Pennsylvania had contracted measles in the current outbreak, with 115 new cases reported in the state in the past week. The state also reported 87 hospitalizations as of Aug. 31, with Lancaster County among the hardest-hit areas.
Lancaster County is home to the country’s largest Amish community, where vaccination rates have historically been lower than in the general population. Pennsylvania health officials estimated last year that only about 25% of Lancaster County’s Amish population had received the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
The Amish Church has no official doctrine prohibiting vaccination. The parents of the newborn who died of a ruptured spleen told The Atlantic that their decision not to vaccinate their children was not politically motivated and was not based on extensive research.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health says vaccination remains the best protection against measles and has expanded vaccination clinics in response to the outbreak. The state says more than 35,000 Pennsylvanians received an MMR vaccine in July, about 10,000 more than in a typical month.
The Lancaster County coroner’s office and the Pennsylvania Department of Health ignored several requests for comment from The Defender.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Reporters Without Borders calls for EU to close loopholes allowing Europeans access to censored Russian media
RT | September 4, 2026
The EU- and US-funded press watchdog, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), has called for tighter controls on AI-based search technology, after discovering that chatbots bypass European censorship laws and present Russian media sources banned by in Western Europe to users.
The Paris-based RSF, which lists EU and the US National Endowment for Democracy among its backers, found that popular AI services can provide RT articles, links, excerpts, and news summaries to web users. “Public chatbots can access these websites and redistribute their content,” a statement by the organisation claimed on Wednesday.
The EU and UK have banned numerous Russian news outlets since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, including RT and Sputnik. Moscow has denounced the EU-wide ban as an attempt to silence coverage of the conflict that contradicts Brussels maximalist political stance.
The censoorship has since spread across virtually every publishing channel, including websites, apps, chats and social media. RT has been blocked and removed from practically all Western tech platforms, while RT France was forced to close in 2023 after its accounts were frozen and RT America suffered a similar fate in 2024.
Though VPN technology is used by a significant portion of netizens, making RT’s counter-mainstream reporting accessible to its loyal audience, in July, the EU’s top court ruled that even individuals running free, non-commercial websites can be found guilty of redistributing RT content.
RSF asked popular AI services to retrieve international news exclusively from sanctioned outlets, including RT, Sputnik, and RIA Novosti.
ChatGPT and Grok emerged as the “leading bots for circumventing EU sanctions,” retrieving headlines and providing links, excerpts and detailed summaries. ChatGPT complied “without reservation,” according to RSF, while Claude responded with “unfailing consistency.”
French AI-bot Vibe located the requested material on VKontakte (known as ‘Russia’s Facebook’) and through an app carrying Telegram posts. RSF praised its “remarkable ingenuity” and described the bot as a “resourceful sleuth.”
Gemini cited sanctions to refuse requests while Meta AI, whose parent company unilaterally banned RT from Facebook and Instagram in September 2024, was the only chatbot tested that “consistently refused” to provide the requested material.
RSF called on the European Commission to investigate ChatGPT under the EU’s Digital Services Act – a raft of legislation that allows the EU to manufacture consensus and alienate dissent from narratives it wishes to impose on its population. The RSF, which is funded by the bloc and the controversial US NED called for cases to be taken over other AI services capable of providing access to sanctioned Russian media.
Ex-Pentagon official: US ‘intentionally targeting Iranian civilians’
Press TV – September 3, 2026
A former senior Pentagon official has said that the United States is deliberately killing civilians in Iran after a US missile strike hit a wedding ceremony in Hormozgan Province, which led to the martyrdom of five civilians, including a four-year-old child, and injured more than 70 others.
Wes J. Bryant, who served as the Pentagon’s chief of civilian harm assessments and now works as a war crimes analyst, told Al Jazeera on Thursday that the attack on the wedding in Kouhestak, Sirik County, exposes the real moral and legal standards of the War Department and the Trump administration.
“Is the US intentionally targeting civilians in Iran? It is,” Bryant said. He rejected US Central Command’s claim that American forces never attack civilians, arguing that Washington is “recklessly and negligently endangering and killing civilians” in its war against the Islamic Republic.
Bryant said every target location is recorded at multiple levels of the chain of command. Comparing Tuesday’s wedding massacre with the February US strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, he said the US military would have been able “to report within hours” whether a school or a wedding had been hit. Washington has still not produced a transparent accounting of the Minab slaughter.
No sitting American official has condemned the Kouhestak attack. Vice President JD Vance said only that Washington was “investigating” the reports while declaring himself “extremely skeptical” of Iranian accounts. CENTCOM spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins repeated the stock line that the US military “never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC.” President Donald Trump described the same night’s bombardment as “large and powerful.”
The US military struck the wedding at the home of fisherman Ali Mallahi around 8 to 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday as families gathered for his daughter’s ceremony. Hormozgan authorities named the martyred as four-year-old Amir Ali Karimi, 16-year-old Mohammad Mallahi, 43-year-old Kolsoum Mallahi and Zarkhatoun Taheri. State television later said a fifth victim, a 22-year-old woman, died in hospital; nearly 70 others were wounded, most of them women and children.
Mallahi told state television that those inside were ordinary civilians. Videos from the scene showed a collapsed roof, blood-soaked carpets and guests being treated in Minab, the same city where US missiles destroyed a primary school on the first day of the US-Zionist war.
US senator calls for a full investigation and accountability of US strike
US Senator Chris Van Hollen wrote that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth treats civilian casualties as an afterthought, cuts personnel responsible for preventing them, & boasts that there will be “no stupid rules of engagement.”
“There must be a full investigation & accountability for this strike. And we must end this disastrous war now,” he added.
Defence experts identified munition fragments consistent with a US AGM-84K SLAM-ER cruise missile. The house stood more than 100 meters from a telecommunications tower also hit in the barrage.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei called the strike a war crime and part of America’s “catalogue of atrocities” against the Iranian nation, linking it to earlier massacres in Minab, Lamerd and Qeshm.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said a power that “picks targets like Satan and kills like Satan” is Satan. The Iranian Red Crescent wrote to the International Criminal Court demanding an independent investigation. Iran’s UN mission sent a formal letter to the secretary-general and the Security Council describing the bombing of a wedding as a grave breach of international humanitarian law.
IRGC Commander Ahmad Vahidi, in a message to the victims’ families on Thursday, said the blood of those killed in Kouhestak “will never go unanswered” and would “catch up with those who ordered and carried out this heinous crime.”
He said the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and Iran’s armed forces would continue to guard the sanctity of the martyrs of the second and third US-Zionist-imposed wars, particularly the Battle of Hormuz.
Mourners buried the dead on Thursday in the coastal village, tossing petals over flag-draped coffins. Iran answered the latest US assault with missiles and drones against American bases in the region.
Tens of thousands of US university jobs at risk as Chinese students — and their money — stay home
Inside China Business | September 3, 2026
American colleges and universities are seeing another double-digit collapse in foreign enrollments. Chinese students increasingly are opting to study in domestic universities, which are climbing in global rankings, cost little, and afford better career opportunities after graduation. The steep declines are devastating to university budgets. Tuition and fees collected by larger universities are lower by hundreds of millions of dollars annually, while smaller colleges are struggling to survive. Closing scene, Hongen Pavilion, Chongqing
Resources and links: America’s lost Chinese students are staying home instead https://asiatimes.com/2026/08/america…
New Research: Loss of 111,000 International Students Could Cost U.S. Economy $3.4 Billion https://www.nafsa.org/fall2026outlook
Why Americans should care when international students stop coming https://www.luminafoundation.org/news…
International Students Contributed $43 Billion to the U.S. Economy in 2024-2025; Fall 2025 Spending Down by $1.1 Billion https://www.nafsa.org/about/about-naf…
International student enrollment falls amid tighter U.S. visa policies, reports show https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/inter…
How New Visa Limits Are Already Affecting Colleges https://www.insidehighered.com/news/g…
Once globally preeminent, U.S. universities are sliding into decline https://hechingerreport.org/once-glob…
Research on Education Services https://www.trade.gov/research-educat…
University of Maryland, College Park, Estimated Cost of Attendance https://marylandglobal.umd.edu/global… Tuition & Costs https://www.admissions.illinois.edu/t…
US Colleges Report 20% Drop in Foreign Students Over Visa Clampdown https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl…
As U.S. Enrolls Fewer International Students, Universities in Asia Are Going the Other Direction https://time.com/article/2026/05/12/u…
OPT growth pushed USA to record high of international enrolment in 2024//25, but drop in new students this year https://studytravel.network/magazine/…
More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, new projection shows https://hechingerreport.org/more-than…
America’s STEM graduate shortage is much worse than we thought. 
• America’s STEM graduates shortage is much …
A proposal seeks to exploit Americans’ debt to force them into wars against Israel’s enemies
MEMO | September 3, 2026
The debt of Americans should be exploited to force them to fight in wars against Israel’s enemies, a Jerusalem Post commentator has argued, proposing that indebted young Americans be offered full debt forgiveness in exchange for military service.
Writing in the Israeli newspaper, security analyst AJ Jaff said a “federally administered debt-forgiveness enlistment program” that discharges Americans’ student loan, credit card and other debts after 24 or 36 months of service “would produce voluntary enlistment at scale”.
Jaff, described by the paper as “a senior strategic security strategist and analyst with 20 years of experience across corporate security, military, and geopolitical intelligence”, wrote that “the war with Iran will not be won through airstrikes” and that a ground invasion would require between 750,000 and 1.5 million American troops, against a current active US Army of 452,000.
The article proposed debt relief as the way to fill that gap. “The economics of the indebted American 20- and 30-something make this the most efficient conversion mechanism available,” said Jaff while explaining that “states generate the soldiers they need through the incentives that work on the population they have”.
The proposal has been condemned as confirmation that Israel expects Americans to fight and die in wars fought on its behalf. The Mises Institute, a US think tank, said the article amounted to a call for more Americans “to enlist – to die for Israel”, adding: “The whole point being to further subsidize the state of Israel.”
Users on social media described the proposal as an attempt “to exploit the crippling debt young Americans are carrying by offering them a chance at forgiveness if they’re willing to go die for Israel in the Persian Gulf.”
Responding to the plan, prominent American commentator Glenn Greenwald said: “ Israel pays scummy US politicians in both parties and DC vultures in the lobbying firms to ensure that Americans are forced to send billions to Israel. Then they argue that the debt of Americans should be exploited to force them to fight in wars against Israel’s enemies”.
The proposal to exploit the debt of Americans to fight wars against Israel’s enemies follows a string of remarks by senior Israeli officials suggesting they see US military power as a tool to be wielded on their behalf, while Israel itself stays out of the fighting. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told the Katif Conference for National Responsibility on 21 July that a US war against Iran fought without Israeli participation was “the best for us”, adding, “Israel has no interest in joining the campaign.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, boasted on Israel’s Channel 14 on 30 August that he had used “close to a thousand hours” on American television and his “influence in the United States” over almost 40 years to persuade Washington to take military action against Iran, saying, “It took a long time to bring the US in.” The US had launched military action against Iran on 28 February, an escalation Netanyahu had reportedly been pressing Washington to undertake for months.
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Iran spent $1 million to wipe out $30 billion in data center plans, and take down Amazon in the ME
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From the Archives
Clash of Civilization, Iran Part II
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist. … continue
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- ‘We are not like everyone else’ laws that bind other nations do not apply to Israel, says Likud lawmaker
- Trump’s govt makes ‘treasonous’ claim of weapons shortages
- Palestinian-American Journalist Naqaa Hamed Imprisoned by Israeli Forces After Settlers Targeted Her
- U.S. Makes, Israel Takes: The Real Story of U.S.-Israeli Military Cooperation
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- Groups urge Americans to support Van Hollen legislation on Israel’s killing of Americans & Palestinians
- Trump administration plans to send 40,000 tons of bombs to Israel: report
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- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
- Fear Of Debate: Alarmist German Climate Scientist Calls On Mainstream Media To Discredit Skeptic Voices
- End-Of-August Arctic Sea Ice Extent Hasn’t Fallen In 20 Years, Official Data Show!
Aletho News 
