By bombing Iran, the US continues to make the world safe for war

 Al Jazeera English

It seems like just yesterday that United States President Donald Trump was pushing a “diplomatic resolution” to the Iranian nuclear issue.

Now, the US has joined Israel’s illegal assault on Iran, striking three Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday in what Trump has boasted was a “very successful attack”.

As CNN dramatically put it, “a midsummer night in June 2025 could come to be remembered as the moment the Middle East changed forever; when the fear of nuclear annihilation was lifted from Israel; when Iran’s power was neutered and America’s soared”.

Of course, a “fear of nuclear annihilation” has nothing to do with Israel’s current strikes on Iran, which have been dutifully portrayed in the US media as targeting military and nuclear facilities but have somehow managed to slaughter hundreds of civilians. . . .

[A]side from being a persistent thorn in the side of US imperialism, Iran’s behaviour has been rather less apparently, um, “evil” than certain other international actors – like the US itself. For instance, Iran is not the one currently funding a straight-up genocide to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

Nor is Iran the one that has spent the past several decades bombing and otherwise antagonising folks in every corner of the world – from backing right-wing state terror in Latin America to conducting mass slaughter in Vietnam.

Furthermore, the sole clandestine nuclear weapons power in the Middle East is not Iran but Israel, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has never allowed UN safeguards on its facilities. READ  MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Working Hard to Justify Israel’s Unprovoked Attack on Iran

FAIR

Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead. READ MORE AT FAIR.

As Israel strikes Iran, what happened to ‘America First’?

 Al Jazeera English

Early this morning, Israel conducted unprecedented strikes on Iran, killing civilians along with senior military officials and scientists and basically forcing the Iranian government into a position in which it must retaliate – as if there already was not enough going on in the Middle East, particularly with Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Israel, of course, thrives on perpetual upheaval and mass killing, all the while portraying itself as the victim of the folks it is slaughtering and otherwise antagonising. True to form, the Israelis have now cast Iran as the aggressor, with the country’s nonexistent nuclear weapons allegedly posing a “threat to Israel’s very survival”, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in his statement announcing the launch of “Operation Rising Lion”.

Unlike Iran, Israel does happen to possess nuclear weapons – which just renders the whole situation all the more flammable. But for Netanyahu, at least, keeping the region in flames is a means of saving his own skin from domestic opposition and embroilment in various corruption charges. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Democrats wooing Musk after the Trump breakup is US plutocracy at its best

Al Jazeera English

It’s official: United States President Donald Trump and the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, have broken up.

At the end of last month, Musk departed from his post as the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he oversaw the mass firing of federal employees and dismantling of various government agencies – all the while benefitting from his own companies’ lucrative contracts with the government.

Anyway, US “democracy” has never met a conflict of interest it didn’t like. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

The Hidden Story: Israeli ‘Aid’ Is Part of Genocide Plan

 FAIR

Israeli tanks opened fire last Sunday on a crowd of thousands of starving Palestinians at an aid distribution center in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The victims had gathered in hopes of finding food for themselves and their families, following a nearly three-month total Israeli blockade of the territory. At least 31 people were killed; one Palestinian was also killed by Israeli fire the same day at another distribution site in central Gaza.

On Monday, June 2, three more Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli projectiles while trying to procure food, and on Tuesday there were 27 fatalities at the aid hub in Rafah. This brought the total number of Palestinian deaths at the newly implemented hubs to more than 100 in just a week.

Mass killing in the guise of food distribution is occurring under the supervision of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a sketchy-as-hell organization registered in Switzerland and Delaware. It boasts the participation of former US military and intelligence officers, as well as solid Israeli endorsement and armed US security contractors escorting food deliveries.

Jake Wood—the ex-US Marine sniper who had taken up the post of GHF executive director—recently resigned after reasoning that “it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence.” READ MORE AT FAIR.

In Gaza, aid kills

Al  Jazeera English

Today, three Palestinians have been killed and 35 wounded by Israeli fire near an aid distribution centre in the Gaza Strip’s southern city of Rafah. The attack came a day after Israeli tanks opened fire on thousands of desperate and hungry Palestinians at the same site, killing at least 31 people. One person was also shot dead at another distribution site near the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza the same day.

There are currently only four such sites distributing food to Gaza’s starving population of two million people, who for nearly three months were forced to contend with a full Israeli blockade that prevented the entry of all aid into the enclave.

On May 19, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu magnanimously opted to allow a resumption of “minimal” aid deliveries to Gaza, having determined that impending mass starvation was a “red line” that might jeopardise the undying support of the US, Israel’s traditional partner in crime and the primary enabler of its slaughter.

And yet these mass killings suggest that the new “minimal” arrangement offers Palestinians a decidedly horrific choice: either die of starvation or die trying to obtain food – not, of course, that these are the only two options for dying in a genocidal war in which Israel has indiscriminately bombed hospitals, refugee camps and everything else that can be bombed, killing more than 54,400 people. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Why Trump and Bukele are destroying Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s life

 Al Jazeera English

In March, the United States government deported to El Salvador 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who had lived and worked in the US for almost half his life. Little did he know that he would soon be the face of US President Donald Trump’s sinisterly exuberant mass deportation campaign.

Married to US citizen Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia was detained while driving in Maryland with the couple’s five-year-old autistic son, who got to witness his father’s capture by the US forces of law and order and has apparently been severely traumatised as a result. In a subsequent court affidavit, Vasquez Sura said her son, who cannot speak, had been “very distressed” by the “sudden disappearance of his father”, crying more than usual and “finding Kilmar’s work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar’s familiar scent”.

Of course, tearing families apart and traumatising children has long been par for the bipartisan course in everyone’s favourite “land of the free”, although Trump has certainly made more of a sensational spectacle out of it than his Democratic predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Anyway, there is nothing like sowing a bunch of fear and psychological trauma in the name of national security, right?

Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador along with more than 200 other people, who shared the honour of serving as demonised guinea pigs in the Trump administration’s current experiments in sadistic countermigration policy. The deportees were swiftly interned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the notorious mega-prison built by Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s self-described “coolest dictator in the world”. The facility houses thousands of people arrested under the nationwide “state of emergency”, which was declared in 2022 and shows no sign of abating. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Project Esther and the weaponisation of Zionism

Al Jazeera English

On October 7, 2024 – exactly one year into the United States-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip that has now killed more than 53,000 Palestinians – the Washington-based Heritage Foundation unleashed a policy paper titled Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. 

The conservative think tank is the same force behind Project 2025, a blueprint for consolidating executive power in the US and forging the best-ever right-wing dystopia. The “national strategy” proposed by Project Esther – which is named for the biblical queen credited with saving the Jews from extermination in ancient Persia – basically consists of criminalising opposition to Israel’s current genocide and exterminating freedoms of speech and thought along with a whole lot of other rights. . . . 

. . . in spite of all of Project Esther’s ruckus over the ostensibly existential anti-Semitic threat posed by the HSN, it turns out that “no major Jewish organizations appear to have participated in drafting the plan, or publicly endorsed it since its release”, according to a December article in the Forward. 

A news outlet catering to American Jews, the Forward reported that the Heritage Foundation had “struggled to attract Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups”, and that Project Esther “focuses exclusively on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism problems from white supremacists and other far-right groups”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s Gaza ‘disengagement’ that paved the way for conquest

 Al Jazeera English

In August 2005, the Israeli government officially withdrew from the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian coastal enclave it had occupied continuously since 1967. Apart from pulling back its armed forces, it had to undertake the dismantlement of 21 illegal settlements housing 8,000 Jewish settlers.

Israeli troops were deployed to begin the process, which pulled at the heartstrings of international media outlets like The New York Times. The paper reported on the sobbing settlers affected by Israel’s “historic pullout from the Gaza Strip”, some of whom had to be carried “screaming from their homes in scenes that moved a number of the soldiers to tears”.

To be sure, there is nothing quite so tragic as illegal colonisers being uprooted from one section of land that does not belong to them and transferred to another section of land that does not belong to them. It bears mentioning that a majority of the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip are themselves refugees from Israel’s blood-drenched conquest of Palestine in 1948, which killed 15,000 Palestinians, expelled three-quarters of a million more, and destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages. . . .

In 2006, Israeli government adviser Weisglass – the same character who revealed the “formaldehyde” approach to disengagement – also took it upon himself to charmingly clarify the logic behind Israel’s restrictions on food imports into the Gaza Strip: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Now that Israel is literally starving Palestinians to death in Gaza with the full complicity of the United States, it seems the “idea” has undergone some revisions. Meanwhile, recent news reports citing unnamed Israeli officials indicate that Israel is also currently plotting the “conquest” and full military occupation of the Gaza Strip.

Two decades on from Israel’s withdrawal-that-wasn’t from Gaza, it’s safe to surmise that “disengagement” paved the way for conquest. And this time around, there’s no disengagement plan. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Is Trump abandoning Israel? Not really

 Al Jazeera English

United States President Donald Trump descends on Tuesday on the Middle East for a regional tour that will begin in Saudi Arabia and include stops in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. It is a business trip in every sense of the term, involving potentially trillions of dollars in investment and trade deals.

The UAE, for example, has already pledged $1.4 trillion in investments to the US over 10 years in sectors ranging from artificial intelligence and energy to mining and aluminium production. Saudi Arabia, for its part, has committed to investing $600bn in the US over the next four years. According to the Reuters news agency, Trump will also be offering the kingdom an arms package to the tune of $100bn.

Meanwhile, in keeping with the president’s solid history of nepotism and self-enrichment, it just so happens that the Trump Organization is currently presiding over real estate projects and other business ventures in all three Gulf countries he is slated to visit.

And yet one country is conspicuously absent from the regional itinerary despite being the US’s longstanding BFF in the Middle East: Israel, the nation that has for the past 19 months been perpetrating genocide in the Gaza Strip with the help of gobs of US money and weaponry. The official Palestinian death toll stands at nearly 53,000 and counting. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.