>What's going to happen next? Is it all kicking off?
Yeah, WW3 is going to happen over a fairly common occurrence in the Middle East. You might as well start stockpiling beans and water if you don't want to be murdered for a pack of frankfurters in the anarchy that will be coming in a fortnight's time.

I'm going to piss you off but I quite like Condoleezza Rice's recent summary in Foreign Policy interviewed given her experiance with the last time:

(21:19)

Israel does have the position that it feels an existential threat from it's neighbours and Iran has spent decades building up proxy forces around the country that it only loosely controls and who have a clear desire and means to deliver hurt. Hezbollah in particular is probably the most well-armed non-state actor in the world but its position in Lebanon has become somewhat precarious following recent elections and the peace it has with Israel has always been tenuous at best.

The problem is that it's difficult to see what victory looks like even after the leadership of the organisation has been decapitated. I think everyone agrees that Hezbollah should have been made to disarm as a condition on participating in Lebanese politics but it's 2024 and Lebanon is teetering on collapse anyway which means the obvious risk is that Israel ends up being sucked into the country as an occupation force. An occupation force already fighting on 1-2 fronts but this time the terrain is harder and the enemy is better armed and coming with experiance from Syria.

>Is it all kicking off?

No, Iran will raise a load of different angry flags as usual. The question will be how far the Israeli population will be willing to go.

>>41741
I'm hoping other hip fashion trends return from 2006 like economic stability. This time it'll be like Quantum Leap though where we'll agree not to demote Pluto and give Battlestar Galactica a decent finale.

It's doing my Lockheed stock no harm at all.

>>41743

I'm not trying to be a prick, but I've been at pains to identify "ethical" investments for many years, now. I've avoided anything to do with weapons. What's your reasoning behind investing in it, or is it just a case of making money and nothing more?

>>41744

Not him, but:

The world is full of bad bastards who would conquer the world if they could. That sounds paranoid to someone in the west, because we stand behind the safety of a massive wall of state-of-the-art weapons. To most of the rest of the world, it's just a very obvious statement of fact.

Companies like Lockheed and RTX are the fundamental reason why you and I can't really imagine getting blown to bits by some mad cunt. A lot of people believe that the term "defence industry" is a euphemism, but they only have the luxury of believing that because it does in fact defend us very effectively.

The people who make Javelin are fundamentally amoral capitalists, but that isn't particularly pertinent to the lads who are using them to stop Russian tanks. They're just very grateful to have such an effective weapons system.

If you choose not to invest in a particular defence company because of the products they make or the customers they serve, that's perfectly reasonable. If you think that it's fundamentally unethical to invest in any defence company, I think you're being naive.

>>41745

I think you have the situation flipped on its head. When you say "bad bastards who would conquer the world if they could", you're directly referring to the people who already use such weapons to dominate the world militarily. If you want to address naivety, I'd start with the belief that high tech weapons are tools of liberation.

You're using a similar logic to that of the "second amendment" crowd in the US use to justify their ownership of ludicrously powerful weapons, or of the former CEO of the NRA Wayne LaPierre when he said "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a good is a good guy with a gun".

>>41744
I've always struggled to buy into the idea that the small actions of the little guy - that do add up to become consequential at the population level - carry moral significance by themselves. It reminds me of voting where one person's input changes precisely nothing unless the result was basically a tie.

Anyway I'm not too concerned with being a good person and consider myself generally a neutral non-actor. I like to think I value honesty more than the average person but I suppose beyond that I have no internally consistent moral framework.

My portfolio is 40% S&P500, 10% FTSE100 and the other 50% is individual stocks and funds chosen with very little thought. I don't fully understand what some of the funds even are - they just had a good rating. With there being multiple conflicts in the news I felt like defence stocks could make money. Over the last six months I'm barely in the black and Lockheed is by far my best bet, with PayPal #2.

I might just be an idiot.

>>41745
I think it's very generous to act as if the defence of Ukraine is anything like a fair repsresentation of the military-industrial complex's real world consequences. Flattened and poisoned Middle Eastern cities, the internal "security" of Gulf dictatorships and the militarisation of every copper in the USA is the prevalent outcome. In fairness, the politics of each scenario are a bigger factor than a defence industry simply existing. However, even if we, naively, assume the defence industry is passively acquiescing to these circumstances, I would still regard that as immoral.

For the record, this would still apply if we were considering Norinco, Sukhoi or the like.

>>41748

Fair enough. I don't think you're an idiot, in fact it sounds like you're good at making money. I didn't write the post to morally attack anyone, I just felt like a discussion because it's something I've thought about a lot.

Most of my investments are in pharma, which are hardly the picture of ethical purity. What you're getting at, though, does seem to me to reveal some of the risks of investment on a purely functional level. I don't invest in index funds for this reason, because I want to know quite a lot about a company before investing in it.

>I've always struggled to buy into the idea that the small actions of the little guy - that do add up to become consequential at the population level - carry moral significance by themselves.

Me too. I went through a period where I wouldn't buy certain products because I loathed the companies behind them, until I realised that logic would probably mean I'd struggle to clothe myself or finish my weekly shop.

I suppose I could make life utterly untenable for myself by enforcing a high standard, but the line I've drawn is that clothes and food are essentials to survival, but investments are not.

I accept it's an arbitrary line, and I've no clear answers.

>>41745

I think this is a very comforting fairytale you tell yourself to sleep better at night knowing you are directly profiting from bloodshed.

I don't have an ethical problem with you doing that, because we live in a fundamentally amoral dog eat dog world, and we do what we have to do to look after our own self interest. It shouldn't be that way, but it is.

What I don't respect at all, in fact I find it contemptible, is your spineless inability to look yourself in the eye. You are deceiving yourself because you are too weak to just own the fact you are profiting from war.

>>41753
Profit is in the nature of war, tree of libery watered by blood, fight for your right to party, etc.

>>41744
This isn't the first time I've seen pearl-clutching on here about investing in defence stocks. Can't you make a thread?

Personally I avoid investing in tech companies that piss me off and dictatorships. The latter should be common sense and has also made me profit while the former keeps me away from Alphabet. Compared to investing in China I think it's small potatoes to have your money in the weapons that ensure that the good guys win and the international order is preserved.

>>41753
He's not profiting from war, he's profiting from the expectation of governments expecting war. But at any rate it's like whinging because someone is profiting from cancer or 'owt else, ultimately he's locking away his money in x and gets a little treat when he uses his access capital productively.

>>41755

>'owt

What letter were you dropping there lad? Hm?

>>41758
?

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nowt

>>41760

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/owt

I like how Biden just walked out and crashed the oil market along with putting the entire world on edge. He had no need to do that and going to by the video I think even he realised he shouldn't have said it.

>>41763

Care to elaborate or post a link to what you're talking about? I don't feel like visiting a news site because they induce existential panic on their own.

>>41764
He's had a couple of hours to reply and he hasn't, so...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx250ygn9ddo

Someone asked Joe Biden if he would support Israel bombing Iran's oil fields and massively driving up the price of oil, and Joe Biden said maybe instead of FUCK NO.

>>41766

Cheers lad.

So on top of the gas and leccy bills that never went down after Ukraine, we'll be paying a fortune for petrol because of Israel and that senile cunt in the White House. Triffic.

I wish everyone would just give it a bloody rest.

The prevailing attitudes here being "It's okay for me to profit from war" and "It's okay for me to profit from war so long as I'm honest with myself about it", maybe that Westernised version of karma has something going for it that you're all miserable and broken human beings. Can't say I sympathise.

>>41768
My own investments are entirely, 100% in UK tracker funds. I’m backing Britain. If you want me to feel like less of a mug, perhaps you should give more money to FTSE100 companies and preferably without pointing out that most of them are crooks too.

>>41769

Is it too obvious to point out that BAE Systems, Rolls Royce Holdings and Melrose Industries are in the FTSE 100?

>>41768

So hows your portfolio in e-scooter rental start ups going granola lad? Can't feed your kids on good karma. You can barely feed them on granola.

What's the deal with the UK/US response to this conflict?
There's something fundamentally strange about the recognised tendency for headlines to break the English language instead of just saying that Israel has done something nasty, or how it seems (not just to me, but to the families!) that the Israeli government couldn't give a fuck about whether the hostages live or die but only Haaretz will say it in a headline, or how our government and the US government endorsed or plead ignorance to almost everything in Gaza (save Hamas, who we must remember started it...) until that became untenable. We rejected a ceasefire and then due to popular demand flipped to calling for a ceasefire everyone knows won't happen. Rafah was a red line until it wasn't, and today we're still right behind Israel as it goes ahead and invades Lebanon. ("Israel has a right to defend itself" which apparently extends to violating the territory of Lebanon — whether Lebanon has a right to defend itself — its military, not Hezbollah — is a question that will go conveniently unasked.)

I don't think it's a big conspiracy, and I'm not inclined to think Israel has a huge blackmail file on every world leader, so what's happening? Do journalists just not want the grief of getting a thousand angry letters from Israel's minister of communications, so pre-censor their headlines? Is there a general understanding, as with Iraq, that you should generally hew to the government's foreign-policy line? Does anyone, anywhere even pretend to care about reconciling things with international law (at least to save face) anymore? Is it something silly — like Biden setting a very pro-Israel policy based on his own beliefs, and everyone else just following America's lead? Or does "the west" just approve everything Israel are up to, including invading Lebanon, but find it more useful to look like complicit bystanders than active enablers? Or is it just that while some parts look like a bad idea — such as invading Lebanon to chase out the unabummer group formed to fight against Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon — Israel's a useful ally while everyone else in the region is either irrelevant or with us, so we'll give them a blank cheque? Is there something else I'm missing?

>>41772

>Israel's a useful ally while everyone else in the region is either irrelevant or with us, so we'll give them a blank cheque? Is there something else I'm missing?

Pretty much, but the exact working of it are a bit of a tangle, and regardless how much they will deny it, that nasty Z word is responsible for stirring the pot up a great deal. It's not a primary cause, but it's responsible for a lot of the confusion and distortion around the whole mess.

In the bigger picture, Israel is the only country in the region we can consider a "proper" country, insofar as their government is made up of white-ish judeo-christian people, not eskimos, and their military is advanced and operates on a peer level with western militaries, not AKs and RPGs. Honestly I bet you could write a pretty decent thesis on how good and evil really revolves around whether you use an AR-15 knock off in 5.56 or an AK-74 derivative in 5.45. But I digress.

The petrodollar is what it all really comes down to. That's why it sometimes appears that we (the US.UK etc) allow Israel to do things that appear to be counter even to our own interests- Our interests are not really our interests. We merely serve the petrodollar's dominance. The Saudis and the Iranians and all those lot would be able to put the West over a barrel get it if we weren't constantly playing them off against one another, destabilising a regime here, arming some rebels there, that sort of thing. The press aren't in the pocket of the government, but they are in the pocket of big business, and their interests align with the government's strongly enough on some things that they go unquestioned.

If we're of a similar age it's easy to have forgotten all the stuff about the 9th of November, Afghanistan and Iraq 20-odd years ago, when we were growing up. But refreshing your memory on it will likely elucidate a lot about the present day middle east.

>>41771

If you were happy with your choices you wouldn't have brought them up to defend them. You'll be a lot better off when you act in ways you don't subconsciously find immoral.

>>41772
>What's the deal with the UK/US response to this conflict?
I think it probably has something to do with 'the west' deep state alliances between Israel, the US and England. Apparently each has a specific role in western power but what they are I couldn't say.
There's an old book called something like 'The Anglo American Connection' which I believe lays out the basis of this, though I can't find it anywhere online using that title. If anyone happens to know it's author, I'd appreciate your naming them.

Sources - my arse.

>>41772

The truth that Israel's neighbours won't admit publicly is that they're allied to Israel. Jordan and Egypt will loudly condemn Israel, but they've got productive and stable diplomatic relations with Israel and bitter enmity with Fatah and Hamas. The Lebanese government can't come out and say that they're quite happy for Israel to rid them of Hezbollah, but they are. Yemen are more than happy for Israel to knock lumps out of the Houthis. The Saudis know which side they're on in a conflict between Israel and Iran.

The Arab man on the street might be enraged about the plight of the Palestinians, but his government just regards them as a persistent nuisance. Those governments aren't trying to stop Israel because they don't want to stop Israel. Netanyahu is doing geopolitical dirty work for NATO, but also for the Arab League.

>>41769
The fun thing about investing in a basic FTSE tracker is that a fraction of your investment always goes to Israeli companies. Not as a 'oh they base in the UK' but in similar to Ireland they can just list here.

>>41772
>Israel's a useful ally while everyone else in the region is either irrelevant or with us, so we'll give them a blank cheque? Is there something else I'm missing?

People overestimate how much influence the UK or even the US have over Israel. The west advises Israel not to kill everyone in the region and to try to minimise civilian casualties but historically Israel has no qualms over, say, hijacking French ships and usually they kill unabummers which a lot of people think is just super. They're also extremely good at playing western politics but I don't want to lose my job.

>>41773
The Middle East already 'has us over a barrel', that's what OPEC+ is about. You don't need to give people in the region an excuse to kill each other, Pan-Arab/Pan-Islamic nationalism is a total meme and the US exports so many weapons to the region that it can deliberately gimp states to maintain a balance of power e.g. Egyptian F-16s can't use BVR missiles.

Fortunately the US likes the UK so we're in the privileged position that we don't need to input a code into our F-35s every 24 hours to avoid them bricking themselves like a printer when it detects knock-off ink.

>>41777

>Fortunately the US likes the UK so we're in the privileged position that we don't need to input a code into our F-35s every 24 hours to avoid them bricking themselves like a printer when it detects knock-off ink.

I bet China's already got a virus that would ground the entire USAF in the event of open conflict.

>>41778
The Chinese own Boeing?

>>41780

I bet that's where a lot of the components come from. I'm even fairly sure I remember reading there was some sort of scandal about that when it was discovered, which made me laugh because really, try building anything without at least some parts from China nowadays.

But nah my point is more that no matter how robust they try to make the cyber-security on their gear, they are still having these things built by the lowest bidder, in true American fashion; the mere presence of a system like that means there will be an avenue to exploit. The Chinese military's entire strategic planning is to find methods of specifically and deliberately countering anything the US has and uses.

>>41781
I'm not saying your starting point is wrong, but the conclusions you're reaching feel a bit like the urban legend about the Americans spending loads of time and money building a pen that worked in outer space, while the Soviets used pencils. Even if we assume there is some kind of superbug the Chinese could release at will, their experiences with COVID-19 would likely make them shy away from open biological warfare. So in my opinion, with the stakes so high, they'd be unlikely to want to play bio apocolypse chicken with the Yanks. Don't forget, the Western Allies spent the whole of WW2 with stocks of mustard gas loaded weapons ready to go just in case Germany decided to pull the trigger first.

>>41782

... A computer virus, lad.

>>41783
This is what happens when I spend more time checking my spelling than reading what I'm replying to. Sorry.

Also, I like how we've finally got a thread about Israel v Everyone and we've barely talked about that at all maybe they won't notice how stupid I am if I change the topic immediately.

>>41784
>Also, I like how we've finally got a thread about Israel v Everyone and we've barely talked about that at all
Fine, I'll start. Israel v France next Thursday night. Everybody knows that France are favourites, but if you say that openly someone will call you an antisemite.

I was being glib when I said it's "Israel vs Everyone" last week, but no, it seems that really is the current strategy:
>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/10/un-peacekeepers-in-lebanon-say-israel-has-fired-on-their-bases-deliberately
>Unifil says two peacekeepers were injured after Israeli tank fired on one observation point and soldiers fired on another
>A UN report published on Thursday accused Israel of pursuing a concerted policy of destroying Gaza’s healthcare system in the war in the strip, saying this constituted war crimes and extermination as a crime against humanity.
>An Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced people in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah killed 27 people on Thursday, including a child and seven women, according to al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital, where the bodies were brought.

>>41799

Really is madness that we're actively supporting this, it's black and white at this stage, what they're doing is no more excusable than the Russians.

>>41800
Some Israeli official, when asked why the hell they were shooting at UN peacekeeping forces, responded that the peacekeepers should just move further away. I think they had been there since 2006 if I remember correctly. Obviously lots of otherwise good countries do bad things sometimes, but I’m with you that we should, at the very least, stop helping.

>>41801
if us and the yanks suddenly pulled all support and promises to defend, they'd be fucked.

How is firing on UN troops not considered an attack on the UN?

>>41803

They aren't UN troops. They're troops from various countries who are participating in a United Nations mission. Personnel on that mission have been killed fairly regularly since 1978 - some by Israeli airstrikes or artillery fire, but most by Hezbollah and other militant groups.

>>41804
>They aren't UN troops. They're troops from various countries who are participating in a United Nations mission.
Oh, that's alright then.

>>41803
They've done it before in 2006 and got away with it then too.

It is really terribly simple. Take every single rule we use to categories an organisation as immortal and evil in the world and assume that that rule doesn't apply to Israel and Israel has probably at some point flagrantly broken that rule.

Israel has a right to defend it self - by which they mean it lives in constant fear someone might do to them what they have done to others in return.

>>41805

I'm not saying it is alright, but the pedantic difference is hugely significant in legal and political terms.

UNIFIL is supposedly in southern Lebanon to oversee the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701, but that's a farce because it doesn't actually have any powers to enforce that resolution and all of the relevant parties are totally ignoring it. 1701 says that Israel shouldn't cross the Blue Line, but we can all see how well that went. It says that there should be no military assets between the Blue Line and the Litani river, but that's where Hezbollah keep all their rockets.

In practical terms, it's irrelevant as to whether Israel "attacked the UN" or not. The UN can issue condemnatory statements from now until forever, but it can't actually do anything because it doesn't have an army. The Irish government could decide "you fired on our peacekeeping troops at the Naqoura base, that's causus belli, so we're going to war with you", but obviously that isn't going to happen.

The Security Council could subject Israel to sanctions, but the US and UK is going to veto those sanctions, because - like it or not - NATO needs Israel far more than Israel needs NATO. Even if NATO had no strategic interests in the Middle East, then Elbit and Rafael are of absolutely vital strategic importance in the emerging NATO-China cold war. The General Assembly could pass some resolution or other, but it's going to be ignored by everyone who matters.

If none of the NATO allies are going to do anything to meaningfully twist Netanyahu's arm - and they aren't - then who?

>>41810

It's just getting weird that the US/UK intelligence agencies who are so willing to organise and stage coups and suchlike in so many countries when they're getting to be a pain in the arse and more trouble than they're worth, won't touch Netyanahanu. That implies that either all this fuckery serves NATO's strategic interests somehow, or that those powers that pulled the strings on the middle east for so long have lost their touch.

Really I think there will come a point (i.e if oil gets expensive because of their actions) where even the US turn around and say "look cut that shit out or you'll be grounded for a MONTH, mister. No more ballistic missile allowance."

>>41812

For the last 1000 years every country in Europe has at some point considered the Jews to be a problem. Maybe the ultimate act of Racism has been to actively encourage them being somewhere else.

They certainly seem to be making a complete pigs breakfast of the middle east in a way no one else could. So seems like a win win for the old divide and rule policy of the foreign office.

>>41817

No subtitles of geopolitics just "da Jews!!". Well done.

>>41817
I wish I could set you on fire in front of your parents.

>>41812
>Really I think there will come a point (i.e if oil gets expensive because of their actions)
I'm wondering if higher oil prices will make untapped deposits economically viable, thus lessening dependance on trade, outside influence etc etc
I hear there're numerous fields in Canada and various other places, only they're currently unviable to tap.

>>41818
If there has been a radicalising influence on me I assure you it is the atrocities of Israel that have continued undaunted my entire lifetime. I cannot just passively observe their crimes and not feel emotionally affected.

I've made no false statement. It is fairly well documented that that has happened. It is clear that they couldn't get on with the other children. Once would be a tragedy, twice is a coincidence but repeatly in independent circumstances for thousands of years is a pattern
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_antisemitism
The behaviour of Israel is self evidently evil. Numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity. When left to their own devices they run a apartheid ethno state. There is evidently something deeply wrong with their culture.

And you only need to flick through the old testament to work out why. It's nothing but righteous propaganda about how they are the chosen people. And all behaviour is justified against outsiders. Imagine the worst kind of Christian or eskimo righteous zealot. Now imagine there were a million of them in one place actively encouraging each other teaching all their children that is the way you should think, now imagine that for a few generations and to deviate from that belief would mean facing the realisation you are an invader who genocided the previous occupants, that's Israel. A lot of Christians deliberately make the declaration that the old testament doesn't count anymore and the reason is because it is filled with the exact same batshit behaviour that Israel is doing right now being congratulated.

The current conflict isn't a singular event. It is a sustained campaign that has been going on before any of us were born. Israel considers it standard policy to treat Palestinians as sub human and cull the herd occasionally. This is just another chapter in their holy war for ethnic cleansing they just hadn't had an excuse for a while so they are making up for lost time.

>>41819

Then you could have a lucrative carrier in the IDF.

>>41812

The "weirder" bit is that Iran is the only other Middle Eastern country that wants any involvement in this conflict. Egypt used to control Gaza, but they've washed their hands of it; likewise with Jordan and the West Bank. Israel have invaded Lebanon, but the Lebanese army seem completely uninterested. That's much less weird if you were paying any attention to the Middle East before the 7th of October.

The western media keeps talking about "fears that this will escalate into a wider regional conflict", but that's absolutely ridiculous, because that wider regional conflict has been brutally fought for more than a decade. 600,000 people have died so far in the Syrian civil war. 400,000 so far in Yemen. Gaza and Southern Lebanon are fairly small fronts in a massive Arab-Iranian conflict. Israel isn't on the side of the Arabs in that conflict, but it's not not on the side of the Arabs either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Saudi_Arabia_proxy_conflict

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_alliance

>>41822

You're still conflating Jews and Zionists - of the latter, many of whom are Christians or simply working on behalf of the Western Military Industrial Complex.

>>41824
>conflating Jews and Zionists

No it is Israel does that. It is literally written into their constitution. Do you go urm Ackchyually to the state of Israel when it says that? Of course don’t. Would you do that with German’s? A country that technically only existed since 1991 and never existed before 1815 and has never included all the people or areas who are culturally German? Pull your head out of your arse.

The country is culturally Jewish

Not every Jewish person is an Israeli but Israel is Jewish, It is the 'homeland of the Jewish people' their words not mine.

I know the difference but Israel is an extension and expression of Jewish culture it is it's core ideal.

>the latter, many of whom are Christians

There really aren't that many.
And they aren't the ones in Israel actively killing the native population, I'm not sure they really exist in a meaningful sense they largely only exist as a concept because American politics. You show me a non Jewish zionist and I'll either show you a nutjob in bumtown, USA that everyone ignores anyway, or someone who relies heavily on millions of dollars from 'zionists who happen to be Jewish and not the Christian ones' to run their political campaign otherwise they will lose.

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>41825

>You show me a non Jewish zionist and I'll either show you a nutjob in bumtown, USA that everyone ignores anyway, or someone who relies heavily on millions of dollars from 'zionists who happen to be Jewish and not the Christian ones' to run their political campaign otherwise they will lose.

Or a Druze.

I have to buy a belt and some socks today, so I can't be typing out an essay length reply to all this shit. However, the idea that Israeli fascism is uniquely demented or serves as any kind of post scriptum justification for historical anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe is egregiously stupid. Israeli fascism relies on the exact same kind of black nostalgia and self-pity as any other kind of fascism. It looks to the Old Testament the same way Franco's Spain looked to the Reconquista, Mussolini's Italy looked to Imperial Rome and Hitler's Germany looked to a bunch of Wagner operas, because for most of their history Germans lived in bogs and only became involved in proper civilisation when the late Roman Empire used German refugees to boster it's tax base and legions.

Israeli fascism is somewhat unique in that because Israel serves US interests, sort of, it is given a big thumbs up and a fat cheque by the Americans no matter what it does domestically. Post-Cold War it skirted by genuine criticism because politicians everywhere stopped trying to change anything, then the neo-cons and the Global War on Terror happened, and right now we have one of the lamest of lame duck presidents in history, who's also a full on Zionist headbanger. There are perfectly rational explanations for why Israel is the way it is, and by suggesting it's actually Old Testament magic you're intellectually aligning yourself with the Israeli ultra-right, while simultaneously ignoring just how much of Europe and the UK is sympathetic, if not openly supportive, of the exact same brand of rightism. Vox have been menacing Spain for years, Italy's PM is "former" fascist Giorgia Meloni and Germany's AfD are polling second, behind the CDU. The UK's third largest party by vote share is Reform, who, fortunately, have a leader more concerned with lining his own pockets than actually doing politics, and we capped off our summer with a cheeky bit of race rioting. Besides anything else, deluding yourself into thinking that the Israeli and/or Jewish mind is especially susceptible to a philosphy of hate is supremely arrogant...

... and he got banned. What a waste of time that was.

>>41824
On this subject, all I can add is that in a UK domestic context, I've had the odd experience of attending Labour antisemitism training where we were told that Zionism was fundamental to Jewish identity and that, while it's not antisemitic to criticise Israel in the abstract, pretty much any specific criticism is a bit dodgy.

Now I'd say the people running the event had a clear factional agenda , but it's interesting that's the position we wound up at. Personally I didn't care for foreign policy much until recently - I can ignore foreign attrocities but not the domestic press or our politicians incompetently talking around the bleeding obvious.

>>41828
>we were told that Zionism was fundamental to Jewish identity
It is really not. I think there's a mirroring of how batshit some Americans are due to them being descended from all the religious zealots who were too far gone to stay in Europe. Israel has a higher majority of religious zealots of its own. Opinions vary of course, the idea that any ethnic group has the same thoughts on anything universally as they're suggesting is just racist nonsense, but for the most part diaspora Jews became or stayed diaspora at least in part because they disagree with Zionism for one reason or another. Hundreds of thousands of not millions of people turning down all the incentives the Israeli government offers for them to go there even now.

>>41829

The majority of diaspora Jews are pro-Israel. Not wanting to move to the Middle East doesn't mean you're opposed to Zionism as a social or political project, it usually just means that you're happy with your life where you are. A very large proportion of diaspora Jews have personal connections to Israel and many of them sleep better at night knowing that aliyah is at least an option if the shit hits the fan.

>>41830

No mate, we're not.

>>41827

For Israel to exist in the first place it has to be fascist. It's Founding principles are that it is an Ethno state. If you tried making it a real democracy it would have been controlled by the preexisting Palestinian population.

You cannot apply the same principles that you do to counties that happened to be fascist for a while or dip in and out of nationalism. It has more in common with Rhodesia than Italy or Germany. If you remove the fascism the country would cease to exist.

I don't want to keep shilling Foreign Affairs on here but they do provide a pretty good look at the logic going on in Foggy Bottom when you read between the lines. The recent interview with Ari Shavit gave the Israeli left-wing opinion of the conflict, justifying collateral damage and accusing western commentators of naivety when we're well acquainted with civilians getting killed in our own operations.

He does make a good point that Gaza is the one place where Israel did revert to Palestinian authority, withdrew its forces and destroyed settlements only to then suffer a medieval pogrom on pacifist farming communities and a festival. It's hard to square the circle that Israel can as a frontier state not seek to now change the security calculus - by the looks of things bringing the area back under the watch of the Israeli military with a series of border walls to break up any chance of resistance. There's obviously the smarter option of actually toppling Hamas and Hezbollah to establish functional states at the border with input from the more secular Arab states but Bibi seems to have his hands tied even if he wanted to go that route.

It's a given though that the US foreign policy establishment still doesn't quite agree on the connection between policy on Iran, Russia, China and Palestine beyond there being a vague autocratic group that is opposed to western interests. This is probably the bigger point at the moment for the US where both sides of the House are virulently anti-China and you saw at the time the US broke its deadlock on support for Ukraine that it was the China connection with Russia and Iran that tipped the scales.

>>41820
At this point it's not necessary with the biggest bottleneck being physical infrastructure and the kinds of oil and gas you want. The US fracking and Canadian tar sands already periodically boom-and-bust with the oil price fluctuation for the reason you point you.

Plus the sheer level of Chinese overproduction on renewables can't be understated at this point. Then entirety of Asia is being reshaped.
https://www.noemamag.com/china-builds-a-new-eurasia/

>>41827
>Israeli fascism is somewhat unique in that because Israel serves US interest

This is an extremely simplistic take on the US-Israel relationship and your post then devolves into irrelevant grunting about the far-right as you run out of script and revert to left-rightism to understand the world.

The US and UK (both governments) have repeatedly tried to restrain Israel and the pressure is slowly ramping - the big story over the past year is actually how little influence the US has on Israel and how weak the Iranian-led 'axis of resistance' actually is to itself counter Israel, which is why Bibi has seen it possible to escalate things. Israel as a state is unique owing to its position that pushes a calculus in how it behaves that brings together left and right Israelis, when you've got genuinely evil people crossing a border to butcher civilians then the response from the society under attack will always be extreme. You had the same in the 00s with suicide attacks but to pretend there's not ebbs and flows is ridiculous and to make out like there's a simple solution like Biden only has to pick up the phone and say 'no' for Israel to morph into a new Lebanon (before it went wrong) is equally ridiculous.

>>41834
I'd dispute that Israel truly withdrew from Gaza - they might not have loaded the place with troops, but it was still effectively an impoverished Bantustan rather than a meaningfully independent and viable entity.
Anyway, at the risk of being glib: if the US is so desperate to control Israel, why have they not at least tried going "cut it out or no more F-35 parts or Iron Dome rearmament for you"?
Sure, Israel has a domestic arms industry, but it can't put together an F-35 and the full costs of domestically producing all the materiel they need would be pretty substantial.
The best argument I can think of is that the effects would be too damaging and might push them towards using their nuclear stash if Iran get an attack in during the production run-up.

I dunno though, what kind of evidence would satisfy the proof of a causal link between thousand year old desert tribe religio-bollocks and homicide? Because it seems to me that there really is a link, not just with judaism but islam and christianity, quite clearly. All those religions are responsible for unimaginable bloodshed.

If we were talking about the link between taking heroin and stabbing people for money to get a fix nobody would leap to the defence of smackheads to say "but but but they're not all like that, some smackheads are completely peaceful!", we are capable of understanding that the heroin nevertheless contributes to people stabbing each other. Which, I posit, is the same case with religion.

>>41835

>if the US is so desperate to control Israel, why have they not at least tried going "cut it out or no more F-35 parts or Iron Dome rearmament for you"?

Israel exports far more arms than it imports. Most of their exports are very high-tech stuff that's difficult to substitute - radar, night vision, electronic warfare etc. Israeli companies have tons of joint ventures with EU and US manufacturers, so you can't cut them off without buggering up a lot of complicated and important supply chains. If you google the phrase "Elbit UK contract", you'll start to see why NATO really doesn't want to lose Israel as a partner.

There's also the basic point that the US are much less pissed off at Israel than they claim to be in public. They don't like escalation, they don't like being associated with a very ugly conflict, but they're also quite pleased to see a lot of threats taken out.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/30/us-israel-military-hezbollah-00181797

>>41836
I'd say religion is mostly window dressing / a way of covering up the grubby materialism of the actual conflicts - like how you'll see pro-LGBT NATO messaging and anti-LGBT Russian messaging, but the war in Ukraine is about land and geopolitics rather than gay marriage. It's just better to give billions to defend liberalism or give your life to defend Christianity and the family than to accept what you're really fighting over is ownership of a sunflower field.

If you like, the religious and culture stuff is just a set of gang signs. You feel better taking a bullet for your gang than you do taking a bullet so that someone else will rake it in selling heroin. Certain turf has sentimental value and the signs change over time, but the heroin is the most powerful thing.

Not that anyone involved sees it that way - it's an evolutionary kind of process, not usually a cynical one.

>>41834
>This is an extremely simplistic take on the US-Israel relationship and your post then devolves into irrelevant grunting about the far-right as you run out of script and revert to left-rightism to understand the world.
Why don't you fucking kill yourself, you podcast ponce. I started my post off with "I don't have time to write a whole essay", so why were you expecting one? I was talking about fascism because some other slab-brain was making out like Israel is uniquely susceptible to winding up being governed by a bunch of hard-right cunts with a bone on for past glories. Oh, sorry, apparently we're not allowed to "grunt" about the right and left of politics, because Mr Underachiever here has been on YouTube this morning and had fuck all else to do today.

I never made any claim about "Biden just needing to pick up the phone", but again you appear to have extrapolated a much longer version of my post that I never wrote. This is why you've wound up rambling about the strategic level revalations we've had since the October 7th attacks, while I was making a brief point about how foolish it is to think that this last year proves Richard the Lionheart was on to something the whole time RE: the Jews, which was what the other twat I replied to today was making out. This has nothing to do with how stupid Hezbollah are for repeatedly deciding to have the lads round while Israeli intelligence are actively trying to blow them up, or how the Houthi's attacks on Israel are about as impactful as throwing paper areoplanes at a brick wall, so I didn't feel the need to mention any of it, you pompous cunt.

>>41835
I'd question how far you could go on that route. It's not like the Gaza Strip is big enough to not have a strong economic connection to Israel and the place ended up effectively embargoed after it was taken over by Hamas that was left to fester. Israeli civilians are seeing that they left an area to its own devices and it all went to pot in short order.

We also don't actually know what the US has done by way of leverage. Implicitly the subsidies should give the US some influence but then Biden has repeatedly been made to look a clown and the US has also had to create humanitarian piers.

>>41839
You're the one buying a belt m80.

>>41840
>You're the one buying a belt m80.
Yeah, so I have one for each colour of shoe I own. Stop being so morbid.

>>41841

... Were you or were you not the poster who told him to kill himself, though? Glass houses and that.

Anyway yeah I don't think ForeignAffairslad's takes are of much value considering all his information is coming from outlets and people that are pretty much explicitly sources of propaganda and have skin in the game.

>>41840
Israel didn't leave the area to its own devices, they continued to control it - of course they did, like you say the Gaza strip is not actually a viable independent economic unit, and it's one that Israel "left to its own devices" in such a non-viable state.
Only it didn't really do that, it kept policing from afar, which is why Gaza had an airport thrown up in 1998 and blown up in 2001 - years before Hamas took over. Gaza was never left alone in some state where it could've ignored Israel and "got on with it". It's hard to see that as being anything but intentional - Gaza as an "out of sight, out of mind" occupation with public order left to a vestigial and impoverished devolved Palestinian authority too occupied with running their 3rd world Scottish parliament to cause trouble for the rest of Israel, not a little Palestinian Monaco.

>>41838

That's a fair point; although in response to that I would say that it doesn't exactly let religion off the hook to say that religion isn't the direct material cause of the conflict, but is merely another way of propagandising and radicalising people to the cause.

I think in the case of Israel there are most definitely bad faith actors using the religious element as a cover and a shield, and even the charge of anti-semitism is pretty directly tied into that as a method of silencing critics. It couldn't be any more transparently hypocritical and self serving; those people in the Israeli government and lobbying groups responsible for it are most definitely cynical.

Otherlad was definitely wrong to start going off about the historical persecution of Jews as though they brought it on themselves, but at the core of it all I think there really has to be something said for this weird kind of jewish exceptionalism, for want of a better term. We have terms like "radical islamist" to refer to the baddie eskimos, the proper wahabists and all that, but we don't call these extremist jewish nationalists "radical jewists" or something.

>>41844
>but we don't call these extremist jewish nationalists "radical jewists" or something.
Zionists. We call them Zionists.

>>41845

That's not quite the same though is it, there are (supposedly, so I am told) benign, peaceful zionists who we wouldn't want to lump in the same pot, because that's already one of their standard textbook counter-plays against their detractors.

>>41845
So what would you call a moderate Jewish nationalist? I reckon you're going to say that they don't exist.

>>41845
Didn't France, some years years ago, legally equate anti-zionism with anti-semitism?

>>41847
How does one support what's happening in Gaza in a "moderate" way?

>>41849
You don’t have to support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to be a Zionist.

>>41850
Workshopping the next tour not going well eh Frankie?

>>41849
It's like being a Labour loyalist because you've got warm feelings towards the NHS, British Rail, and a gang of dead Keynesians: put today's crimes out of mind and think back to 1946-77 back when it all seemed so pure and optimistic. Ben Gurion and Meir would never have put up with this, and they were long enough ago we can imagine that all they did put up were nice little Kibbutzes. They never took anyone's land, or endorsed any acts of outright terrorism, did they? Not any that I can remember...

So condemn Netenyahu and feel morally secure backing the now irrelevant Israeli Labor party, never having to question if perhaps ol' Ben Gurion's project was always doomed to end up like this by merit of its starting position. No, no, he'd be shaking his head - if reality fails the ideal Israel, or the ideal Labour party, that's reality's problem. In my heart the project remains pure.

>>41852

Pretty apt metaphor considering how Labour could have been on a completely different path under Corbyn, and enjoyed considerable backing of party members and the voting public, but it was DA JOOZ what took him out and engineered a return to the neoliberal skinwalker norm. In that sense your analogy has backfired and made me less skeptical of the idea of moderate zionists.

Who's Israeli Corbyn then? Who's the leader to the good people of Israel, who don't want an endless war with every single country around them and genocide in Gaza but merely want to live their lives in peace and conduct their religious beliefs with no ill will to their arabic cousins and neighbours, but whom the zionist warmongers and media propagandists won't allow a sniff of power no matter how popular their support?

>>41853

There are plenty of moderate Jewish people who want peace. The Likud-led coalition are likely to lose the next election to a Yesh Atid led coalition; Yesh Atid are committed to peace negotiations with the Palestinians based on a two-state solution and the halting of settlements in the West Bank. That YA coalition would also include Hadash-Ta'al and Labor who are significantly to their left, and might plausibly include Ra'am, which is an Islamist party.

The problem is that there is no equivalent constituency in the Palestinian Territories. Of the 132 seats in the Legislative Council, only four are held by parties who support a peace process - Third Way and the Palestinian National Initiative. Hamas hold an absolute majority of 74 seats and they are committed to the total destruction of Israel. Fatah are the dominant minority party with 45 seats; while they are at least in theory open to the possibility of a two-state solution, they are notoriously corrupt, they have a long history of political violence against Israel, Lebanon and Jordan and they have consistently refused to implement the Oslo Accords.

According to polling by the most credible research organisation operating in the Palestinian Territories, a large majority of Palestinians think that the October 7th attacks were a good idea and believe that Hamas will ultimately defeat Israel through armed struggle. That's the political reality we have to deal with before any plausible peace process can begin - most Palestinians think that the current nightmare is a path to victory.

https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/980

>>41853
>Who's the leader to the good people of Israel, who don't want an endless war with every single country around them and genocide in Gaza but merely want to live their lives in peace and conduct their religious beliefs with no ill will to their arabic cousins and neighbours, but whom the zionist warmongers and media propagandists won't allow a sniff of power no matter how popular their support?
It's hard to say because Israeli political parties get founded and then dissolved quite quickly, it seems like the Likud party is pretty much the only one that doesn't represent some sort of political "tribe" (Arab-Israelis, the Russian diaspora, the Haredi community, etc) and has been around for more than a few elections, but left-leaning Israelis do exist. It's just that they're becoming increasingly just another "tribe" in Israeli politics, that is, city-dwellers. That's my understanding based some YouTube videos I watched a while ago though.
I can think of one notable Israeli that just wanted peace, but he's dead now. His name was Amos Oz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Oz

>>41854
The leader of Yesh Atid was finance minister in a coalition with Likud in 2013-14 and is generally supportive of the government's prosecution of the war in Gaza and Lebanon, they just don't like that Netanyahu is a crook.

How many liberal Israelis are comfortable with a two state solution in which Palestine get to have an army and an independent immigration policy? Everyone's got warm words for it in the abstract, but a real Palestinian state - not a protectorate or a Bantustan - is realistically never on the table. Palestinians backing Hamas is a bad look, but the last time an Israeli PM sat down in anything like good faith (Rabin, the "bone-crusher" who personally signed the order to expel the Arabs from Lydda, going for peace out of security concerns rather than bleeding heart liberalism) he was assassinated for his trouble. Itamar Ben Gvir, the current minister of national security, was threatening Rabin on TV shortly before he was assassinated. He also kept a portrait of mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein on his wall. It's obvious the Palestinians have been radicalised, but because the Israelis aren't scary Arabs we overlook that they've gone down the same route: Kach (a Kahanist party) was once banned and proscribed as a unabummer organisation - today the Kahanists are in the government. The liberals might win the next election, but that does little to avoid the fact that Israeli society has also been radicalised - and from a starting point where even the nice Labor Zionists of the 40s-70s were already doing things well beyond what would be acceptable in an ordinary country.

>>41856

If I were a Palestinian, I'd want a peace treaty under any reasonable terms, even if that meant making the kind of concessions that most countries have to make after suffering a substantial military defeat. I'm not a Palestinian though, and most Palestinians don't want a peace treaty under any terms. They want to win the war and believe that they can.

The Western narrative on the Israel-Palestine conflict tends to regard Palestinians as entirely passive and completely ignores their goals and aspirations. The people demanding a ceasefire haven't bothered to ask the Palestinians whether they actually want one.

We can - and should - criticise the behaviour of Israel, but they can't just unilaterally make peace happen. No normal country would glibly accept being continually attacked. In any normal war, the defeated side eventually recognises that they've lost and sues for peace in the hopes of avoiding unconditional surrender. If the Palestinians don't accept that they've lost the war, then the outcome is utterly predictable and looks very much like the last 75 years - the Palestinians continuing to lose an unwinnable war in increasingly painful ways.

>>41857q
I've yet to see Israel offer even unreasonable terms of the kind a war-loser usually gets nowadays: a rump Palestinian state capable of economic development? Unacceptable - they might get rich enough to start a war, and any land worth developing would be better held in Israeli hands. There's a reason Oslo collapsed. Conquer Palestine and make the Palestinians full citizenship, the kind of deal Ukraine might expect if it just gave up? A non-starter because Israel isn't for them, it would lose its character as a Jewish state and just become a normal country.

What are the Palestinians to do if they were to offer unconditional surrender? Accept third-rate residence without citizenship in an apartheid (and that is what it would be) Israel? Accept permanent poverty in a Bantustan pretending to be a two state solution where one state has less authority over its foreign policy than Holyrood? Emigrate and become the contemporary people without a homeland?

>>41858
A lot of more zealous Zionists say that a Palestinian state already exists, that state being Jordan, since it's 70% Palestinian. What they fail to mention though is that it's only 70% Palestinian because so many of them were forced out of their homes over the last 80 years.

I think the only solution really is the destruction of both states and their governments.

The international community would have to come in and say look, both of you sit down and shut the fuck up. This country is neither the homeland of jews nor palestinians, but both; you will have to share, like every fucker else on Earth. Here's a new government, here's your new republic constitution that says explicitly you're not allowed to have pro-jewish, pro-palestinian, or discriminatory policy either way. Now get on with it.

Zionists wouldn't be happy but if they are indeed moderates who want peace, they should be able to accept a country that still fulfils the role of a safe home for the jewish diaspora (not that most of them even give a shit because why return to the desert tribe shithole when you have a comfortable life in America, for instance) but doesn't have the supremacist, nationalist, fascist overtones of the current one.

It's reasonable to point out that the Palestinians are unwilling to accept peace and they're in favour of continuing the war etc etc, but equally you have to acknowledge that in the context that Israel is, absolutely and unequivocally, the occupier and aggressor there. Maybe they are fighting a war that they've no chance of winning and it's stupid, but so are the Ukranians. We're not expecting them to surrender to Russia and for the same reason I wouldn't expect Palestinians to either; but ultimately peace has to come about one way or another.

>>41859

The Emirate of Transjordan was established as a British protectorate out of land that was originally part of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.

>>41860

Mandatory Palestine was supposed to be just that, but then the British left and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war immediately broke out. A majority Arab state that is also a safe home for the Jews is practically an oxymoron.

>>41863

There needs to be some kind of failsafe. We set up two states with two governments, but each of the presidents has to wear a buttplug with a live hand grenade in it, and his counterpart on the other side has the remote to detonate it. That'll keep em honest won't it.

Israel has launched air strikes against Iran now.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgr0yvrx4qpo

And I'm glad that the BBC news website has taken the two contradictory positions of our government and very helpfully combined them into one handy sentence:
>UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Israel had the right to defend itself, but urged all sides to “show restraint” and called for Iran not to respond.

On a pure PR level I wish they'd shut the fuck up about Israel's right to defend itself when it comes to actions that are defensive only if you love tedious sophistry and which invite the question: does anyone else have that right?
I'd prefer western institutions and leaders giving an open endorsement to everything Israel has done over these constant rote-memorised insults to our intelligence.

>>41867
>>41868
>does anyone else have that right?

It's borderline consent for both parties. Iran/proxies send rockets to Israel but notify the US ahead of time and do the 'we're very, very cross' flag business. Israel responds with a 'oh that falling debris might've hurt an Israeli!' and tell the world that they're going to strike back well in advance. The escalation with the last Iranian missile barrage was they gave less time.

It's the international relations equivalent of two lads pushing each other but neither side really wants to throw a punch because they don't want to get barred. Iran always has to back down first because they're not as 'ard and Israel has a cop friend.

>>41868

>does anyone else have that right?

Yes. It's there in black-and-white in Article 51 of the UN Charter. If you attack another country, you have absolutely no recourse under international law if that country decides to strike back. If you don't cease hostilities and sue for peace, that country has a lawful right to continue fighting until you surrender.

Ukraine has the legal right to invade Russia or attack any legitimate military target on Russian soil, unless and until a peace treaty is signed or the Security Council intervene. DRC has that right against Rwanda. Syria has that right against Turkey. Armenia has that right against Azerbaijan.

>>41870
No that's not right. It has to be 'proportionate' to the right to self-defence but nobody has defined what that level is or how it works in practice so it's an international opinion affair where Israel tends to favour a disproportionate response and we have the Nicaragua Case try to establish rough criteria via the ICJ.

>>41870
International law is so passé, it's all about the rules based international order these days.

>>41870
>Yes. It's there in black-and-white in Article 51 of the UN Charter. If you attack another country, you have absolutely no recourse under international law if that country decides to strike back. If you don't cease hostilities and sue for peace, that country has a lawful right to continue fighting until you surrender.

I don't see the part in Article 51 that says any of this. It says states have the right to self-defence. Retaliation is not, in and of itself, self-defence.

>>41873

Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel. In a senseless act of retaliation, Israel blew up the factories where Iran makes ballistic missiles.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/israeli-retaliatory-strikes-iran

Israel apparently eyeing up strikes near some ancient Roman sites in Lebanon, which I presume is in retribution for the Pope not giving back the menorah from the temple in Jerusalem.

>Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) have issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and former defence minister, as well as the military commander of Hamas.

>A statement said a pre-trial chamber had rejected Israel’s challenges to the court’s jurisdiction and issued warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly2exvx944o

I don't think it's even remotely anti-semitic at this point when I say Netanyahu's response can be summarised as "oy vey muh holocaust" because that's pretty much exactly what it actually was.

>>41903

This man is going to be the next Prime Minister of Israel and it's going to be fucking awesome.

>>41905
Young Benjamin Netanyahu looked like that too. I saw a documentary about him. Did you know his brother did the legendary Raid on Entebbe?

Here he is. One young Bibi, for your pleasure. Mossad commando brother not pictured.

>>41913

He could mount a daring raid behind my lines, IYKWIM.

>>41913
Hopefully he get's arrested and tried for war crimes.

>>41928
There's more chance of you getting arrested for crimes against grammar.

>>41929
Poor grammar is an antisemitic trope - lock him up!

>>41740

Any of you lads fancy a Gaza Cola?
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/11/23/genocide-free-cola-makes-a-splash-in-the-united-kingdom

>>41932

Grifters gonna grift, I suppose.

>>41933
What does that mean? What does that even mean, in this context? Are you just saying words you think sound clever?

>>41932
That article is a truly mad read. It feels satirical, like The Onion but more po-faced and earnest.

>>41933
He's also donating all profits from the drink to pay for the rebuilding of a hospital in Gaza, so while he does initially feel like a grifter, I don't think he actually is. Although he could be, of course.

>>41934

Aside from the sheer inanity of accusing a fizzy drinks company of genocide, international donors have already pledged enough money to rebuild the healthcare system in Gaza several times over. Gaza is absolutely glutted with money via UNRWA and the PA and directly from the Qataris and the Egyptians. Gaza has been the largest per-capita recipient of international aid for over a decade.

>>41935
If you don't know the leadership salaries you're unable to evaluate how earnest a supposedly non-profit venture is.

>>41936
>Aside from the sheer inanity of accusing a fizzy drinks company of genocide

That's not what it says.

>international donors have already pledged enough money to rebuild the healthcare system in Gaza several times over.

Absolutely fine to bomb it to back the stone age and massacre civilians then I guess.

>Gaza is absolutely glutted with money via UNRWA and the PA and directly from the Qataris and the Egyptians. Gaza has been the largest per-capita recipient of international aid for over a decade.

I'm sure they're all living it up at the moment.

Summat's going on with Syria.

(We may as well have this be "Middle East Forever War General Mk 1 right?)

>>41946

Summat's always going on in Syria. 600,000 dead, 13 million refugees.

>>41946
Syria seems to be the #1 newsworthy place on the planet right now. Rebels have captured Homs, they are heading towards Damascus, Bashar al-Assad is missing, and nobody has any expectation that his regime will last more than a couple of days. I didn't follow the Syria stuff the last time it was a big news story, so I'm not sure how to rate the dozens of factions on the goodie/baddie scale, but I know the Russians were backing Assad so it's good that he's going, and ISIS have gone now so hopefully these current rebels are more "Arab Spring" rebels than "Iran 1979" rebels.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/dec/07/syria-rebels-reach-damascus-bashar-al-assad?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-6755588d8f0896ed0c2373a7#block-6755588d8f0896ed0c2373a7
>The military command of the opposition forces has issued a statement, with strict instructions sent out to all opposition forces.
>It is strictly forbidden to fire bullets into the air under any circumstances, as it causes panic among civilians and endangers the lives of the innocent.

Genuinely never seen anything like this before.

>>41981
Most news reporting seems to be cautiously optimistic about the moderate, secular eskimo regime (which did some bad shit too) being overthrown by these rebel forces who used to be al-Qaeda-tier but now claim to be big fans of democracy. Hopefully everything in Syria will all turn out great, but if it does, I will be astounded.

>>41981
>It is strictly forbidden to fire bullets into the air under any circumstances, as it causes panic among civilians and endangers the lives of the innocent.

Well that's gone well. Yet again it's one rule for militants and another rule for us thanks to Two-Tier Kier:

>>41982
What I find strange is that Abu Mohammad al-Jolani seems to have a good track record in technocratic rule in Idlib, trying to work with the west (against ISIS) and speaks constantly about institutions having so far recognised the importance of symbols of orderly transition. HTS has even been trying to assure Israel - although the Israeli air force is currently hammering the south of the country anyway.

Maybe we all need to start drafting those apology letters to Francis Fukuyama.

What do I do with all the memes from this war? It had a big influence on shitposting in the 10s - do I archive them for future generations?

Israel is now advancing into southern Syria to create a buffer zone for the buffer zone. They're certainly busy these days.

WWIII is cancelled. al-Jolani owes Netanyahu a falafel. If Trump doesn't bottle it, the entire Axis of Resistance could be done for by next Christmas.

Do you reckon we're going to do that thing again where we say 'never again' once we find out more about what Assad's regime was doing all this time?

>>41986

The "international community" for the last 14 years:

There will be no "never again" until we admit that the rules-based international order is just an excuse for inaction.

>>41986
Every dictatorship has horror stories. The Shah of Iran got up to all sorts of similar shit, and we were actively encouraging that because the alternatives were not advantageous to our economic outlook. I'm not willing to say we should therefore ignore these horror stories when they come out, but you can pretty much find whatever atrocities you want in any regime like this. The new guys, currently the good guys, could well be doing things right now that will make us all say "never again" in five years, and they've only been in power for one day.

>>41986
>>41987
Yeah, we should have sent a coalition of the willing in to sort everything out because that was a definite success just waiting for someone with the balls to pull it off. Clearly it's nought but ambivalence that allowed Assad to brutalise the Syrian people and live like a French king in the process.

I'm sure we could have just bombed around the Russian forces stationed in the country too. They would have understood, and Putin himself would have realised he was never really that arsed about having access to a military port on the Mediterranean Sea. A NATO Battlegroup or three could have simply strolled into Aleppo, taken Assad to Den Haag in chains, and congratulated themselves on a job well done as Syria sprung anew. All those deeply anti-western militias across the border in Iraq, whose whole raison d'etre is KILL AMERIKKKA, would have sent flowers and a card to SHAPE as well. CENTCOM could have sent a delegation of Jarheads into Lebanon too, get that lot shipshape while we're at it.

"True Neo-Conservatism has never been tried!"

Obviously I'm being very sarcastic. But what are you saying? The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a network of torture dungeons is a good guy with eleven aircraft carriers? I think you're underestimating how much the average Arab loathes the United States, or at the very least loathes having half their neighbourhood blown up because someone was preparing a mortar pit down the street. Trying to liberate Syria from Assad with a US helmed invasion force would be like trying to liberate 1950s Poland with an army from West Germany, politically speaking.

>Britain’s Syrian refugees vow to return home after fall of regime
https://www.I need to find an archive link for this.co.uk/world-news/2024/12/08/syrian-refugees-return-to-homeland-after-fall-assad/

A Syrian family runs the Kebab shop near me. This is a disaster for my late night pub sessions after work.

>>41990
^rape enabler.

>>41991
>^rape enabler.
I never even mentioned Israel!

https://rewardsforjustice.net/rewards/muhammad-al-jawlani/

Lads I'm gonna be rich.

>>41995
I thought he was changing his name back to his birth name, to appear more moderate again? You’ll send the CIA to find Mohammed Al-Jawlani and they will only find Ahmed al-Sharah or whatever he’s really called. And then you’ll get nothing.

Why does the news keep calling them “Gazans” now? As far as I have always known, the residents of Gaza were Palestinians. To call them Gazans, people from the Gaza area rather than the country of Palestine, feels to me like a calculated move to perhaps stop saying Palestine is a country (which it arguably isn’t, but the world has been moving towards saying it is in recent years). It’s the same as “the Ukraine”. And as society teaches us all to be more sceptical of our news reporting, I can’t help but speculate why the media is deliberately manipulating us into downplaying the national autonomy of the Palestinian people. Is that mental?

>>42074

You notice it every so often that the media just suddenly at some point changes something and carries on like it's always been that way, and that very much is part of how they manipulate The Narrative, manufacture consent, all that. Once you've spotted it once or twice, it becomes hard not to notice in future when Eurasia is suddenly Eastasia.

Why, we can only speculate, but the short answer is yes.

>>42074
>Is that mental?
It's a rational response to the 'firehose of shit' thing atomising the narrative.

Funny thing, that. Obviously when we had a [more] unified narrative, that just meant we were all believing one particular propaganda feed. Nationalism, the monarchy, whatever. The 'firehose of shit', for all the problems it's causing, is probably more honest in its way - a multitude of perspectives and interpretations of reality. The author is dead and so is the propagandist. Very post-modern.

>>42074

Gaza and the West Bank are separate territories with different governments. The Palestinian Authority is the universally recognised government of the Palestinian Territories, but it has absolutely no presence in or control over Gaza. In principle the Palestinians want to be a state, but in practice they would still be two separate countries even if Israel declared tomorrow that they had full statehood.

I couldn't really say without seeing specific examples, but often the distinction matters and it would be needlessly confusing to refer to Gazans as Palestinians.

>>42074
I understand why you'd feel like it's the normalisation of something sinister, but I think that's just because what's happened to them is so sinister and the global reaction to it so blasé, that it feels like anything that isn't expressing the total horror of the situation is anti-Palestinian. Having said that, it's not really any different to referring to Londoners being effecting by all the trains on the Tube getting their doors glued shut overnight by mischievous gremlins, rather than Britons or the English being effected.

I don't mean to be judgemental, but I don't make much of these Israelis they have now.

>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/06/israeli-military-admits-initial-account-of-palestinian-medics-killing-was-mistaken
>Israel’s military has backtracked on its account of the killing of 15 Palestinian medics in Gaza last month after footage contradicted its claims
>The military said initially it opened fire because the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” on nearby troops without headlights or emergency signals.
>The almost seven-minute video... shows a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.
>investigators were looking at “operational information” and were trying to understand whether this was due to an error by the person making the initial report
>Israeli media briefed by the military have reported that troops had identified at least six of the 15 dead as members of militant groups and killed a Hamas figure named Mohammed Amin Shobaki.
>None of the 15 killed has that name and no other bodies are known to have been found at the site. The official declined to provide any evidence or detail of how the identifications were made

You know how it is, when you see a load of lights and you mistake them for darkness. I mean, I don't personally, and neither does any living organism with sight organs at least as developed as those of a house spider, but on a kind of metaphysical level, you know how it is.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajBouTY-45c

>>42293
>after footage contradicted its claims
The BBC keeps using this phrasing as well. "A video has been released that contradicts the Israeli explanation of events." "Some new video evidence is casting doubt on the official Israeli account of what happened." "With this new footage, there are now conflicting reports of what happened."

I guess there are always two equally valid sides to every story, and it's entirely up to the viewer to decide what actually happened. It certainly isn't the job of journalists to take a side, especially when it's six of one and half a dozen of the other like it is here. The IDF shot a bunch of paramedics and then not only buried them but also buried the ambulance they were driving, but on the other hand, it's good to stop unabummers, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>>42293

Never forget that the "problem with anti-semitism in the Labour party" amounted to opposing shit like this. You know, like a human being with a fucking conscience.

>>42295
Funny you should mention the antisemitism thing, on the day that this also happened:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9133z2v30o
>Two Labour MPs say they are "astounded" to have been denied entry to Israel while on a trip to visit the occupied West Bank.
>Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang said it was "vital" parliamentarians were able to witness the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory first-hand.
>They were refused entry because they intended to "spread hate speech" against Israel, the nation's population and immigration authority said.
>Foreign Secretary David Lammy criticised Israeli authorities, describing the move as "unacceptable, counterproductive, and deeply concerning".

But luckily, the Conservatives are standing up for Israeli self-determination:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czjn3071yv3o
>Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has been criticised by senior politicians across the political spectrum after she backed Israel's decision to deny two UK Labour MPs entry to the country.
>Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang said they were on a trip to visit the occupied West Bank to "witness, first-hand, the situation" and were "astounded" after being stopped at the airport.
>Badenoch told the BBC that Israel had a right to "control its borders", adding it was "very significant" there were Labour MPs other countries did not want to let in.

>"Countries should be able to control their borders," she said. "What I think is shocking is that we have MPs in Labour who other countries will not allow through, I think that's very significant."
>She continued: "I believe that the people who represent us in Parliament should be people who should be able to go anywhere in the world and people not be worried about what they're going to do when they go into those countries."
>Badenoch said the reason given by the Israelis was that "they don't believe that they're going to comply with their laws" and "there are many people that we don't allow into our country and I don't think we should be setting precedents in a different way".

God, politics is so weird now.

>>42296
>>She continued: "I believe that the people who represent us in Parliament should be people who should be able to go anywhere in the world and people not be worried about what they're going to do when they go into those countries."
Can we crowdfund her a trip to North Korea or something?

>>42297
I'm in for 75p and a packet of Rolos. It's been a rough time lately.

>>42295
>Never forget that the "problem with anti-semitism in the Labour party" amounted to opposing shit like this.

Are you sure? Because I have at least a vague recollection that the "problem with anti-semitism in the Labour party" was, you know, actual anti-semitism. Praising of unabummers, endorsing anti-semitic tropes, accusing Jewish members of the party of divided loyalties, etc.

>>42299

Shut the fuck up scum.

>>42300
He might be annoying. However, that's no excuse for shoddy grammar.

>>42299
You'd think, but the reason you can tell that's was never the real problem is because it totally dropped off the radar once the Labour leader was replaced with someone more agreeable.
The Telegraph chanced running this nonsense a year ago https://www.I need to find an archive link for this.co.uk/news/2024/08/04/israel-antisemitism-palestine-starmer-labour-hamas/ but none of the other major papers joined in, and even the Telegraph didn't think it was worth developing on the story that the leader who'd supposedly driven out the antisemites was himself being accused of stoking antisemitism. Assuming everyone was acting in good faith, I would infer from such an accusation that the institutional problem has not gone away, that this merits similar levels of coverage to before, perhaps more coverage over "why did his high-profile attempt to tackle the issue fail? Why has he become the thing he set out to tackle?"
Yet strangely enough...

Admittedly "It's antisemitic to withdraw your objections to the ICC case against Israel, to fund the UNWRA, and to minutely cut arms sales to Israel" is too stupid even for The Guardian to join in with. (And, somehow, not itself antisemitic for conflating Israel and Jewish people, or dangerously minimising of antisemitism...)

It's fascinating watching everyone scramble to cover their arses so Wikipedia will say they were always against all this, isn't it?
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cq8037dd3p9t
It's an affront to the values of the British people what Israel's up to, if only we'd known earlier when we were saying Israel does have the right to do this, if only someone had told us what they were doing with the RAF spyplane flight data and F-35 jet parts we sent them. Well, no more, until they cut it out we're going to impose harsh measures: pausing trade talks until they finish the job.

>>42467

I mean let's be real that's the only way it's really going to go isn't it.

It's horrible and it's a perverse irony of history and if we lived in a sane world nobody would have stood for it from the start, but I am fairly sure in 50 years time there will be no Gaza, and there will no longer be a people called Palestinians. Israel will join the rest of the West in having a horrible blood soaked origin story for liberal politicians to feel performatively guilty about and conservative politicians to whitewash and downplay.

Sometimes it does just feel like they really ought to just rip the plaster off and get it over with, because it's just even more cruel to prolong it and pretend it is anything other than it really is. I think more than the abject cruelty of what they are doing in the first place, that's the part that I find really viscerally disgusting about it. The dishonesty and seemingly intentional drawn out cruelty of the whole affair.

It is at least interesting that the tide appears to be turning, mind. Never thought I would live to see that.

Which flag will Iran fly this time?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c93ydeqyq71t

>>42486

I dunno, but I reckon it'll be charred around the edges and mildly radioactive.

What TeaCon are we at?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg72ny4xeyo

How the fuck are we all not just sick of Israel's shit now? How long do they have to get away with it before the anti-semitic tropes start looking all too obvious to deny? The brass fuckin' neck of those cunts.

The Caliphate Strikes Back


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGcVu2noaUU

It's an interesting world where you can get a heads up on events based on Dominoes orders in the US.
https://x.com/PenPizzaReport/status/1933591903997440412

You might be able to set up a trading bot off it.

>>42489
Until "we" includes the USA, who certainly won't ever be "sick of Israel's shit" under the current admin, it doesn't matter. Israel is the perfect proxy for America's most brutal forms of foreign policy. Additionally, now they're governed and supported by a combination of people who 1) think non-white people aren't human and 2) think Israel will be the site of an end times prophecy. And 3), which isn't solely an American issue, there's a lot of money to be made exporting arms and equipment to Israel. Our government can't even stand up to the junk food lobby, so you can imagine how it treats the likes of BAE Systems.

Touching upon point uno again, a considerable amount of New Labour-era MPs still don't see anything wrong with the UK's hand in inflicting hundreds of thousands of deaths on Iraq. As such, a pitch black hearted devil like Trump is hardly going to be swayed by a bit of colateral damage, is he? Geopolitical interests aside, we don't need to try very hard to see how much of a factor racism is in what a free hand Israel is given. Ukraine is right there, tooled up with loads of NATO kit. Then again, even they're considered too oriental in character to have avoided the indignity of being drip-fed military aid a deeply paternalistic and patronsing manner. What I'm saying is a lot of people have a much more 19th century attitude to foreigners and race than we realise. Sorry, Palestine, try being west of the Vistula next time.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that more have been killed for less. It's just this time it's a national ally (apparently), we can see how cynical the whole thing is (Netanyahu will be invading Tajikistan at the age of 80 to avoid the slammer at this rate), and, of course, the whole thing is documented in HD video so the overkill is plain as day. The final difference is that we don't have reams of media hacks telling us how great the Burmese Junta are, or what a swell job Taliban are doing now they're back in charge of Afghanistan. Give it time...

>>42489

Netanyahu and his far-right pals are arseholes, but nobody is particularly pissed off about Iran's nuclear programme going up in smoke, including the Arab countries. There's a reason why Jordan is perfectly happy to share radar data with Israel and let them use their airspace.

The same could be said of Israel's operations in Lebanon, which was fundamentally part of a proxy conflict with Iran. The Lebanese army is regaining control of the south from Hezbollah and their society is considerably more stable than before the war. The average Lebanese eskimo might be disgusted at Israel's conduct in Gaza, but most have a (very) begrudging gratitude for what they did to Hezbollah. The collapse of the Assad regime is inextricably linked with Iran being weakened by Israel and everyone knows it.

Israel is a giant pain in the arse geopolitically, but that doesn't mean that anyone necessarily wants to stop them. Most Arab governments have spent a lot of blood and treasure on dealing with Iran's proxies across the region. Non-alcoholic champagne corks will be popping across the Middle East if Netanyahu brings down the regime in Tehran, or (more likely) cripples their ability to project power in the region.

>>42492

> and 2) think Israel will be the site of an end times prophecy.

It may sound incredibly daft to us here in enlightened Britain and Europe, but a not insignificant number of Christian Right politicians and supporters actually take the Bible literally to the point that they indeed want to actively bring about the End Times just to fulfill the Bible's prophecies.

How exactly they rationalise following the teachings of a Middle Eastern, brown skinned migrant who was fending for the poor, weak, sick and marginalised and was a champion of tolerance and compassion, they are never able to tell you convincingly. Which makes American-style Evangelicals by far the most unpleasant and pernicious strain of the entire faith. A set of denominations that was borne out of American isolationism, anti-elitism, bigotry, ruthless materialism and capitalism, and a culture of hopelessly clueless lay preaching. Just an amalgam of the absolute worst things the country had to offer. If the actual historic Jesus of Nazareth were to come back, he would be having an absolute field day. Because the American Christian Right are literally almost everything he was preaching against.


Self sage for rambling.

>>42492
>Until "we" includes the USA, who certainly won't ever be "sick of Israel's shit" under the current admin, it doesn't matter.

This is starting to be overplayed. Netanyahu and Trump have diverged significantly lately and Israel needs the US to get involved because it doesn't have the capability alone to knock out Iran's nuclear programme - it's no coincidence that Israel just killed Iran's chief negotiator just before he was to meet again with the US. The Republicans are themselves divided on the issue even if for the minute its mostly the establishment vs normies:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/us/politics/trump-republicans-iran-israel.html

The truth is probably more terrifying - nobody feels restrained by the international community anymore so we're going to get more and more instability while Article 2(4) of the UN Charter loses all meaning. We've only just had India-laplanderstan flare up again and I don't see the world getting any more stable. The US has done everything possible to shoot itself in the foot and it now shows because a steady drip of crises is sapping the ability of the international system to respond effectively which then leads to more crises.

Are they still at it, or was it just another handbags ladies situation?

>>42497

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c93ydeqyq71t

>Iran warns it will target UK

This got me a bit unsettled, but it turns out it was just the first part of a not stellarly crafted headline.

>Iran warns it will target UK, US and French bases in region if they help defend Israel

Then again, targeting our bases would probably make us party to a heating war in the Mideast which could easily spread and get much worse.

Do press/politicians really not care about what it does to their credibility to talk about Israel like it's anything other than a feral rule breaker?

Look, I get it, they're our ally and attack dog. Whatever. I can take the wars and the war crimes, but I can't take the PR. It'd be less jarring to see North Korea covered like it's just another normal country that we've got to stand with.

>>42499
Where are you seeing pro-Israel sentiment currently? Everyone's giving them the kid-glove treatment because of the widespread establishment hate-boner for Iran, but I don't think I have seen anyone report that Israel is bravely defending itself against a cruel bully by assassinating its scientists and actively trying to start World War 3.

The only good news I am taking from this is that all those weapons we sell to Israel are clearly fantastically effective, so if Russia tries anything against NATO, we can presumably push their shit in with approximately zero effort.

>>42500
>Where are you seeing pro-Israel sentiment currently? Everyone's giving them the kid-glove treatment

Why bother asking the question if you're just going to answer it in the very first clause of the very next sentence?

>>42501
My argument is that very careful criticism is still criticism. Nobody is actually supporting this warmongering lunacy.

>>42502
Carefully criticising lunatics makes it look like you think they're normal and just making a few questionable moves, damaging your credibility.
Especially when it follows months of pretending the lunatics are the good guys in a morally clear civilisation v terrorism battle, despite a permanent war crimes livestream from their own troops and genocidal statements from their own leaders shown to you courtesy of "translate this tweet". In that light, it looks like token arse covering.

>>42503
Yeah; I have definitely lost this argument. I just watched the BBC News, and while I still believe that they were focusing on the Israeli victims of Iran's retaliatory attacks because that's the best way to be impartial if they sided with Iran last night, I didn't watch any news last night and I would have preferred to see it framed as "Iran is defending itself" anyway. Because they are doing. If they really started wiping Israel off the planet like Israel is doing to the Palestinians, my support would shift, but this "look at these poor innocent Israelis who got killed" does not sit well with me at all.

>Pro-Palestine activists have broken into an RAF air base and damaged two of the air force's military aircrafts, the group said.

>The Palestine Action group (PA) said that flights leave daily from Brize Norton to Cyprus, which is "used for military operations in Gaza and across the Middle East".

>Using electric scooters, the activists rode up to the planes and used "repurposed fire extinguishers to spray red paint into the turbine engines of two Airbus Voyagers". They also used crowbars to cause further damage, they said. They chose to use red paint to symbolise "Palestinian bloodshed". In addition to spraying it in the plane, they sprayed it on the runway.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/breaking-raf-brize-norton-military-35423440

Surely it shouldn't be possible to enter an RAF airbase, damage aircraft and escape undetected?

>>42532

They're now going to be labelled a proscribed (i.e., unabummer) organisation because of it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn81g4e0nlyo

>>42533
They hate our freedoms, you see.

>>42532
There's a reason the RAF regiment is bullied mercilessly.

It's incredibly hard to defend an airbase from trespassers as it's a huge perimeter and since the 90s we both gave up on funding security and started bunching all our air assets together. At least we know drone-lad hasn't defected to the Russians

I'd suggest this is a better thread for discussing The Inevitable Annihilation of Iran™ than the regular Trump thread. So, my question is as follows: if America and Israel wipe out a sovereign Middle-Eastern nation's regime, but all the other countries in the Middle East hated that regime, what side do we expect Saudi Arabia, laplanderstan, Iraq, Oman, Bahrain, etc, to come down on? Will Islamic solidarity override any Inupiat/Shia disagreements?

>>42536
Aside from Qatar, Armenia and Russia I think the region would love to watch a collapse from the side-lines and we'll see a repeat of Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Syria where the multitude of ethnic groups making up Iran implode into warlords that can be used to advance foreign interests and extract resources. The problem in that scenario for the West is that we're going to lose the leverage the threat of Iran offered and we'll soon find ourselves having to deal with ISIS, Iran's neighbours engaging in irredentism, crippling oil and gas prices along with a wave of migration that is going to make Syria and Sudan look like campervan season.

>Will Islamic solidarity override any Inupiat/Shia disagreements?

This didn't even work during the Crusades.

>>42536

I don't think it will wipe them out, it'll just be another Afghanistan situation where being bombed by Israel and the Americans without provocation makes them hate Israel and the Americans even more, so the mental turbo-muzzer regime they already have gives way to another even more fundamentalist regime that's actually committed to the destruction of Israel, and not just in their propaganda.

There was a bit on Radio 4 Any Questions yesterday where one of the guys started off saying "theocratic fanatical regime whose minds we can't read" and I wish Ash Sarkar had been quick enough to interrupt with "... and then there's Iran!" Fucking desert tribe religio nutters the lot of them. The USA's version of Christianity is an apocalyptic death cult. The zionist jews are ethno-supremacist tyrants. The jihadi lot almost look like the reasonable ones.

Can we go back to the mid-00s edgy atheism? I am sick and tired of the apologism for religio nuttery these days. It's bad and we should say it's bad. If I could time travel, I would assassinate Emperor Constantine before he turned the Roman Empire christian, and hope that had enough of a ripple effect to stop this kind of bullshit.

My hedge with American defence stocks could pay off. I bought a good handful of those stocks a few days ago. Although you never know what the trading algorithms will make of it, they should see gains early in the week.

The PR for this is all over the place. Every western leader using the same ChatGPT script to endorse US Strikes on Iran and demand Iran return to a negotiating table it was already at, our good patriotic Farage explaining that Iran poses an existential threat to Israel as though this being our problem is self evident, finally followed by a string of articles explaining that stupid old Trump has fallen into Netanyahu's trap by joining a war that nobody wants.

Say what you will about the lies and manipulations leading up to the Iraq disaster, at least they had some message discipline and usually assumed we had longer memories than goldfish. The token opposition by the French was also reassuring. I can handle the war, I can handle being lied to, but my god, hire a fucking editor. I can't handle this shambles.

>>42538
>Can we go back to the mid-00s edgy atheism?
I feel like this is coming back some what. How many times can you hear Netanyahu bring up the Old Testament to justify carpet bombing, or Pete Hegseth thanking God for bombing strikes his president just ordered, before you realise these people are nuts or liars.

>>42540
Europe (and our lot) are especially pathetic to behold at this time. Everyone loves selling arms to Israel, no one wants to upset Trump, and all of them know the Gaza-Iran situation is completely unjust and totally shortsighted. These people aren't so stupid as to realise Iran can't negotiate while Israel is blowing it up with no regard for any negotiations, but they have to make themselves sound stupid because they're cowards in every way.

>>42538

Iran has an urbanised, highly educated and surprisingly westernised population, most of whom are desperate to see the back of the regime. Prior to the nuclear-related sanctions it was a relatively wealthy country and they still have a highly diversified economy. They manufacture more cars than Britain or France. It's profoundly unlike Afganistan and markedly different to Iraq.

I don't want to downplay the risks if the regime collapses, but I also don't want to downplay the opportunities. Iran has a lot of very able people who are desperate to rebuild their society. The country isn't a complete basket case, it's just being held hostage by nutters.

>>42542
The problem is that nutters tend to be very highly motivated. It's on account of their nuttiness, you see.

I personally think talk of regime collapse is bewilderingly premature. If it collapses tomorrow I'm sorry Because even before we get to the nutters, the Iranian government has hundreds-of-thousands of military, paramilitary and security personel at it's disposal. The IRGC are obviously ideologically wedded to the regime, but even if some of these forces could take or leave the Islamic Republic aspect of the country (although I have no reason to think that they do), they're reliant on the government for their whole livelihood and status. That alone gives them a tremendous motive to fight any movement that might take it away.

It's this colossal mass of state sanctioned violence that induced such outrage in me when Netanyahu flippently told the Iranians to "rise up", as if it were some minor thing to rebel against a government that killed hundreds during the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests a couple of years ago.

>>42543

The same was true in Syria, right until it wasn't.

The fundamental strength of the Taliban is that it's highly decentralised, operating essentially as an ideology superimposed upon centuries-old tribal loyalties and local power structures. It's practically impossible to overthrow, because there isn't much of a hierarchy or a chain of command.

Like the Assad regime, Iran is a very top-heavy autocracy. It's a system of minority rule that is highly resistant to internal power struggles and coup attempts, but that rigidity of control also makes the system brittle. By design, IRCG commanders don't have the autonomy to function outside of the structure of the regime. If some day they stop getting orders and paycheques, they'd be highly inclined to go the same way as the Assad loyalists - burning their uniforms and melting away into the civilian population in an effort to evade accountability and retribution.

I don't think this outcome is necessarily likely, but it's more plausible now than at any point since the revolution. Israel now have a battle-tested strategy for eroding the foundations of autocracies; they're currently being restrained by the US, but it isn't hard to imagine a scenario in which Trump runs out of patience and gives Bibi the green light to assassinate the Supreme Leader and unleash hell on the IRCG. If that comes to pass, then I think the regime has a realistic life expectancy of no more than two weeks. The big unknown is what replaces it.

>>42544
>The same was true in Syria, right until it wasn't.
Right, but before that there were millions of displaced persons and hundreds-of-thousands dead. The civil war there started before I took my GCSEs, and ended weeks before I turned thirty, insomuch as it has ended at all.

The Assad government fell because the Hezbollah soldiers who had been holding it together were recalled to Lebanon. This isn't a "battle-tested strategy foe eroding the foundations of autocracies", it's a fluke. The situation you describe, of Israel doing shock and awe against the government of Iran bears no similarity to what happened in Syria. The Syrians were not also being patriotically galvanised by the assault of a foreign military. When Israel and the US "unleash hell", it tends to involve a lot of dead civiliansand razed public buildings. Women and being children being crushed to death beneath a tower bloc because an IRGC major lived there isn't going to help the opposition, such that there is one, very much.

>they'd be highly inclined to go the same way as the Assad loyalists - burning their uniforms and melting away into the civilian population
You have no idea if that's true. Without wanting to turn this into a cunt-off, I don't give much credence to any of your opinions regards the internal workings of Iran. As far as I can tell, even with your occasional bet-hedging, you seem wildly optimistic about how easy all of this would be.

>>42544

>Israel now have a battle-tested strategy for eroding the foundations of autocracies; they're currently being restrained by the US, but it isn't hard to imagine a scenario in which Trump runs out of patience and gives Bibi the green light to assassinate the Supreme Leader and unleash hell on the IRCG

I'm highly skeptical of this. I almost hope it does turn into a full on all out war so we can see if Israel really has the minerals or if it's just another glass jaw who's been fighting rigged matches this entire time. They almost certainly won't do it without American back-up. I might be able to respect them if they just went in and got on with it by themselves, but they won't.

I don't want to accuse but your tone reminds me of that lad who was always posting in the Ukraine thread, parroting whatever the most centrist newspaper's current line was. It amused me how somebody could be so consistently wrong all the time, every single time, without once being correct; yet carry on talking as if they were well informed. I'm sure those are the same kinds of voices commentating on this about how Iran has a very westernised populace just waiting for the US and Israel to bomb them so they can elect a nice new democratic leader. This time it will be different! This time it will work out! Iran's good for it!

Regime change in Iran, whether it works in the first instance or not, will just be another huge fucking decade long mess for us to deal with, just like every other middle east regime change I have lived through. At this point I'm just amazed they are still trying it on.

>>42546

>I almost hope it does turn into a full on all out war so we can see if Israel really has the minerals

That's predisposed on the idea that Iran has the capability of usefully fighting back. Mainstream media coverage of this conflict has grossly under-stated how much of a battering the Iranians are taking, in part because literally no- one in the British media knows the first thing about defence and in part because there's an instinct to hype up the jeopardy.

Two weeks ago, Iran had about 3,000 ballistic missiles; as of this morning, they had about 800. They had an air force, but now they don't. Their sophisticated air defence capability has been reduced to a smattering of 1950s-era flak guns. Almost their entire military leadership has been killed; the handful of survivors and their replacements are in hiding, too afraid to meet in person or even use the telephone because of the pervasiveness of Mossad targeting.

It sounds like absurd hyperbole, but it's just the facts on the ground. Iran's military is being systematically dismantled at an unprecedented pace.

>>42545

>When Israel and the US "unleash hell", it tends to involve a lot of dead civilians

Thus far, Israel have killed fewer Iranians than the regime itself killed in the aftermath of the 2022 protests. Unless the IRCG and the Basij decide to abandon their bases and operate out of civilian buildings, the civilian death toll is likely to remain low.

As regards the popularity or otherwise of the regime, I'll just say that there's a reason why they felt compelled to completely disconnect their country from the Internet.

>>42547

>It sounds like absurd hyperbole, but it's just the facts on the ground. Iran's military is being systematically dismantled at an unprecedented pace

Then what is the danger. Sounds like they are a complete non-threat. Those sophisticated anti-air capabilities can't have been very sophisticated, and it seems even less believable that they are 2 weeks from a nuclear weapon if they were such a paper tiger. What does there even need to be a conflict for?

It's all very "any minute now, Russia will crumble. Just you wait. They are losing 400 gazillion troops a day compared to Ukraine's single digits. Any minute now". Why bother asking the Iranians to negotiate when a) clearly there's no point negotiating when they are going to get bombed either way, they can't take America's or Israel's word, and b) they're clearly a pushover so why don't we just finish the job.

None of it adds up. Someone somewhere is telling porkies. To what end I do not know, but I am keeping my skeptic hat on.

>>42546
>I don't want to accuse but your tone reminds me of that lad who was always posting in the Ukraine thread, parroting whatever the most centrist newspaper's current line was. It amused me how somebody could be so consistently wrong all the time, every single time, without once being correct; yet carry on talking as if they were well informed. I'm sure those are the same kinds of voices commentating on this about how Iran has a very westernised populace just waiting for the US and Israel to bomb them so they can elect a nice new democratic leader. This time it will be different! This time it will work out! Iran's good for it!

Are you still bumsore that Ukraine didn't surrender in 2-weeks?

>>42548
Not him but I think it's more a case that Iran is a serious threat and it's been addressed seriously. I don't think there's a disconnect to say that Iran and its proxies are a serious risk that has been mitigated by, for example, killing all the blokes who were going to order a mass missile attack on Israel designed to overwhelm its defences.

There's probably a spreadsheet somewhere in the IDF with RAG ratings.

>it seems even less believable that they are 2 weeks from a nuclear weapon if they were such a paper tiger

I think the problem is that once you get above a certain level of enrichment its incredibly easy to do the next steps covertly. The Obama deal was about pinning this because you can't really stop some blokes in the physics building from building a fission device once they have the right material and that's a level of potential damage you're not going to tolerate.

>>42547

>Two weeks ago, Iran had about 3,000 ballistic missiles; as of this morning, they had about 800.

Where are you getting these figures from? Are you claiming Iran has fired ~2,200 missiles in the past fortnight?

>>42549
>I think the problem is that once you get above a certain level of enrichment it[']s incredibly easy to do the next steps covertly.
This is something I've been thinking about. Iran says they have been enriching their uranium to about 60%, and Israel say that this is enough to make nuclear bombs, which need uranium enriched to around 90%. That sounds like bullshit to me, but everyone is going along with it.

Here's a link I found which supports it, however: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Uranium-Enrichment-What-It-Is-and-Why-It-Matters.html
For nuclear power, you don't really need to enrich your uranium beyond 20%, although it probably doesn't hurt to enrich it further.

>>42550
They've fired a couple of hundred, as I understand it, but Israel also blew up a lot of the launchers and stockpiles, so Iran can't fire most of their others either now.

>>42552

So you pulled the figure out of your arse, essentially?

>>42552
>>42553

They've got enough left to chuck them at American bases at any rate.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc23hxQFMdQ

>>42553
Well, firstly, I am someone else who just joined in because you posted around the same time as me, so I thought I could offer a faster reply than waiting for him to come back. So pipe the fuck down. Secondly, here is an image I saw which offers different numbers from the 19th of June, but which make the original poster’s numbers seem plausible. That’s why I agreed with him. Do you have any different numbers you can offer?

>>42555

I think the only thing we can say for certainty is that nobody in this thread, you me or the other lad, has the first fucking clue at all how many ballistic missiles Iran has. The Pentagon probably only even has a rough guess.

I love being an armchair general and statesman as much as any of you but come on. Twitter posts are not military intelligence.

>>42556

We could debate the exact numbers all day because they're obviously estimates, but every credible report makes it clear that Iran is rapidly running out of missiles. We can see that clearly in the tempo of Iranian attacks - initially they were using huge massed waves to overwhelm Israeli defences, but in the last few days they have been sending dribs and drabs. Even Iranian sources are arguing "Israel will run out of interceptors before we run out of missiles", which is a tacit admission that they're running out of missiles.

Even before the war, Iran had a production capacity of no more than 50 medium-range missiles per month. That capacity is likely far lower now, because we have clear satellite images showing that many of their production sites have been destroyed.

The crux is that Iran's strategy relied for many years on deterrence - they used proxies to project regional power and people fought those proxies, but nobody wanted to take on Iran for fear of what they were capable of. We now know that either Iran wasn't nearly as potent an enemy as everyone had thought, or (IMO more likely) Israel's combination of intelligence capabilities and air power have fatally undermined Iran's capabilities - it isn't a matter of debate that the entire senior leadership of Iran's military died on the first day of hostilitles.

https://henryjacksonsociety.org/2025/06/20/a-war-of-inventories-the-arithmetic-behind-israel-and-irans-missile-conflict/

https://www.newsweek.com/iran-missile-stockpile-israel-conflict-2088520

https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/online-analysis/2025/06/israels-attack-and-the-limits-of-irans-missile-strategy/

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/is-iran-running-out-of-missiles-here-s-what-the-numbers-suggest/ar-AA1GZbku

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2lk5j18k4vo

>I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured.
Is he taking the piss here, or did this actually happen? I'm inclined to go with the latter; I remember there was a previous instance of Islamic handbags in that part of the world, and analysts on the news suggested on that occasion that Iran (I think) needed to retaliate to save face, but wanted to avoid any further escalation. So perhaps they did that again, wanting to show the world that they'd fight back, but not actually wanting the fight to continue.

>>42557

Not only are the best sources you can produce Newsweek, The Henry Jackson Society and *checks notes* 'Zee News', but none of them appear to mention the 800 missiles figure, probably because it had indeed been pulled out of your arse.

It was interesting today how the markets seem to have known that nothing was going to happen. You even saw the oil price stabilise. I'm glad nothing happened but also I'm sure someone's mates made a lot of money today.

>>42558
Telegraphed strikes is something Iran has done a lot of (2024 and 2020) and the limited nature makes it the most likely outcome. The bombing of Iraq in 1998 also had this because the intention was just to punish Iraq for not complying so you even had leaflets being dropped beforehand telling the Iraqi army to leave.

Iran wants to save face without escalation but the catch is that there's a gentleman's agreement not to officially announce it. But obviously Trump isn't known for his conduct when he's tapping away on his iPhone in the bog.

Thank fuck for that. I could quite happily live my entire life without ever hearing about Iran again.

>>42561

Ahh, back to the scheduled broadcast of nothing happening, about time.

>>42561

You've got to hand it to Trump - just announce that you've negotiated a ceasefire without actually negotiating anything, on the off-chance that it sticks. Fair play to the fella, I wouldn't have the nerve.

>>42560
Iran's love of purely symbolic strikes makes it hard to take seriously the idea they're a bunch of completely deranged religious nutters outside of domestic policy. If anything their approach seems more western than the west (as you say, Iraq 1998 etc), who are backing a bunch of religious nutters who base their claim to their territory on a book, name all their military operations after the bible, and get a good chunk of their support because a different set of religious nutters think it'll result in the second coming of Christ.

I suppose it's neither here or there now, so the question is: will this stunt have distracted from Gaza effectively enough that we stop talking about it despite that now being the top story in the region again?

>>42564

It'd be nice if we talked about Sudan for once, but no-one gives a fuck about Sudan.

>>42565
Which Sudanese faction are Britain and America backing?

>We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

Dropping truth bombs in the Middle East sounds like a dangerous escalation.

>>42565
There’s always something like that happening in Sudan; part of what makes things news is that they have to be things that don’t happen every day.

How are the Rohingya eskimos doing? I haven’t heard much from them in a while.