RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/18/israels-clash-with-iran-is-nothing-like-the-iraq-war/

Remember when Saddam Hussein sponsored an army of fascists that invaded the United States and raped and murdered thousands of Americans? And when he funded a gang of religious fanatics to fire thousands of rockets at people in Leeds and Manchester here in the UK? And when he himself pressed the button on ballistic missiles that landed on New York City and London? No, me neither. Which makes it perplexing that Israel’s push against Iran is being compared to the Iraq War of 2003 – for Iran has done all of that to the Jewish nation, and it dreams of doing more.

The debate about Israel / Iran is at risk of being derailed by disinformation. Gaslighting swirls all around it. This is a crazed stab at ‘regime change’, cry Israel’s critics, and we all know what hellish things spring from ‘regime change’. It is an ‘illegal war’ and a ‘war of aggression’, insists the left. And the trump card: it’s Iraq all over again. Both the digital right and digital left are ‘invoking the spectre of Iraq’, in the words of the New York Times. ‘Welcome to Iraq 2.0’, says the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Only worse – Israel’s ‘unprovoked attack’ on Iran has the potential to be ‘far, far more catastrophic’, apparently.

The moral evasion on display here is off the charts. To compare Israel’s fight against its fanatical tormentors in Tehran with America and Britain’s vain and ruinous war on Iraq is to be wilfully blind to both historical truth and moral principle. First, there’s the fact that Saddam’s regime did not attack us. This was a shattered nation, broken by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the West’s sanctions and bombing raids of the 1990s. In 2003, Iraq barely posed a threat to its neighbours, far less to mighty America or Britain. Washington and London’s depiction of this shell of a regime as a threat to the world was the blackest of black propaganda. It was the lie that unleashed untold horrors.

The Israel-Iran clash is wholly the reverse of this. Iran has attacked Israel ceaselessly and ferociously. Its neo-fascist proxies in Hamas sent a 6,000-strong army into Israel in October 2023 where they raped and murdered hundreds. Its most important proxy – Hezbollah – followed up this pogrom with barrages of missiles into northern Israel. Between Hamas’s pogrom and June of last year, Hezbollah fired 5,000 rockets and other projectiles at Israel. This caused the evacuation of 60,000 people and the deaths of scores of civilians, including 12 Druze kids. Iran itself has directly fired missiles at Israel: 120 ballistic missiles in April 2024; 200 in October 2024.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21690/israel-acted-for-all-of-us

Often lost in the media frenzy is that Iran, unprovoked, initiated hostilities against Israel.

The seeming dispute was not about territory, policy or any disagreement that states normally have. It was about ideology. For nearly five decades, Iran and its proxies have waged a war against Israel and the United States, calling for their destruction. From their point of view, neither country, as “disbelievers,” has a right to exist. Full stop.

No other issue, domestic or foreign, was as consistent, prioritized, or systematically pursued as Tehran’s hostility toward Israel, the country blocking its way to destroying the United States. To that end Iran for decades had been preparing “forward bases” in South America, especially Venezuela.

The JCPOA failed to address the fundamental nuclear threat, focused on temporary technical limits while ignoring the regime’s long-term ambitions, and actually agreeing to a “sunset clause” that would have allowed Iran’s regime legitimately to have as many nuclear weapons as it liked — starting this October.

The Biden administration unfortunately repeated Obama’s errors, perhaps under the illusion that if it were nice to Iran, Iran would be nice back. Instead, Iran seized on its good luck to escalate its uranium enrichment to 60% by April 2021 and near weapons-grade (83.7%) in 2023.

President Trump wisely pulled the U.S. out of Obama’s deal – which, it turned out, had not only been fraudulent but totally illegitmate.

Does the world really want a terrorist state to have nuclear weapons? If you look at the damage Iran has been doing without nuclear weapons, you image the damage it could do with them…. Right now, Israel is on the front line doing what others –whose lives and countries Israel is saving — criticize it for doing. Israel’s actions are not about starting a war; they are about stopping a war that has been underway for 46 years before the theocratic tyranny that initiated it enlarge it even further.

Best of all, China, Russia and North Korea are looking on. …Netanyahu’s and Trump’s resolve is not only creating the opportunity for a new, golden age for the Middle East but possibly also providing a deterrent — remember them? — to other enemies of the West that have expressed wishes for its demise.

President Donald J. Trump’s Churchillian defence of the Free World and the West will place him at the forefront of history. Both he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – ans well as the extraordinary Israel Defence Forces — deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for rescuing the world from one of the most toxic regimes since the Third Reich and the Former Soviet Union. Failure by the Norwegian Committee to do so will probably tell us more about them than about one of the greatest triumphs of all time.

Often lost in the media frenzy is that Iran, unprovoked, initiated hostilities against Israel. The seeming dispute was not about territory, policy or any disagreement that states normally have. It was about ideology. For nearly five decades, Iran and its proxies have waged a war against Israel and the United States, calling for their destruction. From their point of view, neither country, as “disbelievers,” has a right to exist. Full stop.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/i-will-not-abandon-this-post-mike-huckabee-texts-trump-saying-he-has-biggest-choice-since-truman-in-1945/ar-

President Donald Trump shared a motivational text Tuesday from U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee reaffirming his support of the president and addressing the potential significance of the Israel-Iran war in the Middle East.

Huckabee said he trusted Trump’s “instincts” and implied that the situation was perhaps the most significant a U.S. president has faced in decades.

“I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945,” Huckabee said, possibly referring to Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb to end World War II.

Huckabee told the president that many will offer him advice but said the decision was up to to Trump himself.

As a former Baptist minister, Huckabee told Trump that God spared his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, so that he could be “the most consequential president in a century — maybe ever.” He invited Trump to listen to God’s voice above all others.

“I believe you will hear from heaven, and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s,” Huckabee said.

The ambassador finished his message to Trump by reaffirming his allegiance to the president and to the U.S. “You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears, and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave,” he said.

“I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down!” Huckabee said.

Trump has faced heavy criticism from many on the right regarding his response to Iran and Israel’s ongoing conflict in the days since the latter attacked nuclear facilities of the former. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said they struck Iranian “nuclear targets” and is believed to have killed multiple senior Iranian officials and nuclear scientists.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/16/the-hilarious-collapse-of-the-cult-of-the-keffiyeh/

Don’t you just hate it when brown people reject your white saviourism? So rude! Such mannerless ingratitude greeted the Global March to Gaza last week. These valiant few from the US, the UK, Ireland and elsewhere had planned to trek to Rafah in Gaza to save poor, hungry Palestinians from Evil Israel. But they came unstuck in Egypt, where instead of welcoming these fearless foreign liberators of the benighted Arabs, local folk ridiculed them, pelted them with plastic bottles and roundly told them to fuck off. Wait, you people don’t want to be saved by a plummy white lady from London in a keffyeh?

I know there’s a lot going on in the world right now, but can we please not overlook how unbelievably hilarious it is that the Global March to Gaza has been thwarted by angry Arabs. That this swarm of pompous gits who fantasised that they would shield the Arabs of Gaza from the ‘genocidal lunacy’ of the Jewish State were instead roughed up by the Arabs of Egypt who don’t want their nation used as a stage for moral masturbation by every puffed-up Palestine fetishist of the West. That instead of getting bottles of water to Gaza, these people had bottles of water lobbed at their own heads by pissed-off Egyptians. The mirth of it all might just get me through the rest of this year.

The Global March to Gaza consisted of 4,000 people from 54 countries. They had planned to walk to the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza where they would have ‘demand[ed] that Israel re-open the border [and] create a humanitarian corridor’. How the Jewish State would have trembled before this mighty delegation that included a gaggle of anoraks from Welsh CND, a British art curator called Tasmin and a bald politician from Ireland! Honestly, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the unworldly vanity of this dishevelled army of weak-chinned Westerners who really thought they could finger-wag a war out of existence.

Some of the marchers were from North Africa. Others were from the West. Like the self-styled ‘empathetic human’ from the UK who said ‘I endeavour to do what our governments have failed [to do]’ and ‘mobilise [my] passion and humanity’. Or the Brit who lamented her ‘privilege’ of being a ‘white, north European living in relative peace’ and promised to do something worthy for once, like ‘lend my presence to this cause’. Or the Canadian who said ‘I can’t ignore my conscience’. All I’m hearing is I, me, mine. Was it really Gaza they wanted to liberate or their own morbidly obese egos?

Sadly, by which I mean hilariously, their cloying pity for Arabs crashed against the reality of Arab self-respect. I am still not recovered from the sight of these self-loving midwits in their culturally appropriated keffiyehs being shouted down by Egyptians in real keffiyehs. On the road to Ismailia in northern Egypt, the marchers were stopped by security forces. So they gathered in a square by the mosque and chanted ‘Free, free Palestine!’. Locals weren’t best pleased. Well, would you be if a gang of pious pricks from afar rocked up in your town and started yelling political shit near your place of worship? The locals shouted at the ‘empathetic humans’. They threw plastic bottles at them. White Saviour card, declined!

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/16/what-exactly-was-iran-thinking-or-not/

Iran apparently had not adjusted to its new 2025 status—or maybe it had. Most of its bought terrorists are currently either destroyed or anemic.

There is no more ascendant Iranian “Shia crescent” in the Middle East. Russia is no longer a Middle East power, patron, and protector.

The Assad dynasty imploded, flipping Syria from an Iranian proxy into a likely Iranian enemy. Hezbollah, once supposedly the most fearsome of all the Iranian terrorist tentacles, was humiliated and neutered by a series of surreal Israeli operations.

Hamas has been reduced to a subterranean terrorist remnant.

The Houthis’ tit-for-tat encounters with Israel and the U.S. are systematically turning their Yemeni enclave into an impotent dump. At its present rate, the Houthis will likely soon launch their last rocket at Israel or the Red Sea in a country without fuel, electricity, and ports.

Iran itself, last year in a disastrous air war with Israel, lost its air defenses and is now more or less impotent and defenseless against Israeli air incursions. Its oil income has been slashed by 70-80 percent by the renewed Trump sanctions and ‘maximum pressure’ campaign. Israel can destroy all of its oil industry if it wishes and, apparently, send operatives inside Iran itself as it pleases.

Most of the Arab Sunni world is now losing its accustomed fear of Iran. While the weary pan-Islamic solidarity boilerplate of the Middle East remains the same, privately, most Arab nations rely on the U.S. or even Israel to deter Iran—and predicate their own foreign policy on the degree to which they do just that.

With the end of the Biden administration and Obama a distant memory, Iran lost all hope that it could bluster, bluff, and negotiate itself out of sanctions and embargoes—and into nuclear weapons. There are no more John Kerrys or Antony Blinkens in charge, eager to meet Iranian demands. Ben Rhodes’s “echo chamber” Iran Deal is ancient history.

Israel had done more than all of America’s Middle East wars or all of NATO’s global presence to end Iran’s claims on power and the ability to project its brand of terror and fear throughout the Middle East.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/israels-war-of-survival/

Israel faced the Hobbesian choice of passing the point of no return and exposing itself to the risk of a nuclear attack by Iran or taking military action in time to prevent that catastrophe from happening. Israel wisely chose the latter course. Israel conducted “preemptive” strikes against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities (including the Natanz enrichment site), long-range missile facilities, and aerial defenses on June 12th, which also killed several military commanders and nuclear scientists.

The United States did not participate in the Israeli strikes inside Iran. However, when the Iranian regime responded with barrages of drones and ballistic missiles aimed at Israeli population centers, the U.S. helped Israel to intercept as many of them as possible. Although some of Iran’s missiles managed to get through Israel’s multilayered defense systems and hit their targets, many lives were undoubtedly saved by U.S-Israeli defense cooperation.

Israel haters leaped at the chance to blame Israel for taking forceful military action to defend itself against the rapidly approaching existential threat of nuclear annihilation at Iran’s hands.

For example, the extremist leftwing group Code Pink said,

“We strongly condemn Israel’s unprovoked and reckless attack on Iran, which risks igniting a catastrophic regional war. This dangerous escalation threatens millions of lives across the entire Middle East. The U.S. must not continue to support and enable this illegal act of aggression.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) declared:

“We condemn Israel’s offensive strike on Iran and the broader pattern of aggression it represents. Netanyahu is using American weapons and taxpayer dollars to launch illegal and destabilizing wars across the region. President Trump must act immediately to suspend all military support to Israel and stop allowing U.S. arms to fuel war crimes, mass civilian death, and regional collapse.”

Pro-Hamas campus groups in the United States rallied around Hamas’s puppet master Iran. “We reject the US/Zionist attack on Iran, and affirm Iran’s right to self-defense, sovereignty, and self-determination,” Columbia University’s pro-Hamas student organization Apartheid Divest posted following Israel’s strikes. “No to the imperialist was of encroachment — from Syria to Lebanon to Iran — and YES [sic] to the people’s struggle for Palestinian liberation.”

All of this is, of course, pure falsehood.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/after-30-years-of-hesitation-netanyahu-pulled-the-trigger/ar-AA1GFxwS

(Bloomberg) — Benjamin Netanyahu has said for three decades that the central threat to Israel’s existence is Iran’s nuclear program. At least twice over that period, he came within inches of carrying out an attack on it.

Now, at age 75, the Israeli premier has launched the biggest strike on Iran in his country’s history. It’s an operation of enormous risk and promise that will define the legacy of Israel’s longest-serving leader — and upend the Mideast.

In a speech to the nation Friday evening, Netanyahu said he ordered preparations for the assault back in November. But the audacious attack was the result of a confluence of factors dating back years.

Hamas’ deadly 2023 attack forced a rethinking of how Israel defends itself and allowed its military to decimate threats from Iranian proxies like Hezbollah. After years of efforts, Israeli intelligence had penetrated Iran so deeply it could strike its protected nuclear program from inside the country. A supportive US president and a hawkish circle in the Israeli leadership made it possible for Netanyahu, his own popularity tarnished, to make the move he’d avoided for so long.

A day after the first wave of attacks — hundreds of warplanes hit hundreds of sites 1700 km (1000 miles) away — it’s far too early to assess how this new war will develop and whether it will expand beyond Iran and Israel.

But initial reports have led Israeli commentators to argue that the operation is so far a success: a dozen top Iranian military officials and nuclear scientists killed, a major nuclear site badly damaged and Iran’s capacity to retaliate curbed. Late Friday, Israel said it had hit another nuclear installation, this time in Isfahan.

Shortly afterward, Iran launched missiles at Israel and residents were ordered to shelters. Authorities reported several people were injured by the attacks in the central part of the country. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed to “act forcefully” and avenge the Israeli strikes. That retaliation is expected both directly and indirectly, and Israel’s assault is due to last days or weeks. 

Since thousands of Iran-backed Hamas operatives broke into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1200 people and abducting 250, Israel has taken a much more aggressive approach to its borders, stationing its troops inside Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and relying less on opponents’ intent and focusing on their capabilities. 

Attacked on all sides as Iranian proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen joined in, Israelis felt they were in a battle for their survival — even if from afar many saw a powerful, nuclear-armed nation against small militias that couldn’t challenge it. 

Since then, Israel has carried out a brutal war in Gaza, destroying vast areas and killing some 55,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. It has taken out the missile arsenals of Hamas and Hezbollah and helped trigger the collapse of the Syrian regime.