OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT—Netanyahu and even Benny Gantz (invited by Washington without Netanyahu being advised) both confirm Israel’s intention to proceed with a ground operation against Rafah, demonstrating that there is little point in trying to divide Israeli leadership. Biden continues to send weapons to Israel, yet says that the US cannot stomach the loss of another 30,000 Palestinian lives. As Alastair Crooke notes in interview with Judge Napolitano today, Biden, despite the fact that he claims that Rafah is a red line, actually has no red line – he is failing to show Israel that there are consequences for mass murder. Biden’s plan to build a pier for offloading aid will take at least two years to implement, and is a clumsy, contorted route for getting aid to people who needed it months ago by the most direct route possible. Crooke thinks that the IDF has a lot more preparation to complete before going into Rafah: it has the potential of trouble in the West Bank during Ramadan, which started two days ago, and given the scale of resistance it is likely to meet in and from Lebanon and Iraq.
UKRAINE/NATO/RUSSIA/CHINA
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Youhoo! Tucker! Here is why Putin calls for denazification (which you called “the dumbest thing I ever heard of”).
by Don Hank53 minutes readDON HANK—It eventually dawned on me that this Russophobia to which I was exposed – and didn’t know its name yet – was only part of a bigger phenomenon that I call Westernness, which is in fact an infectious psycho-social disease, ie, primarily a way of thinking and functioning, one of whose symptoms is a general recalcitrant mediocrity and incompetence that in America has spread throughout academe, the professions, politics (in particular), the military, the think tanks, intelligence agencies, the media, Big Religion and the general populace. But it is also a sociopathy, making it invisible to the wide public.
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SIMPLICIUS—The most notable revelation completely repudiates years of propagandists’ claims that Russian FSB/GRU/etc. had assassinated top Donbass ‘patriotic’ figures, like Motorola, Givi, Zakharchenko, Mozgovoy, etc. These propagandists, many of them 6th columnists ostensibly pretending to be ‘pro-Russian patriots’, attempted to tie these incidents into a wider conspiracy theory about the Kremlin allegedly hunting down any “true patriots” like Strelkov and co.
But now, the CIA readily admits via their NYTimes mouthpiece that it was in fact the secret Ukrainian intelligence directorate they trained, which carried out the murders of figures like Motorola.
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Scott Ritter: GAME OVER for Victoria Nuland as Russia Destroys Neocon Agenda in Ukraine
7 minutes readEDITOR—Former US Marine Corps Officer and UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter reacts to Victoria Nuland’s retirement and how it represents an admission that US foreign policy toward Russia has been an abject failure.
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The Real Victoria Nuland: US foreign policy official retires after decades of fomenting conflict and destruction
16 minutes readJORDAN SCHACHTEL—Nuland began her tenure in the Obama Administration as the State Department spokesperson.
From 2013 to 2015 Nuland’s portfolio was dominated by Eastern Europe and Russia. She was the American point person for the infamous “Maidan uprising” in Ukraine, which resulted in the ouster of the country’s elected president. Critics of the Nuland-led campaign have labeled her activities in Ukraine as a successful coup effort in a foreign country.