Palestine Open Thread 2024-246

News & views related to the war in Palestine ...

Ukraine Open Thread 2024-245

News & views related to the war in Ukraine ...

The MoA Week In Review - OT 2024-244

Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:

Ukraine:

• Oct 8 - Ukraine - FT Proposes Impossible Peace Deal, Demands More Violence
  Related:
  - Recruiters raid Kyiv venues in search of Ukrainians not registered for conscription - Euronews
  - Wounded soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are not treated and sent back to the front-Da Vinci medic (in Russian) - Strana
  - Corruption schemes in the MSEC. Who receives millions of disability payments? (in Russian) - Strana
  - The Russian ‘Steamroller’ in Donbas - Gilbert Doctorow
  - Victims of Communism memorial faces call to remove over 330 names linked to Nazis, fascists - Ottawa Citizen

Palestine:

• Oct 8 - For Doubters - Hizbullah Reports That It Is Back
• Oct 12 - Hizbullah, Iran Put More Pressure On Israel
  Related:
  - US deploys THAAD anti-ballistic missile defense to Israel amid rising tensions with Iran - Ynetnews

b here - Note on the last headline:

The IRIB video of an alleged hit on a THAAD radar has been geolocated and it has nothing to do with THAAD. But the news that the U.S. is scrambling an additional THAAD to Israel seems to confirm that the one stationed there is in deep trouble after Iran somehow hit it.

• More related:
  - It's So, So Bad, And It's About To Get A Whole Lot Worse - Caitlin Johnstone
  - How Israel killed hundreds of its own people on 7 October - Electronic Intifada
  - The great emigration: Israel sees an unprecedented number leave the country - Jerusalem Post
  - Zionist groups are falsifying antisemitism statistics and the media are playing along - Redflag
  - 'Prepare for post-Hezbollah phase' US envoy tells Lebanon as Israeli massacres intensify - The Cradle
  - 'No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound That Is Palestine: Arundhati Roy - The Wire

> As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—

From the river to the sea

Palestine will be Free.

It will.

Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.

That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time. <

Empire:

• Oct 9 - Emmanuel Todd On Europe's Hopefully Fading Submission To The U.S.
• Oct 10 - Biden's Intent Is To Sow Chaos - Netanyahoo And Zelensky Are Working For Him
  Related:
  - The End of History or a War of American and Russian Messianisms - Gordon Hahn
  - The Arabs are transparently displaying their crossover to multi-alignment in a US-led Middle Eastern war - Indian Punchline
  - Commentary: US not walking the talk in Southeast Asia as Biden skips ASEAN Summit again - Channel News Asia

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Other issues:

Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review - OT 2024-244

Hizbullah, Iran Put More Pressure On Israel

Two weeks ago, after successful Zionist attacks on Hizbullah's leadership, I asserted that Hizbullah would be back:

However, Israel can not kill its way to peace.

Hizbullah is a social movement deeply ingrained into the people and society of Lebanon.

Hizbullah has a social society side which takes care for and aliments large parts of its constituency.

It also has a military side which is very well organized, disciplined and which has many hidden assets ready to be activated when needed. Following the Shia creed Hizbullah's soldiers are ready and willing to die for their cause.

In 1982 Israel assassinated Hizbullah chief Musawi. His replacement, Hassan Nasrallah, proved to be the more formidable enemy who organized resistance movements that span the whole region. Anyone following Nasrallah will also be younger, less risk avers and a more formidable enemy.

The same holds for the replacements of lower level casualties.

The Zionist colonist will rue the consequences of their deeds.

Today Hizbullah's operation room warned the Zionists in Haifa to empty the city:

Cont. reading: Hizbullah, Iran Put More Pressure On Israel

Palestine Open Thread 2024-243

News & views related to the war in Palestine ...

Ukraine Open Thread 2024-242

News & views related to the war in Ukraine ...

Open (Neither Ukraine Nor Palestine) Thread 2024-241

News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine ...

Biden's Intent Is To Sow Chaos - Netanyahoo And Zelensky Are Working For Him

There is a great believe peddled by main stream media that the Biden administration is trying to hold the Zionists   back from their devastating action in Gaza, Lebanon and beyond, but unfortunately fails to do so. Some commentators argue that this is the case because the Israel lobby has a very strong position in U.S. policies and can direct the U.S. government into any direction of its liking.

My hunch is that this is putting the cart before the horse.

It is in fact the Biden administration which is using the Israeli (and Ukrainian) government to serve its foreign policy purposes. As I remarked:

This has been the general theme of a media campaign for a while. "Natanyahoo is steamrolling Biden and the poor guy can do nothing about it."

I do not buy it. One phone call from the White House to the Pentagon would hold resupply flights from the U.S. to Israel. Without constant supply renewal the Israeli Air Force would have to stop its bombing campaigns in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen within days if not within hours.

But instead of calling the Pentagon, the whole Middle East team around Biden, Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk and IDF soldier Amos Hochstein, has been urging Israel to extend its campaign.

They are hoping, like the neoconservatives in 2006 during the Bush administration, for the 'birth pangs of a new Middle East', which will forever change the strategic situation on the ground.
...
The conclusion from this is that Netanyahoo is largely doing exactly what the Biden administration wants him to do.

Gilbert Doctorow, the well known historian and journalist, is of similar opinion:

More on tails wagging dogs and vice versa

Cont. reading: Biden's Intent Is To Sow Chaos - Netanyahoo And Zelensky Are Working For Him

Emmanuel Todd On Europe's Hopefully Fading Submission To The U.S.

This blog has been following the writings of Emmanuel Todd for some time:

• Emmanuel Todd on Europe - December 19, 2008
• Seeing Social Decline As A National Security Threat May Change Conservative Policies - November 30, 2018
• Transgender - The Inability To Distinguish Facts From Wishes - March 14, 2024

In the later one I had quoted a New York Times review of Todd's latest book:

This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West’s Defeat (archived) - New York Times, Mar 9 2024

American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident” (“The Defeat of the West”). Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist who in 1976, in a book called “The Final Fall,” used infant-mortality statistics to predict that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.
...
While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones. The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”

The Italian version of "The Defeat of the West", Todd's latest book, has just been published. It is the occasion for an interview with Corriere Di Bologna.  The answers Todd is giving during the interview deserve your attention (edited machine translation):

Q:You argue that Europe has delegated the representation of the West to the United States and is now paying the price. How do you think this trend can be changed?

A: “In the present state we cannot do anything else. A war has begun. It is the outcome of this war that will decide the fate of Europe. If Russia is defeated in Ukraine, European submission to the Americans would be prolonged for a century. If, as I believe, the United States is defeated, NATO will disintegrate and Europe will be left free.

Even more important than a Russian victory will be the halting of the Russian army on the Dnepr and the unwillingness of the Putin regime to attack western Europe militarily. With 144 million people, a shrinking population and 17 million square kilometers, the Russian state is already struggling to occupy its territory. Russia will have neither the means nor the desire to expand once the borders of pre-communist Russia are reconstituted. Western Russophobic hysteria fantasizing about the desire for Russian expansion in Europe is simply ridiculous to a serious historian.

The psychological shock awaiting Europeans will be to realize that NATO does not exist to protect us but to control us.”

Since the beginning of the recent phase of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, I have argued that Russia does not want to take all of Ukraine but only those parts which, up to 1922, had been traditional parts of Russia before the communists added them to the Ukrainian borderland.

It is nice to see that Emmanuel Todd agrees with this analysis:

Cont. reading: Emmanuel Todd On Europe's Hopefully Fading Submission To The U.S.

For Doubters - Hizbullah Reports That It Is Back

The Zionists had hoped that their terror tactics of exploding pagers and the bombing of Hizbullah's leadership in Lebanon would hinder or decrease its enemy's ability to fight.

That hope however was in vane. Hizbullah, like its Hamas ally in Gaza, was build to sustain its efforts despite such incidents.

Today, Naim Qassem, the deputy leader of Hizbullah appeared in a broadcast and declared that Hizbullah remained fully operational:

In his address, Qassem stated, “We are firing hundreds of rockets and dozens of drones. A large number of settlements and cities are under the fire of the resistance.” He emphasised that Hezbollah's top leadership remains active and that the posts of the slain commanders have been filled, asserting, “We have no vacant posts.”

How useless it is to kill an enemy's leadership was also shown in Gaza:

[A]n insight into what is actually going on in Gaza was offered by Israel's latest announcement that it had killed three senior Hamas officials - Rawhi Mushtaha, the head of government and de facto prime minister; Sameh al-Siraj, who held the security portfolio on Hamas’s political bureau; and Sami Oudeh, commander of Hamas’s General Security Mechanism.

The air strike happened three months ago, and no one had noticed their absence. This is because Hamas continued to function regardless of which leaders were alive or dead.

In the past, assassinations had led to a period of uncertainty for Hamas. This happened after the killing of Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi in 2004. But it does not work today and nor does it work with this generation of fighters.

Yesterday Hizbullah fired five missiles on the harbor city of Haifa. Today 100 more missiles followed.

These are in response to Israel's bombing of Beirut's suburbs.

Israel has committed several division to invading the south of Lebanon. The distance they have managed to intrude from the border is still measured in mere meter.

Cont. reading: For Doubters - Hizbullah Reports That It Is Back