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Tic-Toc 9 On The War On Iran
A ceasefire.
To be broken in 3, 2, 1 …
Added:
Patrick Armstrong
So, what have we learned?
- Iran is a lot more powerful than many people thought.
- Western air defence systems aren’t very effective.
- Who knew those little Iranian lawnmower-engined dorito drones could get all the way to Israel?
- Hypersonic missiles are invulnerable and very frightening.
- Tehran now knows which missiles in its arsenal are most effective and which most effectively soak up the enemy’s air defence and will build accordingly
- Tehran’s decision to follow the missile-based armament route is vindicated. Suvorov: “Fight the enemy with the weapons he lacks“; Sun Tsu: “avoid strength and strike weakness“. `Others will notice.
- Israel has used up the sleeper cells and intelligence penetration that it had built up in Iran.
and
My predictions.
- The damage in Israel will be much greater and much more effective than we have been told.
- In Iran, not so much.
I agree.
In light of verified Israeli accounts openly tweeting that a symbolic bomb in Washington could “restore national honor,” it’s worth revisiting the precedent. Because this isn’t the first time Israel has operated inside U.S. borders with strategic ambiguity, and no consequences.
1999-2001, across 30+ U.S. cities, dozens of young Israeli nationals posing as art students began appearing uninvited at DEA, ATF, and even military offices across the U.S. According to a leaked DEA memo, they attempted to map floor plans, visit federal residences, and probe security layouts, behavior wildly inconsistent with any legitimate art initiative. Many had backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence, signal interception, and ordnance. Some were detained, none were charged, most were quietly sent home, and the story was buried.
Summer 2000, an Austrian “art collective” called Gelitin gained access to the 91st floor of the North Tower under an artist residency. They removed a window, installed a temporary balcony, and photographed it via helicopter. Their work, titled The B-Thing, was celebrated post-9/11 as avant-garde. But it also meant they had precise knowledge of structural access points in the months before the attacks.
Then came Urban Moving Systems. On September 11, 2001, 5 Israeli nationals, employees of that firm, were detained after being seen filming, cheering, and “high-fiving” as the Towers fell. They failed parts of their polygraphs, showed deception regarding Israeli intelligence ties, and were quietly deported. The company’s owner fled. No charges, no trials, just silence.
What ties all this together is not coincidence, but doctrine: logistical cover operations, embedded reconnaissance under cultural or commercial fronts, and physical access vectors disguised as art. Not one resulted in prosecution, despite surveillance, confessions, or intelligence flags. Nobody was ever punished, only repatriated.
So when someone from within that same national framework now posts that a bomb on U.S. soil might serve as symbolic leverage, it shouldn’t be dismissed as rhetoric, it’s precedent. America’s post-9/11 wars all aligned with Israeli strategic goals. And history shows: when the match is lit, the fingerprints are always scrubbed.
Today’s broadcast isn’t new. It’s the same signal, just louder.
https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGuOJSDsWcAA6uoA.jpg
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Jun 24 2025 16:24 utc | 316
If you make a deal with an Israeli, or a ceasefire,
he will test the edges and see what he can get away with.
Posted by: Otto Penn | Jun 24 2025 18:09 utc | 379
In the same vein, here is how Chris Hedges sees it.
And why it was so easy for Netanyahu to fool Israelis on October 7th and beyond.
The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort–a comfort they are desperately seeking–in their own moral superiority at the very moment they have abrogated all morality.
The Big Lie, as the father of American public relations, Edward Bernays, wrote, is limited only by the propagandist’s capacity to fathom and harness the undercurrents of individual and mass psychology. And since most supporters of Israel do not have a desire to know the truth, a truth that would force them to examine their own racism and self-delusions about Zionist and Western moral superiority, like packs of famished dogs they lap up the lies fed to them by the Israeli government. The Big Lie always finds fertile soil in what Bernays called the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays wrote, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.”
This is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the irrational becomes rational. It is one where, as Gustave Le Bon noted in “The Crowd: A Study of the Public Mind,” those who supply the masses with the illusions they crave become their master, and “whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” This irrationality explains why the reaction of Israeli supporters to those who have the courage to speak the truth–Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappe, Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss–is so rabid. That so many of these voices are Jewish, and therefore have more credibility than non-Jews who are among Israel’s cheerleaders, only ratchets up the level of hate.
But the Big Lie is also consciously designed to send a chilling message to Gaza’s Palestinians, who have lost large numbers of their dwellings, clinics, mosques, and power, water and sewage facilities, along with schools and hospitals, who have suffered some 1,650 deaths since this assault began–most of the victims women and children–and who have seen 400,000 people displaced from their homes. The Big Lie makes it clear to the Palestinians that Israel will continue to wage a campaign of state terror and will never admit its atrocities or its intentions. The vast disparity between what Israel says and what Israel does tells the Palestinians that there is no hope. Israel will do and say whatever it wants. International law, like the truth, will always be irrelevant. There will never, the Palestinians understand from the Big Lie, be an acknowledgement of reality by the Israeli leadership.
The Israel Defense Forces website is replete with this black propaganda. “Hamas exploits the IDF’s sensitivity towards protecting civilian structures, particularly holy sites, by hiding command centers, weapons caches and tunnel entrances in mosques,” the IDF site reads. “In Hamas’ world, hospitals are command centers, ambulances are transport vehicles, and medics are human shields,” the site insists.
“… [Israeli] officers are tasked with an enormous responsibility: to protect Palestinian civilians on the ground, no matter how difficult that may be,” the site assures its viewers. And the IDF site provides this quote from a drone operator identified as Lt. Or. “I have personally seen rockets fired at Israel from hospitals and schools, but we couldn’t strike back because of civilians nearby. In one instance, we acquired a target but we saw that there were children in the area. We waited around, and when they didn’t leave we were forced to abort a strike on an important target.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, in a Big Lie of his own, said last month at a conference of Christians United for Israel that the Israeli army should be given the “Nobel Peace Prize … a Nobel Peace Prize for fighting with unimaginable restraint.”
The Big Lie destroys any possibility of history and therefore any hope for a dialogue between antagonistic parties that can be grounded in truth and reality. While, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, the ancient and modern sophists sought to win an argument at the expense of the truth, those who wield the Big Lie “want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” The old sophists, she said, “destroyed the dignity of human thought.” Those who resort to the Big Lie “destroy the dignity of human action.” The result, Arendt warned, is that “history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility.” And when facts no longer matter, when there is no shared history grounded in the truth, when people foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no useful exchange of information. The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by Israel, as perhaps it is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems in the world to the brutish language of violence.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/04/why-israel-lies
Posted by: Otto Penn | Jun 24 2025 18:28 utc | 388
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