COMMENTARY / OPINION
Iran Launches Largest Drone & Missile Attack In History [34:57] Caroline Glick
April 15, 2024 JNS TV – Iran launched the largest combined missile and drone attack in history on Saturday (April 13th, 2024) against Israel. Now, it stands behind the effort to paralyze the global economy. All the details and analysis about what it means for Israel and the U.S. on Caroline Glick’s In-Focus
Matti Friedman: The Real War in the Middle East Comes into Focus By Matti Friedman
Like a flash going off in a dark room, Iran’s attack on Israel has finally given the world something valuable: a glimpse into Tehran’s true intentions.
April 14, 2024 – JERUSALEM — After a night of tension and aerial booms here in Jerusalem—including family time spent in the safe room as the air-raid siren blared in the street and the Iron Dome worked overhead—the direct consequences of the unprecedented Iranian attack on Israel aren’t clear yet. But like a flash going off in a dark room, the attack has finally given the world something valuable: a glimpse of the real war in the Middle East.
For the past six months, since the Hamas massacres of October 7, the ideological forces arrayed against Israel have done their best to make this seem like a war in which there are two sides, and that these sides are Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians. This information campaign is as critical to Israel’s enemies as the physical war, because it erodes the Western support that Israel needs to win and survive. Its successful execution has turned a jihadi war against the Jewish minority enclave in the Middle East into a story about Jewish oppression and even “genocide” of Palestinians, a story that has become the focus of the increasingly deranged discourse in the liberal West.
Iran’s strategic blunder Ron Jager
The Iranian attack on the State of Israel has been a complete offensive operational failure and exposed Iran as a “paper tiger”, severely weakening her ambitions to be recognized as a regional superpower in the Middle East. Op-ed.
Apr 14, 2024, 10:49 AM (GMT+3) – Iran’s attack from Iranian territory against the State of Israel, is not only a strategic blunder but also signifies the beginning of the end of the Islamic regime of Ayatollah’s as rulers of the State of Iran. The attack marks the first time Iran has launched a full-scale assault on Israel despite more than four decades of hostilities using proxy forces throughout the Middle East and beyond.
As I write this, at this hour, after midnight on April 14, and after two waves of missile attacks on the State of Israel with a third wave expected towards the early morning hours, little if any damage has been reported throughout the country. Israel has not only successfully repelled various classes of missiles, but according to reports by military sources, Israel, with the help of the US and others, has succeeded in shooting down 99% of the missiles fired against Israel from beyond Israel’s borders, employing advanced air defense systems.
This is an unprecedented defensive capability that has placed Israel’s at the technological forefront of anti-missile operational know-how. After over 200 drones and ballistic missiles fired on Israel by Iran, there are is only one report of physical damage.
The Iranian attack on the State of Israel has been a complete offensive operational failure and exposed Iran as a “paper tiger”, severely weakening her ambitions to be recognized as a regional superpower in the Middle East.
More importantly, military forces of the United States, Britain, and other members of the Western coalition participated in shooting down missiles fired toward Israel by their forces located throughout the Middle East. At this hour the President of the United States, President Biden, expressed his complete support and American backing of Israel against Iranian aggression. While Biden said to refrain, Israel has complete legitimization to attack Iran and will may this opportunity to destroy Iran’s strategic military capabilities including Iran’s nuclear capability.
The military response by Israel is a strategic imperative and will strengthen Israel’s deterrence against Iran, perhaps ushering in a period of stability in the Middle East.
Iran has in one misguided decision to attack Israel, wasted an almost impregnatable strategic situation. It is important to remember that Iran has no historical enemies, no irredentism, and no source of permanent tensions on its frontiers. Iran is well endowed with sources of energy, resources, and an educated population of close to 90 million Iranians. Iran has a distinct identity and culture, a unity denied many of her neighbors in the Middle East.
Iran has failed to capitalize on these rich human and material resources due to an excessive cultivation of extreme Islamic ideology and its promoting Islamic terror proxies throughout the Middle East and beyond.
What can explain Iran’s misguided decision to directly attack Israel?
In recent weeks, daily demonstrations against the Netanyahu government have re-erupted after an extended period in which public support for anti-government political forces seemed to have abided. The Iranians seemed to have misinterpreted the implications of these demonstrations similar to Hamas’s mistaken interpretation of the demonstrations against Israel’s judicial reform over the past year.
Both Hamas and the Iranian regime based their decisions to attack Israel on media reports that were biased and projected falsely that Israel going through a period of self-induced destruction from within. For the past year the broadcasted and printed media, social media, and political pundits have adopted an anti-Netanyahu agenda successfully conveying a sense that Israel is on the verge of civil war and incapable of responding to attacks by her enemies and defend herself. They even claim preposterously that Israel is losing the Swords of Iron war.
Instead, the very opposite has occurred; Hamas is on the verge of being totally destroyed as a military force and political movement as a result of misinterpreting Israel’s readiness and willingness to defend herself. Iran, instead of learning from Hamas’s strategic blunder on Oct 7th, has deluded herself and made the very same mistake against Israel.
Confrontation with Iran: Who Won? by Victor Rosenthal
April 15, 2024 – The West likes its Jews passive, dependent, and weak. When American officials say “Israel has a right to defend [herself]” they mean that they will allow her, and even assist her, to ward off the blows of her enemies. But their “rock solid support” does not extend to Israel taking offensive actions. Israel is allowed passive defense, but not to take the war to our enemies. And don’t even think about preemption.
Insofar as Israel obeys her Western “allies,” she is placed at a great disadvantage for several reasons. The most obvious one is that an entirely passive defense does not deter enemies from attacking over and over again. Why shouldn’t they? They have nothing to lose. The opposite: they will learn valuable lessons from their failures, which they can apply to the next round. And everyone is encouraged to keep trying for the honor of being the one who finally broke the Jewish state.
Then there is the relative high cost of defensive weapons. Each Arrow 3 missile like the ones used to intercept missiles fired at Israel on Saturday night, costs $3.5 million. Each Tamir interceptor used by the Iron Dome system to destroy the cheap Qassams of Hamas, the Katyushas of Hezbollah, and the drones of Iran, costs $50,000 (and two are usually fired at every enemy weapon). Each Iron Dome battery costs $50 million. The cost of using F-35s to shoot down drones is also high relative to the cost of the drones. Passive defense is expensive.
A purely passive defense strategy is so expensive, in fact, that no small country can afford to sustain it for a long period of time (and passivity guarantees that it will be needed forever). As a result, there is no alternative but to turn to one of the great powers as a sponsor. The price is loss of control and ultimately of sovereignty. It is already clear from the way American officials talk about Israel (e.g., President Biden is often described as “furious” with Israel), that Israel is seen as a satellite at best and a satrapy at worst.
Finally there is the message that is inherent in passivity. Shooting at Jews, because there are no consequences for it, becomes normalized. The Jews, people think, must deserve being shot at because, after all, everyone is doing it with impunity. This is particularly important in the Middle East, where honor is a paramount element in most cultures. Individuals, tribes, or nations that are hurt by an enemy must strike back or suffer a loss of honor, a mark that invites others to victimize them as well. Even in Western cultures – well, at least in the recent past – children were taught that failure to strike back at a bully invites more bullying.
Biden-Obama’s War on Israel: Hitler Would Be Pleased Dr. Michael Hurd
Posted on April 14, 2024 – Reason # 5,632 as to why Biden, Obama, Democrats and RINOs in power should all be arrested, tried and convicted:
Under their watch, and with their authorization, America deliberately financed and armed the fanatical country that now Israel (and probably America) must go to war with to defeat.
As @MorganOrtagus wrote on Twitter/X:
“Reminder: Biden allowed the UN sanctions on Iran’s drones and ballistic missiles to expire less than six months ago.
The very same drones and missiles en route to Israel right now.”
It’s going beyond incompetence, and even beyond treason. Biden, Obama and all the others are war criminals.
[Ed.:
Invade Rafah Now! By Walter E. Block
The heroic Prime Minister Netanyahu has set a date for the invasion of Rafah. In doing so, he is cocking a snook against the Biden Administration of the US and against much of the rest of the world. If this is not courageous, nothing is courageous.
04-11-2024 – All literary people have heard of “Waiting for Godot.” (Don’t ask me; I’m not a literary man.)
All men of good will are now waiting, with bated breath, for Rafah. We have been waiting for Rafah for quite some time now. What is meant by “Waiting for Rafah?” It means we are waiting for the IDF to smash into this city, the last powerful redoubt of Hamas, located in Rafah, in the south of Gaza. There, waiting like rats in a trap, are some four battalions of Hamas, comprised of about 1000 terrorists, for a total of roughly 4000 of these scum. If they stay as intact as they now are, if Israel can be persuaded to leave them in situ, they will remain a serious threat to engage in yet another atrocity of the October 7, 2033 level. It is thus imperative that they be completely neutralized.
Why is Netanyahu waiting to attack and pulverize them? The IDF is way more than a match for these murderous scoundrels. One reason is that there are some one million civilian Gazans also located in that metropolis. An all-out invasion would spell the deaths of many of them, at least some of whom are innocent. The Biden Administration of the United States (with friends like these who needs enemies?) is adamant that no such offensive take place; if it does, dire threats will endanger Israel at the hands of its erstwhile ally. Egypt is adamant that the women and children in this beleaguered city not be allowed into the Sinai Peninsula under any circumstance. The usual whiners in Europe, and, to be fair, all around the world, are equally determined to turn Israel into a pariah state if it proceeds with its self-defense in this manner. The United Nations, as is its wont, is engaging in apoplexy at the prospect that Israel will invade, capture its hostages, and end this war.
The US has not won a war in the last 80 years. Sorry, Grenada just does not count. And yet the administration of this country has had the effrontery to advise Israel on the best practices to conduct hostilities. Anthony Blinken has visited this country on numerous occasions, forbidding this, demanding that, and making a general pain in the neck of himself. Has America no shame?
US “ironclad” support for Israel means “we won’t let you fight back.” Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, April 14, 2024 – President Biden loves to use the word “ironclad” in describing US support for Israel’s security.
He used that term while campaigning in 2019, saying that his administration would “[sustain] our ironclad commitments to Israel’s security regardless of how much you may disagree with its current leader.”
He’s said it again in 2021, 2022, 2023 last week and yesterday.
I’ve just spoken with Prime Minister Netanyahu to reaffirm America’s ironclad commitment to the security of Israel. I told him that Israel demonstrated a remarkable capacity to defend against and defeat even unprecedented attacks – sending a clear message to its foes that they cannot effectively threaten the security of Israel.
While the rhetoric has been similar during the Obama and Biden administrations, both the words and US actions have indicated that Israel may only employ tools and policies to defend Israeli civilians from attack – but to do nothing beyond that.
US policy towards Israel is to keep the Jewish state – within the 1949 armistice lines – in a hermetic bubble of fences, walls and air defenses.
The problem with this policy is that it is unsustainable. It allows Israel’s enemies to keep attacking, day after day, hoping to find the weak spots in Israel’s defense, and Israel cannot do anything to stop those attempts.
So we see things like October 7. Or Hezbollah’s successful emptying out the northern part of Israel because there is no magic “Iron Dome” type defense against someone using anti-tank rockets on civilian communities. Or Gaza terror groups attempting to overwhelm Iron Dome itself because it is not 100% effective.
The US is telling Israel to sit back and accept being attacked forever, and if its defenses fail, that’s a shame, but be very careful not to respond in a way that provokes Israel’s sworn enemies to escalate further.
Because, US policy implies, then they would be justified.
On Friday, a US official told Al Arabiya that “The United States will take part in the response to the Iranian response, if Tehran escalates the situation inappropriately.” This means that the US would help shoot down drones and missiles, as it does when Houthis are shooting at Israel – but nothing more.
Are the Houthis being deterred? Is Hezbollah? Is Iran?
[E. Rowell: Independent Israeli Journalist, Amir Tsarfati, wrote today, “It is clear this morning that the Iranian attack was coordinated with the American administration. It is likely that the Iranians gave a warning that they were going to attack, and the US assured them that it would not allow an Israeli response. The Biden administration, in the most monstrous way, continues to see Iran as an asset, with which agreements must be reached.”]
CHAPTER 14: Changing Hearts and Minds by Linda Goudsmit
Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [forthcoming release May 2024]
April 14, 2024 – Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.
On October 30, 2008, in Columbia, Missouri, candidate Barack Hussein Obama declared to an unsuspecting public, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America.” It was the promise of a radical leftist to change the culture of America and move the nation from constitutional republic to socialism. John Dewey’s destruction of American minds through progressive education had a partner in Obama and the Culture War president Obama unleashed on America.
To move our constitutional republic to socialism and beyond, globalism’s leftist progressive movement adopted the binary victim/oppressor social structure of cultural Marxism. Classical Marxism identifies the oppressors as the bourgeoisie (owners of production) who exploit the proletariat (workers). The metric of classical Marxism is economics. Cultural Marxism re-labels the participants and defines culture, not economics, as the metric of exploitation. It is one species of the genus Marxism as described by James Lindsay in Chapter 11. In cultural Marxism, white males are the identified oppressors and everyone else is their victim.
Both classical and cultural Marxism seek to replace the existing order with collectivism, each selling its own idealized form of a secular heaven on Earth. Today’s social justice warriors who sign onto this leftist lunacy are ignorant of history, arrogant, and too childish to examine the objective reality of the offer. Leftist ideologues actually believe the fantasy of a Marxist Utopia, and don’t realize that the paradise they advocate is the powerless state of infantile dependence, the opposite of individual freedom. When infantile dependence is advanced into adulthood, it awards the state total control.
[Ed.:
Netanyahu Responds to Backstabbing Biden & Schumer [6:04] By Avi Abelow
Mar 18, 2024 – President Biden and the Democrats don’t stop. Now they sent the highest ranking Jewish Democrat to throw Israel under the bus, from the Senate floor.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded publicly and begun interviews across US media basically calling out Biden, Schumer and the whole administration for turning their backs on us. This is a good beginning. We must have our leaders stand up for ourselves, with the truth, in response to the growing narrative of lies from the Biden administration.
Murder Most Foul: Many of the Hostages Have Been Murdered BY HUGH FITZGERALD
APR 12, 2024 10:00 AM – Hamas now says it cannot come up with even forty hostages, consisting of women, the elderly, and female soldiers, to be exchanged for what, at last count, was supposed to be 700 Palestinian prisoners, some of them now serving multiple life sentences for murdering Israelis. What does that mean? It means what everyone of sense has suspected all along. Hamas has been steadily murdering many, perhaps most, of the hostages. More on these murders most foul can be found here: “Report: US officials fear most of the hostages held by Hamas could be dead,” Times of Israel, April 11, 2024:
“US officials tell the Wall Street Journal that there are fears that most of the Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity could be dead.
The report comes amid talks to secure a hostage release deal and a truce, with some Hamas sources indicating that they are unable to provide 40 living hostages from the elderly, women and female soldiers that Israel is demanding.
It is believed that 129 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza. The IDF has confirmed the deaths of 34 of those still held by Hamas, citing intelligence and findings obtained by troops operating in Gaza.
How many of the 34 hostages confirmed dead by the IDF were murdered by Hamas? No one in his right mind believes that all, or most, died in Israeli airstrikes. Hamas committed mass murder of innocent civilians on October 7. Why wouldn’t it continue to murder the hostages for any number of reasons? Some Hamas members may have found the elderly Israelis required too much attention. Why not just eliminate them if they proved too much trouble to take care of? Perhaps some of the girls and women were insufficiently accommodating to the sexual demands of their captors. So why not kill a few, to make sure the others are obedient? And then what fun, after all, to every so often kill a few of the male IDF soldiers. What’s not to like?
Generating the “national will” to spend hundreds of billions and give up our civil and human rights on the altar of pandemic safety–here is how it was done MERYL NASS
Here’s the 25 year history of how this was foisted on us. And how the WHO has repeatedly failed upward over the past 20 years.
APR 13, 2024 – Clinton Begins the Phony Era of Pandemics and Bioterrorism
In November 1997 US Secretary of Defense William Cohen held up a 5 lb bag of Domino sugar in front of an army of cameras and told the world that if the bag contained anthrax it could wipe out NYC or Washington, DC.
That was not true, but it provided a fitting justification for the start of the DOD’s “biodefense” vaccine program, begining with mandatory anthrax vaccinations for soldiers in March 1998.
According to an NBC cover story,
“In April 1998, President Bill Clinton read a Richard Preston novel, “The Cobra Event,” about a biological attack on the U.S. using a lethal virus that spreads like the common cold.
“It scared the bejesus out of him,” recalls Kenneth Bernard, a now retired U.S. Public Health Service official who was then representing the U.S. in Geneva at the World Health Organization.”
The USG invested in a new smallpox vaccine, ACAM2000, based on the older Dryvax vaccine. The fact that it caused high rates of myocarditis (1 case in 175 doses administered according to CDC) has been ignored.
And the biodefense era began, supplying handsome contracts to those who promised remedies in the new wild west of biowarfare and infectious disease. Many of those who got the contracts had friends in high places, like FOB Ronald Perelman, who made a killing on a smallpox remedy (Tpoxx) that was eventually used as a monkeypox drug. Did it work? Who knows?
The 21st Century ushered in a well-coordinated push to generate fear about:
- a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic,
- jumps of deadly viruses from animals to humans (“spillover,” zoonoses and epizootics were the new terms to be mastered), and
- biologic warfare threats
The 2002-3 SARS outbreak and the hyped Avian influenza (bird flu) outbreak — both beginning shortly after the anthrax letters—were hyped to the max to generate fear of pandemics and biological warfare.
How many people did these infectious diseases kill in the US and around the world?
- The anthrax letters caused 5 human deaths, all in the US.
- SARS-1 caused under 800 deaths around the world. There were 27 US cases designated as SARS-1 and not a single US death.
- Avian flu is said to have caused 463 deaths total in the entire world over the past 20 years, according to the WHO. Only 2 Americans have been identified as having an illness associated with avian flu, and both were very minor. Not a single American has died from avian flu. The recent case of conjunctivitis is recovering.
The CDC and mainstream media claim that avian flu has killed over 100 million chickens. It has not. USDA rules have forced growers to cull over 100 million chickens. When one chicken has a positive PCR test for bird flu, every chicken in the chicken house (and sometimes all those on the farm) must be killed. Was that test even accurate? But expansive claims like these are what gets the public going, and putting up with incursions on their freedoms.
[Ed.:
The US, UN Are Funding Mass Illegal Immigration to US [AUDIO 55:51] DR NAOMI WOLF
APR 13, 2024 – Millions in our tax dollars support a three country staging area from
which illegal immigrants enter the US
Three-Country US- and UN-Funded Illegal Immigrant Staging Trail [VIDEO 58:50] DR NAOMI WOLF
APR 13, 2024 – The US State Dept and the UN Are Funding the Mass Importation of Illegal Immigrants to America
The untold story of Israel after October 7th Daniel Greenfield
Israel has come together to a remarkable extent. That’s not a story which interests the media, but it ought to interest us. Opinion.
Apr 12, 2024, 6:32 AM (GMT+3) – The story of what happened after Oct 7 has played out in the international media as a montage of bombs and rubble. (Or the protests of the small group of radical leftists beloved of Israeli media, ed.) And while Israel’s campaign against the Hamas perpetrators of the horrific massacres, rapes and kidnappings is an important part of the story, it is not the only one.
From the men who grabbed their guns and drove south in the hours after the attack began to the warehouses quickly set up to provide food and clothing for the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who were forced to leave their homes after the attacks from Gaza, inside Israel, the real story has been defined by a country coming together not only to fight, but to support each other.
In the month after the attacks, one survey estimated that the majority of Israeli Jews were volunteering in one form or another at everything from baking cookies for soldiers to standing guard at potential terrorist targets. With hundreds of thousands of soldiers mobilized and hundreds of thousands of people stranded, even the most ordinary things became a problem.
Like laundry.
