Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous to your contracts, they said, what the f*ck are you talking about? You insane Hollywood f*ck. So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 a month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, beat slower above 40 gigabytes of details. Calling all poker players, join us for the 18th annual Arizona State Poker Championship held at Talking Stick Resort. $1.5 million is up for grabs. Registration is now open for the August 15th through the 21st event. Mark your calendar and get in on the first of many satellites and earn your spot. Don't miss your chance to be part of the most thrilling poker tournament of the year. Visit us at talkingstickresort.com for scheduled events. Must be 21 to visit. Please gamble responsibly. From cozy breakfast nooks to formal dining areas, Ashley has versatile dining options, starting at just $4.99.99. And for a limited time only, you can receive a $250 mattress credit with the purchase of any six-piece bedroom set, floss gets 60 months, special financing on select and store purchases, made with your Ashley Advantage synchrony credit card. Shop and save today, only at Ashley, subject to credit approval, minimum monthly payments required, no minimum purchase required. See Ashley.com for details. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sunday Wire. This is episode 517. I'm your guest host, Brian McLean here. Streaming live from alternatecurrentradio.com, 21st centurywire.com. Also going out to x.com at Hesher Media. That'll be reposted by 21 Wire. We are also out there on Rumble and Rockfin today for the video stream. And on Spreaker, trying a slightly different setup today so that we can bring in Patrick Henningson. And we're gonna find out if it actually works or not. I've got two apps going at once here. So I'm hoping that the video stream will go out over the video. So if we got any listeners out there in the Discord, head on over to one of the video streams, which the link is in our Discord for all the different platforms there. But I need someone to just double verify that you can actually hear Patrick over the video streams. And if not, we can make a quick pivot and bring him into the other app here. But let's go ahead and try that out. Let's say hello to Patrick Henningson. Patrick Ray there. - Yeah, I'm here Hesher, can you hear me okay? - Yeah, I've got you great. And I'm currently hoping that everyone on the video streams can hear you too. I got a couple people out there listening. So once they get together with the stream here, we'll get a verification that everybody can hear you. But I know I've got you on the audio. Okay, excellent. Thank you, Fleety, thank you, Photon, thank you, Ruckus. Okay, so we're all set. We can hear you, Patrick. Welcome to the show, it's great to have you. - Yeah, it's great to be back. It's been a while. The last Sunday wire we did, I did was in the beginning of July, actually. So it's been a little while. Think Freddy Ponton was the guest on that. It was a video interview. And but I appreciate you filling in for me over these weeks in August and September as well. So it's you guys, Ewan Ruckus and Joseph and Basil and everybody. It's been great to see you guys stepping up there and keeping the streams alive and the news going and stuff. So thank you. I just want to say that straight off the bat. - Absolutely, yeah. A lot of people sounded off in the various chat rooms. Glad to hear you, myself as well. Happy to fill in while you're on a break here, man. But also very happy to have you today. Today is turning out to be kind of a big day. It looks like tensions and violence are escalating in the Middle East. We got violence happening in Lebanon, in Yemen and of course the ongoing violence in Gaza. So what's going on? It looks like Israel is going after Hezbollah big time here. - Yeah, I mean, well, I got a lot to say about it. But just from your vantage point there in America watching the media, what's your sort of just of, from your perspective, U.S. media perspective, maybe more and looking at the conservative media, what, how are you seeing this story? Like how would you sum it up? And then I'll get into some of the details and actually it'd be great if you could fire me a few questions that'll help get me, you know, kind of triggered a little bit into motion. But how is it on the U.S. side firstly? - Well, it, I think on Thursday or so earlier this week, one day we started seeing big explosions look like, you know, rocket attacks or J dams or something happening in southern Lebanon. And of course that was, you know, following the pager attacks, right? And, you know, the various communication devices exploding on people, which was a staggering story in and of itself, you know, but to go from that to where we're at now looks really bad. Looked like a lot of explosions were happening. Looked like we had a couple of more than a handful of Hezbollah people, high ups in Hezbollah killed and a lot of saber rattling about Iran. And yeah, it looks like we've seen military forces, American military forces deployed into various regions. So, and then as far as the, you know, sort of the mainstream conservative accounts and analyses that we've seen. A lot of strange early victory laps, you know, like, oh, this is, this is why this is so great. Seeing a lot of pundits and analysts out there talking about how this is just such a wonderful thing. You know, these Hezbollah commanders have been murdered. So, but not a lot about like what actually happens next. And what to expect. It's almost like in conservative media here, we're just getting the talking points that yeah, bombs are falling, they're falling on the right people. Well targeted precision strikes, all this stuff, you know, and no sort of, you know, we'll wait a minute. What does this lead to? And this morning I saw that Hezbollah has, you know, basically said, yeah, we're at war now. And this is, this is gonna go big. - Yeah, it's really a difficult story to talk about. To a lot of people who aren't, you know, familiar with the Middle East, who aren't, haven't been following the story. I guess for a lot of people in the West, like when October 7th happened, many people really didn't have any kind of a background on, you know, the Israel-Palestine story and much less the, you know, the Gaza-Israel and the Gaza-Palestine story and that piece of it. So a lot of people just have to go off the sort of two or three line narrative on it. And what Israel and the United States have done successfully is basically take that oversimplified narrative that they used to basically justify some of the worst crimes against humanity atrocities that we've ever seen, at least in the modern era. But I think probably ever, they've managed to justify that under the narrative that Israel was hitting terrorists, basically. So that sort of justified any, you know, targeting of hospitals, schools, mosques, many Christian churches as well, ancient churches as well, U.N. shelters, U.N. facilities, the halting of, you know, aid, food aid and into Gaza, all of these things are, you know, contravening international law, Geneva conventions, every single U.N. resolution. Since the U.N. was founded, all of these things fall foul of all of those international institutions and treaties and agreements, but it's all justified under the sort of guise of the, you know, this Israel's war on terror. So ergo, it's, United States is war on terror. It's Britain's war on terror, it's the EU's. So it's the U.S. Britain and the EU and Israel versus the terrorists. So this justifies any level of military support, collateral damage, and they've successfully shifted that exact template to Lebanon to portray, as they did with Hamas, Hamas wouldn't exist if not for the Israeli occupation, that's pure and simple. And in fact, Hamas was recognized, is still recognized legally under international law as an armed resistance movement, R.E. struggle as well. But the problem is it's been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States government, by the British government and certain EU governments, not all, I think, but most. And so that's the West, Canada, Australia, that's the international community quote unquote, plus a few other allies thrown in there. And they've done the same with Hezbollah. It's like Hamas, it is an indigenous armed resistance and indigenous militia, which has been classified as a terrorist organization. Ergo, any amount of collateral damage, dead civilians, anything, is seemingly justified in a rhetorical sense, not by international law. So what Israel's done is basically justify a destroy an entire city block and many other buildings and villages in southern Lebanon, but specifically in Beirut two days ago, is what we're mainly talking about. And how many hundreds of civilians, it's nobody knows for sure, but there have died many, many injured. But that's supposedly justified in the eyes of Israel, the US, the UK, and the EU. Not all the EU, I don't believe France, if I'm not mistaken, France and some other European countries haven't designated Hezbollah as a quote terrorist organization. So, but the problem is they're in the parliament, they're in government. It's a legitimate political party in Lebanon. And the armed resistance wing of it is a direct result of Israel occupying, militarily occupying and terrorizing South Lebanon for many, many years. Like Hamas, Hezbollah would not exist if not for Israeli, illegal Israeli occupation and the violence that it brought upon the indigenous population there. So it's a similar type of story. So Israel's decided to do a big bold move to kill the leadership of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General, of the organization, the movement, based in Lebanon. And contrary to the narrative, it's not an Iranian proxy. It is in fact an ally of Iran and it has its own command structure, it does its own operations, it makes its own decisions. But, and again, one of the reasons it exists is because the Lebanese army, Lebanon has a military, but because the United States dictates what that military can and can't have, it is not allowed to have any airplanes and no anti-aircraft defense. So the US specifically has leaned on Lebanon and forbids it to have any capabilities to actually defend itself. And that's because Israel uses Lebanon and Lebanese airspace to attack Syria. It reserves the right to do over flights, over Lebanon, to bomb and attack Syria for any reason that it wishes, even though that itself is in controversial international law. So that's one of the main problems. So Hezbollah exists again because the Lebanese army, because of the United States. Otherwise Israel probably still be occupying South Lebanon. It was kicked out for good in 2006, but still retains Lebanese territory. So Israel still occupies parts of South Lebanon. Not as much as it did before it's war with Hezbollah in 2006. And so now we're at this point, Israel's much stronger, I think militarily than it was in '06. The technology is much greater. You have these bunker buster bombs which had dropped on Beirut. And they've killed the Secretary General and many of the top leadership all in one fill swoop. And a lot of people are speculating as to why this has happened. And there's different people saying different things on this. There's a lot of chatter and on Twitter basically saying, "Oh, the reason they killed Nastrallah and the reason Hezbollah is all but defeated right now is because Iran did not strike back after the Hamas leader Hania in Iran was assassinated by Israel over a month ago." So because of that, that's why they decided, because Iran did showed weakness and Hezbollah did not retaliate. This is why Israel felt emboldened to make this move and it's successful. But this is actually a completely fallacious argument. First of all, Hezbollah did retaliate and had ongoing operations back and forth between itself and the IDF. Okay, so that puts that side to rest. And Iran, it's personally, and if you just look at, to compare the capabilities of the United States in Iran or the Israel and Iran, the US and Israel combined have much, I mean, it's overwhelming force. It could really destroy Iran. So Iran has more to lose in that sort of exchange. These are two nuclear powers. Israel and the United States, Iran is not a nuclear power. And they're outgunned on every conceivable level, other than they may have more in terms of missiles, I think, in terms of stock and how much of that they could use before a nuclear weapon was dropped on Iran somewhere. That's a calculation that the Iranian government has to make, which is a very serious calculation. There's a lot of armchair quarterbacks and people posing as military experts and war hawks on social media who just want to see a war. And so there's a lot of divisive, I think, rhetoric going on right now of people who are basically trying to set, they've used this tragedy to set Iran against Syria or to set Hezbollah against Iran or Hamas against Iran or whatever. So this is what Israel and the United States are attempting to do. You see it in the media, UK media as well. They're having people on for interviews like Dr. Miranda. We have a clip which will pull up shortly, I think. It's really excellent by Mohammed Miranda. - Sorry. - Go ahead. But so the question hasher is why? Why did Israel choose to strike now? And we weren't a hundred percent. - This is very different. They have huge. - We, sorry, we weren't. Yeah, so the question is why would Israel choose to strike now? And we weren't a hundred percent sure, but then an Israeli official basically leaked it out or blurbed it out earlier today. And what it was was there were negotiations between Israel and Hezbollah. And Hezbollah had agreed to a format of some kind of a deal, to have some kind of a ceasefire. And they agreed to a longstanding demand by Israel to pull back to the Latani River. This is in southern Lebanon, close to the sort of recognized border of Israel in Lebanon, not recognized by everybody, but recognized at least by the West. But the condition was that Israel accepts a ceasefire in Gaza. And Israel rejected the second part of that proposal by Hezbollah. And you could say by extension, Iran and other countries may have been involved in the back room on that negotiation. But that's the main point. Israel was not willing to end the war on the people of Gaza. That was the main point. So they decided right then and there, there was no reason to have any negotiations with Hezbollah anymore, and that they would kill Hassan Nasrallah and any other leadership, that they could with dropping, I think, I don't know how many bombs in total 58 bunker, including eight bunker busters, if I'm not mistaken, to basically take out the whole city block and then some. And so what they've done here is they've always wanted to go to the Latani River and retake this land. And they'll be able to launch a ground invasion now and they'll probably use the momentum of this to launch a ground invasion very soon. So they're leveraging this now. And then so they're going to basically take that offer that Hezbollah gave them and take what they want without giving Hezbollah anything that it wants or that the Palestinians want for that matter. Obviously the people of Gaza want to stop the 24/7 bombing of refugee camps, tents, women and children, which Israel's been doing for the last year, they'd love to see that stop. But sadly, that doesn't look like that's going to happen. That kind of shows you the barbarism kind of of what we're dealing with here. And then that brings us back to that question of why, what's Iran going to do? Is Hezbollah really a proxy? If Iran, how come Iran didn't intervene earlier after the Hamas leader was assassinated in Tehran, et cetera? So I think Dr. Miranda, old friend of the show as well, he's been on our program a number of times, you know him well, Hesher. And he's most famously made a huge viral splash on Pierce Morgan's shows by schooling Pierce Morgan over the last couple of months over the Gaza crisis. But we do have a clip from that. I don't know if you've got that handy, maybe we could listen to his explanation. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let's take a listen. - There's numbers of people ready for war with sophisticated weapons, missiles that are very well protected. This is not Beirut. So if Israelis think that they're going to walk into Lebanon, I think they're going to be beaten badly. Hezbollah is-- - Right, but what is Iran going to do? I'm sorry to interrupt. It's just a bit of a delay on the line. What will Iran do to help? You know, why has there not been a response, a missile response from Hezbollah yet? - I think in general, from the very beginning, what happened was that Hezbollah actually entered the battle in order to defend Gaza, to draw forces, Israeli forces away from Gaza to help the resistance and also to help keep kids alive in Gaza. So Hezbollah took a voluntary decision. They made a sacrifice and they lost many people during the last year but effectively drew away half the Israeli army during this year. And obviously they were very effective and that's why Israelis are now seeking revenge. But Hezbollah has from the very beginning and the same is true with Iran, the same is true with the axis of resistance, is that they don't want to be the first that escalates because they want the global South and the international community, forget the West. The West is pro-Israel, pro-ethno-supremism, pro-racism, they're useless. But the rest of the international community sides with Iran. We saw this brutal monster Netanyahu at the UN General, when he was giving his speech at the General Assembly, how the global South walked out. So Iran and the Hezbollah want to keep him isolated and then escalate so that everyone sees that this retaliation is legitimate. - Mahamma Murandi, we must leave it there. Thank you very much indeed for your time. - Interesting. - Isn't it just, so did you see how quickly they wanted to cut him off at the end? Because he was basically making a very sober and logical rational case and shows you how rational the Iranians are. They're not hot under the collar like Israel is and they're very judicious and careful about the decisions they make. You know, what's a retaliation going to me in terms of civilian lives? These are all calculations that all of the countries that the US and its allies are constantly demonizing like Russia, Iran and others. They actually care about avoiding civilian casualties and it's pretty clear in all of their strategy. Israel doesn't care. It doesn't care because it has carte blanche to basically work outside of any human rights principles outside of international law, outside of the rules of war or whatever. They'll never be held to account and they know it. They get a free pass to basically, you know, rape, pillage and plunder as they wish. And they know that. They've gotten away a year now. The full numbers on Gaza now, according to a number of journals and reports that are counting excess deaths. They're counting excess deaths plus people who are likely to die as a result of the deprivation, the starvation, the blocking of food and aid, plus the injuries and so forth, health time bomb and they're not having any medical system. That the numbers, by the end first, they're estimated at something like, I think it was 160,000 and it's gone up now to, it will be in the end, 600,000. 600,000 will have died as a result of what Israel's done to Gaza, just Gaza alone. And I think probably two or 300,000 have already basically been ethnically cleansed into Egypt to bought their way through into Egypt. That's another story in itself. But so this is, that's what's interesting about this because what I ran, the whole concept of red lines, actually, you probably heard this with a lot in politics, ever since Obama's red lines, that if someone crosses the red line, then they're gonna be emboldened and keep crossing it. And they'll say that Israel crossed all these red lines set by Hezbollah or Iran and so forth. And the whole point of red lines is, if you actually study war in game theory, and not everybody has, I'm lucky enough to have, been able to have some academic training in game theory, especially to do with sanctions, because of my postgraduate work. So I actually understand the principles and concepts behind it, and you can, like Russia is the same thing. Russia set many red lines from 2007. At the Bucharest summit, I think, or Budapest summit, I think it was Budapest. And I think it was 2007. He gave a speech basically saying, NATO, you know, don't go any further east, otherwise, if you go for Georgia and Ukraine, there's gonna be trouble. And of course, NATO thumbed their noses at them. I think it was a defense summit. Yeah, it was the European defense, might've been Munich. I don't know, my memory's a little foggy. But basically, if you cross those red lines, you know, there's going to be hell to pay. And so they crossed that red line. NATO crossed another red line. Then the Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014. That was another red line which was crossed. And then on and on it goes. And NATO's arming and training, Ukrainian soldiers. And then shelling the citizens of Donetsk and Lugansk. Eight years go by, red line, red line, red line, red line one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. And everyone's saying, ah, Putin's not going to do anything, so we'll just keep going. So they planned a tech offensive against Dombas in January, December, January, in January 2022. And then Russia finally acted on the red lines. So that's the point of red lines. You can keep crossing them. And what Miranda, Dr. Miranda said, which is what people should really pay attention to, is that's the same by the time all those red lines are crossed, the person crossing them has to calculate what price they might pay by crossing those red lines in the future. Because there's infinite amount of red lines until a peace treaty is signed, or surrender agreement is signed, or there's a decisive military defeat. That's when the red lines stop, otherwise they can go on infinitely. And so what did they do? Russia basically moved in. And the West went nuts, sanctioned them a thousand different ways. And now you have the precipice of World War III, a nuclear exchange possibly between the West and Russia. And that's because Russia decided they're going to finally enforce that red line. And the same could happen with Iran or its allies, with Israel. It could be in a year. It could be next week. It could be in five years. It doesn't matter. Miranda said it, that they don't want to be the first. No one in the axis of resistance, Iran, Hezbollah, or anybody, doesn't want to be the first to escalate. They always want to be reacting so that they can get the global south, the rest of the world on their side to see it as a justified action. So some people might say, oh, that's weakness. Oh, that's wrong. Well, the reality is those are normative international actors that are trying to act within international law. They're trying. Israel and the US are not trying. And anybody who says that this was an Israeli attack and not a US-Israeli attack is really lying because those were all US bombs. The US was in position, had AWACs in position. It was as much a part of that strike on Beirut, as Israel was. The only difference is they weren't flying the planes. And Kamala Harris releases this crazy statement on Twitter, basically saying that Hassan Nasrallah was a terrorist with American blood on his hands. What American blood did Hassan Nasrallah have on his hands? That's the question. And I'm not sure what she's actually talking about there. She might be referring to a US contractor in Iraq. But that was Qatib Hezbollah, which is an Iraqi militia, part of the PMUs in Iraq, that started that chain of events that ended in the assassination of Qasem Sulemani and Abu Mari Mahindas. And then the Iran retaliated and smashed to US bases in January 2020 before COVID. So maybe she's referring to that. So the reality is Hezbollah saved, in some ways, saved Christianity, and definitely in Syria, by fighting defeating ISIS. So all of the people that fought ISIS on the ground, Hezbollah, Syrian army, the Hashdoshabi, the PMUs in Iraq, the Quds forces led by Sulemani, they all fought ISIS and fought Al-Qaeda in Syrian Iraq. But those are all the enemies of Israel and the US. So isn't that interesting how the lines are drawn? Is anybody who actually fought ISIS on the ground is an enemy of Israel in the US, you see? And a lot of people argue, and it's come out, I think you have a clip, you have an image, you might throw on screen of Israel providing aid to the so-called rebels, Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria. That was recently formally admitted by an Israeli official. I think that was a piece in Haaretz in the Israeli press. But I mean, so it's amazing, I think, how they're-- it's so easy to just to say, it's a terrorist group. But if you actually look at the facts and the dynamics and who was fighting who, especially over the last 10 years in the region, it's pretty clear who were the, let's say, belligerents, the agitators, and who were basically putting out actual fires. And so that's quite interesting. And I went to one of those Christian communities that was rescued by Hezbollah in Syria. And they have nothing but praise and graciousness and thanks for the role that they played in Syria, putting down all the Western armed and Western backed radical militants, ISIS affiliates, Al-Qaeda affiliates, and so forth. Hezbollah did that, and did that completely legally. It wasn't terrorism. But a lot of people say the US is managing ISIS currently in Northeastern Syria. They're allowing them to move about and keeping them in play for the next wave of, let's say, attacks on Syria, which is likely to come after what we've seen here this week. That's what I think was probably coming next, is it could be in soon, it could be next spring, who knows. But the US and Israel would like to up their attacks, possibly target these president of Syria. That would be next on the list. There may be another Iranian president that they might want to assassinate, and this just keeps going on and on. There's just going to be continuous war in the region. And there's other reasons for that. We can talk about that. But I don't know if you have any feelings or anything I've said, no, just no. Just getting back to that concept of red lines, I mean, my goodness, how long does the world think that NATO, America, Israel can do this? It's like you said, it's been red line after red line, after red line, to the point where now we're just dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into aid in Ukraine. My co-host here in the boiler room, lovely spore, just sent me a news break that she got today on a very mainstream app, and it's talking about how Russia may have more nuclear warheads than NATO has altogether. And we've been kind of seeing this rise in nuclear warfare propaganda going around. For example, I think it was last year, a year before. The New York City, I don't remember the name of the organization, but one of the New York City things put out this piece about what to do in case of a nuclear warhead dropping in the area. And it's just like, what is going on here? I mean, it feels like we go all the way back to my dawn. It's like, man, that was almost 10 years ago now, wasn't it? And it's crazy to think that they're just going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing, poking nuclear powers, messing, just committing all these crimes across the war crimes across all the Middle East, especially after the whole legacy of post 9/11 and their attempts at realizing their PNAC plans. So it's just like the boldness of what they're doing, it just feels like they're trying to create a situation that none of us are going to be able to control or get out of or complain about. But the fact that they took out like a whole quarter mile with 50 plus 2,000 pound bombs and cruise missiles, I mean, who knows what they threw in there? But it looked just like the whole place was leveled. And of course, we've been escalating the types of weapons that were exporting to other countries to now to the tune of last year, it was tanks. And this year, it's F-16. So it's just like, it's hard for me to see how this could end any other way than horribly. Yeah, I mean, you hear this a lot. This is sort of the Piers Morgan kind of base sort of simpleton like geopolitics argument. I won't even say geopolitics 101 because it's basically junior high level thinking. But unfortunately, that passes for discourse on mainstream media for people like Piers Morgan. He says, well, Putin, they've drawn red lines. And Putin, the Russians have drawn red lines. And Putin's allowed them to cross. He's just bluffing. He's just bluffing. He's just bluffing. So basically, you have your mainstream media, your politicians wagging the finger at Russia, saying that they're just bluffing, they're just bluffing. And at what point does the pressure build in the West to use a tactical nuke in Russia or on the border with Ukraine or something, or in Dombas? Because they believe that Russia is just bluffing. So I mean, even if we don't get to the action stage of that exchange, and let's just say we're just in the conversation stage, with the discourse, the rhetorical stage, that's way too far. It's a rhetorical stage. When you're making accusations about nuclear bluffing, which is what I see now, it's common, especially with some of these sociopaths, like John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, and some of these relics. They're still running around, hoping to get World War Three on before they are cycled out of politics, if we're lucky enough anyway. And you see this on social media. We see this in the punditry class. And you see it-- you start seeing it at the NATO level. It's really kind of disturbing. And the same is true with the Middle East. You say, oh, well, Iran, they're just bluffing. You can hit them with anything. And you don't know once you start triggering these sort of exchanges where it's going to end. And it will ultimately end, quite possibly, in somebody using a nuclear weapon, whether that's the US, Israel, or Russia. And what it's really doing, as well, is giving Iran an incentive to develop one. And they do have the capability to develop one and very quickly. And who knows? They might have already developed it, especially with what's been going on in the last 12 months. Because it's now in their interest to, quote, defend themselves to develop that capability, whereas before, maybe that wasn't the case. But it's a different game now. And that makes things more dangerous for everybody, obviously. We'd all like to avoid that. Iranians would like to avoid that. Everyone in the Middle East would like to avoid that. Everybody in the world, I think anybody saying would like to avoid that. But the problem is we have a minority of insane people in media and politics, especially. And plenty on social media. That's for sure. But they're not thinking sanely or rationally. Everybody is popping off. Everybody is trying to top the next person to see who is more sort of extreme. And I'm talking about in the West, OK? You can see what it's like with Israel. So it's beyond, I think, dangerous at this point. I think we're really probably going to see something really, really tragic happen that could pull the world into a spiral that it will not be able to get out of unscathed. OK, that's what's at stake right now. And the entire international system that we constructed after the Second World War is basically now falling apart much the way that the post-World War I, League of Nations, fell apart in the mid-1930s, OK? Because they weren't able to-- not only were they weren't able to enforce anything, but just the will wasn't there to do anything about some of the most serious problems that the world was facing. I think the main crisis at that time was Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. So it could do nothing to stop that and couldn't really make any impact. And then by the time the German war machine was built up and inertia had already set in the Second World War, the League of Nations was toast. And what they built after the war was the United Nations. And that was meant to avoid things like, first and foremost, genocide. So the fact that all the European countries, the ones who were eviscerated during the Second World War, that they were the first to rally behind Israel and to give full backing to what is quite obviously a genocide in the most violent of genocides, tells you two things. It tells you not only is the post-World War II liberal world order dysfunctional and failing, it shows you that if that's the defining principles of Western Europe after the Second World War, then that means European civilization is a failure. It's an abject failure. And I can throw the United States and Canada into that in Australia as well. They failed. They failed in the most dramatic way. Because they can't even uphold even the most basic obvious principles that all these international institutions and their own governments and laws and treaties, which they all signed, binding treaties, they can't even uphold the basic tenets of any of that. And that means that Europe is basically degrading into what it was before, which is a barbaric, tribal, murderous sort of blob that is going from one call and massacre to another, which is basically what it did for a thousand years. So have they learned anything from World War I and World War II? No, they haven't. Germany is backing genocidal Israel, if you can believe that. I mean, it's beyond comprehension. How obvious it is, but how many people are so gung-ho and they don't see any problem with anything that's happening right now, be it the Ukraine-Russia theater or what Israel is doing by waging war against pretty much all of its neighbors simultaneously, itself appearing to be on some kind of a conquest or a death wish, it's hard to see which is which at this point. Yeah, and thinking back to World War II, it's like, what does the winner of a war, right? The winners of wars, yes, they get to write the history books and all that, but generally speaking, what is one is land, right? And after World War II, we didn't see any European countries gain any land, we didn't see America gain any land, but we did see one piece of land get gained by one group of people, and then Germany itself get partitioned into a communist state divided by a wall there. So it really makes you wonder who actually won World War II if it's about land acquisition. Well, I think, yeah, and in the redrawing of those borders, obviously, so the seeds of future conflict. And that's pretty obvious with Europe, Eastern Europe, that you see in this expressed in the Polish designs and attitudes vis-a-vis Ukraine, Ukraine itself being a sort of a new state, if you will, a new concept of a country. They talk about it like it's been there forever. It hasn't. It's really a relic of the Soviet Union and Soviet mapmaking and border drawing, including Crimea, including the Dombas, all of it. So the Middle East is even more chronic because it is really a disaster that was made by the British and the French after World War I in the Sykes-Pico agreement, where they drew all of these countries that didn't basically make any sense. The intention of the British and the French were they themselves had a rival, but then the emergence of oil was coming on the scene in that region. So European powers, the United States, the major Western powers, wanted to control and be able to manage that. But they had to divide the Arabs into lots of different small enclaves so that they couldn't be united. And so that's what they did with Syria and Lebanon, very cleverly, in Iraq. And then later you could see the US and its allies, Israel, building up the Kurds to try to further subdivide Iraq and Syria is currently doing now. And you see this-- well, Palestine's a good example. And the creation of the state of Israel was really the cherry on top of that post-colonial exercise by implanting a new colonial project, which was called Israel after the Second World War. And by anyone's measure, I don't know who could call it a success at this point. It's been a disaster for the region. If you look at the amount of people that have been killed, that includes the Iraq War, which was really something Israel lobbied hard for, to successive US governments. And they got their wish at the end. And 9/11 kind of sealed the deal on that. That's another discussion, of course, that one could have. That's an interesting topic in itself. But it's been a disaster. And now you can see that disaster is about to unfold to galactic levels, basically. And you have-- Israel is basically occupying illegally Lebanese land, Syrian land, and, of course, Palestine. And if they had it their way, they'd take a chunk of the Sinai again in Egypt. And I don't know if you'll flash this up on screen. There's an article about Lebanon that already, just this week, the Israeli press is saying, is Lebanon part of Israel's promised land, its biblical promised land? I sent a screenshot of that earlier. I don't know if you got it or not. But it's interesting, just like clockwork, they're starting to create a case, justify basically occupying Lebanese land. And that's really interesting. That leads to another conversation, which is the Greater Israel Project. So you put the Greater Israel Project. That's the map up on screen that we have. And this is being openly talked about now by these aren't like fringe extremists. These are people that are part of Netanyahu's political ruling coalition. And how are they going to make the Greater Israel Project work? You need to get rid of people from those areas, from those cities, from those regions. How do you do that? You do what they did in Gaza. You do what they're doing in South Lebanon. And yeah, the article is Lebanon part of Israel's promised land, or promised territory. I mean, it's just unbelievable. But this is the sort of revisionist history that is accepted. And there's nobody calling it out. There's nobody in the US saying this is kind of ridiculous. And by the way, it completely violates all of the principles of international law. I mean, they're having a go at Russia over the Dombas situation in Crimea, but not a word of condemnation about something which arguably is much worse, which is what we're looking at Israel attempting to do. And then there's this other article that's, again, another admission major op-ed piece in the Israeli press about Gaza's genocide to basically saying ethnic cleansing, genocide, bombing, terrorizing the population to get rid of them, kill them. This is on the menu for Israel, for the IDF. This is a tactic that has been successful. And they're going to use it. The Israeli army general has a plan for Gaza, starvation, transfer, i.e. ethnic cleansing, and genocide. If you let someone do that for 12 months, and they don't even get so much as a slap on the wrist from these so-called powers that be at the UN Security Council et al, then that's pretty much giving them the green light to repeat that formula in Lebanon, in Syria, in Jordan, Iraq, wherever, and certainly in occupied Palestine. They've already done it. In the West Bank, they're in the process of doing it. I mean, this is just really beyond the pale. And the fact that nobody's stopping it, that people are actually many people in media and politics are up cheering for it, I don't think the average person finds this very palatable at all. I think the average person in America doesn't support this in Canada, in Australia. There's a lot of people that just don't understand it, so they'll just go with the propaganda lines. Terror is bad, is real good. But the people who actually have a few brain cells and a basic IQ, north of Haiti, can very quickly and easily work out just by reading a few UN resolutions and understanding international law that Israel's beyond the pale and that the US is backing this, arming it, and supporting it every step of the way. And it doesn't matter if the Democrats or the Republicans get into office, this election, Israel wins either way. And even if there was an independent candidate, like Robert F. Kennedy, Israel wins either way. The Israeli lobby have made sure that all those horses in the race are theirs. So you're not going to see any noticeable change in US foreign policy between Trump, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, or Robert F. Kennedy's junior if anyone believed that he actually had a chance to win, which he didn't. But he's a very, let's say, important spoiler. And he's now moved over to the Trump camp, basically. So again, Israel wins, the Israeli lobby wins. And that is concerning because if the reason-- and I'll round out my point here and come-- I want to hear what you have to say, Heshir. But the whole reason there is a resistance, what fuels the Iranian position, what fuels the Hezbollah position, what fuels the Iraqi position, what fuels the Yemeni position, answer Allah and Yemen, what fuels their position. I'll talk about Yemen in a minute. There's been big developments in the last 24 hours, by the way. Huge developments, I'll unleash those in a minute. But what fuels their position is this kind of total violation of human rights and human dignity and crimes against humanity. That is what fuels, and it's in their constitution, they say it in all their speeches. So it shouldn't be a surprise at this point that that is to be in their bonnet. It's not anti-Semitism. It is the injustice and the apartheid system, which Israel is running in occupied territories. And the fact that the US is backing it basically means that they're in the frame. The US is a party to those crimes against humanity, to that injustice, that evil as other people see it. So all you have to do is hold Israel to basic international laws, for Israel to be a regular normative international actor in the international community. That's all you have to do, but they won't do it. So you're always going to have this resistance. It's always going to be there. And this is going to be basically the undoing of the US-led post-World War II international order. And they're also doing it by using NATO as a cudgel to basically poke Russia and create some kind of a major World War III type exchange there. So it's kind of obvious what the solutions to the problem is. It's to de-escalate and have diplomacy and enforce international law, not just shouting, oh, terrorists, destroy them. And to hell, and anybody who opposes that is supporting terrorism. And you should be censored and whatever harassed by the state in the West because you can't go against the state of Israel, because there are friends, end of story, narrative closed, no more debate, that's it. And they can enforce the same thing with Ukraine. You support Ukraine, or you need to be anti-Russian, you need to support Ukraine, especially if there's a nuclear exchange or any major declaration of war, that's how it's going to be enforced. Forget about free speech. It will be absolutely and very quickly snuffed out in the West. If they do any formal declaration of war with Russia, that's the end of free speech. You will not be allowed to say in public, in private, on social media, what you really want. And they're trying to enforce the same thing by criticizing Israel, by painting it disingenuously and fallaciously as anti-Semitic speech or whatever hate speech, which is just patently ridiculous. The people trying to enforce that in the US, in the UK, in the EU, it is really sad that they would go to that extent to basically squash legitimate political discourse and criticism over something is consequential, is potentially World War III. We should all be allowed to discuss this because everybody has a stake in the outcome of this, especially in our so-called, quote, democracies. So I'll leave it there if your thoughts, Hesher, I mean, sorry about their rant. No, that's great. And it just, it kind of begs the question like, what's going on in the UN? Because it does appear that there are elements within the UN that want to see this stopped. I mean, I've seen videos of people walking out when Bibi Netanyahu takes the stage. And so it's kind of like, just building off what you said there, it makes me feel like, wow, this could stop so easily if the UN were to actually, you know, do what it was chartered to do. And if the US would stop sending money and missiles and bombs and, you know, AWACs and intel and spec ops and contractors into the area. I mean, this could stop quite easily, Israel's like, what the size of New Jersey or something. So it's just like, it's a little sad to feel like, wow, you know, we, all these nations went through World War II, created the UN, it's supposed to, you know, do all these things, stop genocide. And this is just not happening. So it's kind of like, it feels like if this were to really escalate into World War III or something like that, the UN's just gonna be, I mean, it's already, should be relegated to the dustbin along with NATO, probably, but I don't see how they can, you know, just sit there and allow this to happen. It makes sense that people are walking out when, you know, who gets up and talks, but I mean, is it not enough of the UN? Is it just that the UN is captured by NATO and Israel? I mean, it's, why do you think the UN is not able to be more effective? - Well, the UN is, this is a good question, Hasher. And it's a fundamental question. And I don't think, I think it needs to be debated more. And I think it needs to be discussed more. I'll preface this by saying, there's a lot of things about the UN I don't like. And during the whole COVID-Virago, with the sort of ridiculous fake global pandemic, to the UN was basically endorsing the WHO, almost giving it a mandate, to run global public health policy, basically. And, you know, that was, that is well, this is not unrelated actually to what we're talking about, because that was basically complete abrogation and cancellation of human rights globally, and was coordinated at a UN level, and with vaccine mandates, so-called public health policy lockdowns, all that sort of stuff, and did untold damage to the global economy. So that's one sort of area, the centralized management where the UN is dangerous, actually, and has basically violated the rights of everybody. It's the one thing the UN is supposed to prevent. It actually enabled, in that case. So with things like conflict, military conflict, wars of aggression, and so forth, the UN hasn't stopped any of them, not recently, and in the West, they always complain and cry that the Chinese and the Russians veto UN resolutions. Well, the US and the British veto everyone else's resolutions as well, so that's pretty much a stalemate at the UN Security Council level, and that's a special VIP club, and to be in that club, you need nuclear weapons, right? So that's who sits at the permanent seats of the Security Council, Russia, China, the United States, France, and the UK, with the EU kind of observing lingering in the background, okay, but these are nuclear powers. They're not the only nuclear powers, but they're the most dominant, I would say. India is not on that committee, maybe it should be. Pakistan, it's not, North Korea is not, those are other nuclear states. Israel doesn't declare it's nukes, of course, but we believe, many believe that they have them, and they have many of them, so that's another discussion. But the US couldn't be stopped with its rampage in Iraq, the US Security Council can stop that. They managed to basically do a side winding sort of sleight of hand, where they have in the past used the UN Security Council to get green lights, to do certain things that were in the US interest, and that will go alone in a sort of coalition of the willing, when it didn't get a mandate from the UN Security Council, i.e. Iraq, Libya, when Medvedev was president of Russia, they managed to hoodwink the Security Council to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, and then once that was achieved, NATO quickly did a little sleight of hand and turned that no-fly zone into a bombing zone, and the rest is history. Libya's a decapitated failed state, and there's many other examples. The UN Security Council should have intervened to stop Israel after, I would say, a couple of weeks, last October. That would have been the right thing to do. The United States should have hit the brakes. Past US presidents did put conditions on the supply of arms to Israel when it was using them indiscriminately against civilians. But for some reason, the current government in the US is not able to do that. And the reason it's not able to do that is because the money spigot has opened up for the free flow of cash into the pockets of US congressmen and senators on both sides of the aisle. There's very few that aren't taking the money. Like there's Thomas Massey and a handful of others that aren't taking that money. Republicans and Democrats, there's only a few on each side of the aisle. And I think that that purchase and capture of US politics, that's actually the big change that, I mean, it's arguably has been captured for many decades. Look at the work of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Wald and the famous book, The Lobby. Many documentaries, studies have been done on the Israeli capture of US policy right back to the 1960s. But it's increased the level of money going into US politics from the Israeli lobby is much, much more in the last couple of years. And I PAC, APAC, the famous APAC, infamous APAC, they've got into the direct funding game just in the last couple of years. And that's made a huge difference. So the US government is pretty much captured on both sides, both parties, both sides of the aisle. And that to me is the big difference 'cause what you're buying there isn't necessarily a cheerleading section. Although they have that when you can see when Netanyahu comes to basically deface the United States Congress in the way that Zelensky did and Juan Guaido, you can see the cheering section, but what it especially does is it buys the silence. It buys the silence of the US politicians. And if there's no, if both parties are agreeing to not talk about something, then the press, our mainstream press are so supine. I'm talking about the, you know, quislings at the New York Times and the Washington Post especially. And then you have the propagandists, which, you know, CNN is arguably an extension of Israel in terms of its propaganda. They're just gonna be silent on any war crimes. You make CNN might do one report out of 50 in order to meet some balanced standard, you know, for broadcast ethics or whatever. But the print media basically let Israel and the United States get away with something that no one's ever seen before in terms of slaughtering civilians after October 7th. And they did that on the back of a lot of lies too. So there's two things, money and an injection of propaganda and the things that even Benjamin Netanyahu got in front of the UN this week. And basically started talking about beheaded babies and beheaded men and just more beheadings, beheadings that didn't happen. And the US politicians, Kamala Harris, parrots these same lies. And they're never pulled up by the media. They're pulled up by us, by the gray zone, by electronic into fodder, among device conscientious people in the independent media, call it out and provide receipts, which we've done. But the mainstream media won't do that. It's quite unbelievable. And it's not insignificant 'cause those propaganda tropes are basically used as justification for all of the horrific policies that we've been forced to watch in the last 12 months. There's a clear line you can draw between those two things. So the injection of money, the pervasiveness, this 24/7 propaganda environment, the lies that spin around and become reality for the kind of subservient population and the media, the politicians. And this is why this is happening. This is a real sort of, I don't know, a degradation stage of U.S. culture, politics, and Western culture and politics as well. It's at all time low. And I think the evidence is right in front of us. The fact there's no pushback to this. And here we are, Hashra, we are all scratching our heads in junior high and high school. When we were all basically, people don't, if you have a state education in America or private education, you basically are guaranteed, you have to, I think it was at least eighth grade and part of high school was dedicated to the Holocaust in terms of history. I don't know if you had the same thing, Hashra, but it was a big part of our public education. So, and we were always scratching our heads and this question always came up. Why, how could something like this happen? Horror of horrors, how come so many Germans went along with Nazi Germany? Didn't they know that it was just completely insane, had cult-like aspects to it as well in the latter part of the Second World War? How could that be possible? How could these horrors happen? How could people accept them? Well, A, a lot of people didn't know they were happening. That's one. And two, there is a pervasive attitude that this is justified, this is the right thing to do and it requires a certain dehumanization of the target that you're basically killing, bombing, shooting. And by the way, the Germans weren't the only offenders in the Second World War. The Americans and the British were right alongside with them in terms of casualties, civilian casualties inflicted. No one suffered more than the Russians and the Soviets in the Second World War. Look at what happened to Japan at the end of the war as well, at the hands of the United States. That should also be part of the conversation. But in terms of the German conversation, they'll say, how could this happen? How could this be allowed to happen? And I think now that question, Haesher has finally been answered. We're now living through similar psychological, political propaganda environment, which we thought we were studying, growing up in the United States as an example. I don't know, you're handed over to you on this, what your experience is and how you're reading this situation. But I have had that realization already in the last 12 months. Yeah, it's really interesting because back in the '40s, it was relatively easy for people to not know exactly how bad it was, but there's no excuse for it now in 2024. The only reason it's happening is because that media capture and that political capture that you just described, it's like if our media here in the United States, like just imagine if the West had a media that was actually looking to report on what's happening in Ukraine with Russia and in Gaza with Israel, there would be no support for this. If all Americans were to see the same things that many of us see in our telegram accounts, just the horror and the death and all that, this would not be supported. There's just no way it would be supported. And this goes back to why we're seeing the push to label people as misdiss and mal-information spreaders, be it journalists, be it citizen bloggers, whatever. It's like there's no excuse for this to be accepted by the global population whatsoever. The only thing that makes it happen is the narrative management and that strict narrative management that is just getting more and more strict and taking us further and further away from a worldview and a context that actually represents reality is exactly this, the propaganda, the psychological operations, the long-term, atomization and tribalization and then the fake narratives built around it. I mean, we spent a good, what, three or four years focusing much of the time here on Sunday Wire on what was going on in Syria, what was happening in East Aleppo and it was a constant battle between us trying to figure out or reporting what's going on and then the mass media and all, I look at the white helmets. The white helmets is the perfect example, like most Americans look back on that and if they were just even, unfortunately, a lot of us weren't even casually paying attention to the news from the Middle East and during the worst parts of the Syrian conflict. But if you were, all you saw was stuff coming out from the white helmets, which is completely a propaganda wing running on British and American money for the most part. So it's like, to me, the worst part about this is that in the 40s, I can understand how they're able to pull the wool over everybody's eyes because people weren't, they didn't have that kind of access. But now it's like we have the ability to share video, to share stories, to share live feeds and then something like this happens and between, I don't know, gosh, it kind of started with the arrival of Trump, I guess and populism/nationalism, it's like, oh, we can't have that, we're gonna start clamping down. You can no longer monetize yourself if you're reporting outside of our shifting propaganda narrative and then COVID came along and it was like, oh, you definitely can't say anything outside of the narrative about that, at least for the first year and a half, two years. And then it was okay to make that political and all this. But now this happens and we're just seeing the screws get tightened down even further, as it pertains to freedom of speech, journalists being able to go into war zones, IDF killing journalists, Ukrainian government, jailing, torturing journalists, this kind of stuff. And of course, all of the new national and international rules about internet content. So it's extra painful to see this happen in 2024 when we have all of the tools and the minds and the brave folks that we would need to report accurately on these things and completely shift the public's perception of what's happening into something much more realistic when obviously they would not go along with it. So it's just like, it's such a sad, huge lost opportunity that we have all this technology, the ability to communicate in HD instantaneously from anywhere almost. And we're gonna watch this happen and free speech gets shut down. Journalism, at least mainstream journalism, just completely captured into propaganda machines now. So that's the worst part to me. Like I'm with you, I understand how it happened now, but it makes more sense that it happened pre-internet, pre-21st century internet and the fact that we're dealing with something, a level of barbarism that we haven't seen since World War II, perhaps, if this all continues, to see that happen in an age like this is very disheartening. - I'm glad you mentioned the white helmets. I thought that's really worth a comment, Hesher. You brought that up. That was the sort of fake NGO search and rescue outfit funded by the US government. And the EU, the British government during the Syrian, the height of the Syrian conflict, that would have been sort of 2013, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and then they basically, there was no where left for them to operate other than al-Qaeda held territory. So they basically had to go to Idlib, and then Israel exfiltrated the others into Israel, and then they were spread out among Western countries that sponsored the project, basically. But they put out heavily produced videos of supposed rescues against pulling civilians out of buildings being supposedly bombed by Assad, okay? And we caught them a number of fake videos. You've seen them in al-Qaeda garb at night, white helmets during the day, al-Qaeda by night. This has all been documented, okay? And just think of the level of fakery and the stuff that was being pumped out on CNN and the BBC and Sky News and Vice and all these sort of mainstream outlets that were pushing all this white helmet propaganda to basically back get Western voters behind air strikes and regime change in Syria and supporting the rebels, which were al-Qaeda and ISIS. And that was the whole point of that. And think of all the fakery. And then go look at the search and rescue videos from Gaza. Go look at them. I see them every day. They look totally different. They're not rehearsed. They're not running around in spotless jumpsuits with all this expensive gear. They're not literally doing fake, you know, pulling kids, faking, pulling kids out that have no dust on them, carrying a rag doll. All these videos that we put out and exposed that the white helmets, it's real. And you don't see any of those videos on mainstream media in the West. You don't see any of that. All you see is sirens in Israel and people fling for bomb shelters. Anytime, you know, there's a volley of, you know, Katyusha rockets from Hamas or Hezbollah. But literally they're fishing dead bodies, children out of the rubble in Gaza. They can't even get to them 'cause if they had half the equipment, the white helmets got. And the total funding for this fake white helmets outfit was easily in excess of 200 million. Way above that, actually. Where did all that money go? Imagine how far that would go in the last year in Gaza. Just imagine. But they can't even use fire trucks there because the ambulances are being targeted by Israel. You know, it's literally mule and cart and is one of the most dependable modes of transportation in Gaza, what's left of it. But the whole white helmets fraud should be completely put to rest after watching real bombing, real atrocities, real search and rescue on a shoestring in Gaza. I mean, that's proven that that was a hoax more than anything in the last 12 months. It's what we've seen. The reality of Gaza has shown what an absolute theatrical performance of Adjut Prop. The white helmets were, while they were still, you know, getting headlines or whatever. But that's an important point, I think, to make. Then the other thing, I think, that people need to pay close attention to is that there's a lot that we're not being told about what's actually going on right now in Israel, Palestine, in Lebanon. Because of the very poor Western mainstream media coverage, we're getting a lot from social media and there's some great accounts on X that are putting great content out and doing a great service to humanity and doing so. But there's, I don't have any confirmation on it, but there was, there are reports that Yemen fired Palestine, what they call Palestine missiles. This is one of their latest models of missiles. Answer Allah and Yemen. Hitting Israeli airport, at the same time Benjamin Netanyahu was landing last night. Now think about that for a moment. - Wow. - Have you seen anything of that? Any coverage of that? - No. Anywhere, no, you haven't, but it happened. It happened, it happened. Now the question is where Netanyahu hasn't given a victory speech after his big UN, just, I mean, I'm just saying this may be, I might be reading into something here that's not an issue, but after that big resounding, disgusting speech he gave at the UN General Assembly to an empty room, accusing everybody being anti-Semitic, and then at the same time watching the IDF while he was away in New York, seeing the IDF destroy and do their assassination and killing of people in Beirut. And Israel Society's doing a victory lap. Israeli Twitter is doing a victory lap. Where's Netanyahu? Where is this, he should be walking off the plane like he's walking off a yacht, okay? They should be like putting, you know, throwing flowers at this great victory. Where is he? Was he injured in this missile strike on the Israeli airport? What happened? Was he rattled? We don't know. Where is he? That's an interesting question. And I know that there's something to this because what we do see in the mainstream Western press is that somehow just after this Israel launched a strike on Yemen's Houdeta port, okay? And that's one of Enso Elaz main activity centers. That didn't happen for no reason. That's clearly a reaction to the Yemeni strikes of the last week. And is it a reaction, especially to the strike at the airport? Because they have been hitting Eliyat port in the south and also hitting targets in central Israel, even close to Jerusalem. So there's something going on there. I've posted that on our X Twitter feed. People can scroll and see those reports about Israel striking Houdeta and then Yemen's announcement. Now Yemen's not gonna make this announcement and give details, which they've done. They've given specific details. They've posted their statement in English from Ansar Allah. That's at Sabah Daw, YE. They've said what ballistic missile they used and what target it struck. Now, there's a media blackout on this. I am absolutely positive. And what I'm saying here to you and everybody has sure is this is, if there's any, anything in this, it's significant, okay? So just as Netanyahu's flights landing, there's this strike on Ben-Gurion or Haifa airports. I'm not sure about the details, but definitely Ben-Gurion airport. I don't know if there was a second airport, military airport. I'm not sure, but that's a big story. Again, potentially very important. No coverage at all in the Western media. So I'm just basically throwing that out there. Yeah, and I also noticed our friend over at DDGO Politics, who's been on the show, posted, Axios quoting Israeli officials. The attack in Yemen was coordinated with U.S. Central Command in a strike that is described as the strongest against Yemen. Tens of Israeli aircrafts targeted the port, the power station, oil storage facilities, and the Haudelah International Airport. According to Ansar Allah, media authority, we have taken precautions by emptying oil tanks in advance at Ras Isa and Hideo ports. So, I mean, there's another piece right there. You're not seeing that in Western media and American media at all, the coordination factor. I mean, that's really interesting to me, 'cause it's like, this is, you know, our assets. Like, these are military assets that are, you know, paid for with American money. I hate saying paid for with my tax dollars, 'cause they just print anything they want and destroy us no matter what. But, you know, the fact that the U.S. Central Command is most likely, according to Israeli officials, coordinating these attacks really is just like, you know, it really makes you wonder. And then, like you said, you know, when there's a counter-attack, it's like, we don't even hear about it, regardless of how serious it may be. - So, something did happen. And I think it happened on both ends, and we're only hearing about the response from Israel. And again, the U.S. is absolutely playing a pivotal role in that. The U.S. is at war. The U.S. is at war in the Middle East, and it's at war against Russia. It's actively involved in both a two-front war at the moment. And it doesn't matter if there's U.S. troops on, you know, officially on the ground. There are U.S. troops on the ground in both theaters. There's British troops on the ground in both theaters, but not officially. But it's in every, it's at war in everything but name, because Israel couldn't do anything. And neither could Ukraine without U.S. full package reconnaissance support, radar, targeting, ammunition, everything, even technical support on the ground. So, if that's not being at war, what is? And that's the other point here. It's really just a formality that whether there's officially U.S. troops engaged in that conflict anyway, and this fits neatly into, again, my thesis, my master's thesis on offshore balancing, is this is an extension of that policy, which is that United States wants to avoid deploying regular troops and will use its local partners to fight its wars, like it did with Saudi Arabia and the UAE against Yemen, like it's doing with Israel, against all of these, although Israel's kind of wagging the dog in the U.S. So it's a symbiotic, toxic relationship between the U.S. and Israel and other allies. But that's, and Ukraine, they're making the ultimate sacrifice, and Lindsey Graham and people like this are making jokes about it. They're saying, oh, well, the Ukrainians are, we're really happy that you're fighting those Russians and dying in droves, so that we don't have to come over and fight them. And what a crass statement that Zelensky made to the pint-sized dictator in Kiev. And that just kind of blows off and nobody has any real problems and no one's challenging them on that, not really, but it's such a crass and dark statement. But that's U.S. policy. Ever since Iraq and now pulled out Afghanistan, but they've been executing basically an offshore balancing strategy of arm's length warfare using local enforcers and partners really for the last, in a lot of cases, if you count Syria, and you can count NATO in that too. Libya, to a large degree, Norway and Britain ran a lot of the air sorties over Libya, although the U.S. took a political lead in that. They didn't necessarily do all the heavy lifting to destroy the country of Libya, but Syria was a proxy war using many different proxies, using the Gulf states to fund it. That's a fact, that's what happened. Yemen, there's a proxy war using Saudi Arabia and the UAE to do all the work, take all the risks really, and Israel, same thing, Ukraine, same thing. And I can give you a few other good examples, but those ones just spring to mind at the moment. The U.S. is on the ground in northeastern Syria and still in Iraq. Iraqis don't want them there. There's huge protests outside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Not as violent as they were in 2019, late 2019, led to that series of events we spoke about earlier, but, and then, so right now they're hoping the Lebanese Army and police forces have put a big enough coordinates of the Quran sanitary around the U.S. compound, massive compound in the foothills north of Beirut in Lebanon. I think it's a third embassy in the last 20 years that they've constructed. This one is basically a giant fortress with a huge underground system, probably with a bunch of escape routes, no doubt, in case you know what hits the fan, which it looks like it's hitting right now. So that's meant to be the base of U.S. operations. They have one in Iraq. They've got a huge one in Lebanon. And they'd like to have a few more, probably in the region as well, if they had their way. So anyway. - And are they, I thought I saw something this morning about the U.S. embassy in Lebanon telling people, American Lebanese people to leave the country. Did I see that correctly? Are there calls for American citizens or people of American origin to get out of some of these regions are going on right now? - Yeah, I think so. I think so. This probably, that's what happened the last time in 2006. And U.S. and British evacuated U.S. and British citizens. I don't think American Lebanese, they may or may not, if they're dual citizens, they may or may not extend. They're basically, those people are on their own. So they may or may not extend that line of support. There's some controversy over this point, actually, as we speak. So I did read some things earlier today about that. So yeah, that's pretty standard. Now if the airport's closed, that's a bit of a problem. It means the only real exfiltration route is by sea. And they did ferry a lot of people with the British army were there physically taking people onto boats over to Cyprus. Cyprus is not that far from Lebanon. It's literally just kind of a few miles off the coast and more than a few, but it's like 70 miles from Lebanon. It's very close in the Mediterranean. So that's where people would be going. A lot of people are fleeing to Syria. There's a series of big countries. There's plenty of places that you can probably go there. Israel is hitting Syria. There was, I think, airstrikes against Homs. So it's bombing Syria constantly. That doesn't get any media coverage. But its claims are terrorist targets in Syria. I mean, it's ridiculous. So yeah, there's a refugee issue in Lebanon. A lot of internally displaced people probably heading north. There's no real safe haven when Israel is going into full bombing mode. So I don't know really what they can expect to do. I think probably the safest places are go where there's a lot of Westerners or go hang out and camp out by the US embassy. Up in the hills is probably safe there. They're probably not gonna get bombed, you know. So, but if you're anywhere else, you could end up being a target. So go to the US allied areas. You know, that's the only thing. It's probably the safest place. If Israel goes on a rampage, which it's already done, it's already started, so. - Yeah. Well, you know, I follow the telegram feeds and I see the footage, you know, of what's going on in Gaza. I've seen, you know, more dead kids than I ever thought I would have to see in a lifetime in the last few months. And it just makes me think back, you know, getting back to the White Helmet propaganda for a second. It makes me think back to Bonna Alibet and Omron. It was like they went out of their way to create these like, you know, victims/savior narratives with the White Helmets, saving all the kids. And it was ridiculous and evil to use children like that for propaganda. But it actually did like that psychological operation, that media-oriented psychological operation did have its effect on people that didn't look any deeper than what the mainstream media wanted to say. And I can't help but think, you know, 'cause that kind of put them in the mindset of Assad must go, right? That's the narrative back then, is that this is Assad's fault, all these barrel bombs, and it's terrible. When in reality, the situation is very, very different. But now it's like, you look at some of these, you know, channels with video and photo and reporting coming out of Gaza, and it's just like, wow, it's a torrent of stuff like, as you mentioned, that looks nothing like, you know, what we saw with Bana and Omran and, you know, all those things. I mean, it is quite literally just a human horror show. And if the public were to see that writ large, I think there would be like a, you know, a huge shift in mindset over this. It's just, it's staggering to compare the two. - Yeah, the fakery of a banner of Aleppo, they had Omran well, well stated, and you remember all these well, there's a whole litany of them. And it was all part of a very manicured propaganda exercise by Western media, by Western governments, intelligence agencies. And they used all these little storylets in order to basically herd consensus and public opinion in the West, but also to divide the Middle East and the Muslim, international Muslim community along sectarian lines. And that was always the Western and Israeli designed for Syria. And understand that the breakup and dirty war on Syria is very much conceived in this sort of planning rooms of Israel as much as it was in the United States and the UK. And some of the EU countries that participated. And it's used to divide, they use the ethnic divisions in Syria. The fact that the president was an Al-Aweit sect of Islam and the fact that Hezbollah was Shiite dominated or mainly a Shiite movement and tried to make this a Sunni versus Shiite sectarian divide in Syria and the West traditionally controls certain groups. And like the Muslim Brotherhood is a good example, it's very much, it can be infiltrated and steered by the United States and British intelligence for a very long time. This goes back decades, okay? And this came into play with these moderate rebels in Syria. And so these people may or may not know that they're being used as pawns on a larger chessboard and then who provides the cash for this is a country like Qatar. Qatar spent tens of billions of hundreds of, some people say hundreds of billions of dollars in Syria to destroy the country and achieve regime change and to basically create a government and a society that the West could work with and Sunni dominated and so forth. And this is basically the tragedy of Syria is that this was, to a large part, successful. And then the diaspora of refugees will all be people who are against Assad who took part in the so-called moderate rebel or which later became dominated by al-Qaeda and ISIS. But that's why they're given sanctuary in the West, the White Helmets, et cetera, because they're anti-Assad. So they become a fifth column overseas, which can be redeployed at a later date and then their children will adopt the same political views with a Western education as their parents did or their uncle or whoever was the dominant political figure in their family or overseas community. And they have the same thing with Iran, which is the pro-Monarchy enclave in the United States of very wealthy Iranian expats who had to flee the country when the Shah fell during the Islamic Revolution in 1979. And they become the fifth column, which the US and other NGOs and groups and US State Department funded Quangos and so forth can water, groom and fund and build up. And then there's even terrorist groups in there like the MEK that are openly endorsed by the likes of John Bolton and others. John McCain was a big fan of the MEK and they would court their wealthy Iranian diaspora to pour money into the MEK's coffers and the rich Iranians would write out checks for the campaigns of all these congressmen senators 'cause they're promising them regime change in Tehran. And so that's also part of the game. Is the US and Western politics use the expat community from these war-torn nations, they promised them regime change in order to extract money from the wealthy businessmen. And this is kind of a well-known game, if you will, especially in the US with regime change in Iran. And so you have the same similar thing in Syria. You had some elements of this from Libya as well. So everybody wants to retake power in the country when there's regime change. And they parachute in a hand-picked leader who's been waiting in London or Washington DC or Paris or whatever and they parachute them in. And they say like the one Guaido effect. This is the new president, this is the legitimate leader and so forth. So this game's been played and they're gonna restart this in Syria. So the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, I think if this is deemed to be successful by Israel and the US, they will have another crack at Syria and will probably be within the next six months, I predict. - Well, that was gonna be my next question is what happened? What can we expect in Syria? I've been concerned about this and what happens in Yemen. Maybe we can dive a little bit into that. But before we do, I also wanted to get your take on, I noticed that one of our guests here, Marwa Osman was on a stream with a news outlet when news of Nasrallah's death came out. She had a bit of an emotional reaction and I can't help but notice a lot of these accounts out there that are just, you know, giddy about that event. And like for example, I'm not even gonna shout out this person's name out, but he said there's nothing more satisfying than watching a quote unquote jihadi journalist who celebrated October 7 cry over Israel's master work. There's like a litany of those kind of comments and people, you know, showing that clip. And I think that's a gross mischaracterization of Marwa's reporting and her worldview. But I mean, did you see that? What'd you make of that? - Yes, people that are doing all crazy victory lap, if you wanna see some crazy stuff, you go over to the Israeli accounts and you see some of the videos and MEMS that they're posting. And they feel justified in doing that because in their mind, Hassan Nasrallah is a terrorist like Osama bin Laden. This is the sort of parallel that US media is making. They're comparing this to the death of bin Laden. It's kind of a ridiculous comparison. But just because the US and its main partners designate some, you know, indigenous militia force as a terrorist group, then that basically justifies dehumanizing them and killing all of them like they did with ISIS. It justified leveling the city of Raqqa, leveling the city of Mosul without any care whatsoever for civilian lives. And the same with Fallujah, you could say, similar type of effect. And so Israel can point to all of those instances where the United States threw caution to the wind and just bombs away to quote stop terrorism. So that's where this attitude comes from for everybody is saying, oh, you know, the region is breathing a sigh of relief. Lebanon's been held hostage by Hezbollah and this evil Hassan Nasrallah. If you listen to his speeches, he's a lot less radical, I think, than a lot of other political leaders. You very much into recognizing the rights of Christians, Muslims and Jews in the region. But their problem is not with other religions. Their problem is with the occupations in Lebanon and in Palestine. And there have been very clear about that. Nasrallah's speeches are famous. They're published everywhere. There's clips online circulating. I tried post a couple of them. That's the position. It's very clear. So I don't know where the terrorism label, how that is sort of what the empirical case is for that. But as we found, the US can designate pretty much anybody. They want to be terrorism. They can sanction anybody they want. They really don't need any justification for it. And it's used to justify all of the policies that follow. So it's been a real interesting trick. The fact that the United Nations International Law specifically recognizes the Palestinian armed resistance, a right to armed resistance to take up arms against illegal occupation. This is recognizing international law. But the United States and its allies in Israel will turn around and say, no, they're terrorists. We can do whatever we want to them. We can level their neighborhoods, kill them by the tens of thousands. We can steal their homes and their land because we're taking it for our security. That's all justified under the eegis in any way of the war on terror. And Israel's war on terror. It's like a little war on terror rubric among the US big war on terror, you see. And that's how it's framed. - And they're, sorry to interrupt, but the thing that I find very, I don't know, it causes a lot of dissonance is that it's largely conservative pundits and big accounts that you see taking up that talking point and running with it. But many of those same people will maybe even point out or maybe they haven't realized yet. I think they should, most of them have. When they talk about domestic, American power politics and cultural shifts, they should notice that if you're a constitutionalist, a Christian nationalist, any sort of populist, in many people's mind, any conservative or even if you're simply like you could be single issue, pro-life or whatever. There are facets of this government. It's a intel law enforcement and security apparatus that would consider them a domestic terrorist simply for wearing a red baseball hat or being pro-life or this is just a whole list of things that they can classify American citizens as to call them domestic terrorists. Yet, a lot of these people will cheerlead this kind of labeling and then a murdering happening in other countries and not even think about the fact that they themselves have been potentially classified in the smaller, more domestic version, this whole concept of domestic terrorism. I think a lot of those people would do well to take pause and think about what that actually means going forward because we can see the way that label is wielded geopolitically. - Oh, completely, totally. I mean, can you really say there's not terrorism in the Western Hemisphere? I mean, look at the cartels and look at some of the mass murder that's done south of the border. I mean, is that not terrorism? But you will not see a democratic government, a democratic administration do such a thing. They will never label any of the cartels as terrorist groups even though they're engaged in terrorism. So there are non-state actors that are killing people and doing all sorts of grotesque atrocities in order to basically scare the population or the government into submission. That's terrorism, isn't it? I mean, what is Israel doing? It's basically using overwhelming force in US weapons and in order to terrorize the populations in Lebanon, South Lebanon, Beirut, in Gaza, in the West Bank. Okay, they don't have any specific targets. There's not Hamas bunkers under all those buildings. They basically lied and said that it was. And because they believe there was a threat of terrorism, it justified unlimited amounts of collateral damage. And everyone in America is okay with that pretty much and won't challenge that, which I find pretty. It shows you the hold, it shows you the trance, the spell of how powerful the propaganda is post 9/11 of terrorism or Islamic terrorism or jihadi, terrorism, whatever, it shows you how powerful they are and people abide by that whenever they're faced with it. And immediately we'll go into the correct mode that the state wants them to be in or the media wants them to be in in order to accept whatever is gonna happen as a result. And if that means going abroad and carpet bombing a country or after the bat-a-clon or you remember that event in Paris, they opened up operations and started attacking targets in Yemen as a result. They had a rumor that one of the Kawachi brothers know that was the Charlie Hebdo, but they had the rumor that the Kawachi brothers were training with AKUP or whatever the Islamic state in Yemen or whatever it was. And that set the scene for the Yemen war that the United States backed in March of 2015. But people are like kind of very easily led along this kind of these narrative points and it's all designed to create a consensus. And we're now seeing the final act of this whole kind of macabre drama and it's unfolding in the Middle East. And it should be a lesson for everybody to really look at the level of horror, the potential horror that can happen when you allow this type of propaganda and this sort of mindless political rhetoric and the total acquiescence by our political leaders and not doing anything, the total apologism that they're all engaged in on a minute to minute basis to justify what the regime in Israel is getting away with. It's pretty unbelievable. I mean, this should be the lesson of lessons in history. And it's happening right before our eyes, which is pretty remarkable. And I'm most afraid to say it's gonna happen. So what's gonna happen next? And this is probably the final point that I'm gonna make is that there's probably gonna be more and more intense retaliation by Hezbollah 'cause Israel escalated. And it's very likely that Iran could at some point in the future join in if they're hit and they reserve the right to further retaliate. And I think we're going to see a long war. And it's not going to, people can do victory laps 'cause leadership has been assassinated. The Israel will assassinate more Iranian leaders. This is a guarantee. They'll try to assassinate the next Hezbollah leader, which is the cousin of Hassan Nasrallah, who's already been sworn in. Who, by the way, is like a carbon copy of Hassan Nasrallah. He looks the same, he has the same sort of, he's sharp and quick. He's probably a little more militant than Nasrallah. Okay, so that's gonna continue. And if they decapitate, the leadership Israel can keep doing this 'cause they've been doing this to Hamas and to Hezbollah for decades and it hasn't stopped them. Both of those groups have gotten stronger as a result. They've been doing it to Iran. They've been launching terrorist attacks through proxies or directly and the Iranian resolve is just increasing. And so are the military capabilities of all these groups. So it's, so are the recruiting for all these groups. They have more recruits now, better recruits. So this, whatever Israel and the US are doing, they claim to be doing this to stop their adversaries to stop these groups. They're making them stronger, they're making them bigger. And that's the net net of it, okay? And then constantly trying to set Middle Eastern populations against each other and thinking that's gonna succeed. That's not working either. So you're looking at one failed policy after another and one failed policy as it uses a Band-Aid to patch up previous failed policy. Then another policy to patch up that failed policy. And that's the story of the US in the Middle East for, I don't know, since the Suez Crisis, to be honest. And then, so what's going to happen to Israel? Israel will continue killing, raping, pillaging, and plundering until the United States tells them to hit the brakes. It's pure and simple. Nobody's gonna stop them. Maybe sometime down the road in a few years, there might be a bigger military standoff. Maybe Iran will acquire nuclear weapons and that might calm the situation down or we might see a nuclear exchange. So, who knows? But Hezbollah is not gonna pack up and go home after what happened this week. That's 100% certain. And neither is Hamas. You notice Israel hasn't had any success killing Hamas leadership. They haven't had any success. They're only against Hezbollah because Beirut is completely infiltrated by Western intelligence, Israeli intelligence. It's an open city. But in the strongholds of Hezbollah in the South, it's more difficult to penetrate, which is why Israel wants to, I think, do a ground invasion. So they wanna make a major dent in that. But have they got any of the military leadership of Hamas in Gaza? No, they haven't. They haven't. They've been bombing it to kingdom come for 12 months. They drop more ordinance on Gaza in terms of net levels of TNT than we're dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden, probably combined, okay? They haven't got one of them yet. So what does that tell you? What a hard nut to crack the resistance in Gaza is. And if they haven't done it by now, they're gonna struggle to do it. And even if they were successful, there's a hundred now behind whoever the leadership is, of future leaders, probably smarter, probably tougher, and probably even better fighters than the previous generation. So in the same with Iran, they're very motivated based on what they've seen and what they've seen unfold. So are the Islamic resistance in the Khashid in Iraq? So our answer a la, they're hitting Israel in Tel Aviv with missiles now. I mean, none of this happened 10 years ago and now this is all happening. So while Israel has achieved a major victory this week, the long arc of history, the long arc of the region, the Middle East, is bending away from the United States and Israeli dominance. And it's bending towards a more pan-Arab and Islamic coalition, if you will, in the region. There's more solidarity probably than there ever has been in the region with putting aside Lebanon sectarian issues, which they have plenty of, putting that aside region as a whole, generally there's more solidarity than there has been in the past, especially in the past few decades. So that's bad news for the US, it's bad news for Israel. And there's a way out for everybody, which is return to the negotiation table, return to diplomacy, everybody cut your losses and Israel has to act like a normal country, has to abide by UN resolutions to international law, plain and simple. The alternative to that is war and it won't stop. It's gonna be three outcomes. If they can't cool it down now, there's gonna be three outcomes. One is there's going to be eventually a military defeat by one side or the other, or there's gonna be a peace treaty, a ceasefire followed by a peace treaty, or there's gonna be some kind of surrender in terms, as well, or some kind of major capitulation, or World War III in total annihilation of pretty much everything, those are the options. All of those can be avoided by engaging in diplomacy now. And the US has to lead that 'cause they're the most powerful country with the biggest interest in the regions with Israel. And if it's not coming from the US and you have no president in the US right now, Kamala Harris is the acting president. She's campaigning for the election. Joe Biden is pretty much absent without leave, for walking zombie. And then Kamala Harris, if she wins, you have the most unqualified, untalented, really probably one of the lowest level individuals ever to occupy the Oval Office in the history of the United States. That's saying something. If Trump gets in, he said some very inflammatory things that looks like there won't be peace in the Middle East if Trump is elected. There's gonna be more war. Maybe he might have a change of heart and try to calm things down, but Jared Kushner's already basically circling around like a vulture, looking at the opportunities for himself and his billion dollar fund and whatnot. And his fake Abraham Accords so-called peace plan that didn't involve any Palestinians funny enough. So that brings a question. Neil in the Discord chat asked a question that fits into what you're talking about right here. I wanted to get your take on it. He said, are we seeing a pivot from Ukraine to the Middle East? Alas, all Trump and Vance presidency will be even more pro-Israel. They may hang Zelensky out to dry, but they certainly won't abandon Netanyahu in war against Iran or whoever in the Middle East. What do you think about that like on the larger scale? 'Cause it almost seems to me like we're gonna just do 'em all, and kind of hoping that we can have issues in Taiwan also. Maybe, what do you think about the potential difference between Harris and Trump as it relates to, obviously it's not gonna be very different in the Middle East, but what do you think about that? - Yeah, I think there's always gonna be a pivot. The pivot is where's the media giving its attention? And then that's going to become the political priority for the US and its allies, okay? So right now the attention to the Middle East, that's the priority. It's funny that you have nobody between Biden and Harris. She's still officially vice president. She got nothing to say other than posting some statement on Twitter that somebody wrote for her. That's completely ridiculous. And then Biden, he's got nothing really. They've been saying before this, oh, we're pursuing a ceasefire. We need a ceasefire. I'm working on it. I'm working on it. That's what Kamala has been talking about. Complete Boulder Dash. She was in, you know, what Israel was playing them to prepare their moves. They were playing the White House. That's what an easy ride they have with the current regime in Washington. I mean, so clearly the Democrats are more hawkish than the Republicans on Russia, okay? Because they have to protect their legacy. There's so much corruption tied up with Joe Biden and Hunter and all the shenanigans that Democrats, Victoria Newland, the Obama administration, what they did to Ukraine and in Ukraine during the Obama eight years. And then what the U.S. continue to do after that is unbelievable. So they have to cover that. So they need to have a public government in Kiev and no peace with Russia as long as they're in power. Because as soon as they lose that legacy, all of the return packages go back to Obama and the Biden's. And that's the Democratic Party legacy up in smoke, basically. Up in smoke. So they can't afford that. They ran Biden in order to basically secure and destroy evidence and make sure that the lies are secure. Because Biden himself is implicated in a lot of that corruption. So who better than have him as the executive to lord over that? So if there's a peace treaty or if there's some kind of a major armist disagreement in the Middle East or something, then they might pivot back to Russia. But I think, and this is where it's going to be very difficult to manage for the war hawks. They're going to have trouble managing on two fronts. Zelensky is going around begging for money and weapons. He's hedging his bets with Trump, thinking that Trump's going to get him a just peace or whatever. Russia's not going back to borders. JD Vance has been clear on his understanding of that issue. Trump has been pretty clear. They're not going to be kicking Russia out of dumb bass, curse on Zapparisha or Crimea. It's just not going to happen. And so I think what's, there's going to be so much pressure politically in the US that the US might have to dither on that issue. And if they're dithering, they might end up, Russia might take Odessa. And if Russia takes Odessa why the US is dithering, then that's game over for NATO in Europe. It's finished. So NATO becomes pretty much obsolete at that point. 'Cause Ukraine's finished, it's a landlocked, Trump's state, there's nothing more to discuss. It's over. And then Romania has to step back as an NATO country and stop being used as a launching pad for attacks on Crimea and Russia and so forth. And then all situation changes. And then you're back to kind of Cold War, bipolar power politics in a way, at least in that region. So yeah, I don't think the US can manage Ukraine under Trump. I don't see the appetite that that issue is fading. Zelensy might end up like past US puppets, if he's not careful. Or he'll get a nice cushy mansion in Switzerland or he'll end up in LA maybe, who knows, where he's gonna end up. But the Democrats clearly can't manage the public story for Ukraine. And they can't manage the public story for Israel because this issue has actually split the Democratic Party. It's created a breakaway of the young vote have fled and are either gonna sit this one out or throw some change to Jill Stein or even, who knows, libertarian or whatever. But it's become a problem for the Democrats, for the incumbents. And it might be a problem for Trump, Israel, if things continue on the trajectory they're going in four years of a second Trump term. And so it's not gonna, they will have a break, there will be a break off faction from the Republicans and real conservatives. Old, old maggots, old style maggots that were anti-war, they're gonna get sort of tired of the hypocrisy and Israel interfering in US elections and politics. Like they accuse Russia and China, I mean, some believable. You look at the amount of Israeli representation, US politics and the conventions, the shindigs, they're throwing, the money they're throwing or 100 million, they threw at Trump and they're talking about Chinese influence over TikTok in America, I mean, it's laughable. - It is. - So the tricoms, the tricoms. - Oh, yeah, the tricoms. Oh my gosh, okay, one last question here. What if, this is via beyond the system in the discord, what will Putin do if it becomes like Israel versus Iran or with American and British support and all that? What happens, like set Ukraine aside, what does Russia do if things go bad between the West and Iran? - Well, that confrontation's gonna happen in Syria first. So how Russia positions its assets in Syria in the Golan Heights or in around Damascus that to deter Israeli attacks, okay? So that confrontation, and there's Iranian forces and military assistance in Syria as well. So the Russia can very easily move its king and queen on the board in some of those key places. And in a way, deter a lot of Israeli and the US activity because Russia reserves the right to respond. But more than that, if it wants to then deploy advanced anti-aircraft to TikTok, that takes away Israel's advantage of its air power. And that would cover Lebanon, the Golan Heights, and it depends how if something bad happened to Russia and it felt that pretty much right along Israel's recognized international northern line, not including Golan Heights, that would be Syrian territory. Same with Lebanon, they would basically unveil and activate those systems. So that's a game changer, okay? If Lebanon had anti-aircraft, we wouldn't be talking about this, but the US has made sure they don't have an air force or any anti-aircraft protection. So as far as Iran goes, Russia, I don't think, has to think twice about coming to the aid of Iran or any country. Russia's a nuclear power and understands what's at stake. It can't go flexing and it can't be seen in the international community much like Iran. It can't be seen to be the escalator. They have to be responding to a US or an Israeli escalation. But even then, Iran has to stand on its own two feet first. And I think it's prepared to do that and it's totally capable of doing that. But this idea that there's gonna be these World War I-style alliances, Unbreakable Ties, where NATO Article 5 packs made in blood, which NATO claims it has, but it actually doesn't have. Article 5 is not an automatic, all for one, one for all clause, by the way. And if the, you know what hits the fan in Europe, you'll see how ineffective Article 5 really is. That's a little dirty secret within NATO that a lot of people understand, but won't say publicly, that not everybody's on board with World War III. So, and you'll see who the hawks are at the end of the day, very few hawks in the West. It's the US, Britain, Canada, basically the Five Eyes countries, and that's almost about it. And so that would be rushing to Israel's side or Ukraine's side, and then you have the rest of the world. And so that's the dynamic that's more and more shaping up. And there's other things that could come into play as well. So I think before there's any sort of military confrontation between the West and Russia over some kind of an escalation against Iran, I think you're more likely to see a lot of other countries step forward to basically comment down or provide support for Iran. That could be diplomatic support, like, for instance, China. It could even be somebody in the region who hasn't done this previously, who might be saying, "Hold on, this is going too far." We want to see the situation de-escalate. I don't know who that actor could be. There's a number of potential Egypt being one of them, a major stakeholder there, and of course Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states if they actually could pull their finger out. Turkey, as a NATO partner, is potentially powerful and can sway the balance. But Turkey, unfortunately, as a NATO state is kind of compromised. So it can't really act that independently. It can, rhetorically, and then intervening in certain places like in Syria or Northern Iraq or even in Sudan or Libya, which it can intervene in places like that. But in terms of Israel, there's limited what it can do as a NATO member, I think, without some serious problems with the US. So, yeah, I don't think Russia, there's not a World War I, you know, alliance, a web of alliances that I don't think that exists. And as a result, if Israel could attack Iran, and, you know, there might be some retaliation locally against Israel, but internationally, I think, you know, I hate to say it, but in the current political environment, you know, there'll be a lot of people condemning it, but nobody's going to take any military action back against Israel. 'Cause again, you're talking about nuclear powers and that's a different conversation. I think this is what a lot of the war hawks and people who are armchair generals for the access of resistance on Twitter don't really understand, is that you're talking that a political leader in a country like Iran or wherever, or even Syria, they have to think about the lives of their citizens. They have densely populated cities. You know, if they make one mistake, it could cost 2 million lives. That's a big decision that you have to make. And, you know, armchair warriors and, you know, war hawks and so-called, you know, geopolitical experts on Twitter have never, many of them have never been to any of these places, which they are, you know, really hawkish about, and they've never really seen, directly seen, the effects up close of war and what they, you know, what are the sort of, you know, what's the cost? The human cost, it's very real and it lasts for decades. If you've been to some of these countries, you can see the hangover from the war doesn't end when the war calms down. It continues for those people in the region. The hell continues for decades. And many people living in the abject poverty as a result of decisions made by people who are long dead, actually. And that's kind of a heavy thing. And I think a lot of people in the Middle East are aware of this because they've lived through, or they've been children and they're now adults after the U.S. destruction of Iraq, after the Lebanese Civil War, after the dirty war in Syria, they're thinking long and hard before escalating another major war. And rightfully so, that's just being human. That's just being human. So I think, you know, the same with Ukraine and Russia. People can't believe that Russia takes so long to take territory. It's kind of a no-brainer. They're clearly avoiding civilian casualties. But all the war hawks on Twitter say, "Oh, Putin, the Russian military is pathetic." And in the U.S. war hawks, they say, "Oh, the Putin's pathetic." He took so long to take Abdifka and back Moot and, you know, lost all these men. If Russia prosecuted a war the way the U.S. does, it'd be over a long time ago. And so, I'm just pointing all this out to show there's a difference between the reality on the ground, decisions that political leaders need to take and military leaders that are real. And then you have this other weird conversation going on on social media and in politics and some of the meatheads and total dopes that you see on CNN and on mainstream media. Some of these experts, it's pretty breathtaking. - Yeah, yeah, it really is, you know. And again, like if you're in the right telegram feeds, you have an eye into what that conflict looks like on the ground, right? Like I can go on a telegram and I can find channels where I can see trench warfare happening, drone warfare happening. And it's heartbreaking, it's sad. It's the kind of thing you wouldn't think you'd be seeing again here in 2024, but it is. But at least you're seeing, I mean, it's mismatched. Ukrainians are way outmatched, undertrained, lot, a lot of conscripts, people forced in, people given bad gear, bad training, no gear, no training, this kind of thing, sent to the front line. But I don't see any of that in Gaza. In Gaza, it's just ruination. You know what I mean? It's not even a chance to fight. I've seen like maybe some, I've seen some footage of like Hamas snipers, ironically using more Russian tactics against the IDF. But I mean, it's not even a, like you look at the Ukrainian footage and it's like, okay, this is a conflict between two military bodies, one of them clearly outmatched. But then you look in Gaza and it's just like, it's just wanton destruction. It's just, Barbara, it's not a war. Yeah, because one side doesn't have an air force, doesn't have any anti-aircraft, doesn't have a standing army, so to speak. It's not a war, it's a slaughter. It's a complete fucking, just a rout. It's grotesque, actually. For Americans to call it a war, they say they frame it. Israel's war against the Gazans, or Israel's war against Hamas. I mean, it's so disingenuous the way they frame it. Or Israel's war against Hezbollah, just these are Lebanese people. That'd be like me saying, you know, if there was some like J-6 militia, civil war breaks out in America. And it's, you know, America's war against the, I don't know what to call them, whatever, you know, whatever the resistance is. Maga extremists, I think is the word they like. The Maga extremists, whatever, they're Americans. Yeah. So that's what's going on. This is, that's what's going on in the Middle East. And all those people are Lebanese first, just like all of the people in Gaza are Palestinians. First, they're trying to frame it as basically Israel, the country versus this naggy little pesky terrorists. Right. Basically. And they do. Yeah. And say Israel's just defending itself. It's like, oh, okay. You'd have a way better, like you can make a better case of that for Ukraine than you can for Gaza. It's insane. Well, yeah, you can make a better case, but when you start drilling down into the nuance and you can find with all of these cases, the more history you know, the more perspective you have, you can see that it is not an open and shut black and white narrative. And there's then international law and treaties and agreements and broken agreements start coming into play. So you have some countries now, it's the world split in two. Those who want to engage in diplomacy, who want to try to buy by international law and norms, and those who just don't and have given up on it or have discarded because it's too inconvenient in terms of them people achieving their global domination objectives. And that's where the US and Israel fall into. And the UK and the EU, unfortunately, NATO countries fall into that category as well. They've just discarded all of those frameworks 'cause they're just too inconvenient. They're keeping them from achieving their ambitions, their domination. So they're just saying, well, we don't want to play by the rules anymore. So we're just going to toss the whole chessboard over and then we're just going to wag our fingers at you and call you terrorists and dictators. And that's how they're basically behaving on the world stage. And it's a recipe for total disaster. We're seeing that total disaster unfold right now. It's a complete failure on the side of the West, but try to convince some people that they're in the wrong. That's Putin's war of choice. How many times have you heard that repeated on it? - Oh gosh. - Let's see, Putin's war of choice. Putin's, it's almost like a, there was a crib sheet, a talking point, a bullet point, so we're circulating that you had, they announced the caveats before they start their diatribe. And Israel's war against Hamas. And then the protesters on US campuses are Hamas supporters. And it's so disingenuous and so intellectually bankrupt. How people, including people down on the street level, on our independent media level, are framing this. I mean, there's just some believable people that, people who are like all against the COVID and the vaccine propaganda, have completely fallen for lock, stock, and barrel, every bit of propaganda, Israeli, US war propaganda, dehumanizing war propaganda. They've fallen for the whole package. All of this sort of COVID health warriors is an example. It's just, it's incredible to watch how people have this sort of selective application of their sort of red-milling. You know, it's like, yeah, it kind of, it's unbelievable. It really is, especially with the dusting off of the, you know, the the jihadi sort of, you know, framework that they put on. It's like, you know, that they did so much damage between 2002 and 2009. And then it was like, okay, we're gonna tone this down a little bit, you know, here under Obama, it was like Islam became the religion of peace in America. We used to hear that one all the time. And then, you know, October, and of course, they're still doing Syria. They're still starving to death. Eight million people in Yemen and the background, but, you know, we're not gonna talk about that here 'cause we're busy working on, you know, cultural warfare and reigniting racial tensions here in the United States, just between the, you know, indigenous blacks and whites and all this. And it's just like all of a sudden, October seven happens and boom, we're back to, you know, that mindset from, you know, post 9/11. And so many people, just like a moth to a flame, just rebooted that, people that hadn't spoken up on it in years, all of a sudden, they're back and they love it. And, you know, it's just, it's really staggering and kind of sad to see the bouncing ball of the, you know, the Atlantis media narrative, just shove people right back in, you know? And a lot of those people that were, you know, railing against COVID, they were late to the party. They were out there wearing masks and social distancing and keeping their sex parties under wraps, you know, doing that anyways, didn't change their lives, but ruined everyone else's. And now here they are, it's back again. Follow that bouncing ball. It's really crazy to see the way the effectiveness of the psychological operation campaigns. - Yeah, I mean, we've been following this for years with our daily shooter coverage, 21 Wire, and of course, on this show, Sunday Wire, and on your programs, The Boy of the Room as well on alternate current radio network. And, you know, as an example, you know, America is one, you know, Islamist terrorist attack away from pretty much seeing some crazy stuff happening, potentially redeployment into the Middle East and, you know, scorched earth bombing campaigns by the US, just one domestic terror event away from that. So I'll give you an example. How is the US, how are they able to redeploy to Iraq and also to illegally occupy a third of Syrian territory with their Kurdish SDF proxies right now, squatting serious oil fields illegally since 2017? How are they able to do that? And in Iraq, they're not welcome. How they did that, the legal basis, if you look at the invocation of the NDAA and the renewal and authorization force overseas, how they were able to do that was because of the San Bernardino terrorist attack or shooting, mass shooting, that was in December of 2015 or something like that, 2014 or 2015. And some obscure local government building in like the Inland Empire, San Bernardino, you know, east of Los Angeles in the desert by Riverside and some weird, weird event featuring a couple of, a couple, a husband and wife team that posted something on Facebook. And then all of a sudden there was a mass shooting and then they ended up getting shot. And so nobody could ever depose them or get any sort of testimony. So that was used because they were ISIS inspired according to the government, ISIS inspired on Facebook. Because of that, they are able to basically have the legal authorization to deploy in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. It's as simple as that. Most people don't know that. And I think what history will show later that one day we'll find out that there was very likely Israeli involvement in San Bernardino and other similar events who are these actors. How do they get put into position and how come all of the ends are tied by the end of the day where you can't even get, you can't even interrogate anybody because all the key, but the narrative in the media is already set, then the policy follows that and then you get the military deployment. The same thing could happen in a whole number of scenarios which I'm sure are basically being cooked up as we speak and how quickly the US, all these people who might be against each other on war, they'll be forced to comply with a narrative if there's an attack on US soil. And then everybody will get behind it, the media will be and you'll be basically scared to say anything against it for fear of really having the people in the system come down to you for being unpatriotic or siding with the terrorists or whatever. We saw it after 9/11 and so many other occasions. So easily done, those buttons are so easy to push. We can all see that they're there. There's plenty of hate against Muslims in America and in Europe as well. And so the groundwork's already been set. So all you need to do is press the button and Americans need to be wary of the fact that they are literally one scripted staged event on US soil being dragged into, really in a big way, dragged into World War III. That's the reality and so people need to be aware of that. That's why it's important to look at and be skeptical about events like 9/11 and all the other so-called terrorist attacks that we've covered and we're talking about. - Yeah, and we have never been more vulnerable to something like that than we are right now because in the last four years, we've got 20 plus million people by many estimates from over 100 different countries pouring into the country. So that just sets up an environment where the options for infiltration, for false flag operations, even for quote unquote organic attacks that could be leveraged and have narrative spun around them to garner support for just about anything. And you brought up Sam Bernadino and every time I think about that one, it takes me back to the episode that we did during that event. Like you had a independent journalist out there on location, just happened to be there. We were able to link up with him and what he was reporting from the ground like in real time was completely, if not destroying the narrative that they were spinning around that event, brought so many questions to it. I mean, it was one of the craziest episodes of Sunday Wire. I mean, they're a number that stand out in my head depending on what I'm thinking about. But when I think about the daily shooter program and false flag operations that are used to garner support for geopolitical maneuvering and that chessboard that you talked about, that they just flipped over, not only did they flip the chessboard over, they set it up before they flipped it over. Like it was not a fair game from the start. So it's just like you get a big Hegelian factor going on there too. And you know, this population unfortunately are not up to speed on what their vulnerabilities are to these sort of military psychological operations. - No, they're not at all, not at all. So that's a big worry. It's a big problem actually. So we're not, you know, people who follow this stuff and you know, listen to this show over the years, it's not so much an issue for them. But for everybody else, it's like, you remember Jihadi John? - Oh yeah, yeah. - You remember, what a vaudeville act that was? And it just to me reeked of Hollywood. You know, so it's produced theatrics. And you know, and then we're vulnerable to that. You know, people are vulnerable to that stuff. You know, people are very gullible. Look at COVID, it really shows you how gullible people are. And sad to say, but it's just a fact. So you just have to eat a good storyline, some good videos, you know, ISIS, the ISIS thing was unbelievable. How, how contrived it was, how fake the videos were, how overproduced they were. It was like cheesy, you know, German or cheesy Turkish soap opera action movie, you know, it's really bad. But people fell for it and they used it and showed it on the news and said, look, it's real. Look at the produced video we're showing you. It's real. They're showing you a similar lacquer of something that's clearly staged with fake flames and everything. And they're saying, oh, it's real, it's real. And these are Islamic terrorists and the whole thing was completely produced. But the people getting shot and killed on the ground by some of these maniacs and head shoppers, that's real. But we didn't get any reporting on the victims of those in Syria, Syrian people, or the victims in Iraq, that not a whole lot of reporting there. So what you do get plenty of reporting are on all these sort of domestic scares or terror scares in knife attacks or the chicken kebab dumpster pipe bomber in New Jersey, I mean, that's like the whole of the Western networks comes to a major freeze for 48 hours, you know, sifting through that non-event. And literally as people getting their heads chopped off in the Middle East, and that doesn't warrant any attention by the US media. So. - Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, well, Patrick, we're a half hour into overdrive here. I wanna thank you for joining us here at the Sunday Wire. It's been fantastic, big, a lot of shout outs come in from our listeners and viewers in the Discord over on X, over at Rumble, Rockfin and YouTube. So, and at 21st Century Wire.com also, big shout out to everybody who's watching us live, listening to us live, or picking this up after the fact. We really appreciate you. Please share this show around. And Pat, I'll give it back to you for any final comments. - No, thanks for, you know, going overdrive. Hesher, it's been amazing. It's great to talk to you. And, you know, I realize our listeners are saying what happened to me since July. I sort of posted something on social media. So, I'm kind of still in rehabilitation from the medical situation, which I faced this summer. But little by little, getting stronger each day and each week, and still a long way to go. But, hopefully, we'll be doing more in the coming weeks and stuff, so, and appreciate everybody's support. And, you know, now 21st Century Wire needs your support more than ever. This has been a very difficult couple months for the site, and we really need an injection of support going forward. So, please don't be shy to hit the donate or subscribe button up on the website. If you're listening in the 21 Wire chat rooms, if you haven't done already, subscribe to 21wire.tv. We really appreciate all your support. So, same goes with you, Hesher and ACR. So, yeah, hopefully you guys can find a way to give us a little bit of support any way you can. And also sharing our work on social media, links to our articles, our interviews. This show, that is a big help, too. So, a big little call out for some help there, and appreciate our listeners who've been there throughout the summer and through all this adversity, and appreciate all you guys. So, it's great to see everybody as well in the chat room. All right, yeah, absolutely. Okay, Patrick, thank you. And really, really again, please, you were able to join us today. It's great to hear your voice. Thank you for that. And thanks for, you know, it's just amazing that, you know, 21wire can still be so active with everything that you've gone through and what you're dealing with right now. So, big thanks to the whole 21wire team. Ruckus has been great, helping me man the ship while you're gone, big shout out to Ruckus. The Daily Ruckus is coming back at alternate current radio. I'm in talks with some of our other friends also about making sure, you know, they have a place to do their shows and stuff like that. So, we've got some exciting stuff happening here at alternate current radio in the wake of TNT closing down. And we got a lot of good stuff to come. And I think this is gonna be a very fast-paced election season. And of course, all this geopolitical stuff going on in the background of it, it's really gonna drive it. And we're gonna do our best over here at ACR and 21wire to keep the analysis coming, you know, as it pertains to the election, as it pertains to all these conflicts that we're talking about here today. And yeah, Pat, well, we'll look forward to having you back on again real soon. And even more so looking forward to you being back on the horse here at Sunday Wire, my friend. - Awesome, thanks, Hesher. Thanks for holding the fort down. And a big shout out to Ruckus as well. Hopefully we'll be on the platform in the coming weeks together as well. - Absolutely. All right, Patrick, we'll let you go. Thank you so much. - Thank you, Hesher, take care of me. - All right, you too, all right. That's Patrick Henningson, everybody. Thank you again for being here with us for this overdrive version of Sunday Wire, myself and Patrick Henningson, everyone at 21st Century Wire. All of us here at Alternate Current Radio. We really appreciate you. And like Patrick said, you can go to 21st Century Wire.com. There's a support link up there in the top menu. So you can jump in there and support. We have a support link over at alternatecurrentradio.com. As well, we do need your help right now more than ever. So if you want to get in there and donate or become a member or even just share our stuff around, we really, really appreciate that. And a number of you have done so on both platforms recently. And I just want to thank everybody, our patrons, anyone that's thrown anything in the swear jar or 21wire.tv members, anyone that's bought t-shirts or anything like that. You've got all these options. And yeah, we'll do this again next week. I hope, hopefully we'll see you here a week from today for Sunday Wire number two, no, 518. So that's it for this episode of Sunday Wire. Have a great rest of the weekend. Keep your head up and stay positive. And we shall hopefully get through this and the truth will prevail. At least that's what we would like to see happen. Have a great weekend, this is Hessier signing out for Sunday Wire. Peace out. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Experiences make life more meaningful with MasterCarts Priceless.com. You can immerse yourself in unforgettable experiences in dining, sports, entertainment and more in over 40 exciting destinations from golf with a legendary player, a cooking class with a celebrity chef or getting on the field during the 2024 MLB postseason, fuel your passions and create memories with experiences on Priceless.com. Explore experiences today at Priceless.com exclusively for MasterCard card holders, terms and conditions apply. - Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited to premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com/switch, whatever you're ready. - $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speed slower about 40 gigabytes of seat details. - Have you heard about the 2018 study that showed half of prenatal vitamins tested had unacceptable levels of heavy metals? No, well, now you have. I'm Kat, mother of three and founder of Ritual, the company making traceability the new standard in the supplement industry. I remember staring at my prenatal vitamins and finding all these things I was trying to avoid, high amounts of heavy metals, synthetic colorants, and unnecessary ingredients. So at four months pregnant, I quit my job and started Ritual, because I believe that all women deserve to know what they're putting in their bodies and why. I'm so proud of our prenatal vitamin. The ingredients are 100% traceable, it's third party tested for microbes and heavy metals, and recently received the purity award from the Clean Label Project. You see, we trace like a mother because let's be honest, no one cares quite like a mother. But don't just take my word for it. Trace for yourself with 25% off at virtual.com/prene as well.
