Zionist Ceasefire = Keep Killing

Mahmoud Sleem, one of the three journalists killed by Israel on March 15, 2025

What is often called "the West" is now, in my mind, the Zionist Empire. One of its chief characteristics is being incapable of making agreements that it actually agrees to, as opposed to pretending to agree to. The current "ceasefire" in Gaza is a case in point. Yesterday Israel used drone strikes to kill eight Palestinians in Beit Lehiya, including Mahmoud Sleem, one of three journalists covering humanitarian relief effort. 

People mourn Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike in the northern Gaza Strip [Mahmoud Issa/Reuters]

Israel has killed 200+ journalists to keep the truth of its genocide from reaching the rest of us; it kills doctors and ambulance drivers to keep wounded Palestinians from surviving; and it targets children and their mothers to keep any Palestinians from surviving. It's not so much "mowing the grass" in the odious Zionist euphemism for periodic massacres in Gaza, but more like digging the grass up and then sowing the earth with salt.

Did I mention cutting of aid trucks that are supposed to be allowed in to bring food and other supplies during the so-called ceasefire?

Did I mention cutting off electricity which also has the effect of rendering water desalinization facilities inoperable?

Did I mention it's Ramadan right now when devout Muslims take no food or water from sun up to sundown?

The Yemeni health ministry says 31 people have been killed and 101 wounded, mostly women and children

Ansarallah gave Zionists an ultimatum with five days to comply: either meet the terms of the ceasefire or we will resume our attacks on shipping that supports Israel. So Israel, with full U.S. support, doubled down. After a final warning the Yemenis went back to doing what they do best: shaming other nations by actually supporting Palestinians as opposed to just paying lip service. They've been bombed by the U.S. in retaliation but have vowed to carry on fighting while fasting. Spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam said in a statement:

The maritime embargo declared by Yemen in support of Gaza is limited only to Israeli navigation until humanitarian aid is delivered to the people of Gaza, according to the ceasefire agreement between the Palestinian resistance and the enemy entity.

Confused voters in the U.S. are claiming surprise that 47 is bombing Yemen, and supplying Israel with the weapons to keep bombing Gaza. And Lebanon. And bulldozing villages in the West Bank where it's estimated 20,000 have been displaced this year.

Here's how that particular charade goes:

Campaign for elected office in the U.S. promising to end current wars.

Escalate current wars & restart ones that had been paused.

Rinse and repeat, because U.S. voters are just about as gullible as the corporate press tells them to be.

Voters in the U.S. are pretty damn mad right now, but not about that. They're mad about domestic spending cuts, federal workforce reductions, and how the "opposition" i.e. Democratic Party declines to take effective action on behalf of people's needs.

Go to any one of the many, many anti-47 and anti-elongated muskrat rallies and tell me if you see a single sign objecting to the continuing U.S.-Israel genocide in Gaza.

I certainly haven't. But I did stand this week with three others in front of a factory in Saco, Maine that makes guidance systems for the bombs General Dynamics sends to Israel. One held a sign she'd made that said, RELEASE THE 10,000 PALESTINIAN HOSTAGES.

Not everyone is confused by violent ceasefires and hostage releases followed by re-arrests.

Among those not confused: Jewish Voice for Peace members arrested for occupying 47's flagship hotel in Manhattan. Their message: FREE MAHMOUD (Khalil) FREE PALESTINE.

Delusions Of Grandeur

Screenshot from Biden era classic "Hunter Got High" by Afroman

With the outgoing administration revealed as "headed" by a senile old rapist, and the incoming administration "headed" by a pre-senile rapist with delusions of grandeur, who's really in charge? We're warned that the elongated muskrat will be in charge come January 20 but what part of his current billions in federal contracts and unregulated access to launch thousands of satellites into low earth orbit suggests that he wasn't already? 

Still, it's not reality but surface appearances that we are all continuously urged to pay attention to. 

For example, a zillion headlines report that 47 suggests he will annex the Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada, and Mexico once in office. It's the latest show by the guy liberals love to hate. Can his team really do it? History would suggest the answer is yes, but overextending is a typical way that empires bring about their own demise.

Israel, which both administrations back unconditionally as the west Asian arm of the U.S. empire, is busy annexing Syrian territories since the Assad regime ended and western-aligned factions took power. That is reality. So is the U.S. continuing its occupation of the the oil and wheat rich regions in the northeast, and Turkey continuing to encroach over its border with Syria's northwest.

Drones have been spotted over U.S. cities throughout the month of December, most densely over New Jersey, but the federal government claims it has no ideas whose drones they are or what they're doing there. That is the show.

The reality is...who knows? I suspect the muskrat because his M.O. is hogging the skies and clearly he has enough influence to insist that government officials maintain a strategic silence. Are they surveillance drones? Flying killer robots? Aliens? We may or may not ever know.

Illusory claims of an imminent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas are written on smoke. It is said that 10% of Gazans have already died and the rest are being subjected to precedented atrocities associated with ethnic "cleansing" -- such as being herded half-naked into trucks for relocation as seen above.

An Ansar Allah spokesman this week said the Yemeni resistance has no intention of standing down until genocide in Gaza is stopped, and also that they confused the USS Gettysburg into shooting down its own warplanes. The U.S. admitted two planes over the Red Sea were shot down by friendly fire, but they declined to give Ansar Allah credit. Which is the show and which is the reality?

https://x.com/witte_sergei/status/1871643379123224615

Analysts can keep asking smart questions like that all they want, but we're unlikely to get any straight answers. The show must go on!

Israel Turns The Page(r) On October 7

10-year-old Fatima Jaafar Abdullah is one of the children in Lebanon who died from Israel's pager explosions.

It's pretty certain by now that the thousands of pager explosions in Lebanon yesterday were caused by Israel implanting explosives (and not by overheating batteries) and that Israel's target was Hezbollah operations.

https://x.com/MsJamshidi/status/1836152315306479839

The explosions came on the heels of two significant events recently.

1) Ansarallah in Yemen succeeded in launching a hypersonic missile that evaded the U.S. Navy and Israel's Iron Dome, crossing the Red Sea to strike near Tel Aviv in Israel.

2) Israel published new war plans to include the return of 62,000 settlers in the area directly south of Lebanon. Evacuated in the wake of the October 7 Gaza breakout by Hamas and subsequent shelling by Hezbollah, those settlers have spent nearly a year as evacuees. Their return necessitates a shift of focus militarily from Gaza in the south to the occupied territories in the north.

Those with a long memory may recall that in 1996 Israel used an exploding cell phone to kill Hamas operative Yahya Ayyash in Gaza. This was made possible by a well-remunerated betrayal attributed to Kamal Hamad, a Gaza contractor who was the uncle of Ayyash's host.

One of the exploded pagers

Whose well-remunerated betrayal led to Hezbollah receiving a tainted order of new pagers? Time will tell.

We have not yet heard from Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, but I have seen reports that he was not injured in the attack. Not so lucky were the dozen people who have now died -- including two young children -- and the estimated 2,800 who were injured.

Nasrallah did issue a warning back in February about the dangers of using cell phones.

The mobile phone is a listening device, so we ask our brothers in the border villages and all of the south, especially the fighters and their families, to do without their mobile phones for the preservation and safety of people’s blood and dignities. The mobile phone is a deadly agent that provides specific and lethal information.

As usual, Australian blogger Caitlin Johnstone had a hypocrisy-exposing headline for her post on the latest development in Israel vs. Hamas-Hezbollah-Ansarallah, et al.: Turning People Into Involuntary Suicide Bombers To Fight Terrorism. 

And as usual UK rapper Lowkey weighed in with salient facts. As reported in the substack Palestine Will Be Free:

According to musician, researcher, and pro-Palestine activist Lowkey, the exploding devices were manufactured by Motorola, a company in bed with the Israeli defence establishment. In a Twitter thread, he explained the deep entrenchment between Motorola and the Israeli security apparatus. The main takeaway is that Motorola in collaboration with the Israeli military built a network [for] in-house use that would “prevent counter-surveillance by resistance forces in the region.”

However and by whomever the deed was done, Israel has turned the page(r) on the most recent phase of their genocidal war against Palestinians. 

Will the Zionists launch a massive attack on Lebanon with more conventional weapons in the coming days? Did the U.S. greenlight the escalation, or put the brakes on? What communication devices will Hezbollah now pivot to using? Because among many unknowns one thing is for certain: resistance will continue until Palestine is free.

Good News, Bad News As Assange Extradition Hearing Gets Underway

Cancillería del Ecuador / Flickr

It's shaping up to be quite a month, possibly a turning point in world history. One the one hand we've got U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, opining on CIA cutout Alexey Navalny's death in prison: "The fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built."

And on the other hand we've seen evidence that the CIA planned to assassinate Julian Assange and we know the U.S. wants to extradite him for "espionage" aka journalism sharing inconvenient truths about the inner workings of empire. In other words, fear of one man underscoring the weakness and rot at the heart of the U.S. imperial system.

https://twitter.com/SMaurizi/status/1759890416852226357

Today it appears that journalists at the Assange extradition hearing in the UK are being deliberately handicapped in their efforts to cover the proceedings. The palpable fear that we, the public, might have access to this information underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system Blinken feeds off of, don't you think?

Some are blaming problematic tech in the very fancy courtroom with poor acoustics and no audio feed to the overflow rooms.

Speaking of very fancy tech that is problematic right now, how about those Houthis shooting down their second $30,000,000 MQ-9 Predator drone? Using technology that costs a few thousand dollars. U.S. military-industrial complex response: ka-ching!

Besides which the Houthis have sunk a British ship carrying fertilizer, and hit two more U.S. ships.

https://twitter.com/SprinterMedia1/status/1759889244313591868/photo/1

Did the Western powers not believe Ansar Allah leaders when they warned that they'll go on denying access to the Red Sea as long as the genocide in Gaza the West is supporting continues?

Meanwhile in the last couple of weeks we saw CIA whistleblower Joshua Schulte sentenced to 40 years for leaking "Vault 7" documents to wikileaks exposing illegal and immoral actions of that federal agency. Here's whistleblower John Kiriakou on the case:

Prosecutors had literally no evidence that Schulte had taken the data from the CIA and transferred it to Wikileaks. But they contended that he was a computer genius who was so brilliant that he was able to cover his tracks. That was enough for the jury..

The CIA leadership apparently thought the leak was so damaging that then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo ordered the Agency to come up with a plan to kidnap or to kill Julian Assange in London. One former Trump Administration national security official said that Pompeo and other senior CIA leaders, “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7. They were seeing blood.”

You remember John Kiriakou right? From his Covert Action Magazine bio:

Kiriakou is the sole CIA agent to go to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite the fact that he never tortured anyone. Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific wrongdoing.

At this point we're all sorely in need of more good news as we await news on Assange that is likely to be very, very bad. Maybe historian Ilan Pappe's article belongs here: "It is dark before the dawn, but Israeli settler colonialism is at an end."

This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end  – such projects usually collapse violently and thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project, and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness, and it is the light at the end of the tunnel.