Israel's Castle Win Backfires - Drones Turn It Into Disaster

Trump’s Iran Deal Just Took A Beating In Kuwait

Donald Trump has already had Iran demonstrate once that hitting them will see him hit back, but being hard of thinking, of course he's done it again... Right, so Donald Trump is out there telling everyone the Iran war is basically sorted, the deal is close, Tehran is desperate and the grown-ups have it under control. And then Kuwait spent this morning shooting things out of its own sky. The Kuwaiti army had to put out a public notice telling its own citizens not to panic at the explosions overhead, because that was just the air defences intercepting incoming Iranian missiles and drones. That is what Trump's ceasefire looks like on the ground. That is the big problem sitting underneath his deal that he cannot talk his way out of: a country full of American troops, hearing sirens, today, while he takes his bow. And this isn't some stale echo from a fortnight ago. It happened this morning, on top of an almost identical interception last Thursday, on top of the ones back in April when an Iranian drone put a hole in a government building in Kuwait City. The man selling you peace has a region underneath him that keeps tripping the alarms. And the IRGC hasn’t been shy in underlining the fact. And the reason he can't talk his way out of it is sitting in his own military's paperwork. Over the weekend, American forces bombed Iran again. US Central Command, the American military command that runs the entire Gulf theatre, came out late on Sunday and admitted it had struck Iranian radar and drone-control sites at a place called Goruk and out on Qeshm Island, which sits right at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. They called it self-defence. They always call it self-defence.

Israel's Castle Win Backfires - Drones Turn It Into Disaster

Israel's ongoing problems with Hezbollah's FPV drones have peaked again, as his conquest of a castle blows up in their faces. Right, so Saturday night into Sunday, Israeli troops climbed a hill in southern Lebanon, walked into a 900-year-old Crusader fortress called Beaufort, and ran two flags up over it, the flag of the state and the flag of the Golani Brigade. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stood in front of a great big photograph of the place and called it a dramatic turning point in the policy he is pursuing. He said they had broken the barrier of fear. He said Israel was seizing the initiative on all fronts, in Syria, in Gaza, in Lebanon. Chest out, flag up, the lot. A fortress on a ridge and a prime minister doing his strongman face for the cameras, as if medieval stone, a camera crew, and a bit of blue and white cloth could somehow add up to security. And then, the very same night, on the very same front, within a few hours of that flag going up, a 21-year-old Israeli soldier called Michael Tyukin was killed where he stood by a drone that costs less than the camera Netanyahu filmed his little speech on. Four more soldiers wounded in the same strike. Tyukin was the twenty-fifth Israeli soldier killed on this front since the start of March, and the weapon that killed him is one the Israeli military has openly admitted it cannot reliably stop. So that is the turning point. That is the broken barrier of fear. A castle taken at the top of the hill and a coffin filled at the bottom of it, by something you could order the parts for off your phone.

Britain Did Israel’s Bidding Again - And Got Caught

Barring far right incitement from entering the UK is one thing, but now it is happening for the sake of protecting Israel only. Right, so Keir Starmer's government has just stopped two of the loudest critics of Israel in American media from getting into Britain, and the only reason it's prepared to say out loud is a phrase with no content in it. Cenk Uygur, the founder of the US online network The Young Turks, and his nephew Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer with an audience in the millions, were both on their way over to speak this week when they were stopped cold at the border. Well, here’s an excerpt of Piker from last year’s Oxford Union address. I wonder if you can spot the reason you think he might be getting banned then! The two men say it's because they criticise Israel, which they do and it almost certainly is isn’t it? Piker says, in his own words, that it was done "at the behest of Israel." And the Home Office? It will only say their presence "may not be conducive to the public good," which is Whitehall for "we'd rather not explain ourselves." So a country that lectures everyone else about free speech has used its own border as an opinion filter, won't tell you the standard it applied, and has decided two blokes with microphones are a danger to the realm. Not men with weapons. Not men charged with anything here. Not men coming over to organise violence. Men coming to talk. And the British state, in all its alleged confidence and maturity, looked at two people with opinions on Israel and decided the safe thing to do was pull up the drawbridge. And it gets more ridiculous the closer you look. The pair were booked for SXSW London, the big film, music and tech festival, and Uygur was also down to speak at the Oxford Union, the posh student debating society that loves to cast itself as the last home of free argument in the country.

Netanyahu Wanted A Lebanon Victory - He Got More Panic Instead

As Israel cheers sticking a flag on Beaufort Castle, it's Lebanon invasion belies utter failure back on their northern border... Right, so Israel has just planted its flag on top of a nine-hundred-year-old castle in southern Lebanon, and it still couldn't keep the schools open in its own north. That is the whole story in one breath. The Israeli military announced on Sunday that its troops had taken Beaufort Castle, a crusader-era stone fortress on a ridge looking down over both southern Lebanon and northern Israel, and the army's own spokesman, Colonel Avichay Adraee posted the images, and Israel Katz wrapped them in the usual heroic language about another chapter being written at Beaufort. Benjamin Netanyahu called it returning to Beaufort stronger than ever. The defence minister, Israel Katz, made sure the photo of the Israeli flag flying over the castle went everywhere. And on the very same weekend that picture was being passed around as a triumph, as this story currently dominates social media today certainly, towns in northern Israel were closing their schools and shutting their nature parks because Hezbollah was still firing rockets and drones across the border. Netanyahu wanted that castle to be the day the war turned in his favour. What he actually bought was a deeper occupation, a dead soldier, and a northern border still under fire while all the cameras rolled for his latest bit of propaganda. So that is the victory. He went looking for the picture that ends the panic, and the panic was still going off behind the picture, wasn't it? Beaufort Castle sits on a high ridge near the town of Nabatieh, about fourteen kilometres inside Lebanon. It is high ground, the kind of position armies have fought over for a thousand years because whoever holds it can see for miles in every direction.

Starmer’s Palestine Crackdown Just Blew Up In His Face

The Starmer government's determination to see palestine Action sent down appears to now be providing cover for something even more sinister... Right, so a café owner in Manchester went to a police station to pick up devices the police had taken off him in an earlier case, and the police, instead of just handing them back, sat him down and tried to recruit him as a spy. Shams Sadiq, fifty-one years old, owns two cafés in Manchester, is known locally for his pro-Palestine activism, and he says that on the fifteenth of May two officers at Ashton-under-Lyne police station asked to speak to him "man to man," told him they'd been through his devices, told him they knew he was, in their phrase, fully involved with Palestine Action, and then told him he wouldn't be charged in relation to that earlier arrest. No charges on that. Just a favour. They said there were benefits in helping them. He asked what kind, financial? Were they going to pay his taxes? And the answer, more or less, was yes, we can help with things like that. One of them added there were other benefits too. They weren't saying he could go out and commit a serious crime, you understand, they were far too professional for that, but they could turn a blind eye to certain low-level things. So this is the law-and-order government, isn't it? This is the terrorism crackdown. The one that's already blown up in the government's own face in the High Court, though we'll get to that. And it has arrived at the point where the actual mechanism is a copper leaning across a desk offering financial benefits and leniency around low-level offences if you'll grass on your mates.