Tag: Jonathan Cook

A WAR FORETOLD – AN IRANIAN PERSPECTIVE

On By Tony TaylorIn History, PoliticsLeave a comment

In recent weeks I have despaired. Such anguish can feel, can seem self-centred and indulgent, less than genuine. As such I hardly share it publicly. Meanwhile, neighbours and friends are getting on with their lives, seemingly unaware of the evil enveloping the world. Or perhaps they are burning inside with anger and, like me, are too embarrassed to speak up. knowing they will not be thanked for disturbing the peace.

Earlier I was intending, at the very least, to post a couple of articles about the Israeli declaration of war on Iran, when I received this powerful and personal message from my dear friend, Siya Vash, who I was privileged to meet In Queensland, Australia almost a decade ago. We were together for only a few days but our friendship has deepened despite the oceans that separate us.

Siya Vash begins:

A War Foretold: The Manufactured Crisis Behind the Iran–Israel–US Conflict

The current war between Iran and the Israel–US alliance did not erupt suddenly. It is the result of decades of manipulation, ideological obsession, and calculated imperial ambition. It is a war seeded in lies, watered with treachery, and now blooming into a catastrophe many of us feared, because we have lived it before.

Memory of Fire: The Iran–Iraq War Never Ended

I was a teenager when the Iran–Iraq War began. Like many Iranians, we were told it would be over quickly. A border skirmish, a short-lived aggression. But it dragged on for eight horrific years, a conflict that devoured hundreds of thousands of lives and left deep, still-bleeding scars across our land.

I still remember the sirens. The sound of missiles and bombs landing. The fear etched into the faces of my friends, some of whom are still alive, barely. They are dying a slow, painful death caused by chemical weapons dropped by Saddam Hussein, weapons supplied to him by Western countries who watched from a distance, hands stained but silent. American AWACS radar planes even helped Saddam locate Iranian troop gatherings which he then bombed with poison.

This memory is why I now look at this war, this unfolding confrontation with Israel and the West with the same dread. The same lie is being told again. The same script, only updated for the digital age. And once again, it is the Iranian people who will suffer.

Netanyahu’s Eternal Alarm: The Cry of the Wolf

Since the early 1990s, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned the world again and again that Iran is “just months away” from acquiring a nuclear bomb. He has sounded this alarm so often, in so many forums from the Knesset to the UN, from U.S. Congress to global media that it has become the central pillar of Israel’s foreign policy narrative.

Yet these claims have been repeatedly contradicted by intelligence agencies, including Israel’s own Mossad and the CIA. They acknowledge Iran’s enrichment activity but have found no evidence of an active weapons program.

Still, Netanyahu’s warnings like a wolf crying for the camera have served their purpose: stirring panic, securing Western support, and justifying pre-emptive aggression. The Zionist lobby in the U.S. and Europe has amplified this message, pushing American and European leaders toward confrontation. It worked in Iraq. It’s working again this time, with Iran in the crosshairs.

The JCPOA: A Deal That Could Have Prevented War

In 2015, the world had a choice. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed between Iran and the P5+1 nations, offered a diplomatic solution: Iran would strictly limit its nuclear program, subject to the most rigorous inspections in the world, in exchange for sanctions relief.

Iran upheld its end of the deal. The IAEA confirmed it. But in 2018, Donald Trump under pressure from Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia, and hawkish advisors unilaterally withdrew. Europe condemned the move but eventually aligned itself with the U.S. position in silence, revealing a tragic hypocrisy.

Now, the very nations that once praised the JCPOA insist that Iran has no right to enrich uranium at all not even for peaceful, civilian purposes. The goalposts have moved. The truth has been buried.

The Nuclear Hypocrisy of Israel

While Iran is demonised for enrichment under international supervision, Israel, a nuclear-armed state, remains outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It has never admitted to its arsenal, but global consensus acknowledges that Israel possesses dozens, if not hundreds, of nuclear warheads.

Even worse, Israel has now been found guilty of genocide by the International Court of Justice and yet continues to enjoy Western backing, arms shipments, and diplomatic immunity. The historical trauma of Jewish suffering is weaponised again and again, not for healing, but for justifying new cycles of occupation, dispossession, and war.

Who else but Israel could commit war crimes while claiming perpetual victimhood?

Greater Israel and the Real Strategic Goal

The Iranian nuclear issue is a cover. The real objective is regional dominance. From assassinating scientists to bombing Damascus and Beirut, Israel’s long-term project is the dismantling of all resistance to its supremacy a vision loosely framed in the doctrine of “Greater Israel.”

Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah stand in its way. The path to their neutralization is paved with pretexts and nuclear hysteria has been the most effective one.

Empire in Decline, Searching for War

The United States, meanwhile, is a crumbling empire seeking relevance. After two decades of failed wars, the focus has shifted toward China. But Iran with its strategic location, energy reserves, and ties to Russia and China has become a critical pawn in Washington’s renewed Cold War.

Destroying Iran’s sovereignty isn’t just about Israel. It’s about control over the future of Asia. It’s about preventing the emergence of a new, multipolar order where America is no longer the center of the universe.

The West’s Two-Faced Game

Let us not forget: it was the West that helped bring Khomeini to power. They saw the Shah growing independent raising oil prices, strengthening the military and decided he was no longer controllable. Better to have a theocracy suspicious of both East and West than a nationalist king with ambition.

And now, some of the same Western elites who orchestrated that regime change are floating the idea of restoring Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son, as a new monarch. The circle of manipulation never ends. Freedom has never been the goal, only influence.

The Future: Remembering the Past, Resisting the Present

We have seen this story before. We have lived it. We remember what chemical war feels like. We know what it means to bury children whose only crime was being born on the wrong side of a border drawn by empires.

This new war was foretold. But it is not inevitable.

Iran may be battered, but it is not broken. The Iranian people despite their suffering under both foreign pressure and domestic repression are not passive pawns. They are resilient, resourceful, and rooted in a deep civilizational memory of resistance.

The West must reckon with its hypocrisy. And the world must finally ask: how many more lies, how many more dead, how many more wars before we say enough?

History will remember. Not just who launched the first missile but who wrote the script.

Complementary to Siya Vash’s calm yet intense explanation of how he is seeing matters unfold, I offer in addition these alternative and differing critiques of the present nightmare.

Israel’s attack on Iran: The violent new world being born is going to horrify you – Jonathan Cook

This is a key moment in the Pentagon’s 20-year plan for “global full-spectrum dominance”: a unipolar world in which the US is unconstrained by military rivals or the imposition of international law. A world in which a tiny, unaccountable elite, enriched by wars, dictate terms to the rest of us.

If all this sounds like a sociopath’s approach to foreign relations, that is because it is. Years of impunity for Israel and the US have brought us to this point. Both feel entitled to destroy what remains of an international order that does not let them get precisely what they want.

The current birth pangs will grow. If you believe in human rights, in limits on the power of government, in the use of diplomacy before military aggression, in the freedoms you grew up with, the new world being born is going to horrify you.

The Function of Stupidity in History – Jeff Noonan

Consider the profound moral stupidity of Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz’s pronouncement that Khameini is a “modern day Hitler” that “can no longer be allowed to exist” and that the missile strike on the hospital in southern Israel was a war crimes. One simply cannot believe the moral blindness of a man who belongs to a government whose armed forces have destroyed every hospital in Gaza, almost every house, shoots people begging for food that Israel has made artifically scarce and killed tens of thousands of people. All necessary, of course! If Khameini is Hitler for partially damaging one hospital what is Netanyahu for ordering the destruction of the whole life-infrastructure of Gaza?

A war criminal?

The War Against Iran: 30 Years in the Making – Piers Robinson

Whatever happens, Western publics should be under no illusion as to how this situation has come to be. The conflicts are the direct consequence of our governments and their associated military industrial complexes pursuing policies of war and, to do so, engaging in covert actions and major deceptions, which include the 9/11 false flag as well as the utilisation of brutal extremist groups in countries such as Syia. The death toll from these conflicts runs well into the millions while the misery is incalculable.

Propaganda, deception and lies, all in the name of war, are becoming firmly established as the parting legacy of the Western empire.

The American Game: Playing and Being Played on the Road to Nuclear War – Edward Curtin

“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”                        Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh

The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that. Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse. It is an economy based on fantasy and fake money with a national debt over 36 trillion dollars that will never be repaid. That’s another illusion. But I am speaking of pipe dreams, am I not?

And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their indifference and ignorance of its ramifications throughout the society and more importantly, its effects in death and destruction on the rest of the world. But that’s how it goes as their focus is on the masked faces that face each other on the electoral stage of the masquerade ball every four years. Liars all.

But they all speak the double-speak that creates pipe-dreams on the road to nuclear war.

Will we ever stop believing them before it is too late?

If, by chance, you read any of the above, not for a moment, do I expect you to embrace uncritically these viewpoints. I do hope for a provisional and questioning response, the very basis of give and take, a critical dialogue. I do hope for a response that refuses the cowardly, immoral and unethical ambivalence and ambiguity of the liberal and professional mouthpiece, that is the Guardian newspaper. And, for my sins, I do skim its pages everyday, hoping for a moment when it speaks plainly at last, when it condemns without caveat the genocide in Gaza and now the attack on Iran.

From the In Defence of Youth Work Archives, July 2014 – Gaza Youth Speak Out

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, History, Politics1 Comment

Nine years ago, for a brief period, IDYW was aware of a group, Gaza Youth Break Out [GBYO]. We had stumbled over its Facebook page, which is now long gone. As it was, not to our credit, we lost touch.

On the 19th of July, 2014 we posted the following on our website.

Gaza Youth Speak Out: Enough is Enough!

The group, Gaza Youth Break Out [GBYO], unfailingly brave in their criticisms of both Fatah and Hamas within Palestinian politics, send a message of anguish in the face of the Israeli assault.

We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of these feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart-aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want!

A fortnight later we linked to an opinion piece in the Guardian by Paul Mason, then the economics editor of Channel Four News, entitled ‘Gaza is not as I expected. Amid the terror, there is hope’. Documenting the oppressive conditions inside Gaza he noted,

I have lost track of how many times I’ve met a young guy, 18 or 19 years old, proud not to be a fighter, a militant, or a duck-and-dive artist on the street. When you ask what his job is, the common answer is “carpenter”. Working with wood – not metal or computer code – is the limit of what the blockade has enabled the skilled manual worker here to achieve.

Faced with such hopelessness, naturally, many become resigned: “Living is the same as being dead” is a phrase you hear among young men. It is the perfect rationale for the nihilist military organisation some choose to join. But its opposite is the resourcefulness that rewires a house after its front has been blown off; that sits on the carpet making bread on a hot pan after a home has been reduced to dust.

Almost a decade later, hope is in short supply – the resourcefulness exhausted?

Meanwhile, Jonathan Cook continues to offer his sense of what’s going on in Israel, Palestine and far beyond.

LAWLESS IN GAZA: WHY BRITAIN AND THE WEST BACK ISRAEL’S CRIMES

As Western politicians line up to cheer on Israel as it starves Gaza’s civilians and plunges them into darkness to soften them up before the coming Israeli ground invasion, it is important to understand how we reached this point – and what it portends for the future.

In a different vein, Charles Eisenstein explores making the impossible happen through the rejection of vengeance.

Hamas, Israel, and the Devil on my Shoulder

We’ve tried everything possible and none of it has worked. Now we must try the impossible.
– Sun Ra

Assange is the modern equivalent of a severed head on a pike displayed at the city gates.

On By Tony TaylorIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I ask no more than you read carefully and with respect Jonathan Cook’s interpretation of the orchestrated assault on Julian Assange and the very idea of critical, investigatory journalism. You might well read it with scepticism and hostility. Assange’s reputation has been trashed. Perhaps, more likely, you will read it in some ignorance. The mainstream media has buried its head in recent years, leaving him to rot in prison, hoping his legacy will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Jonathan’s blog is to be found at ‘For years, journalists cheered Assange’s abuse. Now they’ve paved his path to a US gulag.’

A few extracts to whet or otherwise your appetite.

Court hearings in Britain over the US administration’s extradition case against Julian Assange begin in earnest next week. The decade-long saga that brought us to this point should appall anyone who cares about our increasingly fragile freedoms.

A journalist and publisher has been deprived of his liberty for 10 years. According to UN experts, he has been arbitrarily detained and tortured for much of that time through intense physical confinement and endless psychological pressure. He has been bugged and spied on by the CIA during his time in political asylum, in Ecuador’s London embassy, in ways that violated his most fundamental legal rights. The judge overseeing his hearings has a serious conflict of interest – with her family embedded in the UK security services – that she did not declare and which should have required her to recuse herself from the case.

None of this happened in some Third-World, tinpot dictatorship. It happened right under our noses, in a major western capital, and in a state that claims to protect the rights of a free press. It happened not in the blink of an eye but in slow motion – day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

And once we strip out a sophisticated campaign of character assassination against Assange by western governments and a compliant media, the sole justification for this relentless attack on press freedom is that a 49-year-old man published documents exposing US war crimes. That is the reason – and the only reason – that the US is seeking his extradition and why he has been languishing in what amounts to solitary confinement in Belmarsh high-security prison during the Covid-19 pandemic. His lawyers’ appeals for bail have been refused.

There were two goals the US and UK set out to achieve through the visible persecution, confinement and torture of Assange.

First, he and Wikileaks, the transparency organisation he co-founded, needed to be disabled. Engaging with Wikileaks had to be made too risky to contemplate for potential whistleblowers. That is why Chelsea Manning – the US soldier who passed on documents relating to US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan for which Assange now faces extradition – was similarly subjected to harsh imprisonment. She later faced punitive daily fines while in jail to pressure her into testifying against Assange.

The aim has been to discredit Wikileaks and similar organisations and stop them from publishing additional revelatory documents – of the kind that show western governments are not the “good guys” managing world affairs for the benefit of mankind, but are in fact highly militarised, global bullies advancing the same ruthless colonial policies of war, destruction and pillage they always pursued.

And second, Assange had to be made to suffer horribly and in public – to be made an example of – to deter other journalists from ever following in his footsteps. He is the modern equivalent of a severed head on a pike displayed at the city gates.

Jonathan ends:

A sacrificial offering

Briefly, Assange raised the stakes for all journalists by renouncing their god – “access” – and their modus operandi of revealing occasional glimpses of very partial truths offered up by “friendly”, and invariably anonymous, sources who use the media to settle scores with rivals in the centres of power.

Instead, through whistleblowers, Assange rooted out the unguarded, unvarnished, full-spectrum truth whose exposure helped no one in power – only us, the public, as we tried to understand what was being done, and had been done, in our names. For the first time, we could see just how ugly, and often criminal, the behaviour of our leaders was.

Assange did not just expose the political class, he exposed the media class too – for their feebleness, for their hypocrisy, for their dependence on the centres of power, for their inability to criticise a corporate system in which they were embedded.

Few of them can forgive Assange that crime. Which is why they will be there cheering on his extradition, if only through their silence.  A few liberal writers will wait till it is too late for Assange, till he has been packaged up for rendition, to voice half-hearted, mealy-mouthed or agonised columns arguing that, unpleasant as Assange supposedly is, he did not deserve the treatment the US has in store for him.

But that will be far too little, far too late. Assange needed solidarity from journalists and their media organisations long ago, as well as full-throated denunciations of his oppressors. He and Wikileaks were on the front line of a war to remake journalism, to rebuild it as a true check on the runaway power of our governments. Journalists had a chance to join him in that struggle. Instead they fled the battlefield, leaving him as a sacrificial offering to their corporate masters.