Image is of a Khorramshahr-4 medium range ballistic missile, which has a range of about 2000km.
As I said in the last megathread, trying to figure out what exactly is happening is becoming ever more difficult. The gist of things is that Iran has, very justifiably, refused to negotiate (assassinating their leader and striking their country with hundreds of missiles in the middle of negotiations causes some reluctance to return to the table, I suppose). Censorship across the Middle East has further ramped up, with reportedly extreme punishments for posting footage of Iranian strikes online. From what I can gather, Iran’s number of strikes have stabilized at a comfortable daily rate, with strikes into both the Gulf monarchies and Occupied Palestine continuing apace. Official charts of these strikes over time seem very disconnected from reality on the ground, but again, it’s hard to really get at the specifics.
The messaging on how long the war is expected to last is rather muddled on both sides. The Trump administration fluctuates more than daily - and even sometimes in the same speech - on whether the war is already won or whether it’s going to last months longer. The US seems to be coming up a new possible scheme every few hours: a ground invasion with the Kurds? A ground invasion without the Kurds? An amphibious assault? A series of commando operations to steal Iranian uranium? A massive parachuting operation into Tehran? Fuck it, let’s just send the Navy into the Strait of Hormuz? There doesn’t seem to be a coherent plan for continuing hostilities beyond firing more and more of a limited stockpile of cruise missiles into mostly non-military targets, hitting easily replaceable drone and missile launchers with a limited stockpile of drones, and burning a limited stockpile of interceptors at an astounding rate (and, in the process, disarming every other Western-aligned country of their interceptors).
Meanwhile, from Iran, I’ve seen rumors and reports from classic anonymous “senior IRGC officials” (no doubt some invented by Zionists to sow confusion), that I don’t know how to substantiate, ranging anywhere from “If the US pulls back their forces now, we will restart negotiations,” to “It doesn’t matter what the US or the Zionists do or say, we aren’t stopping until every last trace of Zionism in the Middle East has been extinguished,” to a few positions in between those poles. Despite the damage to infrastructure in Iran, it doesn’t seem like there has been any political or social fracturing. Not to speak too soon - perhaps the West will start earnestly trying to overfly Iranian territory to drop their very plentiful bombs soon - but every indication is that there will be no regime change nor societal collapse in Iran in the short and medium term.
The US is desperately trying - and mostly failing - to keep a lid on the economic firestorm they have ignited. There has been much ado about oil prices and oil futures and indexes and what all the myriad Lines going up and down signify and things like that, which is befitting such a financialized empire which is so disconnected from the actual physical flows of materials and much more attuned to vibes and speeches. The only thing I’m personally paying much attention to on the economic front is the drones and missiles slamming into fossil fuel infrastructure, the Hormuz blockade, and the resulting global shockwave of shortages, stoppages, closures, bankruptcies, and force majeures spreading out from the epicenter that is Iran.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Iceland, Netherlands join South Africa’s ICJ case against Israeli genocide in Gaza
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Better late than never I suppose?
Every so often I start to write a summary of what is going on with the 3 ICJ active cases about Israel 186, 192 (the South Africa case discussed here) and 196 just from activity of the ICJ website. But I get discouraged.
Basically, Israel has flow by several deadlines by which they are supposed to have submitted information. I think its about a year and a half of homework extensions granted now. You can’t see a lot of the correspondence but basically Israel is either like “were busy here” or they are nitpicking with SA’s submission, like there were a few non archived hyperlinks so Israel says they can’t respond because they dont even know what they are responding to. They also spend some time whining about how they shouldn’t even be involved in the process etc.
Its also very annoying because there is no comprehensive announcement or RSS feed or anything when files are added, only when major things are done. So its hard to follow. And the website is not fully archived on the WayBack!! Every time I go there I spend so much time manually adding things. It might be due to their very aggressive “are you human” which they presumably require due to cyber attacks. But anyway its difficult to follow the plot of what was added when.
while we would all prefer the court would act decisively and swiftly to do something which would have put the breaks on, that was not ever in the cards. but by treating them with all extra fairness, they are minimizing future arguments that Israel could use to delegitimize the process. Assuming the case eventually proceeds and has some sort of power behind it, the whole groundwork is here where they had every chance. They were not set up to lose in a show trial. Also by explaining to them exactly what they should not do in order to Not Do Genocide they cannot claim ignorance or confusion in the future.
Anybody who has questions about the underlying “opinions” of the Zionist project should read the evidence and arguments put forward by them at the ICJ. It is more convincing than the materials of their opponents IMO (as these have tended to be quite reserved and minimal) in describing the heinous and malignant nature of the project. For example they included the whole Free Press “expose” about how they were starving very sick babies and photos of sick babies shouldn’t be circulated as typical of other starving babies. The “evidence” is full of that kind of thing. Tweets, right wing media. Too bad it isn’t hardly reported on.
Also there was something of an investigation opened into judge subunde as she has openly bragged about being a Zionist christian Evangelical group which guides her to do everything she can to bring about the rapture, and Israel is an important to that project. Apparently there is some theoretical rule that a judge shouldn’t go around saying that they make their judgments exclusively based on what will more quickly bring about the end of the world.
“Intervening in a case” and “joining a case” aren’t the same thing. If you join a case, you support one of the parties in the case. Belgium, Brazil, Ireland and Spain support South-Africa. Paraguay supports Israel. What the Netherlands and Iceland are doing is something else, they are neutral in the courtcase. Dutch media reports the following:
I’m personally afraid that the Netherlands, which historically always had one of the most pro-Israeli governments in the EU, will use their “neutral” role to do the judicial equivalent of concern trolling to try to hinder the South-African case.