Vance White

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

I have no doubt this screed released by Laura Loomer is retaliation for my lawsuit against the DHS for its illegal seizure of my phones following my return from a reporting trip to Iran. Our lawsuit succinctly details Loomer’s role in lobbying for the unconstitutional seizure, and her claims of credit for it. Now she’s seeking cover in the Zeppelin-sized shadow of Randy Fine.

A federal judge has clearly stated that my Fourth Amendment rights were violated through the seizure of my phones. She framed the DHS action as an attack on my First Amendment rights as well, situating it within the Trump administration’s wider assault on press freedom.

Loomer and a trio of Israel First backbenchers have responded by escalating their attack on my First Amendment rights. It’s a desperate bid to silence me and The Grayzone - not for breaking any laws, but for journalism which exposes wanton corruption and war crimes.

They are particularly incensed by my reporting on the crimes of a certain foreign apartheid state whose lobbying proxies guide their careers. Indeed, their letter is packed with hysterical complaints about my journalism, demanding that I be “investigated” for producing a documentary on Iran’s Jewish community and for clinically exposing official Israeli deceptions about October 7 designed to generate public support for genocide in Gaza.

The letter also contains blatantly false, libelous statements. For instance, its authors claim I was “cultivated by an agent of influence by an FTO and current military adversary.” This is textbook defamation, and I don’t think it’s protected by congressional immunity.

Finally, it’s impossible to ignore the irony of Randy Fine falsely accusing an American journalist of unspecified crimes just days after Fine was filmed rummaging through a private citizen’s mailbox while he was campaigning for reelection.

Breaking into a mailbox is a federal crime. Journalism is not.

[GBC @GBC_Press]

🇺🇸 "Why do you think Trump is trying so hard to prevent the Epstein files from being released?"

Thomas Massie: "These files implicate billionaires, his friends, and political donors. Epstein had ties to our intelligence agencies and Israeli intelligence."

[Evan Dyer @EvanDyerCBC]

Israeli official speaks to Australia's ABC about the strike he ordered on World Central Kitchen that killed Jacob Flickinger and 6 other aid workers.
Says he's not sorry, that WCK has Hamas links and is "not really an organisation you can say is innocent."
https://t.co/aqzxmMAd7B

[Vance White @Axiscnceng]

@RL__2022 @AMK_Mapping_ Rather there are cliques in DC, amongst other places, who know the reality, in their way, and produce and disseminate the narratives tailored to suit their crazy schemes.

[Vance White @Axiscnceng]

@mar80549 Wishing strength.💛

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

The Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, Rabbi David Yosef said today that the Palestinian people do not exist, do not have rights, that it is good that Gaza was destroyed and that with the help of God, all of Gaza and the West Bank will be Jewish soon. The Jewish religion is being used as a tool of genocide. This is not a fringe rabbi. This is the most important rabbi in Israel.

[Vance White @Axiscnceng]

Beyond belief....

[Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2]

🚨Israel just closed down the case of its murder of American, Canadian, British, EU & Australian humanitarian workers of WKC in a triple tap strike in Gaza

The commander Israel had blamed, Nochi Mendel, was quietly promoted as head of the Settlements & National Infrastructural unit at the Defence Ministry. A fanatic settler himself who had signed a petition calling for starving Gaza before this massacre, Nochi received total support from the settler council who even sent him a box of chocolate to celebrate what he did.

[Vance White @Axiscnceng]

Shame of shames.

[Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2]

The IDF commander Israel itself blamed for this killing was quietly promoted as Head of Settlements & National Infrastructure unit at the Defence Ministry & received a box of chocolate from the settlers’ council after his killing of British, US, Canadian, EU & Australian citizens

[Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2]

Disappointed the BBC cancelled my interview on Israel's killing of Hind Rajab

2 producers eagerly reached out. They confirmed the time & one called to prepare a brief for the anchor

She asked me whether Israel's announcement is positive, I explained in detail it was a cover up.

The IDF is blaming the killing of Hind, her uncle, aunt & 4 cousins on the family itself for trying to flee by car & on the ambulance sent to rescue her for "failures in the co-ordination of the movement."

None of this is remotely true! The Red Cross immediately informed the IDF about 5-year-old Hind who was hiding in that motionless car, & they requested permission from Israel to allow an ambulance to rescue them.

After multiple long hours, Israel granted greenlight to the ambulance & provided them with a designated route on a GPS to drive on.

As soon as the ambulance reached Hind's car, the IDF ambushed & bombed them immediately with an American made anti-tank missile then opened fire on Hind's car. The car was hit with 355 bullets.

Israel then kept that area under lockdown for 12 days, & prevented anyone from approaching.

Hind's mom went daily to the Ahli baptist hospital hoping to find her daughter, until her lifeless body was brought in along with the charred remains of the ambulance men.

Israel then claimed after an "initial investigation" that its troops were NEVER in that area to begin with. They maintained that claim for 2 years despite ample recordings & satellite images debunking this lie.

The only reason Israel is now making this new announcement of a deeper investigation is to shield its soldiers & generals from the International Criminal Court by invoking the principle of "complementarity;" that the ICC cannot investigate a state that is already investigating itself in good faith.

I told the BBC producer Israel today also quietly shut down the investigation into the triple tap killing of American, Canadian, British, Australian & Polish citizens in the WCK massacre. Israel blamed the massacre on the aid workers themselves for "deviating from the predesignated route" & for hiring an armed security guard "without informing the IDF" (both claims where debunked by WCK themselves, who had coordinates their every step with the IDF).

I told the producer the Israeli commander responsible for this massacre, Nochi Mendel, is a fanatical settler who had signed a petition calling for starving Gaza & that he was celebrated by settler leaders & supported by Israeli government leaders after what he did.

Mendel even received a box of chocolate from the settler council's leader & a letter of support for what he did.

Mendel was initially dismissed by the IDF & blamed for the massacre, but was quickly & quietly reinstated & promoted in the Defence Ministry as the head of the settlements and national infrastructure unit.

It's abundantly clear Israel is NOT serious about prosecuting any of the atrocities committed in Gaza. Since the genocide began, only two soldiers were punished by the IDF; one for microwaving a living frog & another for cooking sausages in the army kitchen on Shabbat.

The producer asked me: What about the 150 cases the IDF said are pending review?

I answered: it's just a number designed to give the appearance of seriousness, but it's essentially meaningless.

If it took the IDF two whole years to admit the simplest of facts that the entire world had already known, which is that their troops were the ones who fired on Hind Rajab's car, how do you expect them to do with the remaining cases that are not as high profile?

Five minutes after the call, the producer wrote me that they decided to cancel the interview & will not even host anyone else to comment on the issue, & instead they'll play archival footage!

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

British doctor working in Gaza says the bodies of Palestinian children killed by the israelis are returned missing their organs | via @HatsOffff

[Ethan Levins ✝️ @EthanLevins2]

I was questioned by the Department of Homeland Security yesterday upon returning from Lebanon.

They asked me about 1 thing.

Why I posted negative things about Israeli Minister Ben Gvir.

I am a born American who lives in the United States, and they stopped me at the airport for an Israeli politician.

I’m serious.

[💧Mary Kostakidis @MaryKostakidis]

Juries now have refused to send Palestine Action astivists to jail as well as Tony Greenstein. His speech to the Jury that refused to send him to jail for ‘terrorism’ worth reading in whole, but here is an excerpt:
‘In the second world war, the Nazis walled the Jews of Warsaw, half a million of them into a ghetto — a sealed district, starved and diseased, from which the trains left for the Treblinka death camp. And in 1943 the young Jews who remained did something nobody expected. With a handful of smuggled pistols, against tanks and the SS, they rose. They knew they could not win. They rose because it was better to die resisting than to be led away quietly. It is one of the proudest moments in Jewish history.
The last surviving commander of that uprising was a man named Marek Edelman. And in his old age, Edelman wrote to the Palestinian resistance and addressed them as fellow fighters — much to Israel’s annoyance. When he died, Poland gave him a state funeral, a fifteen-gun salute, the President gave the oration. Israel did not send the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy. Edelman wasn’t a Zionist.
Edelman, who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, described Gaza as a ghetto. I have used his comparison for years before October 2023. Two million people, most of them refugees or the children of refugees, sealed into a strip of land under blockade for 16 years, where the majority are children who have never once been allowed out. When I wrote “ghetto,” I meant a ghetto. My blog supported the Uprising just as I would have supported the slave uprisings of the 19th century. That is a political opinion. It was a political opinion on 7 October 2023, and it is a political opinion now.
And here is the crazy thing. Read section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and ask what it would have made of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. If this Act had existed in 1944, they could have been classified as terrorists. So could the French Resistance.’

https://t.co/vgjThBrQfv

[Piers Morgan @piersmorgan]

When will the (many) decent Israelis stand up to what psychopaths like Ben Gvir & Smotrich are doing in their name?

[Peter Cronau @PeterCronau]

It is almost unbelievable — that the US tested an experimental tungsten pellet missile by slaughtering a female volley ball team.

But sadly not.

[The Last American Vagabond @TLAVagabond]

Trump saying once again that he will "remove" the "Jew haters" from this country. First, even as I agree that one who hates another solely due to their religion (zionists for example) are abhorrent, hating someone is constitutionally protected, as is expressing that hate. Second, those deciding what constitutes "Jew hate" have already proven to be deliberalty dishonest by conflating any Palestinian protest or any criticism of Israel with antisemitism. #RepublicansAttackingFreeSpeech #TwoPartyIllusion https://t.co/jZMIIxxBLE

[Middle East Eye @MiddleEastEye]

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israeli forces "destroyed Gaza" and flaunted its military operations which similarly destroyed 24 villages in Southern Lebanon.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

BREAKING: Israel is wiping out civilian homes in Kfar Tebnit, South Lebanon.

House after house is being blown apart in massive explosions.

If homes can be erased during a “ceasefire,” then it’s not a ceasefire.

It’s the continuation of genocide under a different label.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

BREAKING: Israel is dropping bombs on residential buildings in Gaza in the middle of the night — while families are asleep inside their homes.

Families with nowhere left to run.

The genocide has never stopped.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Time has a new article out in which unnamed sources assert that the Pentagon was caught totally off-guard by Iran’s aggressive retaliation against the US-Israeli onslaught which began last month, reporting the following:

“Key Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were surprised by the barrage of retaliatory attacks Tehran launched against U.S. and Israeli targets across the region, including in countries long assumed to be off-limits: Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, a state that had both harbored Iran’s terrorist proxies and served as a conduit for backchannel diplomacy between the U.S. and Hamas. The response shattered the assumption that Tehran would confine itself to performative retaliation. In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran’s muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war. Hegseth ‘was caught off guard. There’s no question,’ says a person familiar with his thinking.”

It’s so wild how we keep seeing reports that Iran’s retaliation caught the US off guard. For all the years I’ve been paying attention to this issue I’ve been reading experts and analysts saying if the US attacks Iran, Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz and strike US bases and the energy infrastructure of US allies in the region.

A few examples:

A 2006 Oxford Research Group paper titled “Iran: Consequences of a War” warned that Iran has numerous options at its disposal in the event of a US attack, and that the “most significant of these would be any possible retaliatory Iranian action to affect the transport of oil and liquefied natural gas through the Straits of Hormuz,” adding that stopping Iran from doing this “would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, leading to a fear of attack which alone would have a formidable impact on oil markets.”

A 2007 Cato Institute paper titled “The Iraq War and Iranian Power” warns that “Iran possesses the largest ballistic-missile inventory in the Persian Gulf — missiles which can reach Israel, Saudi Arabia and US military bases in Iraq,” and that “experts argue Iran could also use the ’oil weapon’: blocking the 34km-wide Strait of Hormuz and conducting submarine and anti-ship missile attacks against ports and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf Cooperation Council states.”

A 2012 NPR article titled “Can Iran Close The World’s Most Important Oil Route?” features then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acknowledging that Iran absolutely can block the Strait of Hormuz, saying Tehran has “invested in capabilities” which specifically enable them to do so.

A paper from the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy and the Center for a New American Security titled “IN DIRE STRAITS? IMPLICATIONS OF US-IRAN TENSIONS FOR THE GLOBAL OIL MARKET” warns of a potential scenario “that includes damage to Gulf oil infrastructure and a temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz.”

These weren’t a bunch of keffiyeh-wearing peaceniks making these assessments, they were deeply entrenched swamp monsters entirely loyal to the US empire. They opposed war with Iran not because it would be an evil act of unforgivable mass murder, but because it would be bad for the imperial power structure.

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton recently tweeted that other administration officials had warned the president to dismiss Bolton’s urging to attack Iran because of the easily foreseeable consequences of that war, saying “In 2018–2019, I made the case for regime change in Iran as often as I could. Voices in Trump’s orbit often cited Iran’s capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz as a reason against regime change. Trump has been fully aware this is a possibility, and yet did not prepare.”

I have zero military training or expertise — on military matters I’m just some schmuck with internet access — and yet nothing Iran has done has surprised me. It’s playing out exactly how the experts warned it would play out. There’s no way any literate, thinking person didn’t see this coming; when they say they didn’t, it’s because they’re either lying or amazingly stupid.

Trump’s war machine is either made up of liars, morons, lying morons, or (most likely), an eclectic mixture of all three.

[Peter Cronau @PeterCronau]

🚨REVEALED🚨 Secret night-time shipments are happening of High Explosives manufactured by a foreign arms company in an Australian government-owned facility — approved for export and headed ultimately to Israel to kill Palestinians.

Excellent reporting from @DaveMilbo for @shot_au:

“Australia is manufacturing the raw explosive that ends up inside the bombs falling on Gaza, on Lebanon, and on Iran. 

“Not the entirety of the bombs. Just the explosive bits. And even Penny Wong wouldn’t have the gall to argue that nitroglycerin, nitrocellulose, and RDX (known as cyclonite) are the “non-lethal parts” of a bomb. 

“Two factories, one in NSW, at Mulwala, and one in Victoria, in Benalla, manufacture the munitions that end up inside the shells, bullets, missiles and bombs used by the US-Israeli death machine in its expansionist, genocidal campaigns.”

https://t.co/jfccmy697Q