by MACKENZIE SCOTT

Lately I’ve been thinking about murmurations of starlings. The direction of these flights of millions of birds is not determined by any single leader or delegation, but by the responses of each bird to the needs and movements of the birds around it. In this way, they are constantly creating their direction together, and no bird among them can know what shape it will take or where they will land.

There is a prophecy written by Hopi elders in the year 2000. It encourages us to recognize and celebrate our role as active participants in the co-creation of our communities.    

It’s easy to focus on the methods of civic participation that make news, and hard to imagine the importance of the things we do each day with our own minds and hearts. Who nurtured a child in the kitchen; who was kind to a stranger in line at a grocery store; who gave fifty dollars to a local food shelter: these are not news stories. But all of it matters.

Since my post last December, I’ve given $7,166,000,000 to organizations doing work all over the world. This dollar total will likely be reported in the news, but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year. To use just one year in the United States as an example, the total donated to US charities of all kinds in 2020 was $471 billion, nearly a third of it in increments of less than $5,000. There was also $68 billion in reported financial support sent to family members living in other countries, tens of billions in crowdfunding, $200 billion in volunteer labor at service organizations, and nearly $700 billion in wages for the paid employees who chose to take jobs delivering those services over jobs where they might have earned more. Over 70% of Americans reported giving both labor and money to people they know, and half reported doing the same for strangers. That’s well over a trillion dollars worth of individual humanitarian action that we don’t read about online or hear about on the nightly news. To begin to imagine how much more there must be, just consider how many people take time out of their income-producing activities every day to listen with compassion, or to speak up for someone.  

And the multiplier effect on the social value of every one of these forms of benevolent contribution is huge.

Generosity and kindness engage the same pleasure centers in the brain as sex, food, and receiving gifts, and they improve our health and long-term happiness as well. The peace-fostering byproducts of one unexpected act of kindness toward a stranger of different background or beliefs might inspire a beneficial chain reaction that goes on for years. Respect, understanding, insight, empathy, forgiveness, inspiration – all of these are meaningful contributions to others.

It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible. Whose generosity did I think of every time I made every one of the thousands of gifts I’ve been able to give? It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college. It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year. And after she saw the difference she made in my life, what was she inspired to do, twenty years later? Start a company that offers loans to low-income students without a co-signer. And how quickly did I jump at the chance to be one of the people who supported her dream of supporting students just as she had once supported me? And to whom will each of the thousands of students thriving on those generosity- and gratitude-powered student loans go on to give? None of us has any idea.

The potential of peaceful, non-transactional contribution has long been underestimated, often on the basis that it is not financially self-sustaining, or that some of its benefits are hard to track. But what if these imagined liabilities are actually assets? What if these so-called weaknesses foster the strengths upon which the thriving (or even survival) of our civilization depends? What if the fact that some of our organizations are vulnerable can itself be a powerful engine for our generosity? What if acts of service that we can feel but can’t always measure expand our capacity for connection and trust? What if care is a way for all of us to make a difference in leading and shaping our countries? Votes are not the only way to show what we’d like to see more of in our societies. There are many ways to influence how we move through the world, and where we land.

 

Hopi Prophecy,

(The Hopi Prophecy translated from Hopi Elder Chief Dan Evehema, June 2000)

You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered…

Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?

Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for your leader.

Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word ‘struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Yield Giving for more

by PETER LUKACS

The metaphor of rewiring offers an ideal of engineered precision. But the brain is more like a forest than a circuit board

Popular wisdom holds we can ‘rewire’ our brains: after a stroke, after trauma, after learning a new skill, even with 10 minutes a day on the right app. The phrase is everywhere, offering something most of us want to believe: that when the brain suffers an assault, it can be restored with mechanical precision. But ‘rewiring’ is a risky metaphor. It borrows its confidence from engineering, where a faulty system can be repaired by swapping out the right component; it also smuggles that confidence into biology, where change is slower, messier and often incomplete. The phrase has become a cultural mantra that is easier to comprehend than the scientific term, neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to change and form new neural connections throughout life.

But what does it really mean to ‘rewire’ the brain? Is it a helpful shorthand for describing the remarkable plasticity of our nervous system or has it become a misleading oversimplification that distorts our grasp of science?

After all, ‘rewiring your brain’ sounds like more than metaphor. It implies an engineering project: a system whose parts can be removed, replaced and optimised. The promise is both alluring and oddly mechanical. The metaphor actually did come from engineering. To an engineer, rewiring means replacing old and faulty circuits with new ones. As the vocabulary of technology crept into everyday life, it brought with it a new way of thinking about the human mind.

Medical roots of the phrase trace back to 1912, when the British surgeon W Deane Butcher compared the body’s neural system to a house’s electrical wiring, describing how nerves connect to muscles much like wires connect appliances to a power source. By the 1920s, the Harvard psychologist Leonard Troland was referring to the visual system as ‘an extremely intricate telegraphic system’, reinforcing the comparison between brain function and electrical networks.

The metaphor of rewiring also draws strength from changing theories in developmental neuroscience. The brain was thought to be largely static after childhood, becoming a fixed network of circuits, much like a hardwired radio. But beginning in the 1960s, researchers showed that the brain was far more adaptable. Stroke patients could regain function by recruiting new areas of the brain.

These findings revolutionised rehabilitation medicine. They also gave rise to an idea that would quickly leap beyond the clinic: if brains can rewire, then people can change.

Aeon for more

by GHADA AGEEL

The Canadian prime minister delivered a stirring speech in Davos on the failures of international law – yet he remains silent in the face of Israel’s ongoing slaughter

Seven people, spanning three generations of one family, were burned alive late last month after an Israeli missile struck a tent encampment where they were sleeping in Gaza’s al-Mawasi area.

The oldest was Rebhi Abu Hadayed, 69, and the youngest was his granddaughter, five-year-old Laya. Rebhi was preparing to go to the mosque for morning prayers, and his brother, Mohammed, was already at the mosque when he heard the explosion.

Mohammed rushed back to find carnage. Two of Rebhi’s sons and one of their spouses had also been killed, along with two other grandchildren, seven-year-old Sham and eight-year-old Jebreel. And this was just the latest tragedy for their family: several other relatives had been killed previously in an Israeli attack last July.

The slaughter of Rebhi and his family came on a bloody day in Israel’s ongoing genocide, with at least 31 Palestinians killed, despite the “ceasefire” that began months earlier, on 10 October.

The slaughter began around 4am on 31 January, when Israeli warplanes targeted a residential building housing the al-Atbash family in western Gaza City, killing three children, Zeina, Maryam, and Manah, aged seven, five and three, their aunt 24-years-old Islam and their 69-years-old grandmother Olfat.

Also among the dead on that fateful day were seven-year-old Mohammed Rezeq and his grandmother, who lived near an Unrwa clinic in Gaza City. Around the same time, Israeli forces attacked the nearby Sheikh Radwan police station, killing 15 people, including six visitors and nine staff.

Between 31 January and 4 February ( five days), about 60 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. This amounts to an average of approximately 12 people killed each day, meaning that a Palestinian life has been taken roughly every 2 hours during this period of supposingly ceasefire.

These figures do not humanise the loss, but they do expose the relentless pace of destruction of palestinian life that words alone often fail to capture.

Decisive moment

Less than two weeks earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had made global headlines after delivering a forceful speech on the “old” and “new” world order at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 

Speaking at a decisive moment to a global audience grappling with protracted wars, and amid a crisis in the systems designed to protect civilians – including the steady erosion of international legal norms – Carney articulated a diagnosis that seemed to offer analytical clarity and moral resolve. 

When Palestinian lives were at stake, Carney looked away – not once, but at least 1,450 times

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient … And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,” Carney said.

While Canada is not a great power, he said it has something just as important: “the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together”. 

“That is Canada’s path,” he declared. “We choose it openly and confidently.”

Carney followed his Davos speech with a statement days later, marking the occasion of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945. 

“Looking away,” he said, “is not a passive act, but an active betrayal.”

On 31 January, these noble words were tested in Gaza – and Canada failed utterly. When Palestinian lives were at stake, Carney looked away – not once, but at least 1,450 times. That is the reported number of ceasefire violations committed by Israel between 10 October and 31 January.

MEE for more

by NICK DOWSON

Nick Dowson imagines a different world of online communities that puts our needs first.

My first interaction with online social platforms – other than email – was on MSN Messenger. My memories of it sit alongside the unforgettable tones of dial-up internet and the bonsai kittens hoax.

The program had an unadorned interface and text-based, mostly one-on-one, chats. There was no public posting, or algorithms (mathematical rulesets) determining who read what.

When MySpace, and later Facebook, came along we mistook their novelty for fun. But, fast forward not so many years and the love affair with social media has quickly soured – save for a brief interlude where, having copied from tools developed by social movements, Twitter took credit for a swathe of revolutions and protests.

It shouldn’t have taken Elon Musk’s ego to prove that having the world’s digital public spheres – core sites for democracy and social life in our age – controlled by a handful of rich men was untenable.

From service providers to the fibre optic cables, the internet has been handed over wholesale to corporations.

Its ills flow from that: social media’s monetization through the attention economy means data mining and the nurturing of users’ insecurities; advertising fuels consumerism; and platforms are incentivized to favour the spreading of far right messages – after all, outrage is seductive.

So, what would it look like if we called time on Big Tech’s failed experiment?

A better social media would need to be decentralized – away from the US stock markets and men like Mark Zuckerberg, on whose watch images of breastfeeding have been banned as misogyny spreads. As well as avoiding a single point of failure (or censorship), this would help with other goals: community ownership, and democratic control, would be facilitated by having many smaller, perhaps more local, sites.

Existing social media giants must be brought into public (and transnational) ownership – in a way that hands power to citizens, not governments. But they should also be broken up, using existing anti-monopoly rules.

New Internationalist for more

by INGRID CHAHINE

The Israeli occupation army set a precedent on Thursday as it struck the Lebanese University’s Hadath campus, killing Dr. Hussein Bazzi, director of the Faculty of Sciences, and professor Mortada Srour, while injuring at least thirteen others who were in the faculty’s courtyard. Previous Israeli operations in Lebanon have targeted residential areas, medical personnel, and civilian infrastructure, but this is the first confirmed strike on academics inside university grounds during the ongoing war, following the killing of Mr. Mohammad Reda Fadlallah, director of USAL University in Haret Hreik.

Condemnations quickly followed. Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) reported statements from colleagues, faculty associations, the Dean of the Faculty of Education, the Ministry of Education, and the Lebanese University administration, mourning martyrs Bazzi and Srour and thanking them for their remarkable contribution to science. There was no official statement, however, highlighting that the Israeli strike damaged a university already suffering from chronic underfunding, or rather systematic institutional weakening.

Parallel to these official responses, a coordinated strategy unfolded on social media, where users circulated a photograph claiming to show Dr. Hussein Bazzi standing alongside martyred Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Akil. The image was first published by Avichai Adraei, the Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israeli occupation army. Shortly after, the Lebanese University’s presidency issued a statement addressing the photograph, explaining that the claim that the person in the photo is the martyr Dr. Hussein Bazzi is incorrect. The statement noted that the image originated from enemy sources and that the identification remained unconfirmed speculation.

The occupation framed the targeting of academic and civilian infrastructure as an expanding campaign to “pressure the Lebanese government” who is reportedly “unable to disarm Hezbollah”.

Still, the bombing of academic institutions and the killing of faculty members, theorists, professors and students, follows a pattern established long before the recent zionist genocidal war on the Gaza Strip in 2023. The [ongoing] genocide, however, consolidated it further during that period, particularly with the level of impunity exhibited by the occupation and the international community vis-à-vis live streamed violations of all laws and morals. According to a January 2024 article by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has killed more than 94 university professors in Gaza since October 2023 along with teachers, and thousands of students. That figure has since increased of course, particularly when IOF attacks on the Strip deliberately continued to target academic, scientific, and intellectual figures as well as institutions. Before their demolition, some universities and schools were also converted to detention facilities and military barracks according to the article.

The Georgetown Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine documented the Palestinian scholars who were killed by Israel during the recent genocide. Martyrs were presidents of universities like Professor Sufian Tayeh, who was a renowned physicist and president of the Islamic University of Gaza and Dr. Said Al-Zubda, president of the University College of applied Sciences in Gaza since 2021, and Director of the Technology Incubator there since 2011. Others were deans, like martyr Dr. Ibrahim Hussein Al-Astal, who has a PhD in Curriculum and Mathematics Teaching Methods and was the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the Islamic University of Gaza, and Dr. Abo Absa, Dean of the College of Media and Internet Technology at the University of Palestine. Israel also killed professors like martyr Nesma Abu Shaira and Islam Suleiman Haboush. Professor Abu Shaira was a visual artist and an educator, and a lecturer at the department of Fine Arts at Al Aqsa University, and Professor Haboush was a researcher at the Islamic University of Gaza. She was the author of the book Popular Resistance During the First Intifada in the Gaza Strip. She was also known for her lectures on the history of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa in particular. Professor Haboush was killed in Gaza, along with most of her family members, in an Israeli airstrike on October 19, 2023. Among the scholars who also struck public opinion was professor Refaat al-Areer, a prominent Palestinian writer, poet, professor, and activist. He taught literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and co-founded the organization We Are Not Numbers, which matched experienced authors with young writers in the Strip, promoting the power of storytelling as a means of resistance. On December 6, 2023, Al-Areer was killed along with his brother, sister, and her three children in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza. Al-Areer had previously received death threats from Israeli accounts.

Israel also killed professor Khalil Abu Yahia in the recent genocidal war. He was a writer and researcher in Postcolonial, Literary and Cultural Studies and an English teacher at the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education. Abu Yahia had participated in international events worldwide and had written and co-written various articles, the last one was about climate justice in Palestine. He was also involved in community oral history and the integration of drama into education. On October 30, 2023, Khalil was killed in an Israeli airstrike, along with his mother, his two brothers, his wife Tasnim, and his two young daughters, Elaf and Rital.

Al Akhbar for more

by KATHERINE WEAVER & JOSH WILSON

In the remote Nukus Museum of Uzbekistan, a vast collection of banned Russian avant-garde art has been preserved for decades. The museum and its collection were founded by Igor Savitsky, a Soviet artist who defied censors to rescue and safeguard these works. His success was also made possible by the unique geography and history of Karakalpakstan, the region where the museum is located. After the fall of the USSR, Savitsky’s hand-picked successor Marinika Babanazarova had to continue to fight for the collection’s survival and international recognition. Today, Uzbekistan is going through a new period of political reform, economic growth, and opening to the outside world. Nukus could finally have a chance for a stable collection and its own growth and development.

Who was Savitsky?

About half a century ago, near the dusty shores of the retreating Aral Sea, Communist Party officials visited the Museum of Igor Savitsky. Savitsky, affectionately called “Junkman” by his friends and associates, was an artist. Under the nose of State officials (and sometimes with their funds), he was amassing a collection of over eighty thousand banned Russian avant-garde artifacts. He owned but one suit, which he wore only during inspections. When the officials saw The Bull (Fascism Advances), a painting by Vladimir Lysenko, hanging in the museum, they immediately declared the painting anti-Soviet and ordered its removal. As founder, director, and protector of the museum, Savitsky instantly complied.

Once the inspectors left, the director returned both his suit and The Bull to their rightful places. For now, his collection was safe: Nukus, the capital city of Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic located inside western Uzbekistan, was far away from the Party nucleus. Inspections were rare.

Savitsky traveled the USSR, visiting the homes of deceased or disappeared artists to relieve their spouses of any forbidden art, at once removing what might further incriminate the family from their home and yet safeguarding the legacy of their departed member. From the tens of thousands of artifacts Savitsky collected, Lysenko’s Bull prevailed as the museum’s unofficial mascot. The long-gone Party inspectors had not appreciated the painting in part because of the unrealistic presentation of the bull but also because the bull is so aggressive. It is known by a second name (which some historians believe that Savitsky actually made up), Facism Advances. However, art critics consider The Bull’s shotgun eyes symbolic–prophetic, even, of the Stalinist repression that branded the early 1930’s.

MSA for more

by JAWED NAQVI

The Tehran-Amol highway, also called the Haraz Road, paves a two-hour drive from the Iranian capital to a royal-era ski resort nestled in the scenic Damavand mountains. In the early years of the Islamic Revolution, it was where the rich elite gathered for lavish picnics, unaffected by the radical changes convulsing their country. Along the road, the wafting sounds of melody and cadence revealed the musical preference of the day for Michael Jackson and Madonna. From the local pick, the Mordab (swamp) song by singing-acting sensation Googoosh was a rage with men and women heading to the skiing resort in the winters.

On the snow-caked hills on the far side of the gorge separating my binoculars from the ski slopes on a 1982 visit were massive love-heart signs etched in fresh snow by female skiers sans hijab. My official minder did look disturbed — not by the sight of the women in free flow, but by a busy camera devouring snapshots of those lovers of Omar Khayyam and Hafez Shirazi on skis. Which accounts for the camera with the film of some amazing frames being ‘stolen’ from a security van. It’s this terrain straddling most of the country about three times the size of Iraq, which stands as a granite honeycomb against foreign military visitors. Iran has been conquered before. But Donald Trump claims none of the strategic intellect or the experienced guile of Changez Khan to swamp Iran. Nor is the IRGC a Shah Muhammad II to be overwhelmed by a stranger from abroad, in his case from Mongolia.

Remember that Khomeini’s Iran didn’t flinch before US-aided chemical weapons used by Saddam Hussein for eight years against the clerical government. Iran didn’t have a standing army at the time, nor a battle-hardened or ideologically motivated force the IRGC has become. Moreover, Iraq was mostly a flat land as analysts with the experience of the US invasion of the country point out. Iran offers rugged mountainous terrain as formidable as Afghanistan’s, if not more. As for the prospects of a ground campaign, the proverbial boots on the ground, Iran’s foreign minister with his enviable arsenic smile called out the prospects. “We are waiting for them.”

There’s a major problem though. Theodore Postol is professor of science, technology and national security policy at MIT who describes Benjamin Netanyahu as a “homicidal maniac”. If Netanyahu feels cornered, which Postol with his acknowledged insights into the world of conventional and nuclear missiles, believes could happen anytime given Iran’s precision blows on Tel Aviv and Haifa, Israel could use nuclear weapons on Iran. Postol’s fear is widely shared. In his view, Iran could respond even after a nuclear attack by assembling 10 bombs for which in his view it has the resources to destroy Israel with. Not a happy scenario for the world at all.

If Iran can indeed survive the conventional assault from Israel and the US, it would radically alter the global architecture of power and influence.

If Iran can indeed endure the pain and survive the conventional assault from Israel and the US, which leading former officials from the American military and the CIA believe is all it needs to do to win, it would radically alter the global architecture of power and influence, nothing less. To begin with BRICS will become a supremely invincible movement, but it’s not clear what Narendra Modi would make of that eventuality. He is due to host the BRICS summit in September this year. But his heart, we are told, is in the Quad meeting also due in Delhi soon where he hopes to host his all-time favourite hero from Washington, D.C. It’s not difficult to remember the ease with which previous Indian prime ministers handled the disarming contrariness of India’s non-aligned policy. Indira Gandhi got standing ovations in the US and Moscow. Manmohan Singh had a triangular association, which included flourishing ties with Beijing. But Modi, by visiting Israel and embracing Netanyahu 48 hours before the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, has fastened India’s sovereignty at Trump’s and Netanyahu’s stormy jetty. The boat under Modi runs the risk of keeling over in the storm.

Dawn for more

by AKBAR SHAHID AHMED

“Imagine being afraid to provide what you think is appropriate legal advice,” one former attorney told HuffPost.

A severe and unusual fear of being punished for doing their jobs has spread among staff at the State Department’s legal office, bolstering concerns about how the Trump administration is crafting foreign policy, five former State Department officials told HuffPost.

Lawyers at the Office of the Legal Adviser at State, known as “L,” worry they will face repercussions if they suggest the administration’s plans could break domestic or international law, and suspect they may be evaluated based on their apparent loyalty to President Donald Trump and his political vision, not their expertise and judgment, officials said. They noted that leadership in the office has steadily and atypically become dominated by Trump’s political appointees.

Administrations have not always followed guidance from the lawyers at “L,” but longtime officials said the office has not typically had a culture of self-censorship or consequences for the counsel that staff provide. Three officials who formerly worked there, two until earlier this year, described the shift underway in the office as alarming and notably different even from the first Trump presidency. Some former officials spoke to HuffPost on the condition of anonymity, citing a fear of retaliation.

“Your job is to provide legal advice,” one former State Department lawyer said. “Imagine being afraid to provide what you think is appropriate legal advice.”

“We’ve always had a culture where we speak frankly, challenge things and really push ideas to ensure they’re solidly supported,” another former lawyer told HuffPost. Now, “there’s an underlying fear of … providing advice that wasn’t well-received and then being cut out of a subject, being further and further removed from the job that you spent your career trying to do.”

HuffPost for more

by BINOY KAMPMARK

The big drain on military resources has begun. A war apparently already won (and not), against an adversary supposedly without means to fight back, its air force and navy destroyed, its missile capabilities blunted, is now drawing the clumsy colossus of American power into the Middle East with embarrassing effect. The Middle East, where US President Donald Trump promised the “forever wars” would end, promises an end to his beginning.

The ledger of losses keeps rising with giddying pace. The US casualty list, for now, remains manageably low, but the military purse is being raided with manic relish. Operation Epic Fury cost US taxpayers $11.3 billion in munitions over the first six days, an estimate that excludes operating and maintenance costs of the engaged military force or the damage inflicted by Iran. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) claims that the first 100 hours of the war cost $3.7 billion, approximating to $891.4 million each day.

Strain is also being placed on inventories. The US prides itself on deluxe, high brand killing and extermination of targets, using chic weaponry and dull doctrine. Expensive homicidal measures do have to be eventually accounted for. According to reporting from Bloomberg, “as the conflict extends toward a third week, the US war effort is showing unexpected signs of strain against an adversary whose military budget is smaller than the GDP of Vermont – but which has an arsenal of missiles and drones unlike anything the US has ever faced.”

Critical munitions are being depleted. With the campaign barely 100 hours old, 168 Tomahawk cruise missiles had been fired. (Each unit costs a mighty $3.6 million.) This is a staggering figure when compared to the rate of procurement: the previous five years had seen the production of 322 Tomahawks. According to a source quoted in the Financial Times, “The navy will be feeling this expenditure for several years.”

While the Pentagon gloats at reducing Iranian strikes by 80% or more, Tehran has gotten more economical with its targeting, successfully striking military and energy infrastructure across the Middle East with telling effect. Ballistic missiles have hit the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, destroying two AN/GSC-52B SATCOM terminals. A costly AN/FPS-132 early warning radar in Qatar – a facility estimated to cost some $1.1 billion – was successfully struck by a ballistic missile.

The AN/TPY-2 radar facilities used by the lauded yet hideously expensive Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system have also been struck in Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base, Al Ruwais in the UAE, Al Dhafra Air Base in proximity to Abu Dhabi and Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base. A sense of how important that facility is to the operation of the battery is provided by N.R. Jenzen, a munitions specialist of Armament Research: “The AN/TPY-2 radar is essentially the heart of the THAAD battery, enabling the launch of interceptor missiles and contributing to a networked air defence picture.” Knocking out the radar blinds the system.

The outstanding feature of many of the strikes is their relative cheapness to the interceptor missiles used to destroy them. “The round’s we’re firing – Patriot rounds, THAAD rounds … these weapon systems, each around is millions of dollars,” laments Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly. “The math on this doesn’t work.” Shahed-136 one-way drones, each one costing $35,000, have played a starring role in upsetting “the math”. CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper has also noted that the majority of wounded US personnel – some 140 troops – have been injured in “one-way strikes.”

This has compelled the Pentagon to pay greater attention to its own Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS), which is now seeing service in some instances against Iranian attacks. But the department is also set to seek more cash, expecting to ask $50 billion in additional funding from Congress. Given the sheer unpopularity of the war, some lawmakers have reservations. “You’ve got to be able to provide us with more information as […] justification,” insists Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Don’t just take it for granted that the Congress’s role is basically to write the cheque.”

Dissident Voice for more

by JOSEPH MASSAD

Repeatedly sold as a path to peace, the historical record shows Arab normalisation deals have delivered only violent expansionism, regional destabilisation and Israeli impunity

One of the key US policies in the Arab world is to bring about “normalisation” of relations between all Arab countries and Israel in order to encircle the Palestinians with allies of their colonisers and deprive them of any external support. 

Previously, the 1993 Oslo I Accord transformed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from a liberation movement into a subcontractor of Israel’s occupation to encircle the Palestinians within the occupied territories themselves. 

This containment strategy was meant to quash the Palestinian struggle once and for all. When Palestinian resistance persisted, culminating in the October 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood operation, the strategy was not reconsidered but rather further accelerated.

Since the 2020 announcement of the Abraham Accords, normalisation efforts have expanded beyond Arab states to include Muslim-majority countries that were never at war with Israel, yet did not have diplomatic relations with it. 

Most recently, in November, the Trump administration touted Kazakhstan‘s formal accession to the Accords, even though it already maintained “full diplomatic relations” with Israel.

Indonesia, which does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, is also reportedly weighing normalisation.

This expansion comes as several Arab initiatives have stalled in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, most notably with Saudi Arabia, and even Libya, whose foreign minister met with her Israeli counterpart in Italy in August 2023, before the ongoing mass slaughter of Palestinians rendered the process untenable.
 
Long before the US advanced normalisation with Israel as a regional strategy, it had already been articulated as a Zionist one. 

MEE for more