by RAHUL BEDI

Chandigarh: Endemically plagued by budgetary constraints, import restrictions, and bureaucratic delays in materiel procurement, both India and Pakistan have long relied on jugaad, or locally executed battlefield improvisations, to keep their respective militaries effectively operational.

Whether it is retrofitting legacy combat aircrafts, refurbishing Cold War-era air defence systems, patching submarines, hacking together heating systems in high-altitude bunkers or adapting civilian platforms for military employment, both the nuclear-armed rivals have consistently turned inherent constraint into invention, forging capability where none existed.

Over decades, these two militaries had become adept at successfully marrying systems that were never meant to meet.

Through jugaad, field commanders, mechanics and technologists – military and civilian – have reframed the rules of physics, engineering and industrial logic to augment their respective materiel capabilities.

In executing these retrofits, they had improvised solutions in rudimentary workshops, far removed from air-conditioned and antiseptic corporate research and development laboratories and factories. But the outcome eventually enabled legacy and even a smattering of modern platforms, to perform well beyond what their original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) had envisioned.

To most Western militaries, however, jugaad was not only unimaginable but reckless and irresponsible.

Trained in precision, redundancy and systematised logistics, many Western and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) militaries regarded Indian and Pakistani ethos of battlefield improvisation with bewilderment, albeit with some riveting, but objectionable fascination.

From fitting tractor parts into tanks to splicing together mismatched electronic systems, jugaad was ingenuity born of necessity – an approach largely alien to most Western militaries. The very idea of a damaged fighter jet patched up by a local mechanic or ironmonger, or a tank or infantry combat vehicle (ICV) being jump-started by villagers, would appear absurd to NATO planners.

The Wire for more

by MICHAEL FOX

Seven thousand years ago, the Chinchorro people, along the Pacific coast of South America, began to mummify their dead. Their bodies remain hidden in the desert. This is episode 41 of Stories of Resistance.

Here on these barren desert hillsides along the Pacific coast of South America, no trees grow. 

No shrubs. No cacti. No green.

The dry brown earth and the desert sand stretches as far as you can see, rolling into the Ocean. But this barren landscape preserves life, as it has for thousands of years. 

Nine thousand years ago, communities of peoples lived on the hillsides here. They were semi-nomadic. Fisherfolk. They survived off of the ocean from the abundant seafood and fish. 

Their water came from the nearby Camarones River, which poured down from the Andes Mountains, like a vein from the gods, transforming its meandering path into a fertile river valley.

This was one of the homes of the Chinchorro people. But here, alongside the refreshing cool waters of the Pacific Ocean and under the neverending blue sky, the Chinchorro suffered.

Miscarriages were common. Birth defects. They watched their babies die before they even took their first breaths.

The elders, the women and men, feared for future generations.

And it was this, the experts say, that led the Chinchorro mothers to mummify their first deceased babies roughly 7,000 years ago. To try to hold on to them.

“It’s like you’re still here. You’re still with me. And I want you to stay. Even though you can’t speak, you’re still with us,” says archeologist Jannina Campos.

They removed the organs and covered the skeletons with wood, mud, earth, and clay. Then they gave their mummies a mask. Tiny eyes, nose, and a mouth. A mask that still seems to speak thousands of years later. A mask that seems to reach into their very souls and connect these people into the present.

The Atacama Desert — the driest in the world — would preserve their bodies perfectly until today.

The Real News for more

by B. R. GOWANI

In a thousand places
I come to an end
I burn
I become a fading star
that disappears
in your sky.”

Parnia Abbasi — Above verse were prophesied by the 23-year old poet who along with her parents and 16-year old brother were murdered in an Israeli missile attack which hit their home on 13 June 2025.

532 CE (the Colombian Era)

On June 13, 2025, Israel, a nuclear power <1>, attacked many military sites and nuclear institutes in Iran because, Israel alleges, Iran is making nuclear weapons. Iran retaliated, and war is still raging on. Israel has killed many nuclear scientists, military leaders, and civilians in Iran.

On June 16, G7 leaders meeting in Canada defended Israel’s right to attack stating “Israel has a right to defend itself” and “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”

No one can question, “why can’t Iran have nuclear weapon when Israel has?”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz supported Israel’s unprovoked illegal war against Iran, and told public broadcaster ZDF:

“This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us. I can only say that I have the utmost respect for the Israeli army and the Israeli leadership for having had the courage to do this.”

To ARD, another public broadcaster, Merz threatened Iran:

“It would be good if this [Iranian] regime came to an end.” “[If they refuse to talk, then] Israel will go all the way.” 

Peter Schwarz describes G-7 leaders:

“[US’ Donald]Trump, [Germany’s Friedrich Merz, [Britain’s Keir] Starmer, [France’s Emmanuel] Macron, and other imperialist leaders behave like mafia bosses, threatening Ayatollah Khamenei and other Iranian leaders with murder, the use of bunker-busting weapons, and even nuclear bombs.”

It’s year 532 CE (the Colombian Era) and the conquest of the white men continues in the form of annexations, killings, deaths, destruction, genocides, starvation, displacements, that began in 1492 when Columbus, almost lost on the sea, was discovered and welcomed by the Native Americans. Columbus and other Europeans repaid their kindness by taking over their land, killing them in wholesale, and restricting the remaining in reservations. In 1992, when the US and some other countries were celebrating 500 years of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, Noam Chomsky’s new book was released: Year 501: The Conquest Continues.

Pahlavis

In 1925, British supported Reza Shah Pahlavi become the Shah of Iran, but he was removed by them in 1941. British were controlling Iran but were gentlemanly, if one could use such a word for the brutal colonial power, in their abdication order:

“Would His Highness kindly abdicate in favor of his son, the heir to the throne? We have a high opinion of him and will ensure his position. But His Highness should not think there is any other solution.”

He was exiled to Mauritius and then to South Africa where he died in 1944. Immediately, after the Shah’s removal, the British installed his son, Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The new Shah was ousted by Iranians in 1951 and he subsequently went into exile in Rome, Italy. The United States CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) put Shah back into power in 1953, by removing the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in the words of US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, “madman Mosaddegh.” “Madman?” Because he had nationalized the British owned Anglo-lranian Oil Company (AIOC) and stopped the British from looting Iran’s wealth. The Shah let the company do business with a new name, British Petroleum.

The US supported Shah’s merciless rule that lasted till he was overthrown in an Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. The Shah banished himself to Egypt. Then he went to Morocco whose King Hassan II had received a $110 million interest free-loan from the Shah. He expected the favor to be returned, but the cunning Hassan II was eyeing a portion of the $2 billion Shah had plundered. Shah left for Bahamas, and after sometime he ended up in Mexico. He had cancer and wanted it treated in the US but President Jimmy Carter was reluctant to let him come due to Khomeini government’s opposition; but Carter eventually had to give in for political reasons. Shah went to the US but had to leave because Iranian students in the US were protesting his presence, in addition to the Iranian government objection. Under heavy US pressure, Panama’s General Omar Torrijos had to take Shah in. Then he again went to Morocco, and ended up in Egypt where, after a little more than 18 months after leaving Iran, he died in 1980.

The US lost Iran, but it never forgave them, except for Obama who tried to improve relations. But his successor Donald Trump zealously reignited the enmity.

Reza Pahlavi, who has been living in exile in the US since his father Shah of Iran and other family members had to leave Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolution, addressed Iranians recently in a three minute video.

He told Iranians that the Islamic Republic of Iran is going to tumble, a bright future is awaiting them, and that they’ll be together in a democratic Iran. He wanted all Iranians to revolt against the regime and informed them he has a plan for the first 100 days. He then predicted “Iran will not descend into civil war or instability” under him.

This guy wants to conveniently forget the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. who were all victims of US imperialism, and when the US changed their regimes, ended up being unstable nations ravaged by civil wars.

If Reza Pahlavi really wants to serve his people than he should learn from the Iraqi experience where most Iraqi oil is being stolen by Western companies. Same is going to happen to Iran if the government falls there. He’ll be a “King” in name only — Israel and the US will be running the show while creating more trouble in Iran’s neighborhood, and forcing it to spend more on defense at the expense of majority of the people’s needs. After some time, who knows, Reza Pahlavi will be looking for a place to exile.

Reza Pahlavi should also remember that it was Netanyahu who was against Obama’s plan to resolve Iran’s nuclear program in a peaceful manner <2>. In 2012, Netanyahu had uttered the following threat:

“So the American clock regarding preventing secularization of Iran is not the Israeli one. The Israeli clock works, obviously, according to a different schedule.”

On June 15, a couple of days after Israel’s bombing of Iran began, more than 50 garlanded donkeys robed in satin and silk were paraded in Gaza while the children caressed them. The planners explained:

“They [the donkeys] have been more help to us than all the Arab states put together.”  

The Gazans should dedicate one more robed and garlanded donkey to Reza Pahlavi, too.

Pakistan Defense Minister

In a June 17 tweet, Khawaja Asif, Pakistan’s Defense Minister, minced no words to slam Pahlavi.

If Iranian people are energized and motivated according to you, show some balls and go back and lead them and remove the regime. Put your money where your arse is, bloody parasitical imperial whore.

Some people reminded Asif of how Shah of Iran had helped Pakistan and also criticized his language. Asif shot back with another tweet:

It is sad that there are people who are worried about linguistic niceties when a genocide is taking place under the watch of “civilized world”, 1000s of children are being butchered non stop.

This is not a sit down dinner where one should mind the language and manners. Pahlavi stands with Netanyahu a genocidal maniac, all he deserves is contempt and nothing else.

One cannot disagree with Asif’s advise. He should have added a couple of words when he branded Reza Pahlavi as “imperial whore.” It should be: “US imperialism’s imperial whore.”

But, now what?

Asif is the Defense Minister but all the decisions are taken by army chief Asim Munir who was in Washington DC on the invitation of Trump when Asif was tweeting the above tweets. Like Asif, Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence feels the same helplessness. She told the US Congress in March 2025:

“The IC [US Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei [sic, Ali Khamenei] has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

Well, the above statement didn’t align with what Trump wanted or was made to want by Israel lobbyists. On 17 June, in answering a reporter, Trump said: “I don’t care what she said.” Three days later, he called Gabbard a liar by stating, “she’s wrong.”

On June 10, Gabbard <3> made a social media video of her visit to Japanese city of Hiroshima, the place where the world’s first atom bomb made by the US, was dropped on August 6, 1945. She also talks about dangerous consequences of nuclear holocaust and that it should be avoided. She should show some more courage and speak out for Palestinians, too.

If Asif is really serious about doing something concrete and constructive, he could do something similar to Gabbard: either he or his department could make a video to draw world’s attention to the looming disaster. about how Iran’s fall could affect the entire Middle East and several other countries, could damage the environment, could displace millions of people, could create resisters or in the western imperialist lingo “terrorists,” thousands of or more orphans and widows. He could produce a solid plan to stop this war and the genocide of Gazans rather than issuing statements.

He could request Egypt, UAE, Morocco, Qatar, Turkiye and other countries to stop doing business with Israel,

He could stir up China, Pakistan’s best friend, to wake up and do something. He could remind China that it started Belt and Road Initiative to avoid the US encirclement. In 1921, China and Iran signed, Iran–China 25-year Cooperation Program, for discounted Iranian oil. If the US and Israel occupy Iran, then that program will be moot and the US could accelerate its plan to strangle China economically.

Asif should look inward too. The Balochistan Province has many grievances which he could request his government and army chief to take care of before outsiders take advantage of the situation, especially if the US prevails over Iran, the next door country with almost 600 mile common border.

He should ask Munir as to the nature of his talk with Trump, during the two hours he spent in the White House.

(I failed to find a single photo of Defense Minister Khawaja Asif and Army Chief General Asif Munir, just the two of them.)

US and Pakistan

On President Donald Trump’s invitation, Munir had lunch at the White House. Pakistan’s army chiefs who have also been presidents (Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, and Pervez Musharraf) have been invited in the past. But just an army chief being invited was unusual. He was accompanied by national Security Advisor Lieutenant General Asim Malik where as Trump was accompanied by his special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Many Pakistanis felt honored and many Indians felt jealous. But one thing’s for sure: this lunch one hopes won’t be the worst one of Munir’s life. If it is, then it will cause gut-shattering diarrhea. Trump doesn’t meet anyone without demanding something or expecting some reward. No photos of the lunch or meeting were released nor was any statement issued.

Munir praised President Donald Trump as “one of the greatest and fantastic leaders.”

Then on June 20, Rubio called Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and talked about Iran and other issues. Pakistan formally recommended Trump’s name for 2026 Noble Peace Prize for helping end the war between India and Pakistan.

It would have been great if Munir had received a guarantee that he would not attack Iran before the Nobel Peace Prize announcement. If terrorists like Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and US National Security Advisor/Secretary of State Henry Kissinger can get it, then why can’t Trump?

Questions

As defense minister, Asif should try to find out, that is, If Munir answers …

If Trump asked Munir to allow the US to use Pakistan’s territory for fomenting trouble in Iran?

Is the US planning to station its troops in Pakistan?

Lunch is never free in the US, so what is the price Trump demanded in return?

Was Pakistan asked to join the war against Iran, that is, if the US officially joins the ongoing US supported Israeli war against Iran? <4>

…

Note

<1> Israel, after getting recognition as a country on a stolen land of Palestinians in 1948, didn’t wait long and started finding ways to develop nuclear program. By 1967, it had the expertise and the material for making bombs; today, it has 90 plutonium-based nuclear warheads and has enough material to make 100–200 weapons. Israel has never wanted that any power in the region could challenge its thuggery or who would extend support to the Palestinians. The GCCP and other countries want good relations with Israel and have no concern for the Palestinians.

<2> The tragedy of US presidents is that they cannot question Israel, a nuclear power, as to who gave them the right to dictate the US as to how it should conduct its policy. Well, the fear of Israel Lobby which has spread like cancer in major institutes and government. The New York Times was also advising Obama about Iran’s nuclear program.

<3> Gabbard was accused by Hillary Clinton as “Russian asset.” Hillary also smeared Green Party’s Jill Stein with the same label. No proof was ever produced. In 2022, the New York Times repeated the same nonsense. Neither of them are Russian assets. However, one cannot deny Gabbard’s charges about Hillary: Gabbard called her “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long …” Hillary, like so many others in every corridor of power in the US, an be called a foreign asset. Yes, Israeli asset. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, and so many others are Israeli assets too.

<4> When in the early 1980s the US wanted Pakistan’s help in giving the Soviet Union its “Vietnam,” Pakistan’s military dictator was offered $400 million for joining the US war against the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan. Zia rejected the offer as “peanuts,” so the price was increased. During the US war against Afghanistan in 2001, Pakistan was threatened to join the war or else it will be bombed to stone age. Pakistan joined them, and as a result suffered a lot.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by JAWED NAQVI

Google Translate has become among the handiest apps for a good reason. It discards the cliché about the meaning getting lost in translation and helps strangers to connect in a naturally multilingual world.

Many Indians who love Urdu poetry can do so because it was translated into English or reset in the Devanagari script. Same with Persian and Latin classics, not to speak of Russian literary treasures. The way some Indians talk knowledgeably about Helen of Troy often sounds as though she was kidnapped by an island king in the neighbourhood.

I asked Graham Earnshaw, my news agency’s Asia editor in the 1990s, to let me cover the raging Islamist insurgency in Tajikistan, but he tossed me a disarming question. “Do you speak Russian or Tajik?” As I could speak neither of the amazing languages, how was I hoping to report, say, an assault on the women of a minority community in a remote Tajik village?

There’s always another way of seeing the problem, though. Most foreign journalists assigned to South Asia, for example, speak little or no local language. Graham’s question, therefore, was a non-sequitur. Besides, there was a larger point at stake. The editor seemed surprised when he learnt that I used translators anyway, even to cover a story in Delhi’s neighbourhoods — not the stories journalists pick up along the highways, where dhabas and paanwallahs deal with assorted clients via a handy mishmash of connecting phrases and languages.

One could argue that an exceptionally erudite scholar of Hindi would perhaps feel challenged traversing India’s sprawling ‘Hindi heartland’, also called the ‘cow belt’. Try to connect conversations from, say, the areas bordering Pakistan in western Rajasthan to the eastern flank of Maithili-speaking Bihar, both notionally Hindi-speaking states, and come back with a cogent narrative.

Prof Higgins would struggle. It’s difficult to imagine a ‘Hindi heartland’ in which a Brij-speaker from a Mathura village in UP can communicate her story to an Awadhi-speaking village belle in Ayodhya, also in UP. It’s a tricky proposition at the very least.

Women writers in South Asia are legion. They write in myriad languages but are read in many more.

And this is what makes the award of the Booker Prize last week to Banu Mushtaq so important. Her collection of short stories was written in Kannada, a South Indian language with a dazzling cultural pedigree. It was crucial that the 12 stories selected from a corpus stretching over three decades of writing were published as Heart Lamp in English, the translation done by a scholar of Kannada and English.

Dawn for more

by EDWARD SARTRE

Once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from view. He was already being attacked for his ‘blindness’ about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and even his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism and sheer energetic reach. Sartre’s whole career was offensive both to the so-called Nouveaux Philosophes, whose mediocre attainments had only a fervid anti-Communism to attract any attention, and to the post-structuralists and Post-Modernists who, with few exceptions, had lapsed into a sullen technological narcissism deeply at odds with Sartre’s populism and his heroic public politics. The immense sprawl of Sartre’s work as novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, political intellectual, engaged activist, seemed to repel more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range and literary distinction (for which he both won, and rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature). He had become a maligned ex-celebrity, except in the Anglo-American world, where he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, not quite as chic and compelling as (the far less talented) Camus.

Then, as with many things French, the fashion began to change back, or so it seemed at a distance. Several books about him appeared, and once again he has (perhaps only for a moment) become the subject of talk, if not exactly of study or reflection. For my generation he has always been one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of our time. Yet he seemed neither infallible nor prophetic. On the contrary, one admired Sartre for the efforts he made to understand situations and, when necessary, to offer solidarity to political causes. He was never condescending or evasive, even if he was given to error and overstatement. Nearly everything he wrote is interesting for its sheer audacity, its freedom (even its freedom to be verbose) and its generosity of spirit.

There is one obvious exception, which I’d like to describe here. I’m prompted to do so by two fascinating, if dispiriting discussions of his visit to Egypt in early 1967 that appeared last month in Al-Ahram Weekly. One was in a review of Bernard-Henry Lévy’s recent book on Sartre; the other was a review of the late Lotfi al-Kholi’s account of that visit (al-Kholi, a leading intellectual, was one of Sartre’s Egyptian hosts). My own rather forlorn experience with Sartre was a very minor episode in a very grand life, but it is worth recalling both for its ironies and for its poignancy.

…

Foucault very quickly made it clear to me that he had nothing to contribute to the seminar and would be leaving directly for his daily bout of research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was pleased to see my book Beginnings on his bookshelves, which were brimming with a neatly arranged mass of materials, including papers and journals. Although we chatted together amiably it wasn’t until much later (in fact almost a decade after his death in 1984) that I got some idea why he had been so unwilling to say anything to me about Middle Eastern politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his horror at the ‘anti-semitic’ anti-Israel riots of the time, common in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague of his in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a different story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young students. I still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. ‘Very exciting, very strange, crazy,’ I recall him saying about those early days of the Islamic Revolution. I think (perhaps mistakenly) I heard him say that in Teheran he had disguised himself in a wig, although a short while after his articles appeared, he rapidly distanced himself from all things Iranian. Finally, in the late 1980s, I was told by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends, had fallen out over the question of Palestine, Foucault expressing support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians.

…

One further point. A few weeks ago I happened to catch part of Bouillon de culture, Bernard Pivot’s weekly discussion programme, screened on French television, and broadcast in the US a short time later. The programme was about Sartre’s slow posthumous rehabilitation in the face of continuing criticism of his political sins. Bernard-Henry Lévy, than whom in quality of mind and political courage there could scarcely be anyone more different from Sartre, was there to flog his approving study of the older philosopher. (I confess that I haven’t read it, and do not soon plan to.) He was not so bad really, said the patronising B-HL; there were things about him, after all, that were consistently admirable and politically correct. B-HL intended this to balance what he considered the well-founded criticism of Sartre (made into a nauseating mantra by Paul Johnson) as having always been wrong on Communism. ‘For example,’ B-HL intoned, ‘Sartre’s record on Israel was perfect: he never deviated and he remained a complete supporter of the Jewish state.’

For reasons that we still cannot know for certain, Sartre did indeed remain constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism. Whether that was because he was afraid of seeming anti-semitic, or because he felt guilt about the Holocaust, or because he allowed himself no deep appreciation of the Palestinians as victims of and fighters against Israel’s injustice, or for some other reason, I shall never know. All I do know is that as a very old man he seemed pretty much the same as he had been when somewhat younger: a bitter disappointment to every (non-Algerian) Arab who admired him. Certainly Bertrand Russell was better than Sartre, and in his last years (though led on and, some would say, totally manipulated by my former Princeton classmate and one-time friend, Ralph Schoenman) actually took positions critical of Israel’s policies towards the Arabs. I guess we need to understand why great old men are liable to succumb either to the wiles of younger ones, or to the grip of an unmodifiable political belief. It’s a dispiriting thought, but it’s what happened to Sartre. With the exception of Algeria, the justice of the Arab cause simply could not make an impression on him, and whether it was entirely because of Israel or because of a basic lack of sympathy – cultural or perhaps religious – it’s impossible for me to say. In this he was quite unlike his friend and idol Jean Genet, who celebrated his strange passion for Palestinians in an extended sojourn with them and by writing the extraordinary ‘Quatre Heures à Sabra et Chatila’ and Le Captif amoureux.

A year after our brief and disappointing Paris encounter Sartre died. I vividly remember how much I mourned his death.

London Review of Books for more

by TARIQ ALI

The expansion of the war from Palestine to Iran, which began on 13 June, signals an Israeli obsession persisting for four decades. As the Trump administration was negotiating in bad faith with Iran over its nuclear programme, the Israeli regime took advantage of an interval to bomb Tehran, assassinating leading scientists, a senior general and other officials, some of them engaged in the talks. After a few unconvincing denials, Trump admitted that the US had been informed of the attack ahead of time. Now the West is backing Israel’s latest onslaught, despite what Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence, said as recently as 25 March: ‘The Intelligence Community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.’  

The IAEA inspectors know full well that there are no nuclear weapons. They have simply been acting as willing spies for the US and Israel, providing pen-portraits of the senior scientists who have now been killed. Iran has belatedly realised that it was pointless letting them into the country and a parliamentary bill has been drafted to throw them out. The country’s leadership had nothing to gain from sacrificing this part of their sovereignty, yet they clung to the lame half-hope, half-belief that if they did as the Americans wanted, they might get the sanctions lifted and a US-guaranteed peace.  

Their own historical experience should have taught them otherwise. Iran’s elected government was overthrown with covert Anglo-American aid in 1953 and its secular opposition destroyed. After a quarter of a century of Western-backed dictatorship, the Pahlavi dynasty was finally overthrown. But a year after the 1979 Revolution, the West – as well as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – funded Iraq to start a war against Iran and topple the new regime. It lasted eight years and left half a million people dead, mostly on the Iranian side. Hundreds of Iraqi missiles hit Iranian cities and economic targets, especially the oil industry. In the war’s final stages, the US destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf and, for good measure, shot down a civilian passenger plane. Britain loyally helped in the cover-up.  

Since then, the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy has always put the regime’s survival at its centre. During the Iran–Iraq war, the clerics had no hesitation in buying arms from their avowed enemies, Israel included. Their solidarity with oppositional forces has been fragmentary and opportunist, devoid of any consistent anti-imperialist strategy, except in their lonely but crucial capacity as a defender of Palestinian rights, in a region where every single Arab government has capitulated to the hegemon. On 15 June, soon after the Israeli attack, there was a remarkable procession of over fifty donkeys in Gaza, the animals garlanded and covered with silk and satin robes; as they were led down the street, children stroked them with genuine affection. Why? ‘Because’, explained the organiser, ‘they have been more help to us than all the Arab states put together’.  

Following the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranians no doubt hoped that collaborating with Washington – clearing the path for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar – would win them some respite. In many respects, the ‘War on Terror’ was not a bad time for the Islamic Republic. Its standing in the region soared together with oil prices, its enemies in Baghdad and Kabul were brutally removed, and the Shia groups it had been backing since 1979 were brought to power in neighbouring Iraq. It’s difficult to imagine that neither the Bush politburo (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice) nor its unofficial US-based Arab advisors (Kanaan Makiya, Fouad Ajmi) could have foreseen this outcome, but that appears to have been the case. The first non-Western foreigner to visit the Green Zone as an honoured guest was President Ahmedinejad. 

Both Sunni and Shia nationalists came together to oppose the occupying forces, firing rockets and mortar at the US embassy. It was Iranian state intervention that split this opposition, ensuring that a united Iraqi resistance movement descended into a futile and destructive civil war. Muqtada al-Sadr, a key Shia leader in Iraq, had been shocked by the atrocities in Fallujah and led a series of popular uprisings against the US coalition. At the height of the conflict, he was invited to visit Iran and ended up staying – or being kept there? – for the next four years. The subsequent entry of ISIS onto the battlefield strengthened this tactical US–Iran alliance, with the Pentagon providing air support to aid the assaults being carried out by the 60,000 strong Shia militants on the ground.

Most of these forces were under the indirect command Qassem Soleimani, who was in regular communication with General David Petraeus. Soleimani was a gifted strategist, yet susceptible to flattery, especially from the Great Satan. He was the main thinker behind the expansionist tactics deployed by Tehran after 9/11, but his tendency to boast to his US counterparts alienated some of them, especially when he explained accurately how the Iranians had foreseen and exploited most US mistakes in the region. Spencer Ackerman’s description rings true: 

He was pragmatic enough to cooperate with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as destroying the Caliphate did, and was prepared to clash with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as with Soleimani’s backstopping of Syria’s Bashar el Assad or earlier with IED modifications that killed hundreds of US troops and maimed more. Soleimani’s impunity infuriated the Security State and the Right. His success stung.  

Yet even as Iran’s regional power increased, social tensions at home were rising. The revolution had excited hopes at first, but the ensuing war with Iraq was debilitating. Partly for this reason, Iran took a tougher stance on the nuclear question, asserting its sovereign right to enrich uranium. Domestically, this was seen as a means of reuniting the population. Externally, it has a perfectly logical defensive purpose: the country was in a vulnerable position, encircled by atomic states (India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel) as well as a string of American bases with potential or actual nuclear stockpiles in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Nuclear-armed US aircraft carriers and submarines patrolled the waters off its southern coast.  

Totally forgotten in the West is the fact that the nuclear programme was an initiative first taken by the Shah in the 1970s with US support. One of the companies involved was a fiefdom of Dick Cheney, Bush’s sleazy Vice President. Khomeini halted the project when he came to power, considering it un-Islamic. But he later relented and operations restarted. As the programme ramped up in the mid-2000s, Iran and its supreme leader found that their attempts to placate Washington had come to nothing. They were still in the West’s crosshairs. The Bush White House gave the impression that either a direct US strike against Iran, or an attack via its tried-and-tested regional relay, Israel, might soon be on the cards. The Israelis, for their part, were virulently opposed to anyone challenging their nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Iran’s leader was described by the Israeli government and its loyal media networks as a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘new Hitler’. It was a hurriedly manufactured crisis, of the sort in which the West has become a specialist. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. The US had nuclear weapons, as did the UK, France and Israel; yet Iran’s search for the technology required for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence provoked moral panic.  

In the scramble by European powers to enhance their standing with Washington following the invasion of Iraq, France, Germany and Britain were keen to prove their mettle by forcing Tehran to accept stringent limits on its nuclear activity. The Khatami regime immediately capitulated, imagining it was really being invited in from the cold. In December 2003, they signed the ‘Additional Protocol’ demanded by the EU3, agreeing to a ‘voluntary suspension’ of the right to enrichment guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Again, it made no difference. Within months, the IAEA condemned them for having failed to ratify it and Israel was boasting of its intention to ‘destroy Natanz’. In the summer of 2004, a large bipartisan majority in the US Congress passed a resolution for ‘all appropriate measures’ to prevent an Iranian weapons programme and there was speculation about an ‘October surprise’ in the runup to that year’s election.  

At the time, I argued inthe Guardian that ‘to face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires an intelligent and far-sighted strategy – not the current rag-bag of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests of the clerics’. A number of liberal and socialist Iranian intellectuals wrote back from Tehran to express strong agreement, especially with my conclusion:

Side Car–New Left Review for more

by MAX BLUMENTHAL & WYATT REED

Top Israeli lawmakers have accused their government of laundering massive sums through a shadowy network of US humanitarian and mercenary orgs. The weaponized aid initiative is the linchpin of Israel’s plan to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by forcing the starving population into concentration camp-like hubs.

Israel’s scheme to commandeer aid distribution in Gaza ended in chaos on May 27, with Israeli soldiers reportedly opening fire on stampeding crowds of hungry Palestinians after just 8000 boxes of rations were handed out by an opaque organization calling itself the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Thousands of starved Gazans stormed the dystopian Israeli-American aid complex in west Rafah after being forced to stand in endless queues under the scorching sun inside a fenced camp, subjected to biometric surveillance.

The US-Israeli backed “Gaza Humanitarian… pic.twitter.com/DaYbaOblxb

— Gaza Notifications (@gazanotice) May 27, 2025

Founded this February in Switzerland under a cloud of mystery, GHF serves as an umbrella for a network of private mercenary firms which Israel is using to supplant the role of the United Nations in feeding Palestinians after bringing them to the brink of starvation.

At the moment, the public has no idea who is funding the opaque aid boondoggle. A GHF spokesman told the Washington Post “the foundation has already secured $100 million from an undisclosed donor.” 

Right-wing Israeli opposition figure and Member of Knesset Avigdor Lieberman proclaimed that GHF’s mysterious financial angel was, in fact, the Israeli government. “The money for humanitarian aid comes from the Mossad and the Ministry of Defense,” Lieberman wrote on Twitter/X, complaining, “Hundreds of millions of dollars at the expense of Israeli citizens.”

Israeli opposition figure and former Deputy PM Avigdor Lieberman says the Mossad and Israeli Defense Ministry are covertly funding the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the aid boondoggle founded in Switzerland and run by a former USAID administrator with Trump admin political cover pic.twitter.com/tOWa8E6HzM

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 27, 2025

Yair Lapid, a Member of Knesset and de facto leader of Israel’s loyal opposition, has accused the Israeli government of funding two “shell companies,” pointing to GHF and the private mercenary firm, Safe Reach Solutions, which was founded by former CIA field operative Phillip Reilly. Two former US officials told the Qatari-owned outlet Middle East Eye that Reilly “had won the trust of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several Israeli businessmen close to him.”

If true, this would mean Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus is effectively laundering massive sums of money through a weaponized aid scheme that forms the linchpin of its plan to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza. A leaked internal GHF document acknowledged that the food distribution centers and residential compounds it was constructing in Gaza could be perceived as “‘concentration camps’ with biometrics.’” 

The GHF model appears integral to Israel’s stated plan to occupy 75% of the Gaza Strip, forcing starving and homeless Palestinians into what its military has branded as “humanitarian islands” designed to “divide and rule” the decimated enclave. It is also a clear attempt at replacing UNRWA, the United Nations agency that has tended to the needs of Gaza’s refugee population since 1949, and which the Israeli Knesset designated as a terrorist organization in 2024.

GHF’s creation can be traced directly to the Israeli government’s COGAT office, which presides over the siege of Gaza, as well an Israeli entrepreneur named Liran Tancman, who was described in one report as “a reservist in the IDF’s 8200 signals intelligence unit, who called for using biometric identification systems outside the distribution hubs to vet Palestinian civilians.” 

The Gray Zone for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

“I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes…”

This is the opening stanza of “I, Too” by Langston Hughes, a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. As you can see, the poem speaks powerfully about racial inequality, identity, exclusion, and, of course, resistance.

Obviously, Hughes’ kitchen is more than a room. It’s a metaphor for the spaces where societies have historically banished those deemed different, dangerous, “disgusting” or simply inconvenient. The act of sending someone to eat in the kitchen when company comes is “othering” in its most domestic, mundane form. Yet this simple gesture contains the entire infrastructure of exclusion.

The term “othering” itself is relatively recent, coined in academic circles, but the practice is as old as the first human who pointed at their neighbour and said, “That one’s not like us”. It’s the psychological and social process by which we create an “us” by defining a “them”—turning human beings into simplified categories that justify everything from mild social awkwardness to genocide.

Edward Said’s groundbreaking 1978 work Orientalism, which we read mainly as a critique of Western scholarship, also told us about how knowledge itself could become a weapon of othering. Said showed how European scholars created an entire academic discipline around the idea that the “East” was fundamentally different: exotic, mysterious, backwards, and, crucially, in need of Western guidance. The Orient became not a place but a projection, a screen onto which the West could project its own fantasies and fears.

What made Said’s analysis so devastating was how he showed that this prejudice was dressed up as objective scholarship, complete with footnotes and university chairs. The “Oriental” was constructed as eternally different, trapped in time, unable to speak for themselves. It was othering with a PhD.

The academic othering had real-world consequences. As Said noted: “Every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” The knowledge produced in European universities justified colonial rule, military intervention, and economic exploitation. The Orient needed to be managed, civilised, and controlled. For its own good, of course.

Frantz Fanon, writing from his experience as a Black psychiatrist in colonial Algeria, understood othering from the inside out. In Black Skin, White Masks, he described the psychological violence of being constantly seen as Other. “When people like me, they like me ‘in spite of my colour’. When they dislike me; they point out that it isn’t because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle.”

The Black person, Fanon said, was forced to see themselves through white eyes, to internalise the very gaze that diminished them. This created what Fanon called a “sociogenic” trauma. In simple words, this is psychological damage inflicted not by individual pathology but by social structure itself.

This is why the kitchen where Hughes’ darker brother eats alone becomes a state of mind, a way of understanding oneself as fundamentally displaced from the main table of humanity.

Frontline for more

by ZOHRAN MAMDANI

New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani says New Yorkers “are ready for a new generation of leadership that puts working people first.”

There are over three thousand New Yorkers here this evening — and thousands more watching from home. New Yorkers who believe that living here shouldn’t be a daily grind of anxiety. New Yorkers who are ready to turn the page on years of corruption and incompetence. To reject the politics of distraction and fear, of big money and small vision, of cowardice and collaboration in the face of Trump’s authoritarianism. New Yorkers who are ready for a new generation of leadership that puts working people first.

My brothers and sisters, you are the beating heart of this campaign. You have climbed six floor walkups and braved the pouring rain to canvass our city, sharing our message with the very New Yorkers you’ve lived alongside for years but never had the chance to meet. And make no mistake, this campaign is reaching every corner of this city.

I see the work each of you do when New Yorkers wave excitedly from bus windows and shout “freeze the rent” from moving cars.

I see it when volunteers who have never participated in politics before dedicate their every Sunday night to spreading our message. I see it when thousands of New Yorkers post proud screenshots of their first ever ballots. And I feel it when the aunties and uncles who have long felt abandoned by a broken status quo pull me aside to tell me that finally, they’re excited to believe again.

We stand on the verge of a victory that will resonate across the country and the world. Make no mistake: this victory will be historic, not just because of who I am — a Muslim immigrant and proud democratic socialist — but for what we will do: make this city affordable for everyone.

I think of a woman I met on the BX33 in the Bronx, who said to me: “I used to love New York — but now it’s just where I live.” We’re going to make this city one that working people can love once again.

That’s who I’m thinking about tonight: the New Yorkers who make this city run. For after this rally, as many of us sleep, millions of our neighbors will step out onto moon-lit streets across our city.

Nurses working the night shift will put on their scrubs and save lives. City workers will clean subway stations and pick up our trash. Office buildings will be made new again, as the midnight shift scrubs and polishes in the dark.

Many of these New Yorkers are immigrants, who traveled to this city from faraway countries with nothing in their pockets except a dream of a better life. And even more of them will spend the entire night tirelessly working, and return home carrying the burden that it still isn’t enough. The sun rises, the bills continue to climb, and the stress never seems to fade.

If New York truly is the city that never sleeps, we deserve a mayor who fights for those of us who labor at every single hour of the day. I will be that mayor.

When we launched this campaign on a cold October evening, few thought we could win. Only a couple more could even pronounce my name. Andrew Cuomo still can’t.

The so-called experts said we’d be lucky to break 5 percent. But I always knew that we would build a campaign like this.

So when a disgraced former governor questions whether or not we can lead this city, I look at our campaign and I know the answer.

Over a million doors knocked. More than 40,000 volunteers. A movement that the pundits and politicians had written off, now on the precipice of toppling a political dynasty. And because of that, we will win a city that we can afford.

But what does winning look like?

It looks like a rent-stabilized retiree who wakes up on the first of every month, knowing the amount they’re going to pay hasn’t soared since the month before.

Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the rent.

It looks like a single mom who can drop her kids off at school and know she won’t be late to work, because her bus will arrive on time and cost nothing at all.

Jacobin for more