Dear Readers:
Today I have this piece by reporter David Narmania, written for RIA, the most mainstream of all mainstream Russian news outlets. The topic is Iran’s rather impressive strike against Israel. Narmania’s analysis doesn’t really add much to meatier pieces I have seen, such as Simplicius, and the guests on Judge Napolitano’s youtube show. In fact, while those other analysts call the Iranian attack awesome, Narmania is more — dismissive is not the right word — but he repeats the Israeli talking point that most of the stuff was shot down. Other analysts are, like, duh! the drones were supposed to be shot down, they were the pawns in this chess game, their job was to overwhelm Israeli air defenses!
But don’t get the idea that Narmania is pro-Israel or anti-Iran. Far from it, and that is the major interesting point about this piece. Not what he writes, but that he writes at all. Along with Zakharova’s fiery put-down of the Israeli Ambassador, I am seeing a sea-change in the official Russian line concerning Israel. And about time, too. The Russian people (the “Deep People”) long ago turned against Israel, they want to be allies with Iran and the Global South. While the government and the elites dragged their feet. But now that is clearly changing. I mean, the fact that Russian mainstream media is starting to print more and more articles and opinion pieces critical of Israel. So, there is a shift going on, and this pleases me. It’s not that I want nations to be hostile to one another; quite the contrary, I wish that all nations could get along and just be good pals. But since that isn’t possible, I always felt like Russia, if she was forced to choose between Israel and Iran, should choose the latter.
But enough of that, let’s get to the story, this was penned on April 14, the day after the Iranian retaliation strike against Israel:
Narmania: Israeli armed forces, prior to October 7, practiced a certain custom: Prior to dropping bombs on, and destroying, the homes of Palestinians, they would drop duds onto the roof as a warning, this gave the Palestinians living there some time to flee from the building before it was destroyed. In the IDF they jokingly called this “A knock on the roof”. To be sure, in the past 6 months they have abandoned this practice. [In other words, they don’t bother with the warning any more.] Last night we became the witnesses of the reverse situation: Iran knocked on Israel’s roof! Russian media already christened this event the most massive drone attack in all of history. But Teheran did not just limit itself to drones: They used cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic rockets. People still have not finished compiling all the results of this strike but, judging by everything that we know so far, Israel was able to shoot down the overwhelming majority of drones and rockets. The only serious target that Iran was able to get to, was the military base Nevatim, in the Negev Desert. It was from here, it is alleged, that the Israeli rockets flew, which struck the [Iranian] consulate in Damascus.
The Israeli media claim there was just one human casualty: a wounded 10-year-old Bedouin boy. Even if this hadn’t happened, Israeli propaganda would have had to invent it: Oh see, how the single casualty of the Iranian rockets was a young Arab boy. One recalls that Tel-Aviv is constantly trying to inflame conflicts between Iran and the other countries in the region.
It is noteworthy that Iran’s representative to the UN declared that Teheran is acting within the framework of Article 51 of the UN Charter: the right of each nation to self-defense. Even more importantly, Iran declared that “the incident has been resolved.” In other words, Iran is offering Israel a get out of jail free card, all they have to do is suck up the rocket attack, and they’re good. The Iranian attack was more for show than of any military strategic significance. But now the ball is in Israel’s court, and we just have to wait and see what they do next.
Awful Avalanche 
In August 2010 I published a post on my now dormant blog with the title “Am I an Anti-Semite now? The post still stands, the only thing I have to add is, that I underestimated the resilience of the Palestinians and the malignancy of the Zionists.
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That is a very perceptive post, Mato, thanks for linking it. Even back in 2010 you could see very clearly what was going on. Some people, it took them this thing to open their eyes.
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Very interesting, thanks Mato48.
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We live in a digital internet age in which videos and commentary fly around the globe in an instant. As such, the world can clearly see that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian civilians in Gaza. That is not a trivial thing. And the message is getting out. I will quote a famous line from the movie Serenity . . . “you can’t stop the signal.”
Most of what mainstream media broadcasts now is propaganda in service to a covert agenda that most intelligent people recognize as deliberate lying. Seeing is believing, and there are now hundreds of videos of Palestinian innocents being slaughtered with maniacal intent. That has done more damage to Israel than any missile attack ever could. No one will ever see the Israelis the same again. Their name will join the Nazis as a global epithet. How ironic is that?
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It is very ironic and actually quite ghastly.
I saw a commenter on another site writing that Hollywood genocide-enablers like Steven Spielberg will never again be able to make a movie about the Holocaust and expect people to watch it. No matter how well-made, or how factual, most people will simply loathe the producer and his hypocrisy, and they won’t be able to stomach any of his works. Same thing with singers and other celebrities who support Israel, whether they are Jewish or Gentile.
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In thinking about the Iranian fireworks show and my comment yesterday, I should add that it’s entirely possible that the Persians didn’t want to lay all their cards on the table and purposely degraded the accuracy of their ballistic re-entry vehicles. Just because Iran was trying to edify the IDF and Israeli-populace, that doesn’t mean they had to show them all the technical specifications.
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I heard Israeli military leaders talking smack on MSM outlets yesterday, “we’ll show them whose boss” crap. I don’t know how far this will go but, there was no visible push-back from the population…who will suffer the privations of war should the IDF succeed in provoking Iran. It should be obvious to most observers that the “radicalized” Israeli population is now the real problem, it has become delusional, convinced of it’s own morality and it’s own invincibility. And should that delusional thinking lead to inevitable failure, then Masada offers “guidance” in how to react in the face of abject defeat. It’s all or, nothing.
What nonsense, Masada was nothing more than a mass suicide meant to avoid the humiliating consequence of an acute military misjudgement. It was the equivalent of Judah’s Jim-Jones-jungle-juice-happy-hour. It offers nothing…other than a lesson in the consequences of hubris. Truthfully, the Israeli population of today has a lot more in common with the 22,000 people who jumped from cliffs of Saipan than “Masada”. Whole families convinced to walk off the cliff’s ledge to escape false images conjured by their “divinely inspired” leaders. Jews are smart people but then, so too were the Germans and Japanese of WW II and…all have succumbed to collective madness.
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Masada was entirely within the fanatical zeitgeist of the Jewish revolt at the time. Read if you can about the Siege of Jerusalem and what went on inside those walls before the Romans breached them. Slaughtering the population was a mercy compared to how the fanatics behaved.
By the time the revolt was done, Rome was well shut of the Jews, and only the Pharisaical tradition (of the three extant prior) survived. They packed up the slaves who’d survived the revolt, scattered the remaining elite to the four corners of the empire, and left the remainder to intermingle with other peoples such as the ‘mongrel’ Samaritans and deal with the religious implications of their lack of temple–again.
Iran has, in fact, acted with restraint. Again. But I do believe more damage was done than the MSM wants to let through the filters. The important bits are not the airfield strikes–airfields are as easy to fix as railroads–but the obliteration of the intelligence monitoring station and headquarters. Those may or may not have waxed people, but certainly degraded signals gathering and analysis capabilities.
Beyond the eschatological yearnings of the Zionist upper-crust, what concerns me most is how Erdogan reacts to the next phase of escalation. Most likely Israel will do something stupid in Syria, again, because they don’t have the range or basing to reach Iran without the *full* support of the US and Gulf states. Something stupid in Syria means Erdogan has another chance to jump in and prove he’s the rightful Caliph; which some rightfully point out is a 1.5 billion-person crown Iran has wrested from him, for now.
Watch Damascus.
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I agree, for the IDF, a non-military-target Syria is the obvious choice, they want some low hanging fruit, something without the possibility of mishap. Problem is, Persians are also smart people and they might have considered Israel’s “punch-down” response beforehand…
Then too, Russia saved Syria from the 3LA’s ISIS/ISIL or whatever Langley wants to call it’s Muslim brand of terrorism this week. I don’t know if the Russians have made a deal with Syria on helping to shoulder Air Defense during Israel’s “retaliation” or not. It’s a tough call, a direct Israel vs Russia conflict is serious business because US Military planners can use that as a pretext to escalate.
Finally, as the Russians have learned to their dismay, Erdogan, is a street thug, if he sees an opportunity to do a smash-and-grab…he will. I find his pretense to be a devout Muslim as convincing as the divinity of a Pope who hails from the Borgia family.
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You messin’ with my boy, Pope Alex VI? He was the greatest Catholic pope ever, I would have you know. You must be under the influence of lying Savaranolan propaganda. According to wiki:
“Alexander is reported to have been reduced to laughter when Savonarola’s denunciations were related to him.” You see, an honest man can laugh at the slanders of his enemies!
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🙂
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Meanwhile, Zelensky was whining how America loves Israel more than it loves HIM. And wouldn’t fly their stuff over Ukraine to down Russian rockets like they did for Israel. Zelensky suffers from the sin of Envy. Among other sins, probably all 7 of them, except for Sloth.
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He’s uninterested in building anything in/for Ukraine. Instead he flies around in leisure asking for handouts. That sounds like sloth to me.
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I reckon it depends on your definition of Sloth. Z doesn’t do anything useful, quite the contrary, everything he does is harmful. But it does seem like he is constantly on the go! When I think of sloths, I think of creatures who just sleep all the time.
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The group suicides in Saipan in 1944 were small compared to the mass suicides of Okinawan civilians, mostly deceived by the Imperial Army, who jumped to their deaths from Okinawan cliffs in 1945. As for the kamikaze suicide pilots, most of them were not simply brainwashed. Letters sent by the pilots and published after the war show that they didn’t want to die but were forced to commit suicide. Even today, resentment for the suicides by Okinawan civilians who were misled by officials remains strong in Okinawa, especially since most of the US bases in Japan are, against the will of most Okinawans, located on the Okinawan islands.
https://www.tamucc.edu/library/exhibits/s/hist4350/page/okinawa
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Concur with your point…that said, civilians, under a totalitarian government, were fed lies, which they fully internalized and sadly, acted upon.
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Don’t forget the Romans’ excellence at torture! And they were mighty mad at those recalcitrant Hebrews who had the temerity to rebel against Rome (plus the Maccabees would send out raiding parties from the mountain, essentially guerrilla warfare). If I was one of the Zealots on Masada, I would have preferred a quick jump off a cliff to a slow crucifixion.
When I went to Israel on my hot kibbutz summer in 1980, I built up enough holiday hours so I could ride around the country via the ubiquitous Eged buses (this was before they were getting suicide-bombed.) One of the places I went was Masada. The fun thing to do there was get up before dawn and scramble up the snaking hillside trail so you could see the sun rise over the mountains in Jordan. I had linked up with a mob of crazy British guys and we got up there in time. It was sobering to look over the cliff edges and think about how many people took the plunge.
A couple months ago, I mentioned Masada to one of my friends who attends the weekly pro-Palestinian marches here. She had never heard of that saga. (She also didn’t know what a kibbutz was, and she’s not an ignorant woman.) I got her up to speed, and at another rally, even brought along some of my old snapshots of the mountain, me floating in the Dead Sea, etc. Fortunately, she believed me, because she knows I’m knowledgeable.
How often do you find yourself explaining things that YOU know, and expect that other people should be aware of, but they cannot accept the truth of what you’re saying? The have a knowledge vacuum, you are informed, but your facts are blocked by their self-chosen density? Yalensis mentions the “knock on the roof” practice before bombing a house full of civilians. I have told a couple people I know here about the “Where’s Daddy?” program nazIsrael has, where the murderin’ Jewzis track a suspected Hamas operative via his mobile phone until they know he’s back with his family, then they blow up the home to kill them all at once. The people I talked to expressed doubts about this being true, because it’s so awful. They didn’t outright call me a liar or conspiracy theorist, especially because I said they could search-engine it to learn more.
There is just SO much happening in the world that people can’t keep track of it all, even something as simple as the Masada mass suicide. It blows too many minds, and people shy away from learning about horrors. I don’t take particular joy from exposing people to the ugly truths, but I think that every conscious person should know what’s going on in the world. It makes me come across as a Grim Jim to people who would prefer to look on the bright side of life, as the closing song from the “Life of Brian” crucifixion scene goes.
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Oh yes, that “Bright side of Life” scene from “Life of Brian” reminds us that Masada guys did exactly the right thing to jump off a cliff rather than submitting to Roman torture. I’d do it too, except I’m probably too much of a coward, but I would ask my best friend to toss me off, and then follow close behind. Self-poison would be even better, it beats jumping off a cliff! If one happened to have some poison handy.
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Crucifixion really is one of the worst ways to die that humans came up with. Jumping to your death would be quite preferable. Romans were not, by the time they’d built their ramp and all, in a forgiving mood.
Most don’t know it was a Persian execution method, encountered by Rome and “perfected” for industrial-scale use.
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Crucifixion is truly horrible. This is why Kirk Douglas had to kill Tony Curtis in “Spartacus”, to spare him from that terrible fate.
The fact that human beings can even invent these kind of tortures for other human beings, to me that proves that we are not worthy to live in this universe. No other species engage in this kind of wickedness. Therefore, we should all just jump off cliffs and get it over with.
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“Masada guys did exactly the right thing to jump off a cliff rather than submitting to Roman torture”
And it was the only right thing they did do. People who start insurrections, [the real ones, not Dc’s-DNC/3LA fabrications], against vastly superior forces with the expectation of a timely divine intervention are not just power hungry dolts but…wait for it…psychotically delusional and their followers are, at best, historically illiterate morons.
As I said, Masada was the equivalent of “Judah’s Jim-Jones-jungle-juice-happy-hour”. How a “modern” nation can hold in the highest regard a bunch of nut jobs who led entire families into a situation where suicide was the only “reasonable” solution buggers the imagination.
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Masada wack-jobs thought that Yahweh would show up just in the nick of time to save them from the Romans. Like, suddenly unleash a flock of locusts against the legions?
Ukrainian wack-jobs still hoping fruitlessly that NATO will play the role of the Deus ex machina! But with Patriot systems and a million-man army instead of locusts.
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Since we are on the topic of Masada and mass suicide, here is another example of this sociological phenomenon:
Balinese PUPUTAN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puputan
The white clad, blessed suicides were the Balinese nobility – the highest caste of Balinese society. The Dutch invaders were duly freaked out, so this theatre of ritual suicide did have effect. (And contemporary Bali still has a caste system).
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Wow! The Dutch colonial soldiers must have really been freaked out. According to wiki: ”The soldiers stripped the corpses of the valuables and sacked the ruins of the burned palace.”
Never too freaked out to loot, apparently!
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P.S. – I am also reminded of a scene from Berlioz’ magnificent opera Les Troyens. After the Greeks breach the walls of Troy and go on their rampage, Cassandra leads the other priestesses in an act of mass suicide. They lock themselves up in the temple, then stab themselves and each other with ritual knives. This, in preference to being captured and raped by the Greek soldiers. These priestesses were the upper caste of their society as well.
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Except Y,
In the case of Masada, they all died because the people listened to a priestly caste who claimed that their “divinity” trumped common sense and reason.
Whereas the Trojans died precisely because they wouldn’t listen to reason common sense. Cassandra, you will recall, actually tried to stop the Trojan from happening in the first place…very unlike Masada’s nut-jobs. And my recollection of Cassadra’s fate was that she was raped while taking shelter in Athena’s temple, her rapist died at the behest of Poseidon…however, Cassandra taken as a concubine died at the hands of Agamemnon’s wife.
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There are a lot of different versions, what happened to Cassandra. Since (1) I think she was one of the good guys, and (2) everybody gets to make up their own historical legends, then here is my semi-happy ending to her ordeal:
Poseidon protects Cassandra against the indignity of rape. However, the god is not quite powerful enough to save her from being shipped off as a slave to Agamemnon’s court.
It is true that Clytemnestra plots to kill Cassandra, but before she can succeed in this nefarious scheme, she is Orested. (i.e., killed by her own son, Orestes). Next, Orestes and his sister Elektra unshackle Cassandra and give her some money, so that she is free to travel.
Cassandra boards a boat and sails to Crimea (Tauride), which is currently under the rule of the Scythian priestly caste. (For more information on this part of the mythology, alude to Gluck’s opera IPHIGÉNIE EN TAURIDE.)
In Crimea, Cassandra meets up with Orestes’ other sister, Iphigenia, who gives her a job in the temple, with a good salary and benefits. With her amazing prophetic powers and her links both to gods and magi, Cassandra proves to be a real asset to the Tauride high priestess caste. She lives a long and happy life. Maybe (depending on one’s romantic inclinations) she marries Orestes eventually, after curing him of deadly Eumenides.
THE END
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I find things quite murky on the Israel/Iran front. Iran nominally holds the high moral ground.
But I am not a fan of Iran — they have treated Canada very badly in my opinion. They only behave normally to countries they consider their peer or superior. Everyone else gets the sneer, and the diaspora here is hassled even if they had sensibly left during the Shah’s fake reign as puppet of big Yankee oil. Perhaps their punk attitude goes back to the Americans held safely in the Canadian Embassy when the Shah got his in 1980. Who knows, but the plane shootdown with 138 Canadians just pre Covid was a damnably dirty trick, as big as Crocus. Before that, Canadian women were held in pitiless jail when they were arrested after going home to see family. Yeah, not a salubrious spot, in my view. Not a problem if you never visit because why would you want to anyway, but a very different and rigid outlook I personally do not appreciate.
Organized religion pisses me off as I’ve said before — a scam where a bunch of bureaucrats wield power over peons by making it bad to not unquestionably believe in a notion that cannot be explained or proven. And the herds do it, go along to get along. Scandalized that anyone should criticize utter bullshit where some people get to swan around at the expense of society by purveying nonsense as a reality that nevertheless affects peoples’ actual physical lives. It gets defended by people who want to hedge their bets on an afterlife.
Then we have Israel where the same kind of religious deal operates. Our team is better than all other teams an all you people are but shit before us.Treachery Inc. Mad raving loonies with a murderous agenda of ubermenschen above all other humans who are but animals — look it says so here in these scrolls and Torah, blah, blah, blah. And yes, it’s Israel provoking Iranian retaliation, and barfworthy dolts in the UK and US back Israel because it has them by the gonads.
Let ’em both have at it, israel and Iran. If the US gets its assets whipped “assisting” Israel, that’d be good. Not so great if Russia HAD to help Iran, last ditch effort if things went wrong for them. Because then the US/RF ICBMs would fly, and articles like “Secret life of the common pond turtle” would no longer be written or read in tra la land where true innoncence lies. We need some of that whimsy to combat human sociopathy and make life worth living. It’s the arts and humanity side of our collective nature, so roundly trounced at the moment by the crazies.
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I think where Persia went wrong was when they abandoned paganism and Zoroastrianism for the monotheist Muslim religion.
I mean, I realize that paganism is B.S. too, but it’s a more harmless version of B.S. fantasy world, akin to science fiction. When major societies became monotheistic and dogmatic about it, that’s where we fell from grace, in my opinion.
I believe that if there ARE supernatural beings, then they probably sitting out there in some galaxy and just laughing at us.
As for Iran, yeah, I wouldn’t want to live in that kind of rigid society either. But geopolitically speaking, I think Russia needs to ally with them against the West.
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O.K., it’s only my humble opinion, but how come Iran makes the best movies in the world?
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Pringle 2004, p. 106: “The Balinese term puputan comes from the root puput, meaning ‘finishing’ or ‘ending’. Western accounts frequently suggest that the puputan were stimulated by opium use and/or by a cultural affinity for spontaneous violence, the tradition of amok (an Indonesian word) found throughout the Malay world, from which the English expression ‘running amuck’ is derived. But not all puputan were the same. They were not all staged against colonial armies. There are several recorded instances of Balinese forces resorting to them against other Balinese, as in the case of the Lombok civil war of 1839. Nor were all puputan suicidal. The original meaning seems to have been a last desperate attack against a numerically superior enemy. In at least one conflict between Balinese antagonists, a puputansucceeded, resulting in victory for those who launched it.”
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I don’t think I have seen any Iranian movies. But I would suspect they have a robust film industry, possibly subsidized by the government? Just a guess, but those are some conditions that would lead to making quality films.
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Alongside the “traditional” industries that a truly independent state must retain to meet that bar (e.g. energy, food), modern societies add “national airline” and “film”.
The former because air-travel embargoes are real, otherwise, and the latter because capability in propaganda is as important as capability in explosives manufacturing.
(Cue pointers to recent fires in the sole US/UK artillery shell manufactories.)
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Beluga, while I don’t defend shooting down airliners full of civilians, it does look as if the Flight 752 shootdown was an accident caused by panic in the aftermath of the American murder of General Solimani. I don’t think Canada has much grounds for claiming that the shootdown was a deliberate crime. And notice that Canada did not condemn General Solimani’s murder, whereas it did condemn the Iranian response against Israel’s bombing of the Iranian embassy. (I notice that everyone talks about the “consulate” as if this makes it all right; in fact the consulate was part of the embassy, so they bombed the embassy, they bombed the embassy, they bombed the embassy.)
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Yes, I think you are right about the shootdown being an accident. If I recall, Iran was on high alert at the time, someone had an itchy trigger finger and accidentally shot down the Canadian plane, thinking they were under attack. If I recall, Iran even apologized and said they had sacked the soldier who made the mistake.
I am confident that Iran, whatever one may say about them, is not the kind of country that would deliberately shoot down a plane full of civilians. Even one of their greatest felonies (the attack and occupation of the American Embassy in 1979) they didn’t actually kill anyone. Not that it justifies that.
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Possibly you’re correct. But it seemed strange that the only airliner leaving Teheran airport that got shot down with two missiles contained mostly Canadians — full citizens and folks about to become citizens visiting home. The next planes took off no problem, the ones before no problem. Then we got the BS story that it was shift change at the AD battery and the replacement shift got confused and shot down one airliner. Oops, sorry.
I know a Persian family here who arrived in the ’60s. They get harassed all the time by Iranian state actors. It’s as if you cannot win. Leave while the Shah ran his torture show and you’re regarded as a traitor. You were supposed to stay and suck it up so that when the Shah got his, you could join the roaring crowds — if you were still alive. Catch 22 situation.
Not my particular cup of tea. Still, it’s likely Israel is far far worse because those people are going to prod Iran again, then get it in the ear. If the US and the doinks from UK, France, Jordan and Saudi Arabia join in, then US assets in places like Bahrein will be flattened too, the US Navy will lose ships and sailors, and the barking dogs back in the US will try to take out Iran. They haven’t a hope when Russia backs Iran up. So then it’s nuclear exchange between the big boys. End of story. Enjoy a sunny day while you can.
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