The Trump administration and its supporters – including the Wall Street Journal editorial page – are working overtime these days to spin the news around the Iran war to make it appear that the US is winning and Tehran had better submit to Washington’s demands before it is wrecked, maybe even “annihilated.” Indeed, Trump is preparing the option of bringing the military hammer down on Iran after the midterm elections if Tehran has not surrendered by then.

In effect, Trump and his supporters are waging a “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran in the mainstream media.

This campaign is sure to fail. If anything, it reflects the Trump administration’s desperation. The president started a war the United States was bound to lose, and there is little he can do now to change that basic fact.

Trump’s propaganda campaign has two dimensions – one economic and the other military.

Feiglin made headlines last year when he declared that every child and every baby in Gaza is the “enemy,” a viewpoint he doubled down on in an English-language interview that was published by The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Feiglin said in the interview that he personally doesn’t want to see babies killed even though he thinks it is “morally” the right thing to do, and that he would prefer all Palestinians to be expelled from Gaza instead.

“I’m saying again again because I’m Jewish and I guess I’m a bit a little bit weak morally. I don’t want to see babies killed, okay? Morally, that should have been done, because of everything I explained. So, but because … I’m Jewish with a soft heart, I would open the borders and let them all go, but no one can stay. And it has to be a part of the Jewish land, Jewish state,” he said.

The ramped-up Ansar Allah strikes on airports came after the group warned on October 5 that Saudi airspace would no longer be safe for civilian aircraft.

On Thursday, Ansar Allah military spokesman Yahya Saree announced a ballistic missile attack on the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh. Later in the day, he announced a cruise missile strike on the same airport and said that Najran Airport and an airbase in Khamis Mushait were also targeted.

According to Reuters, one of the attacks on the King Khalid Airport left a commercial aircraft belonging to Saudi state carrier Saudia Airlines heavily damaged. On Wednesday, Saudi authorities said that multiple attacks on the King Khalid Airport and the Abha International Airport killed three people, including two women, and wounded 36.

The US refueling of Saudi warplanes was one of the most controversial aspects of US involvement in the war in Yemen after it began in 2015, as the Saudi-led coalition fighting against Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, was notorious for bombing civilian targets.

The first Trump administration ended the practice of refueling Saudi jets involved in the war in Yemen in November 2018, several months after Saudi Arabia bombed a school bus in the Saada province of northern Yemen, killing at least 40 children, a strike that was carried out with a US-supplied bomb.

At the time, the Trump administration didn’t link ending the refueling to the civilian casualties since it continued supporting the war in other ways, but framed the move as a Saudi decision to “use the Coalition’s own military capabilities to conduct inflight refueling in support of its operations in Yemen.”

The village has seen regular incursions by Israeli forces, detaining civilians, establishing intermittent checkpoints, and leveling acres of pine trees from the nearby forests. Yesterday, IDF troops shot a young disabled man from the village and detained him for a few hours, before eventually returning him without explanation.

The more immediate concern for villagers isn’t just the Israeli military coming and going, but the Israeli military’s constructions giving the impression at some point, they’re not going to be going at all. Substantial fortifications have been established along the west edge of the village, including observation posts and trenches.

Per-capita comparisons are a perfectly legitimate tool. A small country feels a massacre more than a large one, and Americans should understand what October 7 meant to Israelis. But a method is only honest if you’re willing to apply it to everyone. So let’s apply Netanyahu’s method to the people his army has been killing for three years.

Gaza had about 2.2 million people before the war. The United States has about 341 million, roughly 155 times as many. Take a conservative figure of 75,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, slightly above the Gaza Health Ministry’s latest count of more than 73,000. Multiply it by Netanyahu’s own logic, and you get about 11.6 million Americans.

For more information, contact

akeaton@antiwar.com

323-512-7095

Antiwar.com

1017 El Camino Real #306

Redwood City, CA 94063