Hidden History -- In The Making

A RECENT POLL SHOWS MOST AMERICANS ARE AGAINST AN AMERICAN MILITARY TAKEOVER OF GREENLAND

Nearly Three-Quarters Of Those Polled, 73%, Said They’re Against Using Force To Take Over The Island, Including A Majority Of Both Republicans And Democrats.

Americans overwhelmingly oppose a possible American military takeover of Greenland, according to a new poll.

Respondents in the YouGov survey conducted Wednesday also had little enthusiasm for the idea of an American purchase of the Danish island territory in the north Atlantic Ocean.

Nearly three-quarters of those polled, 73%, said they’re against using force to take over the island, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats opposed to the idea. Only 8% said they favor using the American military to seize the island.

Opinions on whether the United States should buy Greenland were more muddled, with divisions along party lines.

While 45% overall of those polled opposed an acquisition, Democratic respondents were far less open to the idea than Republicans.

Results among the former were 75% against, whereas only 14% of the latter rejected the idea.

Overall, 28% of those polled expressed approval of an American purchase of the island, with 51% of Republicans onboard, compared with 10% of Democrats. Meanwhile, 27% were undecided.

President Donald Trump’s push to take control of Greenland has rattled NATO ally Denmark and other members of the bloc.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Monday that if the United States were to take the territory by force, that would mean the end of the NATO alliance.

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that the idea of purchasing the territory is being discussed by Trump and his national security team.

Alarms have been raised domestically as well, with a number of lawmakers speaking out against the notion.

“When Denmark and Greenland make it clear that Greenland is not for sale, the United States must honor its treaty obligations,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said in a joint statement Tuesday.

“Any suggestion that our nation would subject a fellow NATO ally to coercion or external pressure undermines the very principles of self-determination that our Alliance exists to defend,” they said.

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Wednesday that the way to strengthen the American position in the Arctic is through bolstering alliances already in place.

“Threats and intimidation by U.S. officials over American ownership of Greenland are as unseemly as they are counterproductive,” McConnell said in a statement.

“And the use of force to seize the sovereign democratic territory of one of America’s most loyal and capable allies would be an especially catastrophic act of strategic self-harm to America and its global influence,” he added.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was expected to meet with Danish officials next week after a request for consultations from Copenhagen, CBS News reported.

EXPERTS SAY THE ABDUCTION OF VENEZUELA’S MADURO ILLEGAL DESPITE CHARGES BY THE AMERICAN REGIME

A Country “Cannot Enforce Its Law On The Territory Of Another State” Without Consent, A United Nations Reporter Said.

As the global outcry over the American regime’s abduction of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro continues to grow, officials in Washington are relying on the United States’ own criminal charges to justify its military operation.

But experts stress that countries cannot use their own indictments to attack another state, rejecting framing Maduro’s “capture” as a legal arrest.

“There’s a very clear limit on enforcement jurisdiction internationally, and that is that one state cannot enforce its law on the territory of another state unless that state gives its consent,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, United Nations special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers.

“So if a state, for example, harboured someone that the US considered a fugitive, the US could approach that state and seek its consent to arrest them and bring them back to the US to stand trial. But it cannot go into another country without that state’s consent and grab up an individual, even if they are indicted properly by the US court system.”

Maduro was indicted by the American Justice Department in 2020 on drug and gun charges. He made his first court appearance in New York on Monday after his abduction and professed his innocence, saying that he was “kidnapped”.

Another international law issue that arises with Maduro’s abduction is the immunity of heads of state and other high-ranking officials from prosecution and civil penalties abroad – a principle that has been affirmed by the International Court of Justice and previously acknowledged by Washington.

“So not only is the US extending enforcement jurisdiction without the consent of Venezuela, but the US is also grabbing up a high state official and saying we have the right to simply take this person out of their position and put them on trial in the US,” Satterthwaite said.

International courts are an exception to head-of-state immunity. In 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over war crime charges in Gaza.

The American regime has imposed sanctions on ICC officials for investigating Israel.

THE AMERICAN POSITION

That legal consensus, however, has not stopped President Donald Trump’s aides and allies from arguing that the abduction of Maduro was a mere law enforcement operation, not an act of aggression against another country.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton likened American special forces abduction in Caracas to law enforcement officers arresting a suspected drug trafficker in America, as he argued that the White House did not have to inform the American Congress of the attack.

“That’s not the kind of thing that you expect advance notice to Congress for,” Cotton told the Hugh Hewitt Show on Monday.

“Nor, for that matter, do I expect advance notice every time the executive carries out an arrest of a drug trafficker, whether it’s in Venezuela or in Arkansas.”

Hours after the operation on Saturday, Vice President JD Vance also invoked Maduro’s indictment as the legal basis for the American attack.

“And PSA [public service announcement] for everyone saying this was ‘illegal’: Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism,” Vance wrote on X.

“You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas.”

Republican Senator Mike Lee initially questioned the domestic legality of the military action without congressional authorisation on Saturday.

But he later said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told him that the violence was “deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant” – an explanation that appeared to satisfy the senator’s concern.

But Yusra Suedi, assistant professor in International law at the University of Manchester, stressed that the attack on Venezuela violates the UN Charter, which prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”.

“A state cannot lawfully justify violating international law by citing its own domestic law. And this is a cardinal principle of international law,” said Suedi.

For his part, Ian Hurd, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, dismissed the notion that American forces were conducting a law-enforcement operation.

“It’s silly for the American government to purport that this is simply the execution of an arrest warrant,” Hurd told Al Jazeera.

“It would require, then, that you imagine that the Canadian government might issue an arrest warrant for Trump for fraud or sexual harassment and send the forces to bomb the White House to extract him to take him back to Canada for trial.”

He added that international law is unambiguous in saying that governments cannot use force against other countries to advance their goals.

“So it’s very clearly illegal under international law. It’s simply an overthrow of a government by a neighbour using military force,” Hurd told Al Jazeera.

QUESTION OF LEGITIMACY

In the wake of the abduction of Maduro, some supporters of the move have argued that Maduro lacks legitimacy due to the alleged voter fraud that took place in the last election, which the opposition claims to have documented.

Even before the American raid, opposition figure Maria Corina Machado said removing Maduro would not amount to regime change because Venezuelans had already voted against the president.

But experts say Washington’s assessment of Maduro’s legitimacy is irrelevant to the illegality of the strike.

He was Venezuela’s head of state at the time of his abduction, a fact recognised by the American Justice Department in its 2026 indictment, which calls Maduro “Venezuela’s president and now de facto ruler”.

Satterthwaite, the UN rapporteur, said that while there are “serious concerns” with the 2024 elections, the American regime itself has treated Maduro as Venezuela’s leader.

In January, Trump sent his envoy Richard Grenell to meet Maduro for talks on accepting deportation flights of undocumented Venezuelans in America.

“If we allowed one government to go around the world saying, ‘Well, this person is legitimate, this is not. And since he’s not, I’m going to go grab him,’ you can see what kind of chaos would ensue,” Satterthwaite said.

She added that the legitimacy of many governments across the world can be questioned over fraudulent elections, lack of elections or ascension to power via a coup. “That does not allow another individual government unilaterally to decide that it can go and grab up the head of that government,” she said.

Maduro’s government has been accused of major human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests of dissidents and torture.

“I, of course, would be in favour of measures of accountability for the [Venezuelan] government, but not in this reckless kind of Wild West manner that we’ve seen play out here,” Satterthwaite said.

THE NORIEGA CASE

Some defenders of the abduction of Maduro over American charges have claimed that the move has a legal precedent.

“Critics calling President Trump’s capture of Nicolas Maduro unprecedented and illegal have short memories. We’ve done this before, and the courts blessed it,” an associate professor of business law at Georgia College and State University wrote in a Wall Street Journal column.

He was referring to the American invasion of Panama and the seizure of its President Manuel Noriega in 1989-1990. Noriega stood trial and was convicted of drug charges in America.

Satterthwaite said the capture of Noriega had its own legal issues under international law, and it is not entirely analogous to the abduction of Maduro.

“That also was illegal, and therefore doesn’t help us at all to make the comparison,” she said.

The UN General Assembly had condemned the American regime’s invasion of Panama.

Satterthwaite said in the case of Panama, Washington attempted to make a jurisdictional argument by saying that Noriega was not the country’s leader, and that the American regime was acting with the consent of the proper head of state at that time, President-elect Guillermo Endara.

“It’s important to note that at that moment in Panama, the National Assembly there had actually declared a state of war against the US, so there was already an engagement between the two states,” Satterthwaite said.

“All of those things make this different, but I don’t think they make that first operation legal.”

THE WAR ON LATIN AMERICA BY THE TRUMP REGIME MUST BE STOPPED

The Attack On Venezuela Signals A New Phase Of The American Regime’s Power In Latin America — One Defined By Coercion, Intimidation, And Open-Ended Intervention.

Any hope that Donald Trump would be an “antiwar” president went out the window almost as soon as he won the 2024 election, when he filled his administration with a coterie of warmongers. After a year in which Trump backed Israel’s war with Iran, went on a spree of blowing up boats in international waters, and has now attacked Venezuela and abducted its leader, that hope has sailed over a cliff and crashed into the rocks below.

It hardly needs to be said that Trump’s regime change operation in Venezuela is brutish, dangerous, and brazenly illegal, though it is obviously all this and more. It’s illegal on multiple levels: a clear violation of international law, of course, but also the latest instance of Trump cheerfully wiping his shoes on the American Constitution. Despite what Vice President J. D. Vance claims, there is no loophole that magically invalidates that document’s War Powers Clause if the Justice Department indicts a foreign leader.

Those drug-trafficking indictments, by the way, have nothing to do with what Trump just did, though we’ll no doubt hear about them endlessly in the weeks ahead. As analysts have pointed out at length, Venezuela has almost nothing to do with the flow of cocaine into the United States. And Trump has gone almost comically out of his way to undermine his own talking point, pardoning a convicted narco-trafficking Latin American ex-president just weeks ago and publicly musing about how much he’d like to get his hands on Caracas’s oil reserves. He is now practically licking his lips over the field day that “our very large United States oil companies” are going to have as they get “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry.

But it’s not just about oil. As Trump helpfully made clear today, the attack on Venezuela is him making good on his administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), which made as its highest priority reviving the Monroe Doctrine — the “Don-Roe Doctrine,” in the president’s words today — to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” box China out of Latin America, and make sure the region’s left-wing governments are replaced by ones aligned with Trump. Within hours of toppling the Venezuelan president, Trump was threatening Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico with a similar attack.

God only knows what will follow from this. Once upon a time, Trump won the GOP nomination by assailing George W. Bush for dumb regime-change wars that blew up in Americans’ faces. Now, he’s not only moved those wars to our doorstep, but is outdoing Bush in premature declarations of “mission accomplished,” marveling at “the speed, the violence” of the operation that he himself compared to a TV show set up for his personal, slack-jawed entertainment.

Yet we have no idea what comes next, either in Venezuela — go ask Barack Obama and Libya how power vacuums tend to turn out — or around the world. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly justified the war in Ukraine and other interventions by pointing to American-led interventions. How will Trump’s precedent— that a country, sufficiently powerful, can casually bomb its neighbors and kidnap their leaders — be taken up by other unscrupulous politicians in the decades to come?

Meanwhile, Trump has already set a land-speed record for mission creep. Despite the president and his acolytes claiming in the run-up to this that they would take a “break-it-and-leave” approach to Venezuela, Trump is already saying the United States will now “run the country,” might put boots on the ground there, and that he doesn’t “want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and then we have the same situation.”

That may not be so simple in a political tinderbox like Venezuela, where the United States’ own war games predicted an explosion of violence and “chaos for a sustained period of time,” which, if it happens, will turbocharge the mass immigration that Trump has staked his presidency on arresting. Sure enough, Trump did not rule out administering the country for years if that’s what it takes, offering only that “it won’t cost us anything” because of oil revenue.

This, it turns out, is the “MAGA” foreign policy: we’ll still do overseas quagmires and nation-building, but now we’ll do them in the Americas, first.

All the focus and condemnation will understandably be on Trump as we watch this unfold, but save some scrutiny for the liberal establishment that played a key role in getting us here. Marco Rubio, the architect of this operation who’s already angling for a similar one in Cuba, was confirmed to his position with the support of every single Democrat. The Nobel Peace Prize committee gave its tacit endorsement to this attack. The European Union, for all its years’ worth of talk of international law and respecting sovereignty, has not offered even a hint of resistance to Trump’s plans, and if anything, has quietly gone along with them.

In fact, if there’s one big loser from this that’s not Venezuela, it is the European center, which has used Nicolás Maduro’s ouster to highlight its own irrelevance and hypocrisy. This morning has seen European official after European official offer non-condemnations of Trump’s actions all clearly based on the same memo, complete with an empty, token reference to the UN Charter and international law — including, most disgracefully, the current president of the UN General Assembly, German liberal uber-hawk Annalena Baerbock, who offered a four-paragraph-long master class in equivocation. Some, like French president Emmanuel Macron and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, offered outright support for the Venezuelan leader’s toppling.

In either case, the statements sit awkwardly with EU officials’ furious, justified denunciation of the Russian war in Ukraine, further cementing growing global outrage at what are widely seen as Western governments’ double standards. Shamefully, even European far-right figures like Marine Le Pen. who ostensibly share Trump’s politics, have made more forthright condemnations of what the American president has done than these leaders.

Trump is likely hoping, as per the NSS, that an aggressive move like this will cement American dominance over Latin America, cowing left-wing governments into subordination and halting the region’s drift towards China. But the United States does not have the ability to easily replicate what it’s done in Venezuela in countries like Brazil and Mexico, and it is just as likely to have the opposite effect: catalyzing deepening ties with China to counterbalance the growing threat from an increasingly belligerent Washington. His tariffs — in Brazil’s case, explicitly aimed at bullying the country to influence its internal politics — have already undermined his wider goal of making the region less economically dependent on Beijing.

In that sense, this looks less like a confident superpower flexing its muscles in its “backyard” and more like an exhausted one playing the only card it has left — the bloated American military — to project its dominance after every other attempt has fallen embarrassingly flat. Trump and the people around him may ultimately not succeed at advancing their larger strategy, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still do a lot of damage as they flail about, which they are surely about to do, in both Venezuela and in the wider region.

We are now firmly inside an uglier, more dangerous world that may very well make us pine for even the empty lip service to international law of decades past. And as long as these foreign adventures continue, no one except moneyed interests and reckless politicians will prosper — not those in the crosshairs, like long-suffering Venezuelans, and not ordinary working Americans, who are once again being dragged into a wasteful foreign conflict as they struggle to make ends meet.

EFFORTS TO CONTROL AMERICAN DISCOURSE HAS BEEN INTENSIFIED BY PRO-ISRAEL FORCES

New Extremes Now Exist In The Long-Running Drive To Limit Debate About Israel, And It’s Actions Against Palestine And It’s People.

Across the American political spectrum, support for the State of Israel is steadily eroding. With the long-running, staggeringly expensive redistribution of American wealth and weapons to one of the world’s most prosperous countries under unprecedented threat, Israel’s advocates inside the United States are growing increasingly desperate to suppress the facts, opinions, questions and imagery that are causing this sea change.

Pro-Israel forces have long worked to limit and shape American discourse to Israel’s advantage. However, the intensity and novelty of what’s taking place in 2025 — from the government-coerced transfer of a social media platform to pro-Israel billionaires, to the jailing and attempted deportation of a student for writing an opinion piece, and more — deserves the attention of every American who values free expression, an enlightened electorate, and independence from foreign influence.

Many Americans know that Congress and President Biden teamed up in 2024 to force the Chinese company ByteDance to divest its American operation of the popular video-sharing app TikTok, yet few realize this unusual intervention was motivated in large part by a desire to serve the interests of Israel.

Though politicians pointed to the supposed Chinese menace lurking inside the app — while revealing their lack of sincerity by continuing to use it themselves — the catalyst for the extraordinary legislation’s passage was a sea of viral content illuminating Israel’s rampage in Gaza, casting Palestinians in empathetic light, and questioning the legitimacy of the political philosophy that is Zionism.

The idea that passage of the ban was largely about Israel is no conspiracy theory. American politicians who supported the compelled divestiture of TikTok have candidly said so themselves. Sharing a stage with Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2024, then-Senator Mitt Romney said:

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature. You look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I’d note that’s of real interest to the president, who will get the chance to take action in that regard.”

Similarly, Rep. Mike Lawler of New York told a webinar that pro-Palestinian student protests were “exactly why we included the TikTok bill…because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.”

Of course, mere divestiture wouldn’t guarantee that TikTok would start suppressing anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian content in the United States. To have the desired effect, the buyer — who required White House approval — would have to be an ardent supporter of Israel. That’s just how things played out. In September, President Trump approved the sale of TikTok’s American operations to a joint venture led by Larry Ellison, the founder of tech-titan Oracle and the fourth-richest man in the world.

Ellison has expressed his “deep emotional connection to the State of Israel” and has been a major benefactor of the Israeli Defense Forces, via donations to IDF-supporting organizations. He spent at least $3 million on Marco Rubio’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, after being assured by Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations that Rubio would “be a great friend to Israel.” There are other Israel-favoring billionaires in the consortium now controlling TikTok’s American presence, among them NewsCorp head Rupert Murdoch and investment trader Jeff Yass.

Americans were propagandized into fearing Chinese control of TikTok users’ data. Now that data will be controlled by Oracle, a firm whose founder has described Israel as his own nation, said “there is no greater honor” than supporting the IDF, and invited Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a seat on the board. It’s also a firm with strong business ties to the Israel government, and a firm whose Israel-born executive vice chair and former CEO last year declared, “For [Oracle] employees, it’s clear: If you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here.”

THE POPE CALLS FOR PEACE AND SOVEREIGNTY AFTER VOICING CONCERNS OF AMERICA’S ATTACK IN VENEZUELA

He Has Deep Concerns Over The Attack On Venezuela, Urging That The Well-Being Of The Venezuelan People Must Take Precedence Over All Other Considerations.

Speaking during his traditional Sunday noon blessing at the Vatican, the pope called for an immediate end to violence and stressed the importance of respecting Venezuela’s sovereignty. He said the unfolding situation should lead to justice and peace, not further instability.

“With a heart full of concern, I am following the developments of the situation in Venezuela,” the pope said. “The good of the beloved Venezuelan people must prevail over every other consideration and lead to overcoming violence and embarking on paths of justice and peace, guaranteeing the country’s sovereignty, ensuring the rule of law enshrined in the constitution, and respecting the human and civil rights of each and every person.”

The pope’s remarks come amid heightened international debate following the American military operation and the detention of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. His appeal focused on protecting civilians and upholding legal and constitutional principles during a period of uncertainty.

This is not the first time Pope Leo has spoken out on Venezuela. In previous statements, he has urged the United States to pursue dialogue and diplomatic solutions, including the use of economic pressure, rather than military force, to achieve political change.

THE AMERICAN REGIME’S WAR ON VENEZUELA

During The Past Few Weeks, The Trump Administration Has Engaged In An Illegal And Immoral War Against Venezuela. The War Violates Both United States Law And International Law And The Principles Of A Just War.

Wars almost always bring atrocities with them, and unfortunately, Trump’s war on Venezuela is no exception. According to an account published by the Washington Post on November 28^th, “As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors. The longer the American surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody,’ one of them said. A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers.”

People were aghast at this barbarous display, and in response, the Trump Administration put out a transparently lame excuse. It tried to shift the blame to the admiral in charge of the operation. “President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he would not have wanted a second strike on the boat and said Hegseth denied giving such an order. But White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that Hegseth had authorized Admiral Frank Bradley to conduct the strikes on September 2^nd. ‘Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated,’ Leavitt said. Leavitt said the strike was conducted in ‘self defense’ to protect American interests, took place in international waters and was in line with the law of armed conflict. ‘This administration has designated these narco- terrorists as foreign terrorist organizations,’ Leavitt said. Starting in September, the U.S. military has carried out at least 19 strikes against suspected drug vessels in the Caribbean and off the Pacific coasts of Latin America, killing at least 76 people.”

Trump’s alleged “concern” for so-called “narco-terrorism” is hypocritical. Trump pardoned a former president of Honduras who was serving a long prison term for bringing an enormous amount of cocaine into America. Somehow, that doesn’t qualify as “narco-terrorism.” Trump’s South America policy is getting more ridiculous by the day. As ‘Moon of Alabama’ reports, “Yesterday he announced a pardon for the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who is serving a 45-year sentence for partnering with drug traffickers who had allegedly shipped 400 tons of cocaine to the United States. He also endorsed a right-wing candidate Nasry ‘Tito’ Asfura for Sunday’s election in Honduras. Asfura belongs to the same party as Hernández.”

It transpires that Venezuela is not a major supplier of drugs to America, despite all the hoopla from Trump. As Finian Cunningham reports, “Venezuela’s role in narcotics trafficking to the United States is not significant compared with other Latin American countries, according to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime. Colombia and Peru are more important as cocaine sources. The American Drug Enforcement Administration has denoted Mexico as the biggest source of illicit fentanyl, which is responsible for most American overdose deaths.

It was said earlier that Trump’s war on “narco-terrorism” violates international law, and Cunningham offers a succinct summary of the relevant points: “The United Nations Charter explicitly outlaws every aspect of Trump’s conduct towards Venezuela. Article 2:3 mandates that all disputes must be settled through peaceful means. Article 2:4 prohibits the use or threat of military force.”

You should know that Trump’s policy violates American law. As law professor Michael Ramsey notes, “The Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 specifically lists as a power of Congress the power ‘to declare War,’ which unquestionably gives the legislature the power to initiate hostilities. . . Most people agree, at minimum, that the Declare War Clause grants Congress an exclusive power. That is, Presidents cannot, on their own authority, declare war.”

Now, let’s look at what is the most important thing we need to consider in assessing Trump’s aggressive and illegal war: Murray Rothbard’s account of just war. Here is what he says: “Much of ‘classical international law’ theory, developed by the Catholic Scholastics, notably the 16th-century Spanish Scholastics such as Vitoria and Suarez, and then the Dutch Protestant Scholastic Grotius and by 18th- and 19th-century jurists, was an explanation of the criteria for a just war. For war, as a grave act of killing, needs to be justified. A reasonable view of war can be put simply: a just war exists when a people try to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.

In sum, what Murray is saying is that a just war must be defensive; a nation must be trying to stop an invasion. And even in a defensive war, you must follow certain restraints. You cannot attack non-combatants. Shipping narcotics to America is not waging war, however much we might oppose attempts to do this.

Moreover, blowing up people who are clinging to a boat so that they won’t drown is cowardly and dastardly. Only those utterly without a conscience could do such a thing. Let’s do everything we can to oppose Trump’s unjust war against Venezuela!

HOW ZIONISM TOOK OVER THE DEEP STATE FROM IRAN-CONTRA TO TRUMP

And So It’s Not A Coincidence That Wall Street And Silicon Valley, Corridors Of Power Where Zionists Hold Decisive Influence, Turned, Arguably Decisively, To Support Trump In Summer Of 2024.

The most politically prescient movie when it comes to the networks infiltrating our government these last forty years must be Power, director Sidney Lumet’s 1986 vehicle for exploring America’s mechanisms of political control, his informal sequel to the much more famous Network. The main characters in Power are portrayed by Richard Gere, as a political campaign consultant, and Denzel Washington, as his client: a lobbyist representing Gulf State sheiks who want to induce America’s government to sponsor coups in Latin American countries. The sheiks’ first step in this direction is using Gere to engineer the election of a dour Midwestern corporatist running to replace an old line WASP senator whose wife, played by the real-life WASP scion Beatrice Straight, committed a financial indiscretion which put her in Denzel Washington’s pocket.

When Gere starts asking questions about who’s paying whom and for what, Washington gets nervous: suddenly Gere’s threatened by mysterious go-betweens, his plane almost crashes, he loses clients, his phone is tapped (and he’s meant to know it). When Gere confronts Washington in the latter’s sleek and immaculate office in the literal shadow of the American capitol, Washington is unrepentant:

“We hired you to do a job, and it wasn’t to investigate me or my company…We just wanted you to know, if you really did try and screw us, something bad could happen to you. That was the message we were trying to convey. Now the plane, the phones, merely dramatic illustrations…It’s no fucking game. You are deciding who runs this country. Who runs other countries. My clients deal with the consequences.”

What is most interesting about Power, besides its forensic representation of an influence play distinctly exotic to pre-1980s America but inherently familiar to colonial societies, is how neatly it maps on to another play being run in Washington DC before and during Power’s production: Iran-Contra. This was also a play, a real-life one, in which operators with ties to the Middle East and Latin America infiltrated the capital via a pliant “heartland Republican,” Ronald Reagan, to run an agenda foreign to American interests. Iran-Contra was, famously yet confusingly, a covert effort by the Reagan administration to funnel arms shipments to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages; then to use the proceeds from these arms sales to fund the guerrilla Contras, who were fighting the socialist authoritarian regime of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua—all without congressional approval. In the course of this effort by “Reagan’s Junta,” people’s offices were bugged, and strange payoffs and stranger outreaches made. Middlemen like Gere were recruited, then threatened, then frightened, then ostracized, then disposed.

The only Iran-Contra element missing in Power, thanks likely to the Jewish-American Lumet’s well-documented loyalty to Israel, is the people who actually ran it: connected Jewish Zionists for whom Denzel Washington’s character was the stand-in. William Casey, the CIA director who set Iran-Contra in motion, was a product of Wall Street just as Zionists rose to influence there, and it was to a group of these associates including Maurice “Hank” Greenberg and Bruce Rappaport that Casey turned for advice on his White House agenda. He also turned for advice to Zionist fixer Roy Cohn (in 1980, during Reagan’s presidential campaign, which Casey ran, Nancy Reagan said that Casey called Cohn “almost daily”) and it was the Saudi expatriate Adnan Khashoggi, a client of Cohn’s, who ended up running crucial aspects of the Iran-Contra play. Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian expatriate arms dealer who shared top Iran-Contra billing with Khashoggi, was known by Casey to be an Israeli agent. And it was Israel which was the deal’s middleman, sending arms to Iran from America via Ghorbanifar via the ministrations of Michael Ledeen, a Zionist “consultant” with the National Security Council.

Then there were the Zionist-Contra connections. The primary Washington point person for the Contra end of that play was Elliott Abrams, the son-in-law of the late Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz—who, by the 1980s, along with Public Interest editor Irving Kristol, was the most famous Jewish neoconservative in America. The Contra’s primary emissary to Washington was Arturo Cruz, Jr., who got his foot in the White House door by dating Fawn Hall, the famously loyal secretary (and future wife) of NSC official Oliver North, who managed Iran-Contra. Cruz thrived in Washington thanks in part to the support of the magazine The New Republic, which had been founded by Beatrice Straight’s family but, in the 1980s under the ownership of the ardent Zionist Martin Peretz, introduced Zionism to the capital’s media circles. The New Republic backed Cruz to the point where Peretz’s second-in-command, Leon Wieseltier, a “man about town” known for his own dubious sexual power plays, assured The Washington Post for attribution that Cruz’s infiltration of North’s office via his relationship with Fawn Hall was not a play for influence but the product of “real love.”

In geopolitical context, these insider operations make sense. The ultimate aim of Iran-Contra was solidifying American military corporate networks in the Middle East—put formally, to “establish a new US relationship with Iran, thus strengthening the US strategic posture throughout the Persian Gulf region”—to the benefit of Israel, already these networks’ most reliable client. Like Denzel Washington’s play in Power, Iran-Contra failed. But its key project, the “usurpation of power by a small, strategically placed group” of seeming renegades, has succeeded over the last forty years in far more dramatic fashion. During this time, Zionist networks run largely though not exclusively by connected American Jews have made themselves into arbiters of America’s military corporate complex. Recently, they have brought new groups of authoritarians and supremacists into that complex, and they have elevated politicians to defend their authority to the highest positions in our government.

THE SUFFERING OF GAZA PALESTINIANS WAS LAMENTED BY POPE LEO DURING HIS FIRST CHRISTMAS SERMON

Global Wars Are “Leaving Behind Rubble And Open Wounds”, The New Pope Has Also Lamented The Conditions For Palestinians In Gaza Several Times Recently.

Pope Leo has decried conditions ‍for Palestinians in ‍Gaza in his first Christmas sermon as pontiff, in an unusually direct appeal during what is normally a solemn, spiritual service on the day Christians across the globe celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

Leo, the first American pope, said on Thursday that the story of Jesus being born in a stable showed that God had “pitched his fragile tent” among the people of the world.

“How, then, ‍can we not think of the tents in Gaza, exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold?” he asked.

Leo, celebrating his first Christmas after being elected in May by the ‍world’s cardinals to succeed the late Pope Francis, has a quieter, more diplomatic style than his predecessor and usually refrains from making political references in his sermons.

But the new pope has also lamented the conditions for Palestinians in Gaza several times recently and told journalists last month that the only solution in the decades-long conflict between Israel and Palestine must include a Palestinian state.

Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in October ‌after two years of intense bombardment and military operations in Gaza, but humanitarian agencies say there is still too little aid getting into the largely destroyed Strip, where nearly the entire population is homeless after being displaced by Israeli attacks.

In Thursday’s service with thousands in ‌St Peter’s Basilica, Leo also lamented conditions for the homeless across the globe and the destruction caused by the wars ‌roiling the world.

“Fragile is the flesh of defenceless populations, tried by so many wars, ongoing or concluded, leaving behind rubble and open wounds,” said the pope.

“Fragile are the minds and lives of young people forced to take up arms, who on the ‌front lines feel the senselessness of what is asked of them and the falsehoods that fill the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths,” he ‍added.

In a later appeal during the “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world) message and blessing given by the pope at Christmas and Easter, Leo called for an end to all global wars, lamenting conflicts, ‌political, social or military, in Ukraine, Sudan, Mali, Myanmar, and Thailand and Cambodia, among others.

“THE WOUNDS ARE DEEP”

Ahead of the pope’s mass, in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, the Christian community began celebrating its first festive Christmas in more than two years, as the Palestinian city and biblical birthplace of Jesus emerges from the shadow of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Throughout the war, a sombre tone had marked Christmases in Bethlehem. But celebrations returned on Wednesday with parades and music. Hundreds of worshippers also gathered for mass at the Church of the Nativity on Wednesday night.

With pews filled long before midnight, many stood or sat on the floor for the traditional mass to usher in Christmas Day.

At 11:15 pm, organ music rang out as a procession of dozens of clergymen entered, followed by Jerusalem’s Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who blessed the crowd with signs of the cross.

In his homily, Pizzaballa urged peace, hope and rebirth, saying the Nativity story still held relevance in the turbulence of modern times.

He also spoke of his visit to Gaza over the weekend, where he said “suffering is still present” despite the ceasefire. In the Strip, hundreds of thousands of people face a bleak winter in makeshift tents.

“The wounds are deep, yet I have to say, here too, there too, their proclamation of Christmas resounds,” Pizzaballa said. “When I met them, I was struck by their strength and desire to start over.”

In Bethlehem, hundreds also took part in the parade down the narrow Star Street on Wednesday, while a dense crowd massed in the square. As darkness fell, multi-coloured lights shone over Manger Square and a towering Christmas tree glittered next to the Church of the Nativity.

The basilica dates back to the fourth century and was built on top of a grotto where Christians believe Jesus was born more than 2,000 years ago.

Bethlehem residents hoped the return of Christmas festivities would breathe life back into the city.

THE BAN ON AID AGENCIES IN GAZA IS “OUTRAGEOUS” PER THE UN RIGHTS CHIEF

The United Nations Rights Chief Has Denounced The “Outrageous” Proposed Ban On 37 Aid Agencies From Operating In Gaza.

“Israel’s suspension of numerous aid agencies from Gaza is outrageous,” Volker Turk said in a statement.

“Such arbitrary suspensions make an already intolerable situation even worse for the people of Gaza.”

SANCTIONS WERE APPLIED TO 30 AMERICAN FIRMS AND INDIVIDUALS OVER WEAPONS SALES TO TAIWAN BY CHINA

Beijing Urged The American Regime To Cease “Dangerous” Efforts To Arm The Island, Which It Claims As Its Own.

China has sanctioned a group of United States defence companies and senior executives over weapons sales to Taiwan, the latest move against Washington’s support for the self-governed island that Beijing claims as its own.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced the measures on Friday, targeting 20 American defence firms and 10 individuals. It said the sanctions are retaliation for the American regime’s newly announced $11.1bn weapons package for Taiwan, one of its largest ever for the territory.

“Any provocative actions that cross the line on the Taiwan issue ‌will be met with a strong response from China,” said a statement from the ministry, urging the American regime to cease “dangerous” efforts to arm the island.

The sanctioned companies include Boeing’s St Louis branch, Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation, L3Harris Maritime Services and Lazarus AI.

The measures freeze these companies’ assets in China and bar domestic organizations and individuals from working with them, according to the ministry.

According to a report in September, Boeing has reportedly discussed the potential sale of up to 500 commercial jets to Chinese airlines, a development that could reopen the world’s second-largest aviation market after years of America-China trade tensions.

China is also expected to seize the China-held assets of sanctioned individuals and ban them from entering the country.

Targeted individuals include the founder of defence firm Anduril Industries and nine senior executives from the sanctioned firms. The measures took effect on December 26.

In response, the American State Department said it “strongly” objected to “Beijing’s efforts to retaliate against US companies for their support of US arms sales that support Taiwan’s self- defence capabilities”.

A State Department spokesperson also urged China to come to the negotiation table with Taiwan rather than impose military, diplomatic, and economic pressure.

The American regime is bound by law to provide Taiwan, which rejects Beijing’s claim to the territory, with the means to defend itself.

But American arms sales to the island have deepened tensions with China.

The latest American regime’s weapons deal with Taiwan, announced by President Donald Trump on December 17^th, includes the proposed sale of 82 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, and 420 Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS – worth more than $4bn.

The defence systems are similar to what the American regime had been providing Ukraine to defend against Russian aerial attacks.

The deal also includes 60 self-propelled howitzer artillery systems and related equipment worth more than $4bn and drones valued at more than $1bn.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defence praised the American regime for assisting Taiwan “in maintaining sufficient self-defence capabilities and in rapidly building strong deterrent power”.