Biden Says He Will Not Order National Lockdown After Demanding Trump to do so

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_TsT_F8ezI&ab_channel=HardLensMedia

Marjorie Taylor Green Contradicts Herself in Less Than 1 Minute

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jhQi42kX7A&ab_channel=TheHumanistReport

Anti- government protests rock Chile

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mln7Lpt8hTU&ab_channel=TeleSUREnglish

The anti-refugee police riot in Paris: A warning to the working class

Alex Lantier
a day ago



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/27/pers-n27.html




Heavily armed riot police descended on a tent camp on Republic Square in Paris Monday night and staged a fascistic attack that shocked millions of workers and youth internationally.

Police savagely beat defenseless refugees in their tents and chased them through the streets of Paris, firing tear gas. When elected officials tried to speak to refugees who fled to City Hall, they were kettled behind a police cordon. Moreover, even as the government adopted an authoritarian “global security” law that includes a ban on filming of police in public, under pain of one year in prison and a €45,000 fine, police assaulted journalists covering their operation and were videoed throwing journalist Rémy Buisine to the ground and beating him.

As public anger mounted, and protests broke out on Republic Square, various newspapers and politicians suddenly rediscovered their objections to police brutality. The New York Times criticized the “drift towards repression” in France. Socialist Party (PS) Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo wrote to the Interior Ministry about “the use of disproportionate and brutal force,” before adding, “Unfortunately, this unacceptable episode is not without precedent.”

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (LFI) party criticized violence against “people who are only demanding their human rights.”

President Emmanuel Macron’s government now feels obliged to criticize its own operation, even trying to turn the crisis to its advantage. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has promised an investigation, claiming he is “shocked,” and Prime Minister Jean Castex has pledged to submit the ban on filming police to a challenge at the Constitutional Council once the “global security” law is adopted.

These are false promises aiming to lull workers and youth to sleep. The brutal state attack on refugees is not an isolated case of “overaggressive policing” by a few bad cops encouraged by a poorly drafted law. Amid a global economic collapse driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, an irrepressible conflict is emerging internationally between the working class and the financial aristocracy, powerful sections of which support building fascist police states. The alternative of socialist revolution or capitalist barbarism is starkly posed.

Even if the filming ban were overturned, this would not halt the Macron administration’s far-right evolution. It is also passing laws to make student occupations of universities punishable by three years in prison and a €45,000 fine, and reviving the drastic pension cut it promised to abandon during the pandemic. Its “global security” law would deploy drones against protests and set up emergency joint coordination of operations by national, municipal and paramilitary police and private security agencies.

With 450,000 armed men to be deployed against the population, Le Monde wrote, France has one policeman “per 150 inhabitants (against 1 per 280 in 2018),” making it “the European Union’s security leader.”

Given the massive police state build-up, the remarks of neofascist retired chief of staff General Pierre de Villiers to the far-right magazine Current Values bear examination.

Last year, after the Macron government had authorized the army to open fire on “yellow vests” protesting social inequality, de Villiers called for more “firmness” against the workers. Even after riot police had arrested over 10,000 people and wounded 4,400 in the protests, he demanded harsher repression of railway and education strikes: “A gulf has emerged between those who lead and those who obey. This gulf is profound. The ‘yellow vests’ were already a first sign of this… We must restore order; things cannot continue this way.”

Last week, de Villiers told Current Values the crisis is so deep that “profound transformations” are inevitable. “Today there is not only the security crisis but the pandemic, all amid an economic, social and political crisis and with our leaders no longer enjoying any broader confidence.”

Since “these suppressed resentments can all explode at the same time… not just in France but in the whole world,” de Villiers said, “We must think the unthinkable.”

Asked what this meant, de Villiers all but openly endorsed a neofascist dictatorship: “The rule of law is obviously a nice thing, but sometimes you also have to think strategically.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is a trigger event in world history. Already before the pandemic, an international eruption of class struggle against unsustainable levels of social inequality had deeply shaken the ruling elite. Now, as deaths mount and with the economy collapsing, social misery is rising at a rate not seen since the Great Depression and the fascist era of the 1930s, when the financial aristocracy pursued a fascistic, class-based policy to defend its privileges against the working class and turned to military conflict against their rivals during a decade that ended in world war.

While seizing trillions of euros and dollars in public funds for bank bailouts, the world’s ruling elites are ordering workers and youth back to work and school amid the pandemic. After the EU’s €2 trillion bailouts, France’s wealthiest have recouped their losses from the initial crash during the pandemic: Bernard Arnault and family are back to $142 billion, Françoise Bettencourt to $72 billion, and François Pinault to $46 billion, according to Forbes.

Workers are told, however, that there is no money for health care or jobs, or to fund a longer lockdown to halt the spread of the virus during which workers and small businessmen receive full financial support. The trade unions in France, Germany and elsewhere throughout Europe issued public endorsements of EU bailouts and backed the back-to-school campaign. As a result, there have been a staggering 265,891 COVID-19 deaths in the United States and 365,639 in Europe—figures set to rise explosively in the coming winter months.

Such levels of inequality are incompatible with democratic forms of rule, which are disintegrating. After trying to illegally deploy the military against nationwide protests on the police killing of George Floyd, US President Donald Trump has refused to admit defeat in the 2020 elections, ominously reshuffled the Pentagon leadership, and backed far-right militias that tried to assassinate top officials, including Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The Democratic Party has consciously avoided alerting the public, let alone making any attempt to mobilize popular opposition to the threatened coup.

In France and across Europe, far-right police states are being built. Pseudo-left parties like Mélenchon’s LFI are no alternative to the fascistic policy of de Villiers, which Macron is implementing with EU support. Macron has led the far-right turn, hailing Nazi-collaborationist dictator Philippe Pétain as a “great soldier” as he ordered riot police to assault the “yellow vests.” Mélenchon’s parliamentary faction itself supported the 2015-2017 Socialist Party (PS) state of emergency, during which the current police machine was prepared and first deployed against social protests targeting the draconian PS labor law.

These events confirm the analysis of the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES), the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), in the 2017 presidential elections. It called for an active boycott and a mobilization of the working class against a second round between Macron and neofascist candidate Marine Le Pen.

The PES warned that rule by Macron was no genuine alternative to the far-right regime a neofascist president Le Pen would oversee. It opposed the reactionary role of pseudo-left groups like the LFI, which refused to warn against Macron’s own fascistic policy agenda. This has proven correct.

The way forward against the pandemic and the threat of dictatorship is the mobilization of the working class internationally on a socialist program. The struggle for an international general strike led by independent safety committees in schools and workplaces to compel an end to the back-to-work campaign and halt contagion entails a struggle against the far-right and police violence. Ruling elites that have made themselves guilty of crimes and reactionary plots against the population must be expropriated by the working class and their property impounded and used to meet social needs.

Censored Planet: University of Michigan research finds worldwide increase in internet censorship

Kevin Reed
26 November 2020



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/27/mich-n27.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws




A group of researchers from the University of Michigan (UM) have published a global database of instances of internet censorship that shows an “extremely aggressive” growth of online interference on a world scale over a recent 20-month period.

The team used an automated global censorship tracking platform called Censored Planet, which was developed in 2018 by UM assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science Roya Ensafi. Between August 2018 and April 2020, the team collected 21.8 billion measurements of online censorship from 221 countries.

Among the key findings of the research—presented at the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) Conference on Computer and Communications Security on November 10—was that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries that were studied, including Norway, Japan, Italy, Israel and Poland.

A press release issued by the UM on November 17 described the findings contained in the team’s research paper as “The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled,” which “shows that even citizens of the world’s freest countries are not safe from internet censorship.” It also showed that among the countries where censorship is expanding are those “rated as some of the freest in the world by advocacy group Freedom House.”

The research reveals that, for the most part, the increasing internet censorship is “driven by organizations or internet service providers filtering content” and not “nationwide censorship policies such as those in China,” where online content is highly restricted by direct state intervention.

The UM press release says Assistant Professor Ensafi noted that, while the “uptick in blocking activity” in the US was small, “the groundwork for such blocking has been put in place in the United States.”

Ensafi explained further: “When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for internet service providers to interfere with or block internet traffic.” She added, “The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.”

The five-member US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 on December 14, 2017 in favor of ending net neutrality, and the new policy took effect on June 11, 2018, approximately two months before the Censored Planet data collection began. Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers (ISPs)—the companies that own the hardware infrastructure connecting consumers to the internet in the form of wired and wireless services, routers, switches and servers—must treat all content on their systems equally.

While the proponents of abolishing net neutrality argued that the change was necessary to “modernize” FCC policies and remove anti-competitive government intrusion into the corporate internet marketplace, the UM research shows that the logic of capitalist private property and nation-state-based interests in the global information infrastructure leads inexorably to undemocratic and repressive restrictions on public access to online content in a range of forms.

As the World Socialist Web Site has reported, the tech monopolies, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, have been engaged in censorship both within the US and internationally by targeting left-wing, anti-war and progressive websites and publishers with various types of internet content blocking, throttling and manipulation.

The WSWS itself and its affiliated organizations have been the target of this increasing censorship in the form of suppression of search results by Google, banning and de-whitelisting by Reddit, account suspension by Twitter and event blocking by Facebook.

Another of the UM researchers, Ram Sundara Raman, a PhD candidate in computer science and engineering, said, “What we see from our study is that no country is completely free. Today, many countries start with legislation that compels internet service providers to block something that’s obviously bad like child sex abuse material. But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and it’s usually a very opaque process. That’s why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time.”

In Norway, for example, laws were passed in early 2018 that require internet service providers to block some gambling and pornographic content. The Censored Planet data shows evidence of “network inconsistencies across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like match.com” in Norway.

The Censored Planet automated monitoring platform is a novel approach to tracking online censorship. It uses public internet servers around the globe as data gathering nodes that monitor and report when access to websites is being blocked. It also uses artificial intelligence algorithms to filter the data, remove noise and recognize trends.

Previous censorship tracking methods have relied upon human activists to gather data manually. As the UM press release explains, “Manual monitoring can be dangerous for volunteers, who may face reprisals from governments. The limited scope of these approaches also means that efforts are often focused on countries already known for censorship, enabling nations that are perceived as freer to fly under the radar.”

The #KeepItOn campaign of the digital rights organization AccessNow, for example, tracks incidents of internet shutdowns annually in countries around the world. It uses some technical measurement tools and also relies upon “news reports and personal accounts” through a coalition of 210 organizations from 75 countries. The organization published its last report in 2019, which noted, “The constraints of our methodology mean that there may be cases of internet shutdowns that have gone unnoticed or unreported, and numbers are likely to change if and when new information becomes available.”

In describing their “longitudinal censorship observatory,” the UM researchers explain that they used four remote measurement techniques (Augur, Satellite/Iris, Quack, and Hyperquack) on six internet protocols to “detect 15 prominent censorship events, two-thirds of which have not been reported previously.” The reference to longitudinal measurement means that data points are gathered multiple times over an extended period of time.

Among the censorship methods that Censored Planet detects are internet shutdowns, Domain Name Server (DNS) manipulation, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) blocking and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) layer interference. Among the countries that were studied for specific censorship events by Censored Planet (in addition to the countries mentioned above) were Egypt, Iran, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, India, Sudan and Cameroon.

The instance of censorship in Sri Lanka, following a series of bombings on April 21, 2019 that killed more than 250 people, highlights the power of Censored Planet platform. To previous reports of social media censorship, the study says, “We observed 22 domains (compared to 7 reported previously) being blocked, including domains like twitter.com that were not reported. Five out of these 22 domains were only from the Alexa test list, showing that variety in test lists is important. After the initial peak, HTTPS censorship remained unusually high through April, and then spiked again in the week of May 12, 2019. This contrasts with most reports claiming that the social media ban was lifted by May 1st.”

It is significant that amid the near-continuous reporting in the corporate media of the false allegations from right-wing organizations and individuals that conservatives are being singled out for online censorship, including US President Trump’s complaints regarding the imposition of fact-checking labels on his Twitter account, not one of the major news organizations has reported on the Censored Planet study.

Along with publishing their methodology and disclosing the tools they are using for data collection, the UM researchers are making their data set available for further analysis by others. As Ensafi explained, “We hope that the continued publication of Censored Planet data will enable researchers to continuously monitor the deployment of network interference technologies, track policy changes in censoring nations, and better understand the targets of interference. While Censored Planet does not attribute censorship to a particular entity, we hope that the massive data we’ve collected can help political and legal scholars determine intent.”

BIDEN, THE EMCEE AT THE BILLIONAIRES’ BALL

By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report.

November 27, 2020



https://popularresistance.org/biden-the-emcee-at-the-billionaires-ball/



The Lords Of Capital Use Periods Of Crisis To Devour The Less-Rich And Reshape The Political Economy To Their Further Advantage, So That The Joe Bidens Of The World Jump Higher And Come Quicker When Summoned.

The Orange Era of racist rants will soon be over – just a few hundred mad tweets to go till January 20th, when the head flunky for the real rulers of the USA will take over the levers of government. Joe Biden made only one campaign promise that counts — to the only people that matter to corporate Democrats — when he assured the party’s rich funders that “No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change” under his presidency. But even as he spoke, back in June, the greatest change in wealth and power relationships in U.S. history was in full roar, as the billionaire class feasted on the Covid economy. As detailed in a November 12 report by the Institute for Policy Studies and other leftish outfits, the combined wealth of the 647 U.S. billionaires increased by almost a trillion dollars, and 33 new billionaires were created, during the same period that 22 million Americans lost their jobs , many of which will not return when the virus has receded. The Pew Research Center found that “one-in-four adults have had trouble paying their bills since the coronavirus outbreak started, a third have dipped into savings or retirement accounts to make ends meet, and about one-in-six have borrowed money from friends or family or gotten food from a food bank.”

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post and the guy that runs the cloud where the CIA keeps its secrets, grew richer by $70 billion during the Covid crisis – a $2 billion per week increase in wealth. As a group, U.S. billionaires are one-third richer than before the coronavirus struck.

What ordinary people experience as disaster is manna from heaven for the Lords of Capital. “Disaster capitalism” is only disastrous for those without capital. Every catastrophe consolidates the power of the billionaires, who use these periods to devour the less-rich and reshape the political economy to their further advantage, deepening their dominance of society so that the Joe Bidens of the world jump higher and come quicker when summoned.

The oligarchs are so obscenely rich, they bend all social and political institutions to their will. “Democracy” cannot possibly exist alongside oligarchy. It is, therefore, necessary that politicians like Biden pretend that the oligarchs are just regular folks, like the rest of us. “You know what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money,” Biden assured a group of 100 rich people in Manhattan.

Black voters may have put Biden in the Oval Office, but the former “Senator from Mastercard” has always taken his orders from the oligarchy. The oligarch-in-charge at the Democratic National Committee is Michael Bloomberg, who has fronted much of the DNC’s bills this year. The coronavirus has been very good to Bloomberg: he added $10.5 billion to his mega-fortune – a 22 percent increase — in just the two months between March 18 and May 15. Such sums can buy every important politician in the Democratic half of the corporate duopoly.

For the Lords of Capital, control of the Democrats is critical, since they are the party that claims to represent the people hardest hit by capitalist crises. (The Republican “base,” although full of people in economic straits, demands only that white supremacy be championed.) It is the Democratic Party’s job to beat back popular demands for social and economic justice, because the peoples and classes that make these demands are Democrats. As the crises become deeper and more frequent under late-stage capitalism, the oligarchy’s hold on the Democratic Party tightens, accordingly.

The Black vote is key, because African Americans are the most left leaning constituency in the nation, the group most in favor of income redistribution – the oligarch’s nightmare – and a range of other measures that would provide working people with some degree of security in this cutthroat capitalist economy. Therefore, the trick for keeping the austerity regime (Race to the Bottom) on track is to make Blacks and their allies more afraid of Republican racists than of rule by oligarch-controlled Democrats. That’s why Hillary Clinton’s campaign was so determined to run against Donald Trump, the most outrageously racist Republican, in 2016, as revealed by Wikileaks.

But the straw-man refused to be knocked down. For the next four years the Democrats, the bulk of the corporate media, and the national security state waged the most furious and dangerous campaign of demonization since Lincoln was elected in 1860. (Trump was correct in making that analogy but, like everything else from his mouth, it came out stupid.) It was a four-year, non-stop shock to the system, administered by the bulk of the ruling class and their media — the biggest beneficiaries of the system. They risked delegitimizing the very institutions that have facilitated corporate governance, for the chance to rewrite the national narrative. From now on, the United States is on a permanent national security emergency footing, requiring censorship of social media, draconian punishment of protesters, and 24/7 witch hunts for Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans and their home-grown “dupes.”


The Lords of Capital know, better than most of the rest of us, that the Race to the Bottom that immiserates the working class and disperses Black communities, is also responsible for the exponential, fantastical growth of oligarchic wealth. The Race to the Bottom is a global phenomenon of late stage imperial capitalism, which funnels ever-increasing proportions of wealth upward by forcing all the world’s workers to compete against each other. War must be endless, to enforce the terms of the Race on as much of the planet as possible. Government social, health and income supports that allow workers to refuse “gig” and less-than-living wage work, spoil the Race.

Biden is the oligarchs’ pick to keep the Race to the Bottom accelerating and the profits skyrocketing. On the other side of the duopoly, the Amerikkaner hordes plot vengeance for their perceived loss of what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “public and psychological” wages of whiteness. There is nothing lesser about either of these evils – which is why the only real option for Black and working people is an independent politics of struggle.

ISRAEL IS (AGAIN) PUSHING FOR WAR ON IRAN

By Moon of Alabama.

November 27, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/israel-is-again-pushing-for-war-on-iran/





NOTE: Breaking – a top Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated and people are suspicious that Israel, along with NATO countries, is responsible. See this thread of tweets by Trita Parsi where he explains why. (Click on the tweet to read the thread.)






There is a campaign to push U.S. president Donald Trump into attacking Iran before he leaves his office. It is likely that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahoo, with the help of Secretary of State Mike Pompous, is the brain behind it.

The campaign started on November 16 with a New York Times piece which claimed that Trump had asked for options to bomb Iran:


President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday.A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike. The advisers — including Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — warned that a strike against Iran’s facilities could easily escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

It is unlikely that Trump will want to ruin his legacy by launching another war in the Middle East. He will want to run again for president in 2024. ‘America first’, avoiding wars that are of no value for the U.S., was and is one of his major selling points.

There is precedence for such an Israeli campaign. Back in 2008 Netanyahoo had also tried to push the outgoing Bush administration towards a war on Iran:


During the last days of the Bush administration in 2008, Israeli officials, concerned that the incoming Obama administration would seek to block it from striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, sought bunker-busting bombs, bombers and intelligence assistance from the United States for an Israeli-led strike.Vice President Dick Cheney later wrote in his memoir that he supported the idea. President George W. Bush did not, …

While Israel has the capabilities to attack Iran it would never dare to do so without explicit U.S. backing.

Mike Pompous, the Cheney in the current attempt to drag the U.S. along, also wants to run for president – if not in 2024 then later. He is 56 years old and can wait a few more years. He is currently trying to catch the Evangelical vote and Zionist campaign support by pleasing Israel as much as possible:


On his recent visit to Israel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added new sanctions against Iran while also releasing a State Department statement defending Trump’s “maximum pressure” against the Islamic Republic. He boasted about the damage being done to the Iranian economy: “The Maximum Pressure campaign against the Iranian regime continues to be extraordinarily effective. Today, Iran’s economy faces a currency crisis, mounting public debt, and rising inflation. Prior to the Maximum Pressure campaign, Iran was exporting nearly 2.5 million barrels of oil per day. Now it struggles to export even a quarter of that volume.”

The Israeli campaign for a new war has come with several rather sensational ‘leaks’ pointing to such an event:


The United States this week rapidly deployed several heavy bombers to the Middle East this week in an apparent threat to Iran, amid swirling speculation that US President Donald Trump plans to take military action against Tehran before President-elect Joe Biden enters office.
…
In a highly irregular move, the B-52H Stratofortress planes were seen flying toward Israeli airspace on Saturday en route to the base where they will be stationed, likely in Qatar. The aircraft were spotted on civilian tracking software approaching Israel before they apparently turned off their transponders, rendering them invisible on those applications.

The rotation of B-52 bombers to Qatar is far from irregular:


It was the third time in the past year and a half that B-52 bombers, which are capable of carrying nuclear weapons and other powerful munitions, have been deployed to the region in tacit threats to Iran.

The base in Qatar is the B-52s’ launching point for air support in Afghanistan. As the U.S. is currently reducing its troop numbers in Afghanistan amid a surge of Taliban activities the additional air support is called for to cover the retreat.

In typical Netanyahoo manner a recent ‘secret meeting’ between Pompous, Netayahoo and Clown Prince Muhammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia was leaked immediately after it had happened. The fact that it was intentionally leaked makes it unlikely that the meeting was about an imminent attack on Iran:
[T]he contradictory news on Monday about such a meeting — with unsourced Israeli media reports saying it had taken place clashing with a denial from the Saudi foreign minister — highlighted the domestic politics in each country and signaled how far apart the two countries remained from the prospect of exchanging ambassadors.
…
Mr. Netanyahu, who has often been accused of leaking reports for political gain, had ample reason to trumpet any incremental steps in building relations with Saudi Arabia. He is eager to improve his standing at home as a leader who can turn Israel’s foes into friends and to divert attention from corruption allegations.The calculation is different for Prince Mohammed, who has told American visitors that he does not consider Israel an enemy but that opening official relations too quickly could inspire extremists and be used against him in a region where Israel remains unpopular.



Another Israeli ‘leak’ today is also designed to create the impression of an imminent attack on Iran:


The Israel Defense Forces have in recent weeks been instructed to prepare for the possibility that the U.S. will conduct a military strike against Iran before President Trump leaves office, senior Israeli officials tell me.
…
Senior Israeli officials tell me they expect Israel will get prior notice ahead of any U.S. strike against Iran. But they’re concerned that won’t be sufficient to fully prepare. Thus the order to the IDF to start taking preparatory steps under the assumption that such a scenario is possible.

Iran has responded to the Israeli campaign by highlighting that any attack on it would escalate into a wider war:


An adviser to Iran’s supreme leader who is a possible 2021 presidential candidate is warning that any American attack on the Islamic Republic could set off a “full-fledged war” in the Mideast in the waning days of the Trump administration.Speaking to The Associated Press, Hossein Dehghan struck a hard-line tone familiar to those in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, a force he long served in before becoming a defense minister under President Hassan Rouhani.

(Why is a warning of potential escalation, should Iran be attacked, characterized as a ‘hard-line tone’ instead of a matter of course?)

Iran also asked its ‘resistance’ allies to avoid provocations that could be used as an excuse for an attack:


Iran has instructed allies across the Middle East to be on high alert and avoid provoking tensions with the U.S. that could give an outgoing Trump administration cause to launch attacks in the U.S. president’s final weeks in office, Iraqi officials have said.

The order, delivered personally by IRGC foreign proxy commander Brigadier General Ismail Qaani, came a day after seven rockets had hit near the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Publicizing the order allows to characterize any further incident as a false flag provocation.

During the last 20 years all of the many rumors about imminent attacks on Iran were products of Israeli propaganda. I do not see why this time is any different.

Israel is deterred and does not dare to attack Iran. Hizbullah, Iran’s ally in Lebanon, has enough missiles to destroy Israel’s industry. Then there is this:


Aᴍɪʀ @AmirIGM – 8:39 UTC · Nov 4, 2020Iran shows off what is essentially a Clip for launching missiles in quick succession from its underground missile cities. This mitigates the low number of launch ports at these bases and adds more possibility of overwhelming ABM systems. – video

Attempts by Netanyahoo to goad the U.S. into attacking Iran have been manifold. But Trump’s legacy is on the line. I doubt very much that he will risk it for an attack that would have wide ranging and unpredictable consequences. How would it benefit him?