Kernow Damo

Like a gold obsessed Zionist vampire, Trump has burned American military depth for Israel and the bill is now landing on the United States. Right, so Donald Trump has chewed through a huge chunk of America’s defensive missile stocks faster than a beaver on ket and all for what? For Israel of course, and now the first bodies are starting to hit the floor in Washington as a result of it. John Phelan, the civilian head of the United States Navy, has walked out, though whether he walked or was pushed depends on which news outlet you’re looking at, at time of writing, but is he just the first crack now beginning to show? This dose after all land right on top of reports that roughly forty-five per cent of US Precision Strike Missiles are gone, around half the THAAD interceptors are gone, and nearly half the Patriot stock is gone as well. Never mind US offensive strategies, this is the defensive stuff. Those are the weapons the United States and its allies keep for the next war, the next strike, the next crisis, to protect themselves with, so Trump, far from being this great master strategist playing 5D chess, actually looks more like a man setting fire to his own house just to keep Benjamin Netanyahu warm. And that is the rotten little core of it. This was all sold as strength. The big con of US military supremacy getting flexed for an ally. It was sold as security. It was sold as America doing what had to be done. What it looks like now is America burning through expensive defensive kit, that will take, if the war stops now, an estimated three to five years to replace and all for a war more and more people can see was driven by Israel’s needs, not any obvious direct threat to the American mainland, with allies getting jittery, Iran still refusing to play dead, and even establishment figures in the United States admitting this thing went in without full preparation or a clear intention and some are speaking out about it too.

While Westminster chases Mandelson for sport, Labour is sitting on a live criminal case over the internal route to choosing one of its own MPs. Right, so Keir Starmer’s having a bad one, but if you’re sick to back teeth of Mandelson dominating every single news cycle ad nauseum, then you’ll be pleased to know that so am I, but not only that, there is frankly a much more damaging story going incredibly poorly reported right now, because frankly the Mandelson stuff is just easier and our5 mainstream journalists might pull a muscle if they actually attempted the real thing. You see four Labour figures have now been charged after a Metropolitan Police cybercrime investigation into allegations that a Labour Party database was manipulated to increase one particular candidate’s chances of selection in Croydon. Joel Bodmer, Shila Bodmer, Carole Bonner and Gabriel Leroy are all due in court now on 19 May in connection with that, and Bodmer faces an extra charge of perverting the course of justice over alleged phone-record alteration. That is a live criminal case now, over how the local Labour Party attempted to choose a likely future MP and amid all the stories and allegations surrounding Starmerroid attempts to rig selections and ensure only the most Starmery of people could ever get selected to stand for his party, this one stands out for all the wrong reasons and if Keir Starmer’s whole sales pitch was that he cleaned Labour up, restored discipline, restored standards and put adults back in charge, then this is not a scratch on the paintwork. This is the bonnet up, smoke coming out, and the cowboy mechanic currently scratching his arse and tutting is still trying to convince you the engine sounds fine. Croydon East is where all of this has taken place. It was a new constituency for the 2024 general election and Labour was strongly placed there, as you would imagine they would be, south London, which means the internal selection was never just a bit of party admin, it was the gate through which a likely MP was going to pass. Natasha Irons was later selected after the process was rerun and she has been the MP for Croydon East since that election, Labour of course very much as predicated won it.

Israel did not just get caught smashing Christ in Lebanon, it got caught smashing its own lie that it stands as a friend and protector of Christians. Right, so Lebanon and the Israeli atrocities being committed there have been somewhat encapsulated this week by images of an Israeli soldier, who has been photographed smashing up a statue of Jesus on the cross in the southern Lebanese village of Debel and this runs somewhat counter to what Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly said of Israel’s relations with members of the Christian faith, he claims to be a protector of Christians even. Well go on then Bibi, sell us your snake oil. Not oppressed in Lebanon though apparently, nor even closer to home either. His words might account for the fact that somewhat unusally, the IDF have readily confessed to it too. They’ve put out a tweet saying: ‘Following the completion of an initial examination regarding a photograph published earlier today of an IDF soldier harming a Christian symbol, it was determined that the photograph depicts an IDF soldier operating in southern Lebanon. The IDF views the incident with great severity and emphasizes that the soldier’s conduct is wholly inconsistent with the values expected of its troops. The incident is being investigated by the Northern Command and is currently being addressed through the chain of command. Appropriate measures will be taken against those involved in accordance with the findings.

Hormuz has shown Trump that punishment is not the same thing as control - he has plenty of the first but a rapidly shrinking amount of the second. Right, so to say Donald Trump has been repeatedly and mercilessly punching himself between the legs with regards to Iran these last few days would be an understatement, I would imagine Little Donnie’s Little Donnie must resemble something akin to orange pate by this point such has been the degree of failure and if I’ve left you feeling somewhat nauseous over that mental image, it’s pretty much justified, because whether you’ve seen the reporting on all of this or not, the breadth of failure on the part of the US currently is truly astounding. Let’s start with a return to negotiations after JD Vance went on a 16 hour jolly to Pakistan, achieved nothing and then went home. Trump has just told the world that his representatives will be heading back to Islamabad for negotiations with Iran, except he’s done that after the United States went ahead and blockaded Iranian ports, after the US Navy has fired into the engine room of the Iranian-flagged cargo ship Touska, after Marines boarded it, after he has gone on Truth Social threatening to knock out every power plant and every bridge in Iran, and after oil has jumped again because the Strait of Hormuz is still not behaving like it belongs to him, because it very much doesn’t. Well surprise, surprise, if his team goes to Islamabad again, they’ll be waiting a long time for Iran, because they aren’t going to waste their time again, they’ve told him no! Well we know what Trump’s reaction to that is by now don’t we?

Israel’s own media man has said the quiet part out loud about Israeli news reporting: fake news works, truth doesn’t. Right, so Israeli propaganda, hasbara, the government financing of pro Israel talking points which for years has shielded the state from being held to account for its worst excesses, it’s taken a battering in recent years, rightly so, being exposed for what it is, no matter how much Israel clings to it being the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and anyone saying otherwise is an antisemite. Well, Benjamin Netanyahu’s press spokesman has now been caught on video appearing to openly brag that fake news works, that truth does not actually matter, and that facts do not matter, and if you are Israel and you have spent years demanding to be treated as the truthful side while everybody else gets smeared as liars, fanatics or useful idiots, that is not a bad afternoon in the press office, that is a self-inflicted credibility hit. Eli Hazan is the man in that clip and he is not some anonymous online gobsh*te either, he is a senior Likud operator who has served as Netanyahu’s spokesman and now sits around the part of the Israeli state that deals with journalists and press access. So the story here is not that a random loudmouth said something stupid, or even said something we didn’t know already really. The story is that a man from inside Netanyahu’s media machine itself has now said the quiet part out loud, thrown hasbara under the bus, admitted the truth of it all and as such, Israel doesn’t just look dishonest on one story, it looks dishonest in every story, when a major comms official says on camera the truth doesn’t matter. So who is Eli Hazan then? Well, Israel’s embassy in Singapore says he served as Likud’s foreign affairs director from 2014 to 2023 and that in 2021 he became spokesperson for then opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu. So this is very much a man from the political machine itself. Israel’s Government Press Office pages matter for the same reason because they tell you what kind of machinery we are talking about here. This office issues press cards, handles visiting journalist accreditation and sits exactly where state messaging meets the foreign press. So the clip is not embarrassing because a politician said something silly. The clip is embarrassing because a man from the part of the system that deals with journalists appears to have admitted that truth is not the working standard inside that system, so what does that say of Israeli journalism more widely?

Tony Greenstein’s suspension is not just a Green Party row, but a warning that the pressure politics used against Corbyn is now being turned on them. Right, so the Green Party has suspended Tony Greenstein, a Brighton-based Jewish anti-Zionist activist who had only just joined the party, and the wording reportedly used against him was “documented history of antisemitism, including court decisions and recent terrorism charges.” Put that next to the fact that the party is already in a live row over Palestine and over a conference motion treating Zionism as racism – which it is - and the optics of an anti-Zionist Jew being suspended frankly lands like a ton of bricks. It starts looking rushed. It also starts looking somewhat familiar. It starts looking like certain people, certain bodies who have decided that if they cannot beat a rising Green party politically, they’ll resort to what they know worked before, the same filth that was used on Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, the weaponisation of antisemitism that we saw during his tenure. The important thing is not simply that Greenstein has been suspended. The important thing is that the people trying to make him the problem have exposed themselves for pulling this same stunt again. Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, has not inherited a sleepy little environmental outfit minding its own compost heap. Under his leadership, still under a year old, Green membership has gone from around 60,000 to over 225,000 in seven months. That is the reason the atmosphere has changed. Small parties are tolerated. Growing parties get trawled. That’s a threat to the status quo, unless you are Nigel Farage’s outfit and then you are tolerated, because that’s an establishment party too. Parties that start to matter to ordinary people and don’t serve the establishment get inspected, denounced, briefed against and held up as public hygiene problems by people who suddenly discover a deep concern for standards when somebody awkward starts getting somewhere. Polanski has made himself very awkward in a very good way for all of us.

Netanyahu can still threaten and still destroy, but this time he has come out of it looking less obeyed, less protected and far less untouchable. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu is in a spot of bother, I’m sure it breaks your heart to hear it, because the guy who has always sold himself as Mr invincible, Mr untouchable, practically wearing his underpants on the outside of his trousers such has been his sales pitch that only he can keep Israel safe and secure, isn’t quite landing how he’d like it to anymore. I can’t imagine why, with all the genocide and warfare he has instigated why that could be, but for all of his posturing and arrogance and egotism, his very real weakness is becoming more and more exposed and he knows it, hence stunts like this one and just as an fyi, there is nothing wrong with your sound: That was NBC’s Richard Engels asking Netanyahu about his role in taking the US to war on Iran, but we can’t let the Israeli people hear a question like that, so his mic got muted in the version they got, which is what you just saw. Propaganda is all he’s got, but he can’t control it all as we’ve seen in multiple cases in just the last few days. Lets start with Lebanon in which case. Donald Trump has announced a ten-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon after six weeks of fighting – that is six weeks of fighting following the collapse of the more than year long ceasefire which Israel never abided by anyway.

Netanyahu keeps reaching for the Bible to glorify war, but once Israel gets hit by a so-called ‘plague’ of bees, the sacred act stops looking so righteous. Right, so back in Old Testament times swarms of bees were seen as a sign of divine wrath and imminent threat, biblical plagues linked to Egypt and the Jewish people are well known too and of course Passover celebrates the culmination of Exodus, following a number of those plagues, and now, the City of Netivot, just to the East of the Gaza Strip, so the optics of location fit nicely here too, has been hit by a huge bee swarm. A plague of bees if you will. A shopping complex in a city in southern Israel has had bees suddenly appear all over it. Cars have had bees on them, balconies have had bees on them, and local authorities have had to tell residents to keep away while the mess got handled. Now you might be thinking, how much sympathy do I have over a few Israelis getting stung, probably not enough to bother to raise a single note on a tiny violin, and yet because of Benjamin Netanyahu, this freak of nature has still carried some weight, as well as ridicule. And that’s because Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years dragging biblical language into modern war politics whenever he wants his atrocities to sound more righteous than the blood-soaked reality we haven take place in Gaza, the West Bank and now increasingly in Lebanon and the wider war spreading across the Middle East, so this thing has gone from local disruption to public mockery in no time at all. Israel has not just had a weird day with insects. Israel has had a weird day with insects inside a symbolic world its own leaders keep feeding, and that leaves the whole chosen-people act looking a lot less convincing than it did before the bees turned up, because where the biblical plagues came to save them before, now they’ve been hit by one of their own. Netanyahu keeps reaching for scripture whenever he wants to dress state violence up as duty. Amalek, the enemy of the Israelites from the Old Testament, who’s erasure from existence came from divine command.

A real photo of settler abuse got called “antisemitic” — and that tells you far more about Israel’s panic than L’Espresso’s cover. Right, so Italian news magazine L’Espresso has published it’s latest weekly edition and being a news magazine it put a real photograph on its cover as you might imagine it would, hardly unusual is it? And yet that simple act has been enough in and of itself to have Israel wailing antisemitism yet again. Israel’s ambassador to Italy Jonathan Peled has called that cover manipulative and hateful and I would argue it could well be construed that way, though not in the way Peled means. The photograph itself shows an armed Israeli settler grinning inanely while filming a distressed Palestinian woman near Hebron during the olive harvest. That’s it. That is the row. Not a cartoon, not an artist’s impression, not some feverish bit of anti-Israel fan fiction, but a real image taken by Pietro Masturzo, printed under the title L’Abuso – The Abuse – and then denounced as antisemitic once it landed in public on te L’Espresso front cover. Enrico Bellavia, L’Espresso’s deputy editor, has not folded over this either, by now a British mainstream outlet would have prostrated itself, but not in Italy, not at L’Espresso, Bellavia has not done the usual apologetic little dance, and has instead said the image is backed by context, backed by reporting, backed by other photographs from the same scene and best of all, backed by video. So the first thing fixed on the record here is very simple. A real act of domination has been shown, the official complaint has gone after the showing rather than the act, which shows where Israel’s priorities lie, not with the abuse, but with the exposure and the magazine has answered with more proof. A handy little video clip. Now Jonathan Peled of course is not some random bloke with a social media account and too much free time on his hands. And don’t look at me like that either. He is Israel’s ambassador to Italy, which is why his intervention lands heavier than it might otherwise do, because when an ambassador says a magazine cover is manipulative, stereotyped and hateful, that is not personal offence, that is a state representative trying to push a boundary around what may be shown and how it may be described. Peled did not say the man in the image was invented, because of course he is real. He did not say the woman was invented, she is very real as is her distress.

Trump tried to choke Iran through Hormuz and ended up smashing into his own side’s trade lifeline like the orange halfwit he is. Right, so Donald Trump has instigated a blockade on ships going to and from Iranian ports through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, though the word instigated is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because what has followed is not some neat picture of Iran being economically strangled at sea but China saying no, you’re not stopping us or we’re going to have a problem; other nations like Britain and France saying no, we’re not going to help you in this act of self immolating stupidity, which is saying something given their leaderships, especially Keir Starmer who has been happy to launch bombers from UK soil and ‘defensively’ join Trump’s war in other ways. And although the Chinese aspect of this story is the bit the mainstream has focused on, they’ve not told the whole story, because it gets far worse for Trump. I wonder what China said to Trump to make him wet himself and allow that ship through in the end? A Chinese-owned tanker called Rich Starry carrying on through anyway. Trump wanted a display of control. He has got a display of leakage. He wanted fear. He has got argument. He wanted the image of everybody lining up behind Washington while Iran gets squeezed from the water. But he has had allies refusing to join, Beijing calling the move dangerous and irresponsible and seemingly saying something which made the orange drain from his face, and maritime data being used to show that traffic tied to Iran and traffic embarrassing to Washington have very much still been moving through the very route he said he was locking down.