Kernow Damo

If Israel’s footage is meant to settle questions, why has it left so many people asking where Netanyahu and Ben Gvir actually are? Right, so this is perhaps not the face you were expecting at the start of this video, but I daresay you were expecting to see something along these lines if you’re already somewhat familiar with this story because this is a clip of the Netanyahu speech Israel has put out, the full version is 8 minutes long, if you really want to watch the whole thing the one meant to show the man alive, present, speaking, governing, all the usual serious-leader stuff after he’s not been seen for days, dark suit, stern face, little hand gestures, the full package. It’s what we expect from a Netanyahu televised announcement, just missing the whinging and the accusations of antisemitism that generally come with it, the sound having been muted. The trouble is, they have managed to release a what amounts to a reassurance video that has left people watching his hands and counting his fingers. Or watching his teeth seemingly come into frame and then disappear as if by magic. Tremendous work. Watch the hands as they come up in front of his chest. Watch the shape of them. Watch the way the fingers seem to sit and then not sit, the way the image starts looking smeared and wrong, the way one part of the hand area starts drawing the eye because it does not look clean or natural enough to just pass over. That is why people have been slowing this down. That is why people have been pulling stills from it. That is why what was supposed to be proof has started getting treated like a possible fake and to say that is feeding suspicion right now would be an understatement. The clip was supposed to settle people down. Benjamin Netanyahu was put in front of cameras on 12 March and instead of calming anything down it sent people into frame-by-frame mode because a lot of them looked at one section of that footage and did not see reassurance, they saw something off. They saw hands that looked wrong, movement that looked wrong, delivery that some thought looked wrong, teeth that looked wrong and within hours the whole thing had gone from “here is the prime minister speaking” to “what exactly have they put out here?” That is how badly this has landed. A wartime government tried to project continuity and have got the internet counting fingers.

Iran and Hezbollah are still hitting Israel and Gulf oil and gas dries up, but Trump insists he's still in control and it's nearly over. Who's he kidding? Right, so Donald Trump has said there is “practically nothing left” to target in Iran and that the war ends when he decides it ends. Fine. But then reality has answered back. Hezbollah fires a heavy barrage into Israel overnight in joint strikes with Iran hitting Haifa and other targets in the north. Israel’s mad war minister Israel Katz answers that not by restoring quiet, not by proving control, but by ordering expanded operations in Lebanon, because that is what you do when the thing you promised to stabilise is still burning in public. The International Energy Agency has answered the Hormuz crisis by reaching for the biggest emergency oil stock release in its history, which is not the behaviour of people who think this is all nicely contained and in another signal as to how precarious energy supplies are right now, Shell has piled on more pressure as they have now been forced to declare force majeure themselves on Qatari LNG-linked contracts, so now even the big energy firms are having to admit that the normal machinery is seizing up and even they cannot now deliver. Spain has permanently withdrawn its ambassador from Israel and following that move Iran has said the Strait of Hormuz will stay passable for states willing to send their Israeli and US ambassadors home. So no, this is not some neat little demonstration of strength under Donald Trump’s firm hand.

Netanyahu admits Iran may not break, US intel says it hasn’t, and the whole filthy war is starting to blow back on the people who sold it. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has finally crawled out from whatever rock he has been hiding under as Iranian missiles hammer Israel, all his own doing of course, and has now said out loud that his gamble may fail. After all the dead, after all the bombing, after all the talk about strength and deterrence and teaching enemies lessons they will never forget, the man selling the war has had to admit he cannot promise the result. He says Israel is creating the conditions for toppling Iran’s government, but he cannot tell you with certainty that Iranians will do it. So, you mean to say that after taking out their Supreme Leader on day one, they didn’t scatter and demand regime change? Well of course they didn’t! You did the one thing sure to unify them! And just to salt that wound that bit further, reporting on US intelligence says Iran’s leadership is still very much in control, not close to collapse at all and frankly breathing fire at this point, not a cat in hells chance of this ending now, when the new guy in charge is the son of the old supreme leader, and not only did you kill his father, you took out half his family with him. So the first thing to get straight here is brutally simple: the war’s main salesman is now admitting this hasn’t gone to plan, all while the intelligence says the target state is very much still standing, still active and that leaves Netanyahu with a war still running and no guaranteed political payoff, especially as munitions continue to dry up faster than price rises at our petrol pumps. Donald Trump hasn’t helped matters either, because the delusional fool keeps speaking as if the thing is already won while the region keeps answering back in fire.

Labour broke the courts by underfunding them, and now wants to use that damage to strip one of the public’s last checks on state power. Right, so Keir Starmer’s government is trying to cut jury trial rights, and the first thing to ask is who gets the better deal once ordinary people start getting pushed out of the room. Because this bill would take a whole range of criminal cases away from juries and put many of them before a judge sitting alone, which is a very different room and they know it. And it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to ask about those pushing these reforms such as they are, which is being met with such dramatic outcry either. Sarah Sackman, the courts minister helping front this, has declared membership of the Jewish Labour Movement and has been reported as having worked at Israel’s Supreme Court in Jerusalem. David Lammy, the Justice Secretary above her, has declared membership of Labour Friends of Israel. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister carrying the government pushing this through Parliament, has spent years publicly courting Labour Friends of Israel. Zionist without qualification. So these optics are not subtle are they? They are not made up. They are sitting right in the middle of it while Labour tries to move verdicts further away from juries and closer to the state. So should we be worried about some kind of Zionist intent behind this, or is it just coincidence? Starmer’s government has already pushed this bill through second reading in the Commons by 304 votes to 203, so the bill has moved forwards.

Trump says it’s nearly over, but Iran is still tightening the trap, the oil shock is spreading, and Washington already looks desperate for a way out. Right, so Tel Aviv has been hit again, central Israel has been under alerts again, commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz have been hit again, and Donald Trump is now doing the exact opposite of what strong men do when they are winning: looking for a way out. That is the story as it stands today. Not control. Not dominance. Not the clean victory lap he and Benjamin Netanyahu were puffing and panting through waving their respective flags, that they thought they were buying with bombs if they threw enough of Iran, because there is no way Iran could cope with such an assault right? Didn’t work out that way did it though? Iran is still firing, and still haven’t broken out their best stuff yet by all accounts. The region is still tightening up, the costs are still spreading through shipping, oil, prices at the petrol pumps and troop exposure, and the White House is hunting an exit, even allegedly going cap in hand to Putin to try and get to an endgame. So there is your meltdown. The side that sold this as strength has landed in the oldest trap in war, because these people are functionally idiots: they can still make things worse, but they cannot make it look under control, Iran said they wouldn’t back down if you struck them and they’re doing so. No way out. Donald Trump is not talking like a man who has achieved his aims and can now calmly set terms. He is talking like a man who helped start something far dirtier and wider than the sales pitch allowed for, and is now trying to edge toward an exit without admitting the whole thing has gone badly wrong. So the old cover story is done all the same.

Trump’s “quick war” is already widening into a regional liability - Iraq hit, Gulf cover blown, oil shock rising, and even his own side reportedly wants an exit. Right, so Donald Trump has spent the last few days talking like this war is going brilliantly. He stood in Florida and said the United States was making “major strides”, said some people could say the job was “pretty well complete”, then said he could call it a “tremendous success” right now or go further, and of course he said they were going to go further didn’t he? It must be lovely to live in a world devoid of reality. yet at almost the same time, people around him have reportedly been urging him to start talking about a way out. So there it is, right at the top, no mystery, no ceremony, no need for any clever decoding. The man in public is still selling victory, but the people near him still in touch with some semblance of real life are already looking for the exit. Making matters worse, US CENTCOM has managed a trumpian trick all of their own. Gulf governments have spent this war trying to sound like they are above it, beside it, merely enduring the weather while American forces happen to pass through. As if those US bases were just figments of Iran’s imagination and these Gulf monarchies and their Israeli normalisation and US alliances were equally all pie in the sky too. Well, CENTCOM has blown that notion sky high. You see they have put out their own material showing HIMARS supporting Operation Epic Fury, HIMARS standing for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, which is a lot more understandable, mobile rocket launchers basically, and its blown this whole Gulf State denial act out of the water, because guess where CENTCOM said these HIMARS are?

Israel’s own propaganda racket is now being sued by the very people and firms it used to sell the Gaza lie abroad Right, so Israel’s own propaganda racket has started chasing the state for its money. People hired to go out and sell Israel’s line, shoved in front of cameras, flown around, paid through private companies, performed a skit on Insta are now saying the state never paid up. Not the usual critics. Not the people Israel always tries to smear and brush aside. Its own people. Its own companies. The same outfit used to push the story abroad is now sitting under lawsuits and payment claims from inside the machine itself. Now this is frankly quite funny, the state that sells a con by way of new has itself conned the conners, but it is also filthy, because once the people hired to do the lying start demanding their money in public, this stops looking like conviction and starts looking exactly like what it is, a paid operation with court paperwork now attached and the propagandists chasing some two million shekels. Now the Prime Minister’s Office took over this hasbara machinery after the Ministry of Information collapsed after 7 October 2023, so that already tells you something useful about the moral confidence of the whole operation, because if the thing is so righteous and so self-evident and so obviously true, why is it being thrown together in a rush through replacement channels inside government as the bombs are falling and the bodies are piling up? Moshik Aviv was the chap who had just taken over the national information system in August 2023 and then the genocide of Gaza commences following that Hamas attack on October 7th. Staffing is thin, urgency is cited, normal tender procedures are said to have been bypassed, and private production companies are pulled in as payment conduits for people representing Israel abroad. Listen to the language of that and tell me it does not sound exactly like what it is trying not to say. “Payment channels.” “Irregularities.” “External consultants.” “Exceptional payments.” The whole vocabulary is built to keep the stain off the façade. Strip the wording back to ordinary English and what you are left with is a state operation using outside firms to fund message carriers during a genocide, and now those firms are saying the money did not arrive through signed work orders.

Israel pulled an epic self-own - and instead of breaking Iran, it’s triggered toxic fallout, oil panic and a much bigger war. Right, so Israel has spent days selling this as control, as precision, as pressure, as the kind of war those in the know can widen without losing hold of the edges, and now Tehran is sitting under toxic smoke and black rain after fuel depots and refinery-linked sites were hit, a Chinese intelligence vessel has been reported operating south of Iran in international waters near the Gulf, and footage from the video game ARMA has been circulating online as if somebody needed fake explosions to make the real ones look more convincing. That is how things are going now. Not with a neat chain of military success, but with a poisoned capital, an information war that cannot keep its trousers up, and outside powers moving closer to the scene because the fire is now big enough to pull them in. Then Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader under wartime conditions, so the leadership gap Israel and Washington plainly wanted did not open. It shut. Overnight. Just as they were told it would. With a new man in place and the whole succession question taken off the table by a formal appointment. China has not sent in divisions, nobody is pretending that, but Liaowang-1, the vessel in question is being reported south of the Iranian coast in international waters, not randomly sight-seeing, but positioned so that it’d be a war crime for the US or Israel to try the same stunt here, that they tried with that Iranian training vessel off Sri Lanka last week, and Beijing has already had its foreign ministry fielding questions about safe passage through Hormuz because Chinese trade and energy flows sit inside this war prominently, Iran being a major source of energy for them. That is what happens when you decide to turn a regional confrontation into a shipping and energy crisis though isn’t it? Other powers do not need to fire a shot to become part of the pressure.

Trump’s Iran war is not just hitting oil routes, it is dragging Europe’s fake energy independence into the open and putting Russia back in the frame. Right, so Donald Trump has set this one up so badly that a war sold as strength against Iran is starting to look like a gift to Vladimir Putin, and no, not because Putin has suddenly become some military wizard in the Gulf, but because oil and gas do not care about swagger, tanker routes do not salute campaign slogans, and Europe still runs on fuel it does not control. The Strait of Hormuz has been carrying around 20 million barrels a day, a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade, and once traffic there backs up, Saudi Arabia can reroute some cargo through the Red Sea, the UAE can bypass a slice of it from the Omani side of their country, which sits just outside the Strait, but nowhere near enough to replace the gaping hole left in global oil and gas supply. So the first thing that hits is not a speech, not a summit, not one of those tragic little statements about resilience from people who would not know what resilience was if it landed on their desk and kicked their coffee cup over. The first thing that hits is price, shipping, storage, and buyers fighting for cargo. QatarEnergy has already put force majeure on affected LNG buyers after halting production at Ras Laffan, and that matters because gas is where the polite European story starts wheezing. Oil is ugly but flexible. Europe can buy more crude from places like Norway, the United States, Kazakhstan, West Africa, North Africa, wherever the grade works. Gas does not work like that. Gas needs liquefaction plants, tankers, regas terminals, contracts, and a seller with spare supply. So once Qatar drops out even partially, Europe is not browsing many shelves for a replacement source. Europe is entering an auction. Asia is already the bigger direct buyer of Gulf energy, so when Gulf LNG goes missing or gets delayed, Asian buyers will then go hunting in the same Atlantic market Europe will need to for a refill. That is how Trump’s Iran war turns into Europe’s energy trap, with tankers diverting east and Europe staring at its storage schedule with ever increasing dismay. The European Commission has spent the last few years telling everyone the system is more secure now though haven’t they? It has points on paper for that. EU gas storage rules still target 90 per cent by the start of winter.

Trump & Israel’s war lies are going up in flames — from Haifa to the Gulf, the fire, failures and panic are getting harder to hide. Donald Trump has rushed more than 20,000 bombs to Israel under emergency authority, while B-1 bombers have landed at RAF Fairford, because no matter what Keir Starmer says, the UK is definitely involved, though it ought to be pointed out that RAF Fairford has little to do with the RAF, it is just a US air base on UK soil, because of course we have such things here too. All whilst that has been going on, anti-war organiser Mike Prysner, a guy who knows a thing or two about war given he has served in both Iraq and Syria has now said US troops and families are contacting his group, the Center on Conscience and War, or CCW looking for help to avoid deployment. One soldier told his mother in his final call home that his unit would be going “boots on the ground” that night, and that his commander said the operation was meant to bring about the Second Coming of Christ, but we’re supposed to believe the Iranians are the religious zealots of course. But that is the current picture in one go: more bombs for Israel, American bombers in Britain, and the coming of the Lord in exchange for razing Iran – how very Christian, not. That is not a picture of control. That is a picture of a war machine feeding itself harder because the first sales pitch has already fallen flat. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sold this as pressure, deterrence and dominance, the usual words the men in suits use when they are about to set half a region alight and call it stability. And it’s not just Trump with issues blowing up in his face right now either.