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Tuesday, September 30, 2025
US to See $350 Billion Nuclear Boom to Power AI, Report Says
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-29/us-to-see-350-billion-nuclear-boom-to-power-ai-report-says?cmpid=BBD093025_GREENDAILY
Monday, September 29, 2025
Sunday, September 28, 2025
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Friday, September 26, 2025
What Fresh Hell is This? - Craig Murray
What Fresh Hell is This? - Craig Murray
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2025/09/what-fresh-hell-is-this/
What Fresh Hell is This? 18
September 26, 2025 Criag Murray
Yesterday saw two announcements. Starmer is to introduce compulsory digital ID cards in the UK, and Tony Blair is put forward by the White House to be the colonial administrator of Gaza for five years.
The political economy of the world appears locked in a vertiginous downward spiral. You don’t have to scratch very hard to find that Tony Blair’s hand is also behind the compulsory ID plan. He has been pushing it for nearly thirty years, and now it comes with added links to Larry Ellison, Palantir and Israel.
The government will be able to garner and centralise knowledge of everything about you. Every detail of your financial transactions, your DNA, your family, your medical records, your education, employment and accommodation. It will be a very short time before the digital ID is linked to your social media accounts and your IP access to monitor your browsing.
There is already the intention to control us through our access to financial services. I have spoken with one of the women charged for protesting outside the Leonardo factory in Edinburgh. She has had her bank accounts cancelled – simply losing the money in them – and cannot open a new account. You may recall they tried to debank Nigel Farage. The campaign to defend Julian Assange suffered multiple banking cancellations.
The desire of the state to control people politically through their ability to carry out ordinary transactions is not in doubt. It is demonstrated. Once you have a compulsory digital ID linked to transactions – which will follow very swiftly, I am quite certain – they will be able to simply switch off your ability to pay for anything. Add this to a digital currency which tracks all of your expenditure – all the key elements of which are already installed – and total control will be in place.
Starmer is trying to dress up a digital ID as an immigration control – whether you support immigration control or not, the notion that it will make a significant difference is nonsense. Landlords, employers, banks and lawyers already have to check the ID and status of their clients. For those bent on evasion, one more piece of bureaucracy will make little difference. It is the law-abiding who will be enmeshed in the system of control.
Increases in state surveillance and restrictions on personal freedom are always falsely framed as protection against a terrible threat – Paedophiles or fraudsters or immigrants or Russians. Yet despite an ever shrinking area of personal freedom, none of these real or invented threats ever actually recedes.
Starmer is the most unpopular PM in history. Attempting to force through this deeply unpopular measure is going to cause him real difficulties in parliament. The calculation is that Reform will oppose the measure on libertarian grounds, and that this will allow Starmer to show himself as tougher on immigration than Reform. The breathtaking cynicism of this is typical of the Starmer government, which believes in nothing except their own power.
As for Blair being made effectively Governor of Gaza, this is so sickening as to be beyond belief. The man who killed a million Iraqis on the basis of lies about WMD, who has made hundreds of millions of pounds through PR services to dictators, whose Tony Blair Institute has drawn up “Gaza Riviera” plans for Trump, and who has been discussing with western oil companies the takeover of Gaza’s gas field, is touted to adminster the mass grave which Gaza has become.
Thursday, September 25, 2025
[Salon] Russian envoy blasts Zelensky at explosive UNSC showdown -
[Salon] Russian envoy blasts Zelensky at explosive UNSC showdown - micheletkearney@gmail.com - Gmail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzGgx_0T9V8
[Salon] Pirate's Veto: How the Huthis Forced a Reroute of Global Shipping - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Pirate's Veto: How the Huthis Forced a Reroute of Global Shipping
Summary: the nearly two-year long Red Sea shipping crisis has had a major impact on global trade, driving up costs and transit times, and having a spillover effect on maritime activity in the region. With no Gaza ceasefire in sight and multinational naval forces downsizing operations, the attacks are likely to continue, and the area will remain off-limits to Western-flagged ships.
We thank Paul Cochrane for today’s newsletter. Paul is an independent journalist covering the Middle East and Africa. He writes regularly for Money Laundering Bulletin, Fraud Intelligence and other specialised titles. Paul lived in Bilad Al Sham (Cyprus, Palestine and Lebanon) for 24 years, mainly in Beirut. He co-directed We Made Every Living Thing from Water a documentary on the political economy of water in Lebanon.
The Red Sea shipping crisis has largely fallen off the political and media radar over the past year as the number of attacks has declined and the industry has accepted the changed reality to shipping routes as ‘the new normal’, to borrow that popular late Covid pandemic phrase. But the crisis has left a lot of collateral damage in its wake, and there is not expected to be plain sailing through the Red Sea for some time to come, even if the war on Gaza ends.
In response to Israel’s war on Gaza, in November 2023, Yemen’s Huthis started to attack cargo ships, particularly Western-owned or flagged vessels, in the Red Sea. In the first year, more than 100 ships were attacked, causing a 70 percent drop in cargo volumes through the Red Sea, and costing the industry an estimated $175 billion. Cargo ships plying the route between Europe and Asia have had to add up to 31 days to sail around the Cape of Good Hope instead, while the cost of a 40-foot equivalent unit (FEU) container soared from $2,500 to $8,500 at the peak of the attacks in late 2024.
As the attacks increased, shipping to and from Western Europe, North America and Australia through the Suez Canal dropped to zero, while non-Western ships, or those deemed by the Huthis to not be as implicated in the Gaza war, were able to carry on using the route. Shipping from the Black Sea region, carrying wheat, sunflower oil, fertilisers and other key agro-food exports from Ukraine and Russia, have been able to continue, in part because ship owners were already paying a conflict insurance premium (which they do not need to pay twice).
The crisis has been particularly bad for Red Sea ports and the Suez Canal Authority. Annual revenues from the Suez Canal plummeted from $10.3 billion in 2023 to $4 billion in 2024, while the number of ships passing through dropped by half, from over 26,000 in 2023, to 13,213 ships last year. Jordan’s only port, Aqaba, saw a 4 percent drop in container traffic in 2024. But it is Israel’s Red Sea port, in Eilat, across from Aqaba, that has taken the biggest hit. Cargo handling dropped by 90 percent in 2024, receiving just 16 ships, and in July this year, after hemorrhaging money for a year and a half, the port stopped operating.
Saudi Arabia’s ports have been impacted as transhipment traffic avoided the Red Sea – instead plying further south on the Cape of Good Hope route – causing volumes at the King Abdullah Port to drop 82.7 percent in 2024, from just under 3 million Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) to 500,000/TEU, and Jeddah slumped by 33.4 percent to 3.7 m/TEU. Local shipping lines have picked up a lot of the slack to ply the Red Sea as larger tonnage ships have avoided the area, and ships have been re-routed to Dammam in the Arabian Gulf, which saw a 42.7 percent uptick in activity, to 3.3 m/TEU in 2024, according to the Saudi Port Authority (Mawani).
The Huthis have repeatedly stated they are committed to continuing their military operations until Israel stops the genocide and siege on Gaza
Maritime security lacking, attacks resume
Moves to improve maritime security in the area were launched by the USA - Operation Prosperity Guardian - in December 2023, while the European Union launched Operation Aspides in February 2024. However, the US operation ended in May this year, following a ceasefire between the US and the Huthis, while the EU mission reportedly has only two or three frigates and some aircraft, providing minimal security given the area needed to be covered.
Despite the dwindling maritime protection, there were no attacks in the first several months of 2025, causing a slight boost in cargo ship activity. The more subdued environment, and the significant loss of revenues, prompted Cairo in May (2025) to offer a 15 percent discount on fees to transit the Suez Canal for ships with a tonnage of at least 130,000 metric tonnes to try to bolster activity.
But in July, two carriers were attacked by Huthi drones and sunk, and four sailors killed. The renewed attacks scotched an expected rebound in Red Sea activity, and prompted container costs to reach $3,560/FEU by early July, around 50 percent more than in late May, according to Freightos, while war risk premiums rose from around 0.3 percent of the value of the ship to 0.7 percent, according to Reuters.
The outlook
The crisis had led to a 10 percent rise in demand for container ships, but as more shipping capacity has been added over the past year, container rates on major Asia-Europe lanes fell in late August by 7 percent to $2,841/FEU, below the pre-crisis rates. ‘This counterintuitive trend strongly suggests that fleet growth is now the dominant factor in the market, outweighing the impact of longer transit time’, noted Israel-based digital freight booking platform Freightos. ‘As we move toward the final quarter of 2025, the Red Sea situation has evolved from an acute crisis to a persistent market reality’.
There is of course significant uncertainty over the future outlook, and how Yemen and Israel will react as tit-for-tat attacks continue, and Israel carries out its ground offence to occupy Gaza City. In late August the Israelis carried out a major air strike on Sanaa, killing 12 out of 16 Huthi ministers, including the prime minister and foreign minister. In response, the Huthis fired a missile at a Liberia-flagged, Israeli-owned tanker ‘Scarlet Ray’ in early September, and two weeks later, the Israelis carried out attacks on Yemen’s Hodeidah port. The attack on the tanker, just 40 nautical miles off the Saudi port of Yanbu, a major export hub for Saudi Aramco, has caused concern in Riyadh about securing key logistical infrastructure.
This crisis is very different from the Horn of Africa piracy crisis that peaked in 2011, and prompted a global maritime security response, being more politically driven than economic. In that sense, it has echoes of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, but is causing less economic pain, as the embargo caused global oil prices to triple while the impact of this crisis is less evident. Indeed, estimates for 2024 show that the Red Sea crisis added up to 0.7 percentage points to global core goods inflation, while other factors have caused a far higher rise in inflation for many countries.
But even if the Gaza war ends soon, presenting a reason for the Huthis to de-escalate or cease attacks in the Red Sea, analysts expect it will take months before insurance premiums drop and the route can be considered fully open again, while there is still piracy off the Horn of Africa to contend with.
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
[Salon] A Prize for Terrorism or a Penalty for Genocide? - /ArabDigest.org Guest Post
A Prize for Terrorism or a Penalty for Genocide?
Summary: the UK's recent recognition of Palestinian statehood is not a moral victory but a cynical, forced penalty for Israel's genocide, revealing Western weakness. Ultimately, this move is a key signpost in an irreversible process of global isolation and internal decay that heralds the inevitable end of the Israeli state.
The recent decision by four nations - the UK, Canada, Australia and Portugal formally to recognise Palestinian statehood was met with the predictable, venomous response from Tel Aviv. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu labelled it “an absurd prize for terrorism,” while the foreign ministry claimed it was “nothing but a reward for jihadist Hamas.” This framing is a deliberate and desperate attempt to control a narrative that is rapidly slipping from Israel’s grasp. For in truth, this recognition is not a prize for anyone; it is a penalty, a direct consequence of Israel’s own actions—a genocidal campaign in Gaza that has shocked the conscience of humanity. Yet, it is also a flawed and cynical manoeuvre, one that reveals more about the fears of a crumbling world order than a genuine commitment to justice. It is, however, an undeniable signpost on the road to a seismic shift: the end of the Israeli state as we know it is not a distant possibility, but a gathering inevitability.
To understand the significance of this moment, one must first look past the diplomatic fanfare. The UK’s recognition, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is not an act of moral courage but one of political expediency. According to the FT, “panic set in” within the Labour leadership. Fearing a forced and embarrassing parliamentary vote on the issue that would undermine his authority, Starmer hastily convened an emergency cabinet meeting. The result was a conditional recognition, a move designed not to empower Palestinians, but to manage the fallout of Israel’s genocide and corral the Palestinian cause back into the defunct cage of endless “peace talks.”
This is not a true affirmation of Palestinian rights. Rather, it is an attempt to curtail them. Western nations, while speaking of “independence,” simultaneously seek to dictate which parties can participate in Palestinian political life, place the entirety of blame on Hamas, and effectively terminate the sacred right of return for millions of refugees. The goal is transparent: to empower collaborators and find a way to absolve Israel of its crimes, allowing it to achieve its war aims under the genteel guise of diplomacy. Starmer, who supports Zionism “without qualification” and who has supported the famine in Gaza from the start, exemplifies this hypocrisy. Even as he “recognises” Palestine, he authorises British spy planes to fly overhead, aiding and abetting the very extermination he claims to want to end. The Palestinian people will now be punished for this “recognition,” with weapons supplied or financed by the same countries that just extended it.
Starmer’s attempt to "revive the hope of peace and a two-state solution" is doomed to fail for two fundamental reasons. First, the current Israeli government is a coalition of fanatics, too intent on Lebensraum in the West Bank and too ideologically committed to maximalist Zionism to ever accept a Palestinian state on any terms. "There will be no Palestinian state," Netanyahu announced on social media immediately after Starmer’s announcement. Even if Starmer could wave a magic wand and erase the genocide from the internet, and even if Palestinians were coerced into accepting a statelet consisting of little more than a single room in the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, Netanyahu and his fascist ministers would dismiss it as an anti-Semitic outrage. There is no partner for peace in today’s Israel; there is only a machine of expansion and elimination.
An elderly Palestinian woman being used as a human shield by Israeli forces in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip [photo credit: Shahar Dvir]
Second, and more critically, the walls are closing in on Israel. For two years, the world watched a slow-motion Holocaust unfold, during which two-faced Western governments wept crocodile tears while quietly doing all they could to expedite the slaughter. But a critical mass is now building. The momentum against the genocide is becoming unstoppable. Despite a huge, concerted effort by Western powers to slow it down—exemplified by the US’s sixth veto of a UN ceasefire resolution—the dam is breaking. The UN has declared a genocide. In the public sphere, boycotts are gaining unprecedented traction.
The spectacle of huge protests against the Israeli team at the La Vuelta cycling tour in Spain sent a clear message: any Western cultural or sporting event that includes the apartheid state is now a target. Ireland, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Iceland, Spain have all confirmed they will boycott Eurovision if Israel participates and Spain has cancelled a €700 million arms deal. Belgium has announced sanctions, including a ban on goods from illegal settlements. Norway’s colossal $2 trillion wealth fund has divested from Caterpillar on ethical grounds. The European Commission has proposed suspending the EU’s free trade agreement with Israel. Even the Royal College of Defence Studies in the UK has banned Israeli students. From the dockworkers of Genoa threatening to strike if aid flotillas are blocked, to the global BDS movement, civil society is leading where governments have feared to tread.
This recalls the sports boycotts that helped bring down apartheid South Africa. When ordinary South Africans saw their rugby and cricket teams isolated, it was a mortal blow to morale. But Israel is not South Africa. South African apartheid was not on a mission to annex half a continent, nor did it have the audacity to lobby Western governments to outlaw criticism of its policies globally. Israel, however, operates with a sense of impunity, carrying out assassinations and bombings across the region, unrepentant and ready to strike anywhere it perceives a threat to Zionism.
As Israel panics, its isolation deepens. Netanyahu himself has admitted it. The IDF, stretched to its limit, struggles to recruit enough soldiers and has resorted to ambushing its own yeshiva students at airport departure gates to force them to fight. This internal rot coincides with a dramatic regional realignment. The most telling signal came from Saudi Arabia, which just signed a significant security pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan. This highly publicised deal is a profound message. First, it signals that Riyadh has lost all trust in the US as a security guarantor. Second, it is a veiled warning to Israel: any “wild moves” in Saudi Arabia’s direction will be met with the knowledge that a nuclear power has its back. This is a complete reversal from just months ago, when talk was all of normalisation.
In the coming days, Israel’s criminality is expected to take centre stage at the UN General Assembly. Israel will likely ignore all accusations and expand its West Bank occupation, lashing out as it did at Qatar. A wider war with Iran is a terrifyingly likely next step as the regime seeks to externalise its crisis. But each reckless act only accelerates its demise.
The end of the Israeli project is coming. This is not ‘possibly coming,’ something illusory or abstract. It is like a ship far out at sea whose masthead can already be seen from the shore; like a child soon to be born moving restlessly in its mother’s womb.
The UK’s recognition of Palestine is not the cause of this shift, but a symptom of it—a reluctant admission by the establishment that the status quo is untenable. It is a feeble attempt to get ahead of a tidal wave of history. The combination of internal decay, global grassroots resistance, and shifting geopolitical alliances has created an irreversible momentum. The collapse of the Israeli state in its current form would be the most significant geopolitical event since the fall of the Soviet Union. And the world is finally, belatedly, beginning to prepare for the dawn.
Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Monday, September 22, 2025
Netanyahu Unhinged - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Netanyahu unhinged
Summary: with Donald Trump functioning as a loyal sidekick rather than as the president of the mightiest military nation in the world Benjamin Netanyahu continues to wreak regional havoc crossing red line after red line with impunity.
We circulate below an edited transcript of our September 17 podcast with Gulf defence and security analyst Andreas Krieg. Andreas’s latest book is Subversion: The Strategic Weaponisation of Narratives. You can listen to the full podcast here.
Can we begin with your assessment of the attack as a military endeavour. The Israelis pride themselves on launching what they call efficient surgical strikes against their enemies. How surgical was this attempt to kill senior Hamas leaders in Doha?
It wasn't surgical at all. This has a lot to do with the fact that the Israelis had to use standoff weapons so they didn't penetrate Qatari airspace. There are essentially two stories of what happened. One is the Qataris flew down the Red Sea seaboard along the west coast of Saudi Arabia, then sent ballistic missiles into space over Saudi Arabia that then came down on Qatar. I don't think this is a very realistic scenario and it's also one that serves the Israelis because they're saying ‘we did not penetrate any Saudi airspace.’
The other story is that they flew from their airbase in southern Israel, Nevatim, into Jordanian-Saudi airspace then went to the northern part of the Gulf where they released the weapons which then flew into Qatar. I think that's the more realistic scenario. It would have meant they penetrated the air spaces of several different Arab countries and thereby violated their sovereignty but Israel has done this time and again over the last two years with impunity.
There's been much speculation about what Trump knew and when he knew it. What is your understanding?
It is very unlikely that Trump knew anything about it primarily because the Israelis know how deeply penetrated the Trump administration is and how close they are to the Qataris, especially [Steve] Witkoff, the Special Envoy to the Middle East. There's just no way if anyone around Trump or Witkoff had known about this attack they wouldn't have leaked it to the Qataris. So the Israelis knew if they wanted to surprise the Qataris and make sure the Hamas leadership wasn't warned, they would make sure Trump wouldn't know about it. Three anonymous Israeli sources yesterday were saying Trump was warned an hour in advance directly by Netanyahu but I find this to be just another information campaign by the Israelis trying to drive a wedge in US-Qatari relations.
What are the implications for the Qataris?
It's a watershed moment, unprecedented in various ways, not just for the Qataris. This is something all the Gulf royal families are looking at as an attack on the Gulf.
The US is still seen as the major security guarantor. Then you have a strike, not just by Iran which was bad enough for the Qataris in June, but by a fellow US CENTCOM partner, because Israel and the Gulf states are all under US Central Command. One American ally - arguably Israel being the closest US ally - striking the probably second closest ally of the United States. Qataris are still in disbelief. They never expected the Israelis to do something as bold as this. There have been questions asked about what would happen if the Israelis were to strike Hamas in Qatar, but most scenarios were looking at some sort of covert operation on the ground rather than an air strike. They now know that you cannot rely on the United States and that's also the perception across the region.
Worse than that, you could make a case that in the 80s and the 90s, even the early 2000s, most of the GCC countries were free riders. They were not investing enough into defence, just relying on the United States. But what we've seen since the Arab Spring is that all the Gulf states are burden-sharing quite extensively. They're a force multiplier for US power in the region, probably a net contributor to US power, unlike Israel, which I still think is a net consumer of US power. So the Gulf states were thinking ‘we're indispensable now we're investing trillions - not billions - of dollars in the United States’. They thought they had literally paid off Trump, then something like this happened. Now Trump looks impotent, especially against the backdrop of his visit to the Gulf earlier this year which was such a high, especially in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Everyone was glowing, saying ‘this is one of the greatest moments for the Gulf’. Everyone thought, ‘we've got him in our pocket’. Now this happens he appears weaker than even Biden or other previous presidents and that is something that the Qataris have to deal with.
Trump is saying, ‘Look, this will not happen again’. Meanwhile, Netanyahu is saying, ‘Oh, yes, it will’. Does Trump have enough clout to prevent another Israeli attack on Qatar or other Gulf states?
No, it's quite clear and it has mostly to do with the fact that Netanyahu is risking everything because he knows he has very little, if anything, to lose domestically. The operation against Iran was already a major risk. Striking [Ismail] Haniya in Iran [political leader of Hamas, on 31 July 2024] was a major risk. He's willing to not just test boundaries, but cross boundaries. He's done it time and again and he's never had any severe consequence from any US administration. In Gaza, I don't even remember how many red lines were crossed. We're now moving into genocide and the US is still saying, ‘Carry on and kill Hamas leadership.’ In this context, I can't see how the US administration is actually able or willing to enforce any red lines on Israel.
How strongly do you think the Saudis and the Emiratis will express their unhappiness with what the Israelis have done?
Well, they have. So the visit to Qatar on Wednesday [10 September] by the Abu Dhabi government and entire strategic establishment at such short notice, not just to pay condolences but also to express support, shows how shocked Abu Dhabi was in particular. Abu Dhabi obviously maintains its relationship with Israel despite what's going on in Gaza but the Emiratis were shaken to their core because they know while they're not hosting Hamas, they host a range of Iranian operations, whether they support it or not, explicitly or implicitly. So the Israelis could say that what's going on in the UAE is a threat to national security and strike the UAE.
The Saudis were shocked for different reasons. I don't think they're necessarily a target at the moment, but the rhetoric about Greater Israel - I think there was a comment by someone in the Israeli administration saying, ‘The Saudis have so much land, why don't they take the Gazans?’ - the Saudis are taking these sorts of comments seriously, because Netanyahu has to be taken verbally literally because he's usually delivered on any atrocious comment that he has made. So it's a wake up call for the Gulf states.
Why doesn't the UAE say, ‘all right, you've gone too far this time we're going to withdraw our ambassador?’
I think that has to do with the fact that they're expecting something worse to happen next week. Canada, France, the UK and others are going to recognise a Palestinian state during UNGA in New York and we are expecting the Israelis to respond to this. One way would be for Netanyahu to go forward with formal annexation of parts of the West Bank. This would obviously lead to massive condemnation globally, but maybe Netanyahu doesn't care anymore. He's a rogue leader in a pariah state, so it doesn't really matter anymore for him, but the Emiratis have said there will be consequences, so they will have to do something. So I think they are holding back, knowing that next week they will have to basically kick out the ambassador as an act of last resort.
Iran has been constantly viewed as the regional security threat. But is Netanyahu and his extremist government the big threat right now in the region?
That's my opinion but more importantly this is the Gulf States’ view. We've had comments from the Emiratis and senior Saudis saying that actually now Israel is either worse than Iran or just equal to Iran as a regional threat. I would go a bit further and say that Iran is actually a more manageable threat. Iran is a country under massive sanctions. The US is very much pushing back against Iran. The Iranians are reaching out their avenues of engagement and dialogue. With Israel there's nothing. Israel has the complete, unequivocal support from the United States. It acts with impunity. It disrespects the United States. It is not under pressure. Even the international community largely, despite all the condemnation, still hasn't done anything meaningful against Israel. Israel is entirely unhinged under Netanyahu and there are no avenues for dialogue and engagement in the way that exist with Iran.
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Saturday, September 20, 2025
Friday, September 19, 2025
[Salon] Kompromat and Gaza - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Kompromat and Gaza
Summary: the unproven conspiracy theory that U.S. support for Israel is fuelled by blackmail from an Israeli-run Epstein operation inverts the racist trope of Arab sexual deviance used to justify violence against Palestinians. Such speculation dangerously echoes antisemitic myths and undermines the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Why doesn’t Trump stop the genocide? As the conflict in Gaza continues, questions about the unwavering U.S. support for Israel, particularly from Donald Trump, persist. This support is exemplified by high-profile visits from U.S. officials, including Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee praying with Netanyahu and the largest-ever delegation of U.S. legislators visiting Israel.
A controversial theory, proposed by among others the late American right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk and former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben Menashe, suggests this support may be fuelled by blackmail. The theory posits that kompromat (compromising information collected for manipulating someone) collected by the late Jeffrey Epstein is being used to influence Trump and other senior U.S. officials. While hotly denied and entirely unproven, a significant amount of circumstantial evidence fuels this speculation.
The connection between Trump and Epstein is well-documented. They had a long-standing relationship, with Trump himself stating in 2002, “I've known Jeffrey for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Epstein’s black book contained 14 numbers for Trump, who Epstein described as his “closest friend”. Epstein’s biographer claimed to have been shown photos of Trump with topless young girls on his lap, and his most famous victim, Virginia Giuffre, was recruited from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. A recently revealed birthday card from Trump to Epstein, signed with the phrase “May every day be another wonderful secret,” adds to the intrigue. (The White House has denied that the letter is authentic, saying the president "did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it".)
The plot deepens with the Israeli connection, primarily through Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister and head of Israeli military intelligence. Barak was a close friend of Epstein, visiting him numerous times even after Epstein’s conviction as a sex offender. Leaked emails confirm their extensive personal relationship.
Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother, believes his brother was murdered in a “professional hit” to silence him, noting that pathologists could not rule out homicide. He also claims Jeffrey told him during the 2016 election that he possessed information on both candidates that could cancel the election if revealed.
While this does not constitute proof of a state-sponsored blackmail operation, the circumstantial evidence is damaging to U.S.-Israeli relations. It raises a disturbing question in the public mind: could U.S. support for Israel’s actions be motivated by blackmail rather than policy?
Four people were arrested for projecting images of Trump and Epstein together on Windsor Castle, where Donald Trump was set to meet the King
This theory also directly challenges a core justification used to support Israel and vilify Palestinians. For decades, a potent racist trope has been employed: the portrayal of Arab and Muslim men as inherently predatory and sexually deviant. This colonial-era “othering” frames the conflict not as a political struggle over land, but as a primal battle between civilization and barbarism.
Israeli media and politicians have long peddled the stereotype of Arab men’s “uncontrollable, animalistic sexuality” as a threat to Jewish women, justifying control and violence to protect “the purity of the nation.” Extensive work on discriminatory laws and racist incitement by Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and Yesh Din - Volunteers for Human Rights provides countless examples of such dehumanising rhetoric. Racist sexual stereotypes were also used to justify expulsions in 1948 based on debunked myths of mass rape, as documented by historians like Ilan Pappé.
This trope resurfaced powerfully after October 7th, with widespread reports of systematic sexual violence by Hamas. While no actual rape victim was ever identified and many claims have been comprehensively debunked, these reports were instantly instrumentalised within a racist framework to dehumanise all Palestinians, painting them as inherently barbaric and thus making retaliation, collective punishment, and the current violence seem justifiable.
A more modern variant is the smear that Palestinian men are predisposed to pedophilia. This ultimate dehumanisation, labeling an entire people as a threat to children, justifies extreme measures like the blockade of Gaza as a necessary “quarantine.” It creates a simple binary: Israelis are modern, rational, and protective of women and children; Palestinians are backward, irrational, and predatory. This framing deflects any criticism of Israeli policy as support for “barbarism.”
The Epstein case inverts this entire narrative. Instead of Arab pedophiles preying on Jewish children, suspicion falls on a potential state-sponsored ring, masterminded by a Jew, allegedly involving Israeli intelligence, systematically abusing white American children to blackmail U.S. elites to secure the state of Israel.
This inversion is deeply shocking and problematic because it unfortunately aligns with classic antisemitic canards like the “Blood Libel” (the ancient false accusation that Jews murder children for rituals) and the trope of a secretive Jewish cabal manipulating world events, as found in the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
It is crucial to state that the theory of Israeli government involvement is unproven and denied by U.S. authorities. The official view is that Epstein was a criminal with a multinational network acting for personal gain, not state-level espionage.
However, the longer the U.S. government withholds the full Epstein files, the more it feeds these dangerous conspiracy theories. Whether released or not, the speculation itself, intertwining real crimes with ancient hatreds, undermines the foundation of U.S.-Israeli relations, potentially making this the last U.S. administration to stand unconditionally by the Israeli state.
MoA - Saudi Arabia's Defense Pact With Pakistan Is A Strategic Loss For The U.S. of A. - Guest Post
MoA - Saudi Arabia's Defense Pact With Pakistan Is A Strategic Loss For The U.S. of A.
Saudi Arabia's Defense Pact With Pakistan Is A Strategic Loss For The U.S. of A.
Back in 2012 U.S. foreign policy analysts were concerned about a possible nuclear alliance between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Scholars from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the Stimson Center wrote an essay about it:
The Pak-Saudi Nuke, and How to Stop It - The American Interest, March 2012
The opening paragraph:
One morning, perhaps in the not too distant future, the President of the United States may wake up to an announcement that, given new dangers in the Middle East, the Saudi government has requested the stationing of Pakistani troops on Saudi soil. The announcement might go on to explain that these troops will also bring with them the full complement of conventional and strategic weapons necessary to ensure their security and that of Saudi Arabia. Word would quickly follow from Islamabad that Pakistan has accepted a generous aid package and low-priced oil from Saudi Arabia. Both parties would stress that the agreement simply reaffirms their decades-long special relationship.
As Pakistan is a nuclear weapons state one had to assume that any such a pact would supply Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons. It was something that the U.S. and its sidekick Israel were very concerned about.
It was assumed at that time that the reason for such a move by Saudi Arabia would be its concern over Iran and its nuclear program:
Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia’s threat perception has sharpened as the dangers from Iran have grown along with doubts about the reliability of U.S. protection.
The time to wake up to a new Saudi-Pakistani alliance has finally come today:
Saudi Arabia signs ‘strategic mutual defence’ pact with Pakistan (archived) - Financial Times
But the strategic circumstance under which the alliance happens are very different from those that had been envisioned in 2012 essay:
Saudi Arabia has signed a “strategic mutual defence” pact with Pakistan, signalling to the US and Israel that the kingdom is willing to diversify its security alliances as it looks to bolster its deterrence.
The agreement with the nuclear-armed south Asian state comes a week after Gulf states — traditionally reliant on the US as their security guarantor — were deeply rattled by Israel’s missile strikes targeting Hamas’s political leaders in Qatar.
“We hope it will reinforce our deterrence — aggression against one is aggression against the other,” a senior Saudi official told the Financial Times. “This is a comprehensive defence agreement that will utilise all defensive and military means deemed necessary depending on the specific threat.”
This is a NATO Article 5 like pact. 'All means deemed necessary', as empathized, undoubtedly includes Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
The U.S. was, the FT say, not at all involved in it:
Riyadh is believed to have informed Washington about the Pakistan defence agreement after it was signed.
Saudi Arabia already has a strategic missile force which is armed with Chinese DF-21 missiles which have a range of up to 1,700 kilometer. They can hit Tehran, but also Tel Aviv. The missiles are conventionally armed but can be fitted with nuclear warheads.
Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons had largely be financed by Saudi Arabia. The two countries have a long history of military cooperation:
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have a defense relationship stretching back decades, in part due to Islamabad’s willingness to defend the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina in the kingdom. Pakistani troops first traveled to Saudi Arabia in the late 1960s over concerns about Egypt’s war in Yemen at the time. Those ties increased after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and the kingdom’s fears of a confrontation with Tehran.
Pakistan developed its nuclear weapons program to counter India's atomic bombs. However, there long have been signals of the kingdom’s interest in the program. Retired Pakistani Brig. Gen. Feroz Hassan Khan, in his book on his country’s nuclear weapons program called “Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb,” said Saudi Arabia provided “generous financial support” for its effort.
Today Saudi Arabia no longer fears a confrontation with Iran. In 2023, with the help of Chinese mediation, the two countries did bury their hatchets. The move was an early sign that the U.S. was losing ground in the Middle East.
The reasons why the is being closed these days is obvious:
The agreement was signed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in Riyadh. Sharif’s office’s reiterated that the agreement “states that any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both”.
The Israeli attack on Doha, one of the US’s major non-Nato allies, exacerbated Gulf leaders’ long-running concerns about Washington’s unpredictability and its commitment to their defence, as well as fears about Israel acting unrestrainedly with its military across the region.
The Saudis had worked on, and hoped for, a deeper alliance with the U.S. But the genocide in Gaza, and the unlimited U.S. support for it, have made such an alliance impossible:
Riyadh had been hoping to seal a defence pact with the US, as well as co-operation with Washington’s nuclear plans, as part of a grand deal that would have led to it normalising diplomatic relations with Israel.
However, those plans were upended after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, triggering the war in Gaza and conflict across the region.
Riyadh has become increasingly outraged by Israel’s 23-month war in Gaza and the conduct of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government.
Prince Mohammed accuses Israel of committing genocide, and has made it clear that normalisation is off the table unless Netanyahu ends the conflict and moves to establish a Palestinian state.
China, which is allied with Pakistan, will be happy about the deal. So will be Iran. It was likely already informed about it:
Before the defense pact was signed, Iran dispatched Ali Larijani, a senior political figure who now serves as the secretary of the country’s Supreme National Security Council, to visit Saudi Arabia. That may have seen the kingdom acknowledge the pact to Tehran, with which it has had a Chinese-mediated détente with Iran since 2023.
India will be concerned about the deal. A lot of the oil it purchases is coming from Saudi Arabia. With a Saudi-Pakistani alliance in place any conflict with Pakistan will likely cause it additional difficulties with the purchase of energy.
The U.S., and Donald Trump, are the big losers in this. The unrestricted support for Israel is coming at an ever increasing price. The Gulf countries are - slowly, slowly - moving away from it.
[Salon] Is America entering a new era of McCarthyism? - Guest Post
> Is America entering a new era of McCarthyism?
> https://www.ft.com/content/54bee7cc-b0b4-4acb-9776-9ad6d39f3400
>
> Since January, Donald Trump has used tactics reminiscent of the 1950s to stifle critical voices. Over the last week, the threats have intensified
> Trump has long railed against what he views as a hostile cultural elite, yet his actions are increasingly being likened to the intimidation methods of Senator Joe McCarthy
>
> Christopher Grimes in Los Angeles FT 19 September 2025
>
> On Monday afternoon, five days after Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a university in Utah, US vice-president JD Vance presented an episode of the podcast that made the rightwing activist famous.
>
> Broadcasting The Charlie Kirk Show from his office, Vance delivered a blistering attack on the leftwing groups he claims are organising violent opposition to the Trump administration. “We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” he said.
>
> The motivations of the man accused of killing Kirk are still being analysed, and prosecutors have suggested that he was acting alone. However, that has not stopped senior figures in the administration from using the killing to demonise opponents on the left.
>
> Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and another guest on the podcast, went even further in promising revenge on what he said was a “vast domestic terror movement”.
>
> “We are going to use every resource we have . . . throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks,” he promised.
>
> Even before Kirk’s death, there was a developing pattern of the Trump administration using the instruments of the state to intimidate some of its perceived domestic opponents. Since January, the White House has conducted simultaneous campaigns against leading universities, media companies and law firms.
>
> While some of the subjects are familiar targets of President Donald Trump’s ire, together they amount to a co-ordinated push to stifle critical voices — a process some have likened to the Red Scare of the 1950s led by Senator Joe McCarthy.
>
> “I think he [Trump] is chilling dissent,” says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at University of California, Berkeley and a specialist in US constitutional law. “That’s where the analogy of the McCarthy era comes in.”
>
> Over the past week, in an environment charged with anger at the murder of Kirk, the rhetoric and threats have become even more inflammatory — reinforcing the impression of a new Red Scare intended to silence potential opponents.
>
> In the podcast, Vance singled out the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, two non-governmental groups that he said received “generous tax treatment”. On Tuesday, Trump launched a $15bn defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, accusing it of being a mouthpiece of the Democratic party.
>
> On Wednesday, ABC said that it was “indefinitely” suspending the late-night talk show of Jimmy Kimmel after the comedian, who often mocks Trump, was attacked by conservatives for misrepresenting the politics of the man accused of killing Kirk. Earlier in the day, Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, had suggested the regulator could withdraw ABC’s broadcasting licence over Kimmel’s comments.
>
> “We’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did,” Trump told NBC News.
>
> Trump himself believes he is pushing back against the politicians, prosecutors and bureaucrats who tried to punish him when he was out of power. Many of his supporters believe he is right to target media groups and universities, which they accuse of being biased against conservatives.
>
> Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said the criticism of Kimmel “has nothing to do with free speech.” She added: “Low-ratings loser Jimmy Kimmel is free to spew whatever bad jokes he wants, but a private company is under no obligation to provide him with a platform to do so.”
>
> Charges of McCarthyism have ebbed and flowed in American politics since the death of the senator in 1957. But the evidence of a new type of Red Scare — one where criticism is being muzzled by an administration using the power of the federal government against its perceived enemies — is becoming more widespread.
>
> Ever since he entered politics a decade ago, Trump has often delighted his supporters by launching scathing rhetorical attacks on the country’s cultural elites.
>
> Since the start of his second term, however, many of these attacks have gone beyond the rabble-rousing of culture war politics. Instead, they have amounted to a co-ordinated targeting of the sorts of institutions that could serve as bases of opposition to his agenda.
>
> And unlike Trump’s first term, when he had fewer senior figures in his administration who were committed to his agenda, there has been much more follow-through of the president’s verbal barbs.
>
> Trump has even gone so far as to try to reshape some cultural institutions in his image, appointing himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
>
> “Trump clearly wishes to dominate the nation’s attention agenda,” says Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. “He sees this as tying into other specific goals such as depriving alternative power centres of agenda-setting juice [and] putting public figures in fear of him. Some of it is culture war, but it goes beyond that.”
>
> Chemerinsky says that Trump “has very much gone after the sources of dissent: universities, the press, law firms”. He argues that in some ways the potential threats are more significant than in the 1950s because McCarthy, for all the influence he once wielded, was only a junior senator from Wisconsin.
>
> “In the McCarthy era, it wasn’t the president of the United States using the enormous powers of the government for retribution and punishment in the way we’re seeing now,” he says. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
>
> The Red Scare of the 1950s is remembered for the blacklisting of Hollywood screenwriters and actors, McCarthy’s incessant red-baiting and the execution of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The prosecution team in the case against the Rosenbergs included Roy Cohn, who later became a mentor and attorney for Trump.
>
> Cohn established a reputation for ruthlessness early on, when he pushed for the death penalty for the Rosenbergs despite concerns from other anti-communist hardliners, including FBI chief J Edgar Hoover, who worried about the optics of executing a mother with two young children.
>
> Trump and his father hired Cohn to fight a justice department lawsuit accusing them of denying Black and Puerto Rican applicants for apartments in their properties in the 1960s and 1970s. Cohn, who died in 1986, advised Trump: “You might be guilty, but it doesn’t matter . . . Don’t ever admit guilt,” a family member of Cohn’s recounted to PBS.
>
> The Red Scare was part of a fight between New Deal Democrats and Republicans, who wanted to roll back President Franklin Roosevelt’s expansion of the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s. “The Red Scare was, first of all, a cultural war, pitting two visions for America against each other, one progressive, one conservative,” writes Clay Risen in Red Scare, an account of the period.
>
> The geopolitical backdrop was the dawn of the cold war, during which the Soviet Union sought to aggressively expand its influence around the world, including inside the US — giving rise to concerns about widespread communist infiltration. McCarthy masterfully fanned those fears.
>
> “McCarthyism, to me, is about the willingness to constantly attack your enemies, to be willing to make things up, essentially to use the Joe McCarthy playbook,” Risen says in an interview. “You see a lot of McCarthyism today, particularly around immigration.”
>
> There is no question in my mind — fear has invaded newsrooms in America
>
> The other similarity, he says, is that there are “not a lot of people standing up” to Trump in his second term. “In the ’50s, institution after institution bowed down to the Red Scare, whether it was school districts, universities, libraries, law firms, Hollywood movie studios — the elite organisations all bent the knee to the red-baiters.”
>
> Instead of an enemy’s ideology and its domestic followers, the Trump administration is targeting illegal immigrants, liberal institutions, the media, members of the transgender community and diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, Risen says.
>
> “And then there’s ‘woke,’ that catch-all,” he says. “I would imagine there is a possibility to see another Red Scare, but this time a much scarier one because it’s aimed at a grab bag of ‘others’ who are right here.”
>
> Trump’s rise to political power in 2016 was accompanied by constant attacks on the press, which he labelled “fake news” and later described as “the enemy of the people” — a phrase associated with 20th-century dictators.
>
> But this time round, the attacks are not only rhetorical.
>
> Just days before the November presidential election, Trump filed a $10bn lawsuit against CBS, for what he claimed was the network’s “deceitful” editing of an interview with then vice-president Kamala Harris on the 60 Minutes news programme. After Trump won the election, there was a widespread assumption that he would drop the suit, which experts in media law agreed was flimsy. He did not.
>
> At the time, Shari Redstone, then the controlling shareholder of CBS parent Paramount, was seeking the administration’s approval for an $8bn sale of the company to Skydance.
>
> Despite a revolt within CBS News, in which the heads of 60 Minutes and CBS News resigned in protest, Redstone paid $16mn to settle the lawsuit — and the deal was approved.
>
> Within CBS News, staff fear the new chief executive, David Ellison, will reposition the division to appease the president. This month, the company appointed Kenneth Weinstein — who led a conservative think-tank and has advised Trump — as ombudsman of CBS News.
>
> Marvin Kalb, who worked for 30 years as a reporter for the news outlet, says journalists at the network are “extremely worried” about what will happen under the new management.
>
> “There is no question in my mind — fear has invaded newsrooms in America,” he says. “If you offend the president, you are subject to a legal challenge.”
>
> Trump has continued his attacks on the press. In July, he sued the Wall Street Journal, including its owner, Rupert Murdoch, for $10bn over a report that he sent a suggestive birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein. This week he moved against The New York Times, which he said spread “false and defamatory content”.
>
> Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO of The New York Times, told the FT on Wednesday that the suit “had no merit” and was intended to stifle independent journalism. She accused Trump of enacting an “anti-press playbook”, drawing parallels with authoritarian tactics in Turkey and Hungary. “Those countries have elections but they also really work to quash opposition to the regime,” she added.
>
> The latest skirmish is with ABC. On his show on Monday, Kimmel said that “the Maga gang [is] desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it”.
>
> This drew a furious response from conservatives, with Carr, head of the FCC, calling the comments “the sickest conduct possible”. Speaking later on Fox, he said the regulator could put more pressure on broadcasters over content it considered biased or inaccurate.
>
> “We at the FCC are going to force the public interest obligation. There are broadcasters out there that don’t like it, they can turn in their licence in to the FCC,” Carr said.
>
> Trump took to social media to celebrate the suspension of Kimmel, who has been a prominent critic of the president. “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
>
> Returning from London on Air Force One on Thursday evening, the president went further, threatening to strip the licences of broadcast networks he said were “against” him.
>
> “They give me only bad publicity, or press,” he told reporters. “I would think maybe their licence should be taken away. It would be up to Brendan Carr . . . He is a patriot.”
>
> Although the administration has made threats against certain NGOs, it has so far taken little action. And while it has targeted law firms, several of which have agreed to provide free legal services for initiatives supported by the administration, it has also lost a number of legal cases seeking to test the validity of its executive orders.
>
> But perhaps the biggest target so far this year has been universities.
>
> After an unprecedented pressure campaign against Columbia, Brown and other Ivy League universities that netted hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, the Trump administration has turned its attention to one of the largest public universities in America: UCLA.
>
> In July, the US Department of Justice said the university had violated the rights of Jewish students during pro-Palestinian protests on the campus. It froze $300mn in medical and science research grants, then came back days later demanding a $1bn fine to settle the antisemitism charges.
>
> The $1bn demand is double the amount the Trump administration is seeking from Harvard, and five times the $200mn paid by Columbia.
>
> Universities have long been a bugbear on the American right. Religious and political conservatives, including Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, have criticised them for being intolerant of traditional viewpoints.
>
> Many conservatives argue that they are the ones who have been silenced by both the mainstream media and educational institutions. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech”, in which he accused the Biden administration of working to “deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech” in a way that was unconstitutional.
>
> In 2021, Vance gave an interview in which he offered a solution that sounded like a blueprint for the future Trump administration. “We go to the universities and we use the hundreds of billions of dollars that we send to them as leverage. And we say, ‘Unless you stop indoctrinating our entire society, you don’t get another dime of our money,’” he said.
>
> Many lawyers and academics believe that the administration’s pressure campaign has less to do with antisemitism among students and more about shifting the culture on campuses.
>
> The administration’s argument that it is cracking down on campus antisemitism is “largely a smokescreen for broader concerns about the ideological leaning of universities”, says Evelyn Douek, associate professor at Stanford Law School.
>
> “They are trying to reshape the speech environment on university campuses in a way that kills not only the universities themselves and the policies that they adopt, but also gives faculty and students a reason to hesitate before they speak.”
>
> There’s a feeling of paranoia on campus. The feeling of fear, the fear of speaking out, is real
>
> Early this month, the University of California, Berkeley, the birthplace of the free speech movement in the early 1960s, handed over the names of 160 faculty members to the Trump administration as part of its investigation into campus antisemitism. One member of the faculty whose name was on the list is Judith Butler, former chair of the comparative literature department, who said that “forwarding names is a practice from the McCarthy era”.
>
> Two weeks ago, a US district judge ruled that the Trump administration violated free speech protections with its attempt to freeze funding to Harvard. Judge Allison Burroughs suggested in the ruling that the administration’s use of claims about antisemitism to crack down on the university was misleading.
>
> “The record here, however, does not reflect that fighting antisemitism was Defendants’ true aim in acting against Harvard and, even if it were, combating antisemitism cannot be accomplished on the back of the First Amendment,” Burroughs wrote.
>
> On the UCLA campus, Trump’s threats to cut funding have frightened students and faculty. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation,” says a longtime faculty member. “There’s a feeling of paranoia on campus — you don’t know how long your programme’s going to last. The feeling of fear, the fear of speaking out, is real.”
>
> There is real anxiety about whether the University of California system will feel compelled to reach some kind of settlement with the Trump administration.
>
> “From the history of the Red Scare, the question is: are we going to stick together or turn on each other?” the faculty member says. “And we’re encouraging the leadership to stick together.”
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