My analysis is Iran's attacking a US base directly and ensuring of no US casualty was its best strategic option to avoid war.
1 - Iran had to save face domestically and regionally so had to attack.
2 - Most importantly, Iran had to immediately attack. With the calculation that many types of false flags or attacks against US personal by other entities would instantly be attributed to it.
A - Their foreign minister Zarif, made it clear that Iran will retaliate "direct and promotional" and not through any proxies, which was the same message signal by their Supreme leader[0]
B - After the attack ended, Zarif made it clear Iran is done with their retaliations[1]. So to avoid being blamed for any further attack that may take place in future date against US forces or interests.
Iran calculus probably was to avoid a high likely hood of attacks possibly orchestrated by Saudis or other entities (who benefit from a Us-Iran escalations) disguised as Iranian.
Having quickly retaliated, ensuring no US casualty and made it clear they're done, they're closing the door for getting blamed for false flags and trying to avoid additional escalations against US.
This signals a very rational and calculating player who doesn't want to escalate against US.
The question is how much US media would now push the narrative of crossing "red line" and forcing Trump to take escalatory military action.
One can even argue even this article uses a language like, "Iranian missile strike has caused extensive damage" and *"...show hangars and buildings hit hard by a barrage of Iranian missiles" to set the stage for US to take re-retaliatory steps.
The article title is "WhatsApp sues Israel's NSO for allegedly helping spies hack phones around the world", which exceeds HN's 80 char limit, so it had to be shortened somehow. The submitted title was "WhatsApp sues Israel's NSO for allegedly helping hack phones around the world". I changed that to "WhatsApp sues NSO for allegedly helping spies hack phones around the world" because it seemed to me that the "spies" bit adds more information than the "Israel's" bit. There's a difference between "helping hack" and "helping spies hack".
For completeness, I do think the commenters pointing out a slightly nonstandard weirdness in the phrase "Israel's NSO"—like the one comparing to "America's Google"—have a fair point. (Exercise for the curious: have there ever been many titles like that?) But it was not the determining factor.
NSO founders' ties to the Israeli government are a bit more essential to their business than the Google example. See also the China examples from another commenter. I'll bet there are examples of "Russian company XYZ" as well. In cases like these, the nationality of the company and especially of its former-unit-8200 founders does seem rather germane.
The way the name "NSO" sounds like a government intelligence agency reminds me of the way "United States Chamber of Commerce" also confuses people: https://0x0.st/zYWr.png
Given how strongly the Israelian security sector is tied to its national government, including directly recruiting from the military and often acting on its behalf the distinction is quite ridiculous.
Would HN have censored "China's Huawei?" Obviously not, it's the typical bias concerning western governments and allies that seems to be getting more blunt as time goes on the website.
Tech companies in Israel, security-related or otherwise, are tied to the government just as much as, if not less than, in the US, the UK, or France. There's nothing even remotely resembling the situation in China. "Recruiting from the military" is true for virtually every company in Israel, including sewage treatment companies, because military service is mandatory, and that's where people usually are before they get a job.
On the other hand, "Israel's" makes it sound like it's a governmental intelligence agency rather than a company. Misleading context could be worse than no context.
I respectfully disagree. A three letter acronym implies shared understanding. NSA, CIA, GHQ, MI6, KGB, IBM, AMZ, USA, etc, are globally recongized. NSO is ambiguous and confusing in a headline and demands explanation.
Google tells me that "NSO" is "Nurse Malpractice" for the entire first page fold. I assume it's similarly unhelpful in other regions for other people. 'Cmon, it's not a big, recognized, entity. Wait a year and the problem will be even more apperent.
There have been a number of posts about NSO on HN, and most of them do not say Israel in the title. But most of them do say "NSO Group" instead of "NSO", so maybe this title should have said that too. Although you might blame that on Reuters as well for not having "Group" in their title when that is actually in the name of the company.
Literally the first sentence of the Reuters article says what it is. It's not as if this is hard to answer.
The principle that it's good for readers to work a little is bedrock on HN. We want users who figure things out for themselves. That spurs the intellectual curiosity HN exists for.
You disagree with calling a company by their name?
If you have an issue with how they named their company, you could write to their CEO and let him know that he is using 3 letter entity names improperly. Unless you want the community to pick a new name to bestow upon them, I’m not sure what you expect from us.
Seriously, that's a lame answer. There's almost certainly another "NSO" company with more past or future notoriety/revenue/whatever. Why be ambiguous when that's not actually their name? The name is , "NSO Group".
Without clarification it's unclear exactly what NSO stands for. If Google was relatively unknown, it probably would be referred to "America's Google."
Also, NSO's founders were members of the Israeli Intelligence Corp (source: Wikipedia). Given the military links it would be reasonable to include its origin. News outlets would likely do the same for a Chinese company.
That they served in the intelligence corp does not imply "military links" in Israel (I'm not familiar with the company, and there could, indeed, be military links, but that fact is not any evidence in support of that). Probably 80% of people with technical background in Israel have done their mandatory military service in the Intelligence Corp or the air force. Among startup founders the ratio is probably higher. In other words, virtually much everyone with a higher education served in the military, and those in STEM fields are likelier than not to have done it in the intelligence corp.
Ummmm...Israel Govt allows them to export these tools. So yeah. The Israeli probably gets something in return from countries, in addition to NSO getting paid.
If you haven't heard of NSO, does "Isreael's NSO" actually clarify anything? Maybe now you know where they are, but you're still no more informed as to what they are.
Yes, it tells me a lot about intent, where people's opinions might lie, and so on. We can pretend like global politics doesn't set context, but it just...does.
"Israelie Security Firm NSO" would totally clarify it for me.
Once I clicked through to see "Israel's", it immediately clarified who they were, at least to me -- in fact I recently watched an entire 60 Minutes segment about them.
Just NSO sounds like some government agency I had forgotten about.
I don't see any reason to have a policy about this one way or the other, but in most cases there's no need to say which country a well-known company is from. There are a couple instances of "China's Huawei" from over a year ago, but that's negligible compared to the number of headlines about Huawei overall.
I personally was approached by what I now believe was an undercover spy agent in San Francisco. I believe he might have been Israeli.
How we got there is a long story. But, the person (agent) came to a coffee shop that I frequented and made himself very visible talking audibly about certain areas that were my interest.
I'm a very outgoing person so after over-hearing him by the second or third encounter there, I approached him or he approached me by asking to share a table. Don't fully remember.
After several meetings, he tried to goad me into saying things which were utterly antisemitic and anti-Israel. So I started to suspect something was off and those days I had a very good memory and I started noticing some contradictory stories from meetings to meetings.
So suspecting something was wrong, I dropped all contact. Then he started calling me and asking me why I'm not coming to the coffee shop anymore and used other phone numbers that were not identified as his to try to call me.
After a while of ignoring him, he stopped calling. But, the whole experience was rather strange and made me realize how easy it is for the Israelis to run a spy network (or a soft spy network) in the open.
So when I see stories like these, I'm not only not surprised but I'm wondering why there are not more of these published on the press.
edit some related news:
1 - An Israeli spy firm was reportedly hired to dig up dirt on ex-Obama aides involved in the Iran deal
Please reach out to the FBI counterintelligence unit at the San Francisco field office.
It sounds like nothing came of it, but screenshots of text messages, call logs, or other information you have may be of assistance in other investigations.
Do you really believe the Mossad is going to assassinate (or otherwise seriously mess with) someone in the United States for reporting a funky, antisemitic conversation?
Obviously, no one said anything about "assassination" by Mossad. Your attempted use of reductio ad absurdum was in bad faith.
One would likely be more concerned with being accused of "anti-semitism" and having your name google-bombed by a Zionist smear campaign like Canary Mission. [0] Imagine having a potential client or employer finding your name on a list of "anti-semite Israel haters" for doing nothing more that suggesting Palestinians have human rights or that Israel engages in an aggressive espionage campaign against the United States?
Can you give an example of someone who is on that list for nothing more than suggesting Palestinians have humans rights, or that Israel engages in espionage in the United States? I clicked on a few people at random and they were all there because they advocated killing jews.
I thought that it was pretty self evident that supporting BDS is different than "suggesting Palestinians have human rights or that Israel engages in an aggressive espionage campaign against the United States?", but apparently not everyone has caught on to the fact that words have meanings.
In theory a good suggestion, but Israel specifically gets a lot of free passes, especially from current US govt, so I wouldn't expect any benefit or positive outcome from this, just troubles for OP.
Now if it would be an Iranian spy for example, they would hunt him/them down with the full force.
>Israel specifically gets a lot of free passes, especially from current US govt
The US has been very aggressive against Israeli espionage [0,1,2] and the president doesn't exercise much control over counter-intelligence investigations.
Israel uses the tactic of antisemitism quite often, even when you clearly criticize a government policy of Israel, not the people. So this is nothing out of the ordinary for them and I see no reason to blame Iran for everything Israel does that's unethical. In fact that's their tactic as well.
> Israel uses the tactic of antisemitism quite often, even when you clearly criticize a government policy of Israel, not the people.
China has been doing this too. Any time someone brings up Chinese civil rights abuses, there's always one or two people crying racism, even though the victims are (mostly) also Chinese.
Having just finished reading Rise and Kill First on the history of Israel's targeted killings, getting your target to introduce themselves by talking loudly about their interests around them for several days is a tried-and-tested Mossad strategy. That way, the target will trust the agent more, as they think that they initiated the contact themselves.
It could definitely have been a "bump" (a manufactured 'accidental' introduction). If you work in a sensitive field, I'd definitely report it. If you hold a clearance, you should have already reported it.
I wouldn't spend much energy trying to second-guess who was ultimately behind the meeting. Especially if it is nefarious, often the initial contact is done with a cut-out or other intermediary and true affiliations are almost never disclosed initially (or perhaps ever).
I don't quite get why an Israeli spy would like to get you to say something anti-semitic/anti-Israel. Would he want to blackmail you then? Did he want to make sure you are supportive of Isreal, sort of reverse-psychologically?
It depends. It could've been grooming for recruitment or unwitting exploitation: either he was trying to prove he wasn't Israeli by dabbling in anti-semitism and/or collect Kompropat that could ratchet up leverage from one minor ask to gradually larger ones.
Several agencies of the US govt are known to deploy facial recognition monitoring of social media for known foreign agents and place calls to employers if their employees take selfies with them, in order to scare the employees that they're a) being watched and b) to make them more paranoid around unknown individuals. Even if it's a casual hang-out at a conference, the US government will nudge average people to make sure they don't associate with people on certain watch-lists if they work for a large corporation in a sensitive field.
PS: If you watch Thom Hartmann and TRNN, Mossad and the Israeli government actively sabotage BDS and nonviolent pro-Palestinian groups on American college campuses with a deep, well-coordinated campaign of dirty tricks and manipulation in order to cover up and confuse people about the Likud hard-liner apartheid state. They're well-funded and student activist groups are absolutely no match to their tactics, resourced and support from both Christian evangelicals and Likud.
That's partly why this is such an effective tactic for Israeli (government or private) intelligence. The presence, or mere accusation, of anti-Israeli government sentiment can be pretty easily spun into accusations of anti-Israeli and/or anti-Semitic beliefs. So it can kind of create a chilling effect on these discussions in general, like in this comment sub-thread. There are so many outlandish conspiracy theories out there about Israel and Jewish people that they can group you in with those types of people and paint you as a kook or bigot when there actually is some merit behind a theory.
There's always a middleground. Never forget that a country's government and intelligence services are not its people. Just as someone criticizing the NSA or CIA or Blackwater shouldn't be assumed to hate Americans, someone criticizing Mossad or Black Cube shouldn't be assumed to hate Israeli or Jewish people.
The difference between criticism of the Israeli government and Antisemitism is the simplification of the problem and putting the blame solely on the Israelis without making an effort.
>The difference between criticism of the Israeli government and Antisemitism is the simplification of the problem and putting the blame solely on the Israelis without making an effort.
Actually antisemitism is being against Jews, and criticism of the israeli government is about particular political and military actions of a certain set of people and a certain state.
If one doesn't have a problem with e.g. Brooklyn jews, then they are not antisemites, no matter how much they disagree with Israel (which they might even believe has no right to exist).
If you can convincingly support how misguided "Apartheid state" is then yes, I would agree. Unfortunately Israeli policy does seem to support the definition.
Is it not essentially official state policy in Israel to label anyone criticizing the Israeli state as an antisemite? Hasn't this been one of their primary weapons against the boycotts?
What of the criticism is not valid, so it can only be explained by "anti-Israeli sentiment"? Is someone who is critical of some of the doings of the NSA or CIA "anti-American"? The issue is complicated by antisemitism being very real, just like there's people who hate America as such. But there is no need to jump to that, especially when you haven't even said what in your estimation makes the criticism only "somewhat" valid.
For anti-Israel sentiment? Leibovitz and others also dropped pretty strong hints, but you can hardly call them anti-Israel, and Desmond Tutu also urged people to recognize Israeli as being an apartheid state. When the shoe fits, it's time to stop buggering messengers.
> "In general, Israeli society is a healthy society, and the majority of it is sane and aims for a Jewish, democratic and liberal country," Ya'alon said. "But to my great sorrow, extremist and dangerous elements have taken over Israel and the Likud Party and are shaking the foundations and threatening to hurt its residents."
> Responding to the resignation of Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon earlier in the day, Barak said that it "should be a red light for all of us regarding what's going on in the government."
> "Life-sustaining Zionism and the seeds of fascism cannot live together," Barak told a Channel 10 interviewer.
> Ya'alon's resignation is "the end of a chain that began with the case of the soldier who shot [a wounded Palestinian assailant to death]," Barak said. "Such incidents give us an X-ray image that is opposed to the will of the people.
> "What has happened is a hostile takeover of the Israeli government by dangerous elements. And it's just the beginning."
> To illustrate his point, Barak referred to legislation promoted by members of the coalition, including the law to lift the parliamentary immunity of Knesset members who allegedly support terrorism and a bill to impose Israeli law on Israelis living in the West Bank.
>U.N. Under-Secretary General and ESCWA Executive Secretary Rima Khalaf said the report was the “first of its type” from a U.N. body that “clearly and frankly concludes that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people”.
Article points out however, that the statement does not represent the position of the UN secretariat.
Considering that South Africa views many of the current Israeli government's actions as similar to what they had[1], I am not sure "apartheid" is such a wrong word to use here.
The foreign agent might have had some suspicion that the target wasn't a fan of Israel or that he was sympathetic to the Palestinians so the agent played a hard-line approach in hoping that he would fall more towards anti-semite than just a person that disagrees with Israel's policies. When you can bond with someone over a passion for something, some technical topic and antisemitism in this case, the target might be more open to sharing more about themselves. They may see the agent not only as a colleague but a comrade. Now the agent has an in as a friend, they can hang out with the target more and share information that two colleagues who don't work at the same place might not necessarily share. Trade secrets, non-public business plans, classified information, and even just access to more people in the community the agent is trying to infiltrate. "Hey Jim, meet my new friend Ben. He's working with blahblahblah right now, I knew you were trying to get funding for some new blablahblah design at work so I figured maybe you two should bounce ideas off eachother". Sounds pretty innocent but maybe Jim is dumber than the first target so the agent gets even closer to the true goal. Maybe Jim has access to source code or production servers for some system the Israelis are trying to hack. Maybe Jim is into fringe activities and can be blackmailed or is careless with his work laptop while the agent is hanging out at Jim's house. Either way, the "cold call" meeting is probably just the beginning of a complex plan to get close to the real targets.
It's because it isn't the Israeli government/Israeli intelligence who's doing this (even if many or most of the operatives are ex-intelligence): it's people in private industry. It's plausible some aspects of the Israeli government also have a hand in this stuff, but I think it's explainable without that as well.
NSO Group, the firm mentioned in this and other articles, and firms like Black Cube (hired by Harvey Weinstein to spy on accusers) seem to be effectively running an intelligence-agency-as-a-service model. They'll deploy agents and compromise devices to discredit any potential witness, gather reconnaissance on potential stories that are being written, spread disinformation, influence policy, etc. All you have to do is give them money.
As for the motive: no idea. But this seems to be a popular tactic for discrediting people, especially recently after some people accused NSO Group of helping spy on Jamal Khashoggi (edit: and there's also at least one lawsuit). Tarring their accusers as anti-Semites is one way of dealing with bad PR. I don't know what the parent poster may have done or what their situation might be, but they or their employer may be in competition, or a feud, with some resourceful Israeli companies or individuals.
that's what I was trying to say, boldly discrediting people seems outside the spying field. I defined it as 'stealth information acquisition'. Not political con artistry.
That’s putting it mildly: I’m entirely aware that there’s a concerted campaign in the UK to smear Corbyn by fabricating a story from out-of-context quotes and, despite not being a fan of Corbyn, I’m entirely on board with the idea that he’s being unjustly targeted and probably isn’t actually antisemitic. But so far there’s no evidence that Israel is behind this effort. A more likely explanation is that he’s a thorn in the side of the Tories and the conservative-leaning establishment media, and the campaign successfully undermined Labour’s (and specifically Corbyn’s) public support (which the polls clearly reflect: they’re losing out agains the most incompetent and least-liked UK government this generation has seen).
There’s no need for Israeli operatives to get involved, and considering the potential fallout if this got out, it would seem to be a risky undertaking. Much easier to publicly denounce Corbyn, as both Netanyahu and the Israeli ambassador to the UK have done (along with the Foreign Ministry, if I remember correctly).
The problem with criticism of Israel is that it tends to be disproportionate compared with their criticism of other countries. While some call to boycott Israel due to it's illegal settlements in the west bank - an area it invaded in 1967, few also call for boycotts of Turkey (invaded Cyprus in 1975), China (invaded Tibet in 1950), Russia (annexed Crimea in 2014 and parts of Georgia a few years earleir), UAE (occupied Socotra last year)
> few also call for boycotts of Turkey (invaded Cyprus in 1975), China (invaded Tibet in 1950), Russia (annexed Crimea in 2014 and parts of Georgia a few years earleir), UAE (occupied Socotra last year)
I think that this statement is false in almost every case. (I hadn't heard about UAE, so don't have any perspective there.)
x = israel -- 616k
x = china -- 57k
x = saudi -- 50k
x = russia -- 28k
x = turkey -- 15k
x = america -- 15k
x = iran -- 11k
x = korea -- 11k
x = uae -- 10k
x = britain -- 6k
x = sudan -- 4k
x = venezuela -- 2k
Sure, and this may be regarded as good first-approximation evidence of your initial claim, that criticism of Israel is disproportionate to criticism of other countries; but I don't think it is good evidence of the claim that few people call for boycotts of China, Russia, and Turkey, which was the specific claim to which I was responding.
Anyway, as far as using Google results to measure societal trends goes, "boycott Microsoft" yields 3.83m results, and I don't think it's fair to conclude that criticism of Microsoft is disproportionate compared to that of all the countries you listed.
"boycott microsoft" is 11,200 [0]. apple 27k, google 20k, facebook 30k, twitter 15k, uber 13k.
Amazon is the only one that comes "close" - 98k -- 15% that of "boycott israel".
Boycotting Israel is an order of magnitude more than China, and 40 times that of Turkey, despite China doing far worse things over a constant period, and Russia and Turkey actually occupying developed countries
"Few" is obviously a relative term, and given that even China is less than 10% of Israel shows that Israel receives a disproportionate amount.
>One of the things that annoys me about this debate is that anti-semetic !== Anti Israel
That's the point. People on the pro-Israel side of things know that being antisemitic is very much not acceptable for anyone in a position of power in the 1st world to be in this day any age so they try their hardest to conflate the two.
It's much more obvious when the conflation is much more of a stretch, e.g. "how dare you not support gun control, don't you care about children" or "how dare you not support corporate tax cuts, are you some sort of communist." Conflating Israel as a nation with all Jewish people is subtle enough that you can get away with it most of the time.
It's basically a reverse straw-man where you conflate your position with something that nobody can tear down in a sufficiently politically correct manner (like a race of people) or the opposing position with something so politically incorrect that nobody will stand behind it.
If you're looking for it you'll see this behavior a lot on HN though people are typically slightly more tactful about it.
It works in reverse too, where you can dog-whistle any anti-Semitic statements by saying that you were refering to "Israeli government" or "globalists" or "bankers", not Jews.
This is a significant point; it's definitely not a one-way thing.
At the simplest, there's genuine confusion over symbolism, like people mistaking the Magen David for the Israeli flag. A lot of other times, there's way less excuse; I think the infamous example here is (ex London Mayor) Ken Livingstone comparing a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard. His justification was that people are afraid to criticize Israel - despite having been speaking to a British reporter covering a domestic beat.
Honestly, I think that's part of what makes the conflation so enduring. If it stemmed from one side, people would get used to dismissing it as a partisan move. But depending on who you're appealing to and what you're justifying, it can be run from all different political starting points, so no one is putting it in political cartoons as "that thing the other guys do".
I can't edit the original comment because it triggered the flame war filters, but I'm curious why this is such a controversial question and garnered so many downvotes. I sincerely wanted to know what popular the consensus is.
You're right, when someone who isn't Jewish says "the Jews" it sounds weird and is followed by "control the banks" often enough that it sets me on edge.
ctrl+f "the Jews". I wouldn't make your opinion of what is "offensive" depend on an ad-hoc poll in times where even the most rudimentary looking into things for oneself seems to be getting rare. (or where people think clicking a button constitutes an argument, for that matter)
In this case, the comment also said "the Palestinians", and if you hear someone say "the blacks", as well as "the whites", yet you only retain the one and discard the other, that says more about the absurd climate than that person.
You're grammar rules here are inconsistent. The comment said "The Palestinians" not "the Muslims" because they were talking about Palestinians, people who live in Palestine. There are Muslims, Jews, Christians and agnostics living there. Israel's, people who live in Israel, include all varieties of religious groups. When you critique Israel's government policies but say "the Jews" you are incorrectly describing an entire religion when you claim to be talking about a group of people that live in Israel. Any "mistakes" with this logic are suspicious, but maybe they just skipped that part of the grammer?
> When you critique Israel's government policies but say "the Jews" you are incorrectly describing an entire religion when you claim to be talking about a group of people that live in Israel.
I totally agree, but they wondered if saying "the Jews" is offensive as such. It's not, as such.
When someone who cares a lot about the issue constantly mixes that up, that's very different from not getting it perfectly right on the first attempt because they're not familiar with the subject. And hey, even confusing Jews and Israel doesn't necessarily mean a person as an anti-semite, they could also belong to one of several schools of right-wing Israeli thought. But your point stands regardless.
I've noticed people can be offended when you refer to them by their adjectives. E.g. "blacks" instead of "black people", "autists" vs "autistic people".
One term encourages the idea that they're people first-and-foremost, with the adjective used to describe a particular subset of people.
The other removes the emphasis on them being people and is pretty depersonalizing.
As you can imagine, it's much worse when it's a historically marginalized group--as an example, fewer people will care if you say "blondes" vs. "blonde-haired people".
My understanding is that people object to this as it is a means of defining them rather than describing them. In fact, I know people who would be insulted with the use of "autistic people" as opposed to "people with autism"
Yeah, but it's also perfectly fine to use it. Jews use it, Wikipedia uses it. The commenter also said "the Palestinians" in the very same comment in which they said "the Jews", making this whole subthread slightly silly. Not that dragging conversation into accusing others of "sentiments" they cannot disprove and one cannot prove them to have, before or even instead of dealing with the factual stuff that all parties can examine and elobarate on, is ever not silly.
What's offensive is that the OP (or generally people like him - not clear of his exact point) thinks he knows Jewish identity well enough that he can divorce it by whatever line he thinks it is (artificially) separate from Israel. Only a tiny minority of very unrepresentative Jews object to the modern state, and they do so only under an even more extreme ideology of what that country should be and who should live in it.
All denominations of Judaism aside from a few Haredi sects and maybe extreme secularists recognize the modern state of Israel as a legitimate country. Many adherents may not like how certain aspects of it are run, but they hold not anything remotely like what the totality of a position would entail to be "anti-Israel". The general acceptance of the country is about as common knowledge in Judaic studies as anything, and is uncontentious. I challenge you to find otherwise.
Which is mostly irrelevant, given the large and diverse groups of secular Jews worldwide. More importantly, you've moved the goalposts from having to defend a fairly extreme statement to trying to defend something like "Jews are more likely than average to support the modern state of Israel", which is just kind of obvious.
The majority religion of a Nation can be irrelevant when criticizing the nation's actions.
I find it surprising more Jewish people don't get angry at the use of their religion to justify/cast smoke clouds around human rights violations by the Israeli government. What a shield to put up - someone's religion! A history of Holocaust! It seems dirty to me, but I don't practice Judaism so I can only comment from the outside looking in.
Totally agree here. I worked quite closely with Corbyn for a bit on human rights issues (esp. Israel/Palestine) and though I might disagree with him on a lot of things - he most definitely is not Semitic. It is very clear to me for reasons unfortunately I don't have time to outline that there is a very clearly orchestrated campaign against him. Basically, it follow the exact same methods, people, talking points etc of other similar smear campaigns against people in the UK holding views that the Israeli right wing government doesn't like.
Maybe Corbyn is just not a very good politician who wants to try a socialist experiement in right wing Britain.
I sat down and did the maths based on tax revenues and so on and Corbyn's plans roughly call for £500bn of additional borrowing. I'm not saying don't do it but it's scary this isn't communicated clearly to people the costs of renationalising water/rail/university fees etc. etc.
What makes you think there is a campaign against him or just that he simply isn't that popular apart from with a small section of society for whom he can do no wrong (i.e. Labour party members)?
> What makes you think there is a campaign against him or just that he simply isn't that popular
Because his policies are virtually never mentioned, he’s being attacked for made-up allegations instead. This very fact that, as you point out, his policies are not discussed in the media is why people think there’s a smear campaign against him. People wish the press would engage him on policy grounds. As for the borrowing specifically, when this policy was initially proposed by McDonnell, it was made abundantly clear that this would involve large-scale borrowing. See e.g. this article in the Economist: https://www.economist.com/buttonwoods-notebook/2017/05/16/ol...
On a more political note, whether this large-scale borrowing is a good idea is obviously worth discussing. But it would almost certainly be more popular than the Tories’ continued twin policies of privatisation and austerity, which, besides being phenomenally unpopular, is largely based on bad science, to boot.
I actually think that’s clearly not true otherwise Jeremy would be miles ahead in the polls... people do understand what he’s offering they just don’t want it!
The spy vs spy comic strip gave us some early lessons on how deep these deceptions can go. Double and triple agents, even people creating anonymous accounts online to put forth whatever unfounded and creative stories they wish about anyone they choose.
Don't forget the anti-BDS laws state politicians have passed at the behest of israel. I think more than a dozen states have already passed this unconstitutional ( in my opinion ) law. Now congress is looking to enact it nationally.
Replace israel with russia. Can you imagine any politician passing a law criminalizing any company from protesting or boycotting russia? The hubris to even think up such an anti-american law like this is worrying.
Yes, and harassers - including stalkers - take advantage of the fuzziness. Including by using terms like "just hitting on" for something which is much better described as "harassment".
Do you all think Silicon Valley should make a public statement and distance themselves from MBS?
After all the photo-ops among executives at Apples, Google and FB it looks embarrassing to have a photo with a possible murderer out there. Or from the PR perspective, it's best to keep quiet and not remind the public at all and hope no one would bring it up?
> Do you all think Silicon Valley should make a public statement and distance themselves from MBS?
Silicon Valley should have made a public statement a long time ago about what MBS is doing to Yemen. It's quite ridiculous that being directly responsible for the deaths of thousands is A-OK, but ohhh kill one journalist and the western world loses their shit.
> kill one journalist and the western world loses their shit.
I would argue that the Western world largely didn't care, but the journalistic class which controls a large chunk of what people think is happening had a tantrum. This was not a "look at what Trump did this week" tantrum, but rather a "these guys just killed one of us, YOU HAVE TO CARE" tantrum.
You can tell it's this because the journalists themselves don't really care that he died trying to expose what is happening in Yemen - they only care that a fellow journalist died a fairly gruesome death.
Also witness the journos circling the wagons around a guy who, by most accounts, is an obnoxious fucknut, because the White House got tired of his shit and pulled his pass.
Expecting the press to be objective or reasonable where their own prerogatives and interests are concerned is foolish.
I am not excusing any belligerents in the Yemen conflict, however the cause of that conflict is a coup that resulted in a failed extremist state. Conditions for the people of Yemen would be dire no matter which way that military intervention went. This is, unfortunately, the reason why that conflict isn't getting more attention.
The only reason Saudi Arabia is bombing their neighbor is MBS decided he needed a successful military victory to highlight and cement his power as the true ruler of Saudi Arabia.
Yemen is the poorest country in that part of the world and poses no threat to SA.
The only reason the US aides SA in bombing and starving Yemen is they asked.
Countries cannot figure anything out if they are internally conflicted or poorly organized regardless of the peacefulness or wealth of their neighbors.
As an example look at Botswana. They are moderately well-off only because of low corruption and strong internal organization even though their neighbors are incredibly corrupt and have frequent political/military turmoil.
What?? Africa, Latin America, whole swathes of planet earth, time and over again that disagree vehemently with that. Who needs enemies (or hostile neighbors) when corrupt and greedy denizens breed within.
What are you talking about? Latin America and Africa have had non stop foreign intervention since the 16th century. Rich angry neighbours / foreign interventions have always created huge amounts of corruption and instability and are the root cause of many of these countries problems.
You also seem to be implying that African and Latin American people are just naturally more corrupt than the inhabitants of other nations which is a kinda bizarre theory.
As an American living in the Middle East the biggest problem is over simplification of complex external political issues, because then nothing and everything are simultaneously the US's business.
Breaking the site guidelines like this will get you banned on HN. We've had to warn you about this before, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on.
How do I prove that you are a completely useless idiot who tries to legitimize blowing children to pieces?
I guess it doesn't need a proof, reading your comments I can tell that you are a ruthless low life.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Only a servile culture would have led to all those SV head honchos prostrating themselves as they did for the prince...I took one look at the photos and wondered how is it that none of their handlers advised them against it...Wannabe reformed dictators using eager and naive westerners to burnish their reputation is an old and well known tactic.
US/NATO bombed the Chinese embassy [0] in former Yoguslavia so nothing is out of the question. Though this is UK. But still it shows embassies are not outside of US target zone.
Yeah but that was a "mistake". Just as it was a "mistake" when NATO thought that the embassy was used as Serbia's military comm center. China stopped complaining after shown what NATO had on them.
OT: Paul Grahm founder of YC was placed on some kind of a blacklist by SV Israeli supporters after the twitter spat he had during Gaza bombing a few years ago. I believe the spat was between PG and Mark Suster, if I remember correctly.
I can do nothing but commend pg for his commitment to stop what I personally think is close to shooting fish in a barrel. Except it's people and the barrel is mostly dry.
My analysis is Iran's attacking a US base directly and ensuring of no US casualty was its best strategic option to avoid war.
1 - Iran had to save face domestically and regionally so had to attack.
2 - Most importantly, Iran had to immediately attack. With the calculation that many types of false flags or attacks against US personal by other entities would instantly be attributed to it.
A - Their foreign minister Zarif, made it clear that Iran will retaliate "direct and promotional" and not through any proxies, which was the same message signal by their Supreme leader[0]
B - After the attack ended, Zarif made it clear Iran is done with their retaliations[1]. So to avoid being blamed for any further attack that may take place in future date against US forces or interests.
Iran calculus probably was to avoid a high likely hood of attacks possibly orchestrated by Saudis or other entities (who benefit from a Us-Iran escalations) disguised as Iranian.
Having quickly retaliated, ensuring no US casualty and made it clear they're done, they're closing the door for getting blamed for false flags and trying to avoid additional escalations against US.
This signals a very rational and calculating player who doesn't want to escalate against US.
The question is how much US media would now push the narrative of crossing "red line" and forcing Trump to take escalatory military action.
One can even argue even this article uses a language like, "Iranian missile strike has caused extensive damage" and *"...show hangars and buildings hit hard by a barrage of Iranian missiles" to set the stage for US to take re-retaliatory steps.
[0] http://archive.is/tqv8M
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/iran-says-it-has-concluded-its-resp...