Russia has threatened to seize assets held by European Union member states that it deems unfriendly if the EU proceeds with what it perceives as the appropriation of frozen Russian funds to support Ukraine's post-war recovery.

Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the Russian State Duma, warned that Moscow would respond with measures that would incur a higher cost on the EU if it targeted Russian assets, many of which are situated in Belgium, reports Reuters.

Volodin accused certain European politicians, particularly European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, of contemplating the diversion of Russia's frozen funds to further the militarization of Kyiv.


He emphasized that such a decision would necessitate a proportionate response from Russia, resulting in the confiscation of assets from countries regarded as unfriendly exceeding the value of Russia's frozen assets in Europe.

The Israeli military has launched the "second stage" of its war against Hamas militants in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address on Saturday night, warning citizens to prepare for a long struggle ahead.

"In the initial weeks of the war, we launched massive airstrikes that dealt a severe blow to the enemy... We eliminated many terrorists," the prime minister said in his address.

In three weeks of Israeli air raids, the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 8,000 people, "half of whom are children," the Health Ministry in the Hamas-controlled Palestinian enclave told AFP early Sunday. It remains unclear how many of the casualties were actual combatants.

The head of Iran's Intifada and Quds Headquarters announced that Israel was defeated in the attack from three axes on Gaza within 4 hours with the resistance of the Hamas forces.

In the meeting to review and analyze developments in the occupied territories, Brigadier-General Ramazan Sharif said that the balance of power in the occupied territories has shifted in favor of the Palestinian people, and the Al-Aqsa storm has marked a new chapter for the Palestinian people

Ramzan Sharif added that the intelligence and security system of the Israeli regime collapsed, and its army, which considered itself a powerful military force, did not have the spirit to be on the battlefield, and a large part of the settlers who were army reserves did not respond to the call of Israel.

As a classic settler-colonial state, Israel is doing the only thing it knows how to do. So long as the West keeps cheerleading, that includes genocide.

It shocks me that in my threads I keep coming across variations of the following tweet:

The Palestinians have it within them to rise up against Hamas to free themselves. Or Hamas can willingly surrender. Two real choices there.

This view isn't just being promoted in bad faith by Israeli apologists. It seems to resonate with ordinary people who presumably know very little about the histories either of Palestine or of settler colonial movements such as the Zionist movement that founded Israel.

So let's delve briefly into both.

First, settler colonial movements are distinguished from standard colonialism - like British rule in India - by the fact that the settler population wishes not just to steal the native population's resources but to replace the native population itself.

There are lots of examples of this: European settlers dispossessed native peoples in what we today call the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, for example.

The definition of genocide in international law exactly describes what those Europeans did to the local population: mass killings; inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of all or part of the native community; preventing births within the local population; and forcibly transferring native children to the settler population.

European settlers who today call themselves Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders never had to account for their crimes against those native peoples. Which possibly explains why the tweet above is so commonplace - and why European countries and their settler colonial outgrowths are today lining up against the rest of the world to support Israel as it intensifies industrial genocide in Gaza.

The truth is the "western" world order was built on genocide. Israel is just following in a long tradition.

The reality of the necessity of war is permeating widely the consciousness of the Arabic and Islamic world.

Tom Friedman uttered his dire warning in the New York Times on Thursday last:

"I believe that if Israel rushes headlong into Gaza now [unilaterally] to destroy Hamas — it will be making a grave mistake that will be devastating for Israeli interests and American interests."

"It could trigger a global conflagration and explode the entire pro-American alliance structure that the U.S. has built...I am talking about the Camp David peace treaty, the Oslo peace accords, the Abraham Accords and the possible normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The whole thing could go up in flames.

"Unfortunately, the senior U.S. official told [Friedman], Israeli military leaders are actually more hawkish than the prime minister now. They are red with rage and determined to deliver a blow to Hamas that the whole neighbourhood will never forget."

Friedman here is talking, of course, about an American alliance system, pivoted around the idea of Israel's military prowess being invincible - the 'Little NATO' paradigm that acts as the essential substrata for the spread of the American-led Rules Order through West Asia. It is analogous to the substrata of the NATO alliance, whose claimed 'unchallengeability' has underpinned U.S. interests in Europe (at least until the Ukraine war).

The US has dramatically beefed up its presence in the Middle East, sending two carrier strike groups, thousands of Marines, multiple THAAD and Patriot missile batteries, and more warplanes to the region amid the Palestinian-Israeli flare-up. But these forces can't guarantee victory in case of a shooting war, says military observer Andrey Martyanov.

Tehran issued its strongest warning to Washington to date over the Palestinian-Israeli crisis on Thursday, cautioning that the US wouldn't be able to escape if the conflict continues unabated.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in New York during an emergency United Nations General Assembly session:

"I say frankly to the American statesmen, who are now managing the genocide in Palestine that we do not welcome [an] expansion of the war in the region. America will not be spared from this fire if the crisis endures. It is our home, and West Asia is our region. We do not compromise with any party and any side, and we have no reservation when it comes to our home's security."

Tehran has so far moderated its response to US and Israeli actions during the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, ignoring efforts by Tel Aviv to goad the country into a military response by attacking Iranian allies in Syria and Lebanon, and snubbing threats by loudmouth officials and lawmakers to bring the war home to "Iran's backyard." Instead, Tehran has joined countries such as Russia, China, Brazil, and Turkiye in calling for an immediate ceasefire.

In a recent interview with Berliner Zeitung, Gerhard Schröder claims that in March of 2022, "the Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to". According to the former German Chancellor, "they first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed" and "nothing could happen because everything else was decided in Washington".

Schröder is now the fifth person to state that the West opposed a peace deal in March/April of 2022. In April of 2022, the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the broadcaster CNN Türk:

Following the NATO foreign ministers' meeting, it was the impression that ... there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don't care much about the situation in Ukraine.

Then in May of 2022, one of Zelensky's "close associates" told the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda that Boris Johnson was an "obstacle" to negotiations because he'd brought two simple messages:

Putin is a war criminal, he should be suppressed, not negotiated with. And secondly, if you are ready to sign any agreements on guarantees with him, then we are not. We can with you, but not with him, he will still abandon everyone.

Then in September of 2022, Putin himself claimed:

"A peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kiev was actually ordered to wreck all these agreements."

Former President Donald Trump was called to the witness stand on Wednesday during a civil fraud trial in New York City to answer questions related to a gag order, and a judge said he found the former president's responses not "credible" and fined him $10,000 for violating the order.

Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the case, issued the fine after Trump made a comment to the press earlier in the day about a person "sitting alongside" Engoron, which Engoron suspected was a reference to his clerk, according to a reporter from Politico who was sitting in the courtroom.

Trump told reporters outside the courtroom:

"This judge is a very partisan judge with a person who's very partisan sitting alongside of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is."

Trump testified to Engoron, according to Politico, that his comment was in reference to his estranged former attorney Michael Cohen, who testified against Trump on Wednesday in the case.

"As the trier of fact, I find the witness is not credible," Engoron reportedly responded once Trump was finished speaking.

The dramatic afternoon concluded with Trump abruptly exiting the courtroom followed by his Secret Service, according to multiple reports.

The upcoming summit in Malta is seen as a platform for Ukrainian officials to court neutral countries, according to the agency...

China is likely to skip a major international meeting of security officials in Malta this week devoted to resolving the Ukraine conflict, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The gathering, which is expected to be attended by representatives of more than 50 nations, will revolve around the Kiev-backed "peace formula" that is rejected by Moscow.

According to people familiar with the matter interviewed by the agency, participants in the summit, which will be held on Saturday and Sunday, will include, among others, members of the G7 Group, Qatar, South Africa, India, and Türkiye, while several other countries, such as Brazil and Chile, are expected to join online.

Andrey Yermak, the head of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky's office, said on Friday that it would address several points of Kiev's "peace formula," including food, energy and nuclear security, humanitarian issues, as well as "the restoration of Ukraine's territorial integrity."

The ten-point plan, which was first floated by Zelensky last year, also demands that Russia withdraw its troops from territory that Ukraine claims as its own, and calls for the establishment of a tribunal to prosecute Moscow for alleged war crimes. Russia has repeatedly dismissed the proposal as unacceptable, calling it a sign that Ukraine was not serious about the talks.

Who is your terrorist?

The first [wave] of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women, and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead... One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house... and to blow up the house with them. The sapper refused... The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clean the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby.

Benny Morris. Israeli historian quoting Israeli soldier.

The right to exist

You have a right to exist — but does Israel?

A better question, however, might be: is the state of Israel a fictional national state, created to fit a mythology? Is it just a group of true believers with guns, convinced of their own superiority and their right to do anything they please?

If authentic existence is difficult to confirm for individual people like you and me, it is much harder for nation states -- especially those arbitrarily created by the dispossession of one people by another - which leaves political legitimacy in question -- an open issue that refuses resolution -an open wound that refuses to heal and infects the whole body public.

Israel was created through the terrorist violence that resulted in the infamous Nakba. a word gradually becoming synonymous with Palestinian Holocaust

Terrorist violence has become a tradition as the Zionists, most of them immigrants from other countries, Germany, Russia, North Africa, the US and other places-- Jewish perhaps, but of questionable Semitic heritage, seeking to re-create the mythic Jewish Empire described in the Bible-- using — as true believers - biblical methods.