If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It's an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. And it is far less ugly than the prospect of bloody conflict ad infinitum..... It's time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not genocide. And anything else isn't a solution. Ben Shapiro, Transfer is not a Dirty Word, Orlando Sentinel

Israel is expediting its action now to complete its original purpose of the ethnic purging of Gaza, which is part of the larger project that started in 1947.... They are also expediting their effort at ethnic purges in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.... This is a historic moment in which Israel wants to make as much dark progress as it possibly can to consolidate their ethno-nationalist settler-colonial project.... They're getting away with it because of the complicity of the United States, the United Kingdom, and a number of countries in Europe. Craig Mokhiber, former Director of the New York Office of the UN's High Commissioner of Human Rights, Mondoweiss

Recently, the US and its European allies - including the UK, Germany, and France - once again accused Iran of supplying ballistic missiles to Russia for use in its military operation against Ukraine. These claims were initially published by The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNN. The US State Department at first refrained from commenting, while Kiev immediately threatened Tehran with "devastating consequences."

A few days later, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken officially accused Iran of escalating the Ukraine conflict, supposedly confirming the Western media's claims. Following this, the State Department imposed sanctions on Iran Air, the country's main airline, for "operating in the transportation sector of the Russian Federation economy." In response, the aforementioned European countries announced immediate measures to suspend bilateral air service agreements with Iran.

The Israeli prime minister has used the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a warning to Tehran and the wider Middle East.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned in a televised address on Saturday:

"The assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon shows that no place in the Middle East is beyond the reach of Israel."

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed the leader of the Lebanese militant group in a bombing of an underground compound in Beirut. Hezbollah confirmed Nasrallah's death on Saturday.

Netanyahu warned Iran - referring to it as the "ayatollahs' regime" - that Israel will retaliate against any state that threatens it.

"Those who strike at us, we will strike at them. There is nowhere in Iran or the Middle East beyond the reach of the long arm of Israel, and today you know how true that is."

The killing of Nasrallah serves as an additional message to Hamas, Netanyahu said.

"The more that Hamas political chief Yahya Sinwar realizes that Hezbollah is no longer coming to save him, the greater the chances for the return of our hostages."

The latest Israeli-Lebanese War shattered everyone's expectations. Hezbollah's enormous missile stockpile made them all believe that "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) had been achieved with Israel, thus restraining both combatants' actions in any future conflict, but Israel's intelligence superiority and the Resistance Axis' reluctance to escalate ultimately gave the self-professed Jewish State a major edge. The present state of affairs is such that Israel is indisputably winning the latest war with Lebanon.

Its audacious pager attack disrupted Hezbollah's chain of command and operations, which Israel then exploited to hit their missile stockpiles while the group was reeling from this blow. Their chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who the IDF claims to have killed on Friday though Hezbollah has yet to confirm this at the time of writing, either still eschewed escalating due to his rational belief in MAD or he was literally unable to after what had happened. In any case, Iran could have escalated instead, but it refused.

It's time to reflect on what everyone got wrong. For starters, nobody had any idea how deeply Israeli intelligence infiltrated Hezbollah. They knew the locations of most missile stockpiles, the whereabouts of the group's leading figures, and were even able to literally plant disguised bombs on many of them. This couldn't have been achieved through technical means alone. High-level human intelligence is therefore obviously responsible. These assets crippled Hezbollah from within before the latest war even began.

Russia, Cuba, Turkiye, and several worldwide and Middle East leaders have condemned the assassination of the Lebanon's rebel group Hezbollah leader Sayyan Hassan Nasrallah by the Zionist state on Saturday.

The armed Palestinian resistance Hamas, said after the crime to "condemn in the strongest terms this barbaric Zionist aggression and targeting of residential buildings," accusing Israel of disregarding "all international values, customs and charters" and "blatantly threaten[ing] international security and peace, in light of silence, helplessness and international neglect".

Hamas added that in the face of the Israeli Nasrallah assassination they will "renew our absolute solidarity and stand united with the brothers in Hezbollah and the Islamic resistance in Lebanon."

For his part, the Iranian government president Masoud Pezeshkian issued a statement saying Nasrallah's killing "will only further strengthen the resistance". He added the US cannot deny complicity.

Explosives used to target the militant group's officials were concealed in batteries in the devices, the network has reported.

The alleged Israeli plot to target senior members of Hezbollah by simultaneously blowing up their pagers relied on explosives hidden in the devices that was nearly impossible to detect, CNN reported Friday, citing sources.

Earlier this month, a series of powerful pager explosions swept through the Middle East, killing 12 people and injuring around 3,000. The victims included numerous officials of the Lebanese-based Islamist movement. The attack was followed a day later by multiple simultaneous detonations of walkie-talkies that killed at least 20 others. Iran and Lebanon have accused Israel of orchestrating the attack, a charge denied by West Jerusalem.

An unnamed Lebanese official familiar with the investigation told CNN that the explosives in the pagers were hidden inside the device in a way "so sophisticated that it could not be detected."

Another official told the network that the materials were "laced" into the pager's lithium battery and were virtually undetectable, adding that he had "never seen anything like it."

Lebanese officials also tested controlled explosions of the pagers and observed how devastating they must have been to their owners, according to the network.

Leading website Guancha has published the transcript of a first-class lecture at Renmin University on China-U.S. relations by Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World. Jacques is one of the very few Westerner scholars with on the ground experience who actually understands the Chinese psyche and way of life in contrast to the West.

A particularly intriguing section of the lecture concerns research by Danny Quah, the dean of the widely respected Lee Kuan Yew Institute in Singapore. This is the money quote:

"Between 1980 and 2020, Europe's share of global GDP fell from 26% to 15%. In other words, it fell by 11 percentage points, a very large drop. Although the decline in the United States was smaller, it fell from 21% in the 1980s to less than 16% in 2020. From another perspective, Asia and East Asia are constantly rising. The share in 1980 was 11.5%, and it has risen to 25% in 2020. Among this 25%, China has made the largest contribution, accounting for 18% of the world."

What this graphically illustrates is the acute swing in the world's center of economic gravity - no matter the rhetorical tsunamis emanating from the Hegemon. In 1980 the economic center was Atlanticist. Quah though believes that the economic center will reach the Sino-Indian border only by 2050.

When we take China compounded with the 10 members of ASEAN, without even considering South Asia, it's fair to argue that the economic center will already be in the East by 2030, and will be Sino-Indian before 2040.

Jacques is correct that by then "the 'Asian Age' will replace the 'Western Age', and since 1750, the world has always been in the Western Age." On a personal note, after living and working in Asia for most of the past three decades, I qualify our century as "The Eurasian Century".

And that, in a nutshell, is the reason why the Hegemon/Atlanticist elites are in Deep Panic mode. The free lunch - of exploiting the wealth of the Global South - is coming to an end.

As another October approaches, the beautiful season of colors begins here in New England. Call it October's Surprise Party. The turning leaves with all their colors come to announce the earth's glory, the possibility of peace and happiness for all.

Yet as the month transpires and November nears, I think we might expect what for many will be the unexpected, as Bob Dylan reminds us with "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Listen: "I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin'/I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world."

A Black Swan event or the expected?

And if that hard rain does fall, it won't just be those ravishing leaves that will be pounded down and die. First comes the beauty, then the dying follows, as every fall decrees. And while nature always brings the rebirth of spring, in their hubris, humans, thinking they are gods, have devised a technological solution that can bring all life to an end for good - nuclear weapons.

That their government is provoking their use by waging a war against Russia via Ukraine and backing the Israeli Middle East slaughter and genocide is not a thought that most Americans choose to entertain as they blithely go about their lives. Such lucidity is deemed too depressing.

Dylan wrote that song in the summer of 1962, 62 years ago (a symbolic number by the way), shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis that October when nuclear annihilation was avoided at the last minute when John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev came to their senses.

Today we are even closer than ever to a nuclear war, as those who closely follow such events tell us. Scott Ritter, the former U.S. Marine and UN weapons inspector who tried to stop the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 by reporting that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is one. He is joined by a host of lonely voices crying out their warnings: ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, journalist Pepe Escobar, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the late Daniel Ellsberg and Randy Kelher, the author James W. Douglass who has been writing and demonstrating (with his wife Shelley) against nuclear weapons for nearly half-a-century, peace activist and former CIA officer Elizabeth Murray, et al. (my apologies for limiting the list). Many of these irenic and fatidic voices warning the world of the closeness of nuclear war have appeared on Andrew Napolitano's illuminating Judging Freedom interview show. Their voices are easily available, for now.

Ritter, who is being hounded by the U.S. government, has just written an article, "Life Pre-empted" whose opening line reads as follows: "If you're not thinking about the end of the world by now, you're either braindead or stuck in some remote corner of the world, totally removed from access to news." [my emphasis]

Just less than thirty minutes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finished his remarks to the UN General Assembly, the Israeli military (IDF) announced major new airstrikes across southern Lebanon, which has included the most intense attacks to date on Beirut's southern suburbs.

Eyewitness say that shortly before 7pm local time, massive explosions rocked Beirut, shaking windows and with blasts felt for miles. Fox News' chief foreign correspondent is reporting that "Fox News has learned the target of the strike on Beirut was Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah." Hezbollah sources have been cited in Sky News as saying Nasrallah is in a safe place.

Breaking reports say that Israeli jets have targeted and struck Hezbollah's main command headquarters.

Al Monitor regional correspondent Joyce Karam writes, "Israeli media and Arabiya reporting that target was Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah but reportedly failed. Awaiting confirmations...lot of rumors.

An Israeli official has confirmed that Israel notified the US administration just minutes before the new largescale strikes on Beirut. Netanyahu had reportedly left a post-UN press conference early to attend an urgent security meeting.

The West, via Israel, is fomenting for Hezbollah and the Shia resistance their own ISIS moment. Moderates are once again losing the argument - because we lost it for them.

Hezbollah has confirmed that its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was among the hundreds of Lebanese killed in Israel's massive bombardment of a suburb of Beirut last night.

Israel's decision to assassinate Nasrallah, using some of the enormous bunker-busting bombs the United States has been arming it with, is beyond foolhardy. It is outright deranged. Israel has removed - and knows it has removed - a moderating influence on Hezbollah.

Israel's action will achieve nothing apart from teaching his successor, and leaders of other groups and countries labelled as terrorist by western governments, several lessons:

• That Israel, and the West standing squarely behind it, do not play by any known rules of engagement, and that their opponents must do likewise. The current restraint from Hezbollah that has been so baffling western pundits will become a thing of the past.
• That Israel is not interested in compromise, only escalation, and that this is a fight to death - not just against Israel but against the West that sponsors Israel.
• That Israel's ideological extremism - its Jewish supremacism, and its endless craving for Lebensraum - must be met with even greater Shia-inspired extremism.

Decades of western terrorism in the Middle East unleashed a Sunni nihilism embodied first in al-Qaeda and then in ISIS.