Israel bombs oil depot in Tehran causing acid rain over city of 10 million
Richard Mellor
afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
As the US and its settler colony wages an illegal war against Iran, it is worth reflecting a little on some history in this region. It is important to recognize that Israel is also bombing Lebanon and Syria. What the Zionists are doing is engaging in another Nakba. Nakba is the Arabic word that means catastrophe and is the Palestinian term for the violent expulsion of some three quarters of the Palestinian people from their homes and land by Zionist militias as part of the formation of the state of Israel from 1947 to 1949.
Contrary to the accepted narrative that promotes the Zionist ideology, Palestine was not devoid of people, “A land without people for a people without land”, Palestinian Muslims, Christians and Jews have occupied this land for a millennium. According to an Ottoman census of 1878, 85% of the Palestinian population was Muslim and 3.2% Jewish. In 1914, Jews were about 7–8% of the population of Palestine, by 1947 it was over 30%.
The central core of Anti-Semitism was Europe where Jews have been persecuted for centuries culminating in the Nazi Holocaust that murdered some 6 million of them. It is no surprise then that European Jews that survived, fled what they considered an existential threat to their very existence in the face of an organized genocide. Up to that point, Jewish workers in particular, had never been drawn to Zionism which is a political formation representing a form of Jewish supremacy. Roger Silverman writes in a post on this blog:
“Before the Nazi holocaust, Zionism was little more than an outlandish sect. The Jews in Eastern Europe were a persecuted minority forcibly confined to their own ghettoes. They spoke their own language, Yiddish, they had a distinct culture, music, theatre, magazines and newspapers, and their political orientation was to the socialist Bund. The Bundists’ riposte to the Zionists was: We’re going nowhere! This is our home! Even the terrible pogroms which propelled a huge tidal wave of mass migration (including by my own ancestors) gave little sustenance to Zionist aspirations.”
The empty land narrative is a cover for the reality that Palestine had a vibrant indigenous population. But Zionism, a form of Jewish supremacy, could not survive in a country where Jews were a minority, certainly not a democracy. You can’t have a Jewish state in which Jews are a minority of the population. The same would hold true for any “religious” state like Pakistan for Instance or Iran.
The native land had to be cleansed of the non Jews for it to survive. There is no doubt many Jews that fled Europe after the Holocaust did not consider the experiment would become what it is today. But the Jewish and Gentile capitalists had a different world view.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after WW1, the need for a foothold for western colonial power in this important region was central to the support of a Jewish state from Britain and later much more so the U.S. In this sense, the Jewish population of Europe, in dire straits themselves, were used to serve western capitalist interests by states whose ruling elite is rife with anti-Semites. Politics makes strange bedfellows as the saying goes.
Since the creation of the state of Israel, and with the support of the western powers, what amounts to a European settler colony has acted in way that settler colonies do. It sees itself as a nation under siege and by the indigenous population as an interloper. The expulsion of close to a million people and the efforts to ethnic cleanse the region from another few million are the result. Those whose populations suffered a genocide at the hands of the European ruling class are imposing similar horror on the Palestinians Muslim, and Christian community.
The Zionist regime could not have committed the horrific crimes that it has and continues without the support of the US rogue state whose ruling class also has interests in the region. For decades, as long as I can remember, the cause of the unrest in the Middle East and the reason there is no peace, is the Palestinians. They hate Jews. The Arabs and Muslims are the problem. The racist lies, the demonization, the decades long portrayal of Israeli’s as innocent victims who are being attacked by the entire Arab world is what we have been taught.
The most successful weapon in this propaganda war has been that Zionism and Israel speaks for the Jews of the world. Zionism cannot exist without anti-Semitism and therefore promotes it, welcomes it. But Zionism is not Judaism; it is a political formation and Judaism is a religion. All Germans were not NAZI’s and all Jews are not Zionists. Fewer diaspora Jews support Zionism and Israel today due to the Gaza holocaust. That so many young Jews in the US and UK are in the forefront of the fight for Palestinian rights is the best and most effective way to combat anti-Semitism.
When we look at the events of the past 30 years we can see that the most destabilizing force in the region is the existence of the Zionist state and its US backers.
More than three million Iranians have been displaced as a result of the illegal and unprovoked attack on Iran by the US and Israel. The UN refugee agency reports that 700,000 have been displaced in Lebanon in the past week due to the Israeli bombing of that country.
The US invaded Iraq in 2003 and withdrew in 2011 leaving at least half a million Iraqi’s dead while displacing 9.2 million according to al Jazeera. Beyond that, Iraq is no longer a viable state. What happens to all these people? Where do they go?
The effect on neighboring countries of millions of war refugees is catastrophic. I have little time for Europeans and those in the UK who are blaming immigrants for their woes. People have to eat. “Go back to where you came from” doesn’t work too well when the accuser’s government has participated in the destruction of their homes, livelihoods and safety. In the UK the so-called Labor government led by Kier Starmer is allowing the US to use British airfields to load bunker busing bombs on the planes headed for a Iran as I write. There will be more victims of UK policy and they will suffer assault and racism if they find themselves in the UK.
The Iranian regime is a backward theocracy, a repressive misogynistic, anti-worker regime. One doesn’t have to be a supporter of this regime, to oppose the barbaric attack on the Iranian people and bombing people in order to get them to change their government doesn’t work. The US ruling class doesn’t care about repressive regimes mind you, it has supported, endorsed or installed them all over the world. The Mullah’s are in power because the US overthrew a democratic secular government in Iran in 1953 led by Mohammad Mossadegh and installed one of the world’s most brutal dictators.
We can’t say where this will end. The possibility of the insane Israeli regime using a nuclear device cannot be ruled out. And listen to Trump and Lindsey Graham or Hegseth talk and the Mullahs seem mild by comparison. But the sexual deviant Trump and the menagerie of lunatics in the US Congress have underestimated Iran’s resolve, this is an existential situation for Iran, one of the western world’s oldest civilizations and it is fighting for its survival as a nation state. Iran has a lot to lose. Trump and others have talked of dividing Iran up in to smaller countries. They want the settler colony to be the only power in this region.
The US rogue regime is, in one sense losing this war and its other so-called allies in the region, the corrupt statelets run by monarchical families that rely on the US for protection are beginning to reflect on this relationship. After all, it is their neighborhood too. What the former Prime Minister of Qatar says in the graphic is true. If these statelets declare war on Iran the US will pull back and send weapons to both sides, The Kurds and all forces in this area have been betrayed many times by the US imperialists and their British predecessors.
Whatever the final result, the quick regime change Trump expected after the Israeli’s assassinated the Iranian head of state and many important government officials has not materialized and Iran has given US Imperialism and Israel a bloody nose.
This arrogant and irresponsible decision backed by the US Congress is wreaking havoc on the world’s population. There is not a thought about what it means for us at home either. One billion a day it's costing. We don't get to vote on war though. It is threatening to bring down the world economy. The Israeli bombing of an oil storage facility in Tehran is poisoning a city of 10 million people with toxic fumes. The natural habitat in the region is threatened as oil facilities are damaged, not to mention the possible sinking of an oil tanker. This war, like the Iraq war is an environmental catastrophe. And the decision to take this road lies primarily on the shoulders of a man who is a convicted felon, a rap*ist, and a con man and those backing him.
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