LeftInTX
LeftInTX's JournalIsrael says it will retaliate: Russian weapons help Iran harden defenses against Israeli airstrike
The factory, NPP Start, in the city of Yekaterinburg, is under U.S. sanctions for supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine. Among its wares are mobile launchers and other components for antiaircraft batteries — including Russia’s S-400, which military analysts assess to be capable of detecting and destroying stealth fighter jets flown by Israel and the United States.
A leaked Russian document, part of stolen Iranian emails posted online in February by a hacker group, described the tour as a showcase for “scientific and technical potential and production capabilities” that Russia could offer Iran.
Whether the visit led directly to a purchase is unknown. But the trip is emblematic of what intelligence officials describe as a deepening strategic partnership between Moscow and Tehran in the two years since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine — an alliance that could emerge as a significant factor as Israeli leaders weigh possible military strikes in retaliation for the hundreds of drones and missiles launched against Israel over the weekend.
Iran opened a dangerous new chapter in its relations with Russia by agreeing in 2022 to supply thousands of battlefield drones and missiles to aid Moscow in its war against Ukraine. The expanded ties have now helped cement agreements between Moscow and Tehran, including a pledge by Russia to provide its ally with advanced fighter jets and air-defense technology, assets that could help Tehran harden its defenses against any future airstrike by Israel or the United States, according to U.S., European and Middle Eastern intelligence officials and weapons experts. The officials, like several others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Last March, a Russian arms maker invited a delegation of Iranians to a VIP shopping tour of its weapons factories. The 17 visitors were treated to lunches and cultural shows and, on the final day, toured a plant that makes products long coveted by Tehran: advanced Russian air-defense systems for shooting down enemy planes.
No Paywall: https://wapo.st/3xui2Ur
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/15/iran-israel-russia-drones-missiles/
The Latest | Israel says it will respond to Iran attack as world leaders urge restraint
Israel’s military chief said Monday that the country will respond after Iran launched an attack involving hundreds of drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. World leaders are urging Israel not to retaliate.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says “all sides must show restraint” to avoid a rising spiral of violence in the Middle East. French President Emmanuel Macron said Paris will try to “convince Israel that we must not respond by escalating.”
The Iranian attack on Saturday marked the first time Iran has launched a direct military assault on Israel, despite decades of enmity dating back to the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. The attack happened less than two weeks after a suspected Israeli strike in Syria that killed two Iranian generals in an Iranian consular building.
An Israeli military spokesman said that 99% of the drones and missiles launched by Iran were intercepted.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/latest-world-leaders-urge-israel-retaliate-iranian-drone-109232836
]Graphic lifted from this DU Post https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218866743
How is a war between Israel and Iran supposed to work?
Note: Russia and Iran are basically nextdoor neighbors (people often don't realize this!)
Azerbaijan was once part of Iran. It was once part of Russia (before the USSR). It is close allies with both countries. It will open it's air, land and sea space to both Iran and Russia.
So you got Israel versus this huge "thing" (like the song "Dem Bones"-- Russia is also connected to China)
Of course, it would entangle the US because Israel can't do this alone!
A Look at Iran's Military Capabilities
Article is a few days old, but I thought it was interesting, informative etc
The possibility of a direct military confrontation between Iran and Israel has brought renewed attention to Iran’s armed forces. What are they capable of?
Snips
What sort of military threat does Iran pose?
The Iranian armed forces are among the largest in the Middle East, with at least 580,000 active-duty personnel and about 200,000 trained reserve personnel divided among the traditional army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to an annual assessment last year by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
snip
The Guards also operate the Quds Force, an elite unit in charge of arming, training and supporting the network of proxy militias throughout the Middle East known as the “axis of resistance.” These militias include Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, militia groups in Syria and Iraq and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
snip
“The level of support and types of systems Iran has provided for nonstate actors is really unprecedented in terms of drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles,” said Fabian Hinz, an expert on Iran’s military at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Berlin. “They could be viewed as part of Iran’s military capability, especially Hezbollah, which has the closest strategic relationship with Iran.”
snip
Iran has one of the largest arsenals of ballistic missiles and drones in the Middle East, Mr. Ostovar said. That includes cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, as well as ballistic missiles with ranges up to 2,000 kilometers, or more than 1,200 miles. These have the capacity and range to hit any target in the Middle East, including Israel.
Image
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/world/middleeast/iran-israel-military-weapons.html
Link with no paywall https://archive.ph/B2d80
Article also states their weakness is their AF.
ETA:
Graphics from Al jazaeera:
Iran Attacks Israel with Over 300 Drones Missiles https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/14/iran-attacks-israel-with-over-300-drones-missiles-what-you-need-to-know
why-and-how-did-iran-launch-a-historic-attack-on-israel
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/14/true-promise-why-and-how-did-iran-launch-a-historic-attack-on-israel
Iranians torn between war fears and pride after attack on Israel
https://aje.io/t4taka?update=2836629
How a Culture Shift in the Israeli Military Helps Explain Gaza's Death Toll
snipped to get to the point:
But for the discussion to be useful, it should progress beyond these immediate interpretations to examine the deeper cultural patterns underlying such incidents. Most crucially, it must scrutinize the shift in military policy and ethos that can be traced back to the Elor Azaria affair of 2016-17. Azaria was an Israeli conscript who was captured on video executing a wounded and immobilized Palestinian assailant in Hebron. The Israeli military prosecuted Azaria for manslaughter and sentenced him to 18 months in prison.
While the case demonstrated the military’s commitment to its own ethical codes, it also sparked widespread protests from right-wing factions and a general backlash against military procedures. The army was accused of failing to support Azaria and creating a culture in which soldiers would hesitate to use force against Palestinian militants. To counter this claim, and from that point forward, the military began to announce the number of Palestinian fighters killed in its operations, demonstrating that its forces did not hesitate to engage.
Under the leadership of the military’s chief of staff, Aviv Kochavi, from 2019 to 2023, the killing-based criteria were reinforced. Kochavi’s goal was to remake the army into a “lethal, efficient, and innovative” fighting force—in other words, a death-generating army. He promoted this vision by enhancing the precision of weapon systems, improving the coordination between forces and intelligence, and increasing the rate of fire.
Kochavi’s directive for field commanders to assess, at the end of each combat phase, the number of enemy forces killed and objectives destroyed—rather than solely focusing on territorial conquest—signified a shift toward necrotactics, where the primary goal of military engagement is killing the enemy. Killing becomes not just an outcome of warfare but its principal aim.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/09/israel-hamas-war-gaza-death-toll/
https://archive.ph/LZ3jU
Foreign Policy.com: The Problem Isn't Just Netanyahu. It's Israeli Society
A large majority—88 percent—of Jewish Israelis polled in January believe the astounding number of Palestinian deaths, which had surpassed 25,000 at the time, is justified. A large majority of the Jewish public also thinks that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is using adequate or even too little force in Gaza. Couched in the idea that Hamas forced this “war of no choice” upon Israel and the people of Gaza and that Hamas must be destroyed as a matter of Israeli survival, even the threat of imminent famine in Gaza has not provoked opposition to the campaign.
Further, in a February poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, around two-thirds of Jewish respondents (63 percent) said they oppose the proposal for Israel to agree in principle to the establishment of an independent, demilitarized Palestinian state. Israeli leaders have framed the movement underway internationally for governments to unilaterally recognize Palestine as a state to be rewarding the Palestinians for the Oct. 7 attack.
You don’t need a poll to discover that support for a two-state solution, much less for Palestinian basic rights of freedom and self-determination, has been steadily declining among Jewish Israelis in recent years, and today is probably the lowest it has ever been. You can just look at the positions of Israel’s Jewish political parties. Almost none of them endorse a two-state solution, and the ones in power actively reject it, working fastidiously to thwart it from ever happening.
The thousands of Israelis who are once again turning out to march in the streets are not protesting the war. Except for a tiny handful of Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians, they are not calling for a cease-fire or an end to the war—or for peace. They are not protesting Israel’s killing of unprecedented numbers of Palestinians in Gaza or its restrictions on humanitarian aid that have led to mass starvation. (Some right-wing Israelis even go further by actively blocking aid from entering the strip.) They are certainly not invoking the need to end military occupation, now in its 57th year. They are primarily protesting Netanyahu’s refusal to step down and what they see as his reluctance to seal a hostage deal.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/02/netanyahu-gaza-palestinians-war-israeli-society/
https://archive.ph/EFELX
(No end in sight)
Texas National Guard member charged with human smuggling after high-speed chase near the border
Snips from article:
Johnson’s arrest was first reported Wednesday by NewsNation, which also reported that he had been deployed to Eagle Pass as part of the state’s multibillion-dollar border initiative, Operation Lone Star.
“It’s not the first Guardsman that we’ve caught,” said Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, whose deputies also responded to the scene. “Everybody is susceptible to it because of the money involved. Guardsmen, other law enforcement agencies, Border Patrol agents have been involved in smuggling, FBI agents have been caught … it’s an age-old deal.”
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/04/04/texas-national-guard-arrest-human-smuggling-pursuit/
Silencing the Song: An Afghan Fallen Star - HBO Original
WTF? This Afghan documentary was totally dubbed in Spanish...ugh....They even talked over her singing....Good grief.....
How hard would it have been for HBO to remove the dubbing?
I'm surprised they didn't replace the Afghan music with Selena music. But you couldn't hear it anyway, because they just had to talk over any music. What a waste.
ETA: I found a copy on Amazon and it isn't dubbed in Spanish. It's not the best documentary (or worth the $3.99) or enlightening documentary. The voice of the dubbing was "sing-song" and void of expression. The dubbing sounded "happy" when the singer was fearful etc. I hate dubbing.
Is DU gonna have members sign a TOS to support our presidential candidate?
There is too much anti-Biden stuff in discussion threads.
The Cancer Detectives - The story of how the life-saving cervical cancer test became an ordinary part of women's lives
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/cancer-detectives/The story of how the life-saving cervical cancer test became an ordinary part of women’s lives is as unusual and remarkable as the coalition of people who ultimately made it possible: a Greek immigrant, Dr. George Papanicolaou; his intrepid wife, Mary; Japanese-born artist Hashime Murayama; Dr. Helen Dickens, an African American OBGYN in Philadelphia; and an entirely new class of female scientists known as cyto-screeners. But the test was just the beginning. Once the test proved effective, the campaign to make pap smears available to millions of women required nothing short of a total national mobilization. The Cancer Detectives tells the untold story of the first-ever war on cancer and the people who fought tirelessly to save women from what was once the number one cancer killer of women.
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This episode was very interesting. How the ubiquitous pap smear test, that we take for granted came to be.
They counted primary ballots by hand. Now a Texas county Republican party says they found errors
After declaring a successful hand count of ballots, Gillespie County Republicans had to fix a series of errors in the results reported from almost every precinct.
FREDERICKSBURG — An hour after Gillespie County Republican Party Chairman Bruce Campbell declared the hand-counted primary election results completely accurate and certified them as final, he found another discrepancy.
“It’s my mistake for not catching that,” he said, sitting in front of his laptop inside the Gillespie County election administration office Thursday. “I can’t believe I did that.”
The late catch meant that Campbell had to ask the early voting ballot board chair, who had already left and lives 30 minutes away, to return to the elections offices, figure out how the error happened, and fix it.
The election was a low-profile party primary, but stakes are high. Gillespie County Republicans, led by Campbell, decided months ago to hand-count more than 8,000 ballots. Experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines, but local Republicans, citing unsupported concerns about the accuracy of voting machines, were determined to try and show otherwise. Workers recruited and trained by the party counted until the early hours of the next morning, and declared the effort a success. Proponents of hand-counting are now touting GIllespie as a model.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/19/texas-republican-hand-count-election/
One worker wrote down 451 for the number of votes, when it was 415. There is no audit or recount allowed.
Bad handwriting, fatigue....
WTF: FDA forced to remove info about why you shouldn't use Ivermectin for Covid
The FDA has agreed to delete and never republish several social-media posts suggesting that ivermectin, a drug that some doctors used to treat COVID-19, is for animals and not humans.
While the FDA still does not approve of using ivermectin to treat COVID, it settled Thursday a lawsuit brought by three doctors who sued it, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services and its secretary, Xavier Becerra, and FDA secretary Robert Califf. All parties have settled.
The lawsuit, filed on June 2, 2022, was brought by doctors Mary Talley Bowden, Paul Marik and Robert Apter, each of whom claimed the FDA was interfering with their ability to practice medicine.
The case was initially dismissed on the grounds the FDA had "sovereign immunity," though a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the lower court's decision saying that the "FDA is not a physician.
https://www.newsweek.com/fda-settles-lawsuit-over-ivermectin-social-media-posts-1882562
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Yeah, I can see, "You're not a horse", but it is forced to remove why Ivermectin does not treat Covid from it's publications too!!
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24495557-fda-stipulation-of-dismissal
https://twitter.com/Jikkyleaks/status/1771232644539220257
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