Aaron Maté

This is #isfahan tonight.💔 A city with a population of 2 millions. Isfahan is known as the “half of the world” city (نصف جهان) for its bridges and the historical and cultural sites. #IranWar‌

This morning, the US-Israel bombed this woman's modest home in West Tehran - all she had in the world. She says, "They claim they don't hit residential areas. This is a residential area, not connected to the military."

Canada and the Israel lobby may have prevented @RimaHas from physically joining us in Montreal, but their plan may have backfired. Hundreds of people are currently in attendance listening to her speak.

on the day that israel officially signed a death penalty law for palestinian detainees, jake tapper is currently doing a panel on cnn about "my antisemitism" absolutely insane.

While travelling in Iran near the Strait of Hormuz, I visited family members of the 168 students and teachers massacred by U.S. airstrikes in the town of Minab. They angrily rejected any suggestion that they or the Minab school were connected to Iran's military. They also confirmed that they've been completely ignored by Western media, the U.N. and U.S. military investigators. My interviews of the family members took place at the cemetery where many of those killed have been laid to rest. I also visited the home of a family that lost five of its members in the atrocity. #Iran #IranWar youtube.com/watch?v=6o2R-_…

Salle comble ce soir à Montréal pour notre conférence ❤️ 🇵🇸

One problem with Jesse’s narrative here is that Avi Lewis is himself Jewish. The fact that Jesse has to obscure that by conflating “Jews” with Zionists underscores that Avi’s assessment about Zionists being cartoonish supremacist cry-bullies is correct.

Israel has now become the first state to codify a death sentence that applies in practice to one ethnic group, while another is effectively shielded from it.

Do you think that the FT would call a law that allows execution of people from only one national group merely “controversial” in any other context? This is not “controversial,” it is pure evil, even by FT standards.

At least two people have been killed by a US-Israeli strike on an orphanage west of Tehran, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency reported Monday, as human rights advocates warned against the scale of destruction. Five others were injured in the attack on a newly built orphan charity complex in the city of Fardis, about 25 miles west of Tehran, the agency quoted a regional official as saying. Rights groups have condemned the number of civilians and children killed in US and Israeli strikes and the targeting of educational establishments and residential areas. In Iran alone, strikes have killed at least 230 children and injured a further 1,800, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported on Sunday. On Friday, the UN human rights chief escalated calls for the White House to publish an investigation into a likely US strike on an elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, on the first day of the war that Iranian media said killed 168 children and 14 teachers – the single deadliest attack so far. “The images of bombed-out classrooms and grieving parents showed clearly who pays the highest price for war: civilians with no power in the decisions that led to conflict,” Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, told a Human Rights Council meeting last week. Read our reporting, with CNN’s Adam Pourahmadi ✍🏽 edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/wor…

It was an honor traveling to Cuba on the Nuestra America Convoy with @codepink @ProgIntl @DemSocialists on a historic delegation with hundreds of international activists in solidarity and joint struggle against the US blockade! #CubaNoEstáSola 🇨🇺 Read my report at @dsapartisan

“The destruction of their factories”

An increasingly likely scenario for ground troops is that Trump will seek to take three Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf claimed by the UAE - Abu Musa, and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs. Both pro-Israeli voices in the US and prominent Emirati accounts have been pushing this idea publicly for the past 10 days. Several motivations and objectives may lie behind this potential move: 1. Abu Musa in particular is a strategic island, situated in the middle of the Straits. But it may no longer be critical given the manner in which Iran controls the Straits - via missiles. It would have been 20 years ago if the Straits had been blocked solely through mines. So controlling it will likely not be the silver bullet Trump is hoping for. 2. Is the idea to trade the control of these islands for the opening of the Straits? Assuming that such a trade is even possible, it would depend on the cost of not seizing the island, but keeping it. The US Navy has kept itself 3,000km away from Iran to avoid being hit by Iranian missiles. Abu Musa is only 70km from the Iranian shorelines - the Tunbs are even closer. Iran would rain down missiles and drones, likely killing a large number of US troops. As a result, Iran would likely not have to trade the island. The US would simply abandon it because keeping it is too costly. 3. However, going for the islands does carry some messaging and political benefits. The GCC states have been split by the war, with Oman and Qatar striking their separate deals with Iran. But the GCC has a unified position on the three islands in support of the UAE. Making the war about the islands may be motivated by an attempt to push Oman and Qatar in support of the US/Israeli war, but under the false rubric that it is now about "liberating" the islands. 4. This would then also add a new political messaging. Given the UAE's likely endorsement and participation in the attempt to take/retain the islands, this would be an attempt to reframe the war from one that an isolated America and Israel are fighting alone, to one in which there is a US-Israel-Arab alliance against Iran. However, while that political messaging and reframing may succeed, it does not translate into a recipe for actually winning the war. That problem will not only remain unresolved, but it will become even more challenging based on Point 2 above. In sum, it appears that an increasingly desperate Trump is lowering his ambition. Instead of winning the war, he hopes to expand the number of stakeholders. And by that, spread out the blame for this debacle.

To criticize Obama for not bombing Syria over the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack, one has to negate the actual history. In reality, Obama backed down because his top intelligence officials warned him that the case against Assad was not a "slam dunk" -- a deliberate reference to the Iraq WMD hoax. That's because there is ample evidence that Ghouta was a false flag by insurgents hoping to trigger US military strikes.

Republicans threaten a GROUND INVASION in Iran. @aaronjmate & @kthalps watched the worst people on the Sunday morning news shows so that you don't have to. Join us LIVE at 10am est: youtube.com/live/h4KLGlTKv…

14,000 is the UN toll for both sides pre-Feb. 2022. Mostly on the Donbas side, but not all. Given that the toll since Feb. 2022 is now over 1 million on both sides, then I have to believe that there was another way for Putin to address the box he was in. He was coy before he invaded which didn't help his case. I assume he concluded that this war was inevitable no matter what he did. I don't have access to all the info that he had, so you never know. But I can't endorse a preemptive war, even if I understand the reasonable fears behind it. One has to show they exhausted all diplomatic options. I think he miscalculated on Ukrainian resolve and just how giddy NATO was at the opportunity to lock him in a quagmire.

@aaronjmate @EliLake Did Putin have a choice? 14,000 ethnic Russians killed in Ukraine. NATO spent years fortifying Ukraine, training & arming Ukrainians. Ukrainian troops amassed on Russia’s border. U.S. instigated NATO’s proxy war to steal Ukraine’s resources, weaken Russia & destroy Europe.

Aaron’s still mad Ukraine hasn’t lost the illegal war of conquest Russia launched 4 years ago.

Antony Blinken’s State Department said they would not sanction this unit that killed a 78-year-old Palestinian-American, because they trusted Israel to fix things. 2 year later, the unit assaults a CNN crew. Blinken is now a board member at the Center for American Progress.