Jonathan Edwards

Lebanese journalist Ghada Dayekh of Sawt Al-Farah radio was killed earlier today in an Israeli airstrike targeting her home in Tyre.

🚨Lebanese Ministry of Health: 87 killed and more than 700 wounded in the initial toll of today's Israeli attacks (Source: Al Jazeera)

Imagine being an impotent old man, calling a guy your grandson’s age a piece of shit for opposing a senseless, disastrous, war of choice. What a pathetic wasted existence.

This is a brazen pre-admission of genocide against the Iranian people, which would obviously be a war crime. Madness.

This is deliberate misinformation. It's a tell that you can't argue these points honestly. 1) Enrichment is the most important step for developing nuclear weapons. Always has been. The focus on enrichment has/had nothing to do with Israel. Even the Obama nuclear deal was centered on enrichment levels. No one actually believes that the fatwa, which no one has seen, was anything but a public misinformation tool from a regime that lies about almost everything. While they moved the program underground in 2004, there has been overwhelming evidence since 2004, including published documents, that the regime has an active nuclear weapons program, so you would have to pretend like all of these regime officials and scientists were actively ignoring the fatwa to seriously cite it. Specifically on the enrichment point: It was an IAEA report, hardly a pro-Israel entity, last February, that determined the regime had increased its stockpile of 60% enriched uranium by 50% in a period of 4-6 months. Enough highly enriched uranium to make 7 nuclear bombs. There is no civilian purpose for enriching uranium at that level, and they are the only non-nuclear state in the world to be doing so. It doesn't take a genius to connect the dots. That's what led to the strikes last year. Neither the regime nor you can explain why they were developing highly enriched uranium clearly meant for a bomb if they weren't planning to or allowed to build a bomb. 2) Nuclear weapons, while the biggest issue, were never the only concern for Trump or his administration. Trump didn't take out Soleimani because of nuclear weapons, but because he had organized a massive terror proxy network that was consistently destabilizing the region, and encouraging terror attacks in the Gulf, the United States, and Europe. It's a tell that you guys continually leave out how the Gulf states also view the Islamic Republic as the key threat and actively are supporting efforts to degrade the regime because it's inconvenient to the "this is all about Israel" narrative. It's the UAE, more than anyone, that wants the war to continue until there is regime change. Yet no one claims that Trump is being controlled by them or the Saudis (because he is not). Trump has also seen the evidence that the Islamic Republic has actively planned to assassinate him since Soleimani. And while you can push conspiracies about that, it doesn't change the facts that they have an active assassination program that has repeatedly targeted Americans. Or that they are responsible for thousands of American troop deaths, which many Americans have never forgotten. Their ballistic missile and terror proxy programs are also major threats. The big knock on JCPOA, which is why Trump left it, was that it didn't address those issues, so it let the Islamic Republic terrorize everyone without consequences. They refused to put those on the table in the recent negotiation. The "Death to America" Islamic Republic has been fighting a proxy war targeting Americans since 1979. We have been focused on responding to the proxies and simply playing defense the whole time. They built up terror proxies and an extensive ballistic missile program as protection to allow them to continue the covert and one-sided war, but those protections have been severely degraded since 10/7, thanks to Israel. Trump made the call that now was the time to stop playing defense and take on the head of the snake to permanently put an end to that war. You might disagree with the timing or his decision, but that doesn't change the context or that he himself made it.