In which the Monday hive mind regulars, Lord Downer, the Caterist and the Major, do their thing ...

 

The pond was shocked and outraged this morning - shocked the pond tells ya - to see Xiao Qian top of the world ma this morning, on the extreme far right of the lizard Oz ...

What sort of propaganda trap had the reptiles in the hive mind fallen for? 

The splash alone was deeply suspicious ...

Don’t fall for NATO’s hyped-up rhetoric on defence spending
Behind the so-called ‘China threat’ lies certain countries’ desire to maintain their hegemony. They are trapped in their own inertia, fear fair competition and cannot tolerate other countries making progress.
By Xiao Qian

The pond even made it to the end to read...

...China and Australia are important economic and trade partners, with highly complementary economic structures. Australia’s abundant energy and mineral resources, along with its distinctive agricultural products, have found a vast market of 1.4 billion consumers in China.
Meanwhile, China’s high-quality and affordable manufactured goods have boosted Australians’ purchasing power and enriched their lives. Although our two nations have different social systems and may hold differing views on certain issues, we share no historical grievances or fundamental conflicts of interest.
We rely on the same trade routes, and no country – especially a major trading nation such as China – has a greater stake in safeguarding maritime security. Differences can be addressed through dialogue, but they should never undermine our friendship.
As I often hear from Australian friends, “we have hundreds of reasons to be friends, and none to be enemies”. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory in the World Anti-Fascist War and of the founding of the UN. As builders and defenders of the post-war international order, China stands ready to work with Australia to jointly uphold the international system with the UN at its core and the international order based on the international law, thus making positive contributions to global peace and security.
China and Australia are friends, not foes. This should never have been in question. China has been always developing bilateral friendship and co-operation with the utmost sincerity and patience, and we hope Australia will work with us in the same direction.
Xiao Qian is China’s ambassador to Australia.

Luckily the pond looked back over to the "news" side - the pond uses the word "news" as short hand for propaganda - and saw that Xiao Quian was merely acting as a straw dog, a sock puppet, an idle distraction, a way to provide the reptiles with a lead on a slow Monday ...

Regurgitate the content, and stick it on top, and you have an ...EXCLUSIVE

EXCLUSIVE
China on attack over US push to lift defence spending
Xi Jinping’s top diplomat in Australia has warned Anthony Albanese about the risks of increasing military spending, while rejecting fears over China’s massive armed forces build-up.
By Geoff Chambers and Noah Yim

Immediately below things returned to normal thanks to the former Chairman, and Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang ...

'UNLIKELY CEASEFIRE REACHED
Rudd gives Trump ‘full marks’ for Middle East intervention
Kevin Rudd has set out his hope that the US President might now persuade Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a two-state solution with Palestine.
By Joe Kelly

And of course the pond should have noted that also over on the extreme far right was Muh Lud Alex, doing his very best imitation of a starry eyed MAGA, a paid up devotee and certified member of the cult:

The header: Aus-US alliance: a true partnership or just friends with benefits?, It sounds bold and principled to say Australia will make its own budgetary decisions on defence, not the US. But like so many statements coming out of Canberra, it’s a statement of the bleeding obvious.
The caption: US President Donald Trump speaks during a media conference at the end of the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands.
The tired advice: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The pond knew immediately it could relax and Lord Downer would take care of everything ...

You may loathe US President Donald Trump but you’ve got to give it to him: he’s effective. He has ended the Israel-Iran war, destroyed Iran’s nuclear weapons capability and made allies bear a fair share of the burden of collective defence.
In all of this, there are messages for Australia.
Let’s just start with the NATO summit. The NATO partners agreed to increase defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035. For Trump, this was a triumph given his vocal and often aggressive demand that allies carry some of the burden of Western defence rather than leaving the heavy lifting to the Americans.
One country in NATO refused to increase its defence spending beyond 2 per cent of GDP. That was Spain. Trump chastised Spain and said he would consider special tariffs against it to force Madrid to do more on defence.
This should have been a wake-up call for the Australian government. Apparently not. The Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, subsequently announced Australia wouldn’t dream of meeting the American request to increase its defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP.

The reptiles interrupted to show off another pair of straw dogs ...Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister, Penny Wong hold a press conference at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

His Lordship wasn't distracted. 

When he's in the church and worshipping his idol, the intensity of his prayers, his devotion to his MAGA lord is profound ...

For the government, it sounds bold and principled to say, as Anthony Albanese does, that Australia will make its own budgetary decisions, not the US. But like so many statements coming out of Canberra, that is a statement of the bleeding obvious but beyond that is meaningless. It’s not that Australia can’t decide how much it spends on defence.
There’s a different question to answer. That is to what extent is our historically close alliance with the US not only the mainstay of the defence of Australia but critical to the stability of the Indo-Pacific region? What Trump has taught the world is that the age of resting on the shoulders of the American taxpayers without bothering with our own defence is over. The alliance remains strong but it is reciprocal, not a relationship of total dependency.
This comes at a critical time for Australia. The AUKUS review, in the main, will be no problem. The Americans will be happy to work with the British and Australian governments to help with the design and building of a new class of nuclear-powered submarines.
The problem is going to be the purchase by Australia of two or three Virginia-class submarines from the American production line in the early 2030s. The US would have to give up that capability to Australia, which historically wouldn’t have caused a problem. The US would have been happy in the knowledge that Australia was, along with Britain, its most reliable ally.
But the disregard of the American demands to increase defence spending when the West is being challenged and the hesitant and ambiguous statements by the Australian government over the Israel-Iran war and the bombing by the Americans of Iran’s nuclear sites will cause surprise in Washington. Is Australia really the reliable ally that it once was? Does Australia see an alliance as a reciprocal relationship or just a relationship to be called on if we ever needed it?
What’s more, when Trump is riding high from his triumphant NATO summit and the successful conclusion of the Israel-Iran war, is all the sneering at the US President in Canberra and more generally in the Australian media going to encourage the Trump administration to see Australia as it might have been seen by previous American administrations?

Most excellent, and naturally the reptiles insisted on showing Lord Downer in prayer with another MAGA devotee, the dog botherer... Former foreign minister Alexander Downer discusses the one NATO member who refused to sign up to US President Donald Trump’s call for a boost in defence spending among allies. Spain held out to Donald Trump’s demands, with the Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, resisting calls to boost defence. “Trump took quite a swing at the Spanish government, saying if Spain is not prepared to pull its weight, then we will make them pay for it through higher tariffs,” Mr Downer told Sky News host Chris Kenny.

Lord Downer reached out to unbelievers, in much the same way as Falun Gong cultists on Swanston street always want to hand out leaflets and suggestions to the pond:

I have two pieces of gratuitous advice for the Australian government. First, if it wants to be taken seriously then it better start increasing its commitment to defence spending commensurate with the Europeans. And, second, the Australian government should think of something useful and creative to suggest to the Americans in our mutual interests.
Believe it or not, Trump is a good listener. What we both need to avoid is the Beijing government turning the Indo-Pacific region into a Chinese lake.
Xi Jinping would like to enforce a Chinese Monroe Doctrine through the region, subjecting the Association of Southeast Nations, South Asia and the western Pacific to tributary status. China would determine regional security arrangements, the architecture of regional trade and regional norms of human rights.
For us, it would be a nightmare. Democratic Taiwan would disappear, Japan would be dangerously isolated and probably would respond by becoming a nuclear weapons state and we would just have to align ourselves with Beijing’s paradigm. To stop this happening we need a regional balance of power and that requires the ongoing presence of the Americans tightly bound with their allies and other like-minded countries, such as Singapore and India.
If you think this through, turning our backs on the Americans is a pretty ugly alternative to putting up with Trump’s eccentricities.
We should propose a new initiative for the Indo-Pacific at the Quad foreign ministers meeting in Washington this week. The optics of the Quad are excellent but it needs more substance.
We should propose the Quad should establish a defence pillar. Instead of the four foreign ministers meeting, they should meet with the four defence ministers in a so-called four plus four format.

Can't we all live together? Can't a snow globe lover unite with a champers drinker? Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and Defence Minister Richard Marles.

What a cue for the last of the MAGA homily from Lord Downer:

Then the eight ministers could start to look at co-ordinating intelligence and operations, or more ambitiously co-ordinate defence production, evaluating defence equipment, working on the military applications of AI and cybersecurity.
Radical as this may seem, the four plus four meetings could direct their respective militaries to work on issues such as critical supply lines and ways all four militaries could work in a more co-ordinated way.
The four countries already participate in an annual informal four countries military exercise known as Exercise Malabar, but this could be formalised and incorporated into the Quad framework. So there we’d have it: a much more potent regional arrangement that would balance China’s power and guarantee a free and open Indian Ocean and South China Sea.
My guess is Trump would like this idea, it would be creative and strategic, and it would be a huge step forward in all our relationships with India. Above all, it would show an Australia active and creative as an ally trying to help America maintain the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.
And, by the way, if you wonder about the power of cyber attacks on us, think about this: Israeli strikes created an internet blackout in Iran. According to reports in the British press, dozens of X accounts advocating Scottish independence abruptly went dark.
It makes you wonder what China could do!

Why they'd give a column and a lead story to the hive mind this day... and many thanks to Lord Downer for his most excellent contribution to the community ...

Moving along, the pond was disturbed to see that the Caterist seemed to have taken a gloom pill ...

The header: Tory strife a grim omen for Sussan Ley’s Liberal fightback, Ley is the leader of the smallest Liberal contingent since World War II, and her first and not inconsiderable challenge will be to ensure it does not shrink further.
The caption: Sussan Ley can take heart from the fragility of the Labor’s domination of parliament. Picture: Martin Ollman
The mystifying proposal: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The pond realised that the Caterist was one of those tired old male farts who'd managed to help in the comprehensive stuffing of the Liberal party, and then in the way of all things, a woman was left to pick up the pieces and try to put them together with ssssuper glue, but perhaps best start with the Tories, where a similar process has been Trussing along for some time now:

The average term in office for a federal opposition leader elected this century is 122 weeks.
Sussan Ley has served just seven of them and she can rest assured there will be harder ones to come.
The good news is that Labor’s domination of parliament is more fragile than it may appear.
A government that occupies 63 per cent of the chamber with less than 35 per cent of the vote is vulnerable to factionalism and changes in the public mood, as British Labour’s Keir Starmer has discovered.
Later this week, Starmer celebrates a year in office with a similar lukewarm mandate – 63 per cent of seats in Britain’s House of Commons on the back of 34 per cent of the popular vote.
Today, British Labour’s popularity has tanked a third to less than a quarter (23 per cent), according to the most recent YouGov poll.
Starmer is fighting off a backbench revolt over reforms to welfare payments. Commentators on the left and right are predicting he could face a leadership challenge within a year.

They always disappoint, and then the reptiles slipped in another distraction, Former Reform UK candidate Mayuran Senthilnathan says Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage has "medically declared" the Conservative Party as “dead”. “Nigel Farage … I think he’s medically declared the Conservative Party dead and over,” Mr Senthilnathan said. “Kemi Badenoch is on the ropes – it is quite likely she will get ousted by the end of the year.”

That gloomy news set the Caterist right off, though there's always hope, because he might be something of a Nige man ..

The bad news for Liberals searching for a flicker of promise is that few disaffected British Labour voters are turning to the Conservatives.
Last week’s poll puts Conservative support at 17 per cent, more than five points lower than at the general election. YouGov’s seat-by-seat analysis projects a devastating outcome for the Tories, who would be reduced to minor party status with just 46 MPs in the 650-seat parliament.
The party would lose a dozen seats to the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party, but the big winner is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Reform would pick up 67 seats from the Conservatives and 194 seats from Labour, putting Farage in the box seat to become Britain’s next prime minister in a hung parliament.
In so far as British politics can be seen as a portent for Australia, Ley’s challenge is more complicated than it may have seemed.
She is the leader of the smallest Liberal contingent since World War II, and her first and not inconsiderable challenge will be to ensure it does not shrink further.
We should add the necessary caveats about such granular forecasting. Massaging the numbers, or multi-level regression and post-stratification polling as YouGov prefers to call it, is vulnerable to modelling assumptions, demographic data quality and last-minute voting behaviour changes.
Yet even if we give the Tories the benefit of the doubt and assume that the loss of, say, Faversham and Mid Kent to Reform is not a foregone conclusion, it is clear the electoral alignments that anchored parliamentary democracy in post-war Britain and Australia are broken beyond repair.

Poor Susssan ... and then the reptiles offered a distracting snap, Keir Starmer. Picture: Getty Images

The Caterist continued mortified and gloomy - those gloom pills can take days to wear off ...

The illusion that a stable two-party system would survive under the Westminster system has been shattered. Inherited party loyalty is dead. Voters have become promiscuous and there is no such thing as a safe seat. The electorates have fractured along similar fault lines of age, sex and education.
Voters under 24 in Britain are more than three times likelier to vote for the Greens (22 per cent) than for the Conservatives (6 per cent). In the 65-plus bracket, the Tories are comfortably ahead of Labour (27 per cent to 12 per cent) but Reform beat them both with 36 per cent.
The myth that the Conservatives were the toffs’ party and Labour the party of flat caps, which was entrenched before the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, is shattered. Labour is the preferred party in the A, B and C1 demographics (26 per cent compared with 20 per cent). The C2S, Ds, and Es, however, are Farage’s people, with 36 per cent referencing Reform. The Brexit factor remains strong but the Conservatives have lost the edge. In April 2020, 53 per cent of Brexit voters favoured the Tories. Last week’s poll shows the Conservatives have retained the loyalty of just 23 per cent of Brexiteers. Most of them (51 per cent) back Reform.
By making a few adjustments for local circumstances, substituting the voice referendum for Brexit and adopting social class as a proxy for education, the pattern is eerily similar in Australia. The Labor vote across the past five years is historically low but relatively steady. Minor parties are polling strongly. The conservative vote has collapsed. The conservative brand is poison for younger voters, weakly endorsed by their parents and grudgingly supported by their grandparents.

Then came a snap of Nige, Nigel Farage speaks during a Reform Party press conference. Picture: Getty Images

Nothing helped lift the Caterist gloom, though the pond was delighted  to start off a Monday this way ... even as a glimmer promised to help the Caterist, only for it to be cruelly dashed ...

One small but significant variation in the Conservative vote presents a glimmer of hope for Ley, who has made increasing the proportion of women in the Liberal partyroom a priority.
In Britain, women are likelier to vote Conservative than men by a margin of 2 percentage points. That may be the accumulated dividend of 14½ years under three Conservative female prime ministers and Kemi Badenoch’s eight months as Opposition Leader.
Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that feminising the frontbench will fix the party’s problems, any more than Badenoch has reversed the Conservatives fortune.
Badenoch’s biggest obstacle to becoming Britain’s next prime minister is not misogyny or racism but the stigma attached to conservatives, particularly among younger voters.

Oh despair, despair, and time now for one of those noxious AI collages and an AV distraction, Detail's have emerged about the new Opposition Leader's circle of trust - here are the details of her closest confidants.

The Caterist began to splutter out his gloom in short bursts:

The urgency of the situation demands honesty. Balanced representation is important, as Nicolle Flint and I argued in our 2015 Menzies Research Centre report, Gender and Politics. Yet, with the best will in the world, it won’t happen overnight. The party’s fate will be decided by its ability to articulate its values across the next three years, not the chromosomal makeup of its partyroom. In an electorate more divided than ever on cultural issues, this is no easy task, as US electoral analyst Henry Olsen outlines in a sobering article in the latest edition of Quadrant. In attempting to appeal to two different constituencies – inner urban, university-educated voters on the cultural left and socially conservative voters in outer suburbs and regions – legacy conservative parties face a strong risk of losing both.

Quick, never mind the Quad rant, show us Kemi ... Kemi Badenoch. Picture: AFP/House of Commons

Oh dear, yet more gloom, time to end it all ...

Olsen is pessimistic about the Conservatives’ future in Britain.
“They are now facing the possibility that their party, perhaps the most successful in world history, could cease to exist within a few short years,” he writes. “The Coalition may be only a few years behind the Tories in that process, but they are clearly on that course.”
Those who recognise that the Liberal Party has governed more consistently in the national interest than its rival since 1949 will be hoping Ley proves him wrong.

And yet not a single hint or note that the Caterist would do the right thing, fall on his sword, depart that Menzies mob, and head back to the motherland, an abject failure and one more reason the coalition has descended into tragic ruination.

Time to celebrate the result of all the Caterist deeds and words, combining his devotion to climate science and jihads:

And with that holy crusade in motion, what better way to introduce the Major, coming in from the golf course to offer his standard rant for the Australian Zionist News Daily?

The header: Anti-US bent continues to colour Middle East coverage, ‘Dehumanisation of Jews’ continues to ‘thrive in Australia’ as journalists fail to understand the politics of the Middle East.
The caption: US President Donald Trump US Vice-President JD Vance and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Picture: AFP
The weird and disturbing advice: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The Major fulminated for what the reptiles clocked as a goodly five minute read, and by golly if they don't pick him as the down under stringer for Israel's Channel 14, there's no justice in the world.

Only the Major knows, and what he knows is to be a valiant warrior and devotee of ethnic cleansing:

Most journalists in Australia still don’t understand the politics of the Middle East – even after the ceasefire between Israel and Iran imposed by US President Donald Trump.
At least the ABC has finally started platforming expatriate Iranians who want the country’s mullahs overthrown, ending the fiction of Iranians rallying around their flag.
On the Israeli side, the ABC reported on Antoinette Lattouf’s court win against it last Wednesday, claiming she had been exposing Israeli genocide.
Lattouf and fellow activists here have never condemned the actual October 7 war crime by Hamas and its murdering of 1200 women, old people and children in their homes on a Saturday morning, and young people at a dance party for peace before taking 250 living hostages into Gaza.
These activists refuse to acknowledge the genuine genocidal intent in the Middle East is not harboured by Jews against Palestinians but by Iran and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies against Israel and all Jews.
Even the silliest keyboard warriors should by now be able to figure out the obvious.
If Israel could take out so much of Iran’s infrastructure in a country 75 times its size, 1500km away in only 12 days, how quickly could it flatten Gaza, 70km south of Tel Aviv, and about the size of Melbourne, if that were its intent?

Actually it's pretty easy to condemn the mad Mullahs and Hamas and all that theocratic nonsense, but the Major never seems to manage the same when it comes to Benji's set of barking mad theocratic fundamentalists...

And then came a most unfortunate AV distraction, with a most unfortunate set of captions...

The Israeli military is bombing heavily populated areas across Gaza.
Gaza city under attack: Consecutive strikes kill at least 20 Palestinians

The Major was completely unfazed, and to prove it, he began his next gobbet with a Major lie...

The truth is Israel has wanted nothing to do with Gaza since it unilaterally withdrew under then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005.

That's a golf course Major truth, and then the Major carried on ...

Members of the media union in Australia famously signed a document in late 2023 saying the October 7 attack needed to be understood “in context” – meaning they believed Hamas was leading a popular resistance.
In fact the events since – including the destruction of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the smashing of Hamas, the Houthis and now the bombing of Iran – can only be understood in the context of the actual genocidal intent of the October 7 murderers, who tried to enlist Hezbollah to join its attack in a letter revealed by the Jerusalem Post last week. Both terror groups act for Iran.
Much media coverage last week focused on the “shock and awe’’ of Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Most ignored the hard work already done by the Israeli Air Force and Mossad’s penetration of Iran’s military.
Whatever the status of its nuclear program, Israel had already taken out much of Iran’s missile manufacturing capability, many of its missile launchers, much of its radar and anti-aircraft weaponry, most of the top scientists in its nuclear program and its key military leaders.
These included Iranian Armed Forces chief of staff, General Mohammad Bagheri, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander in chief Hossein Salami, IRGC headquarters chief Gholamali Rashid, IRGC aerospace commander Ali Hajizadeh, IRGC head of intelligence Mohammad Kazemi and a dozen other senior officers.
Add the political chief of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, killed sleeping in his bed in central Tehran last year; Hezbollah’s long-time commander Hassan Nasrallah, bombed in Lebanon; Hamas’s Gaza military chief Yahya Sinwar and his brother Mohammad, both killed in Gaza.

The reptiles interrupted this Major rant with another AV distraction, A billboard depicting Hamas's slain leader Yahya Sinwar with the Arabic slogan "if Sinwar departs from the battlefields, Palestine will birth a thousand Sinwars", in Yemen's Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa in October, in protest against Israel's attacks on Lebanon and the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. Picture: AFP

To which the Major might retort "Even should the Chairman Emeritus depart this earth, his money has birth a thousand more Majors, and they shall rule for at least a thousand years, or how ever many years the Chairman Emeritus deemed appropriate, if they can ever sort that bloody will out" ...

Trump is now happy to leave the Iranian regime in charge and criticises any suggestion Iran may be able to restart its nuclear program.
For Trump, this is not a matter of life and death but a notch on his belt as commander-in-chief.
For Israel it’s about much more. It’s potentially a matter of survival for a tiny country of nine million that has every reason to take Iran at its word when it pledges to drive the Jews into the sea.
Still, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, subjected to a tirade by Trump in the early hours of the ceasefire last Monday, was happy with the support of the US, its stealth bombers and bunker-busting technology. He wants to participate in future Trump-led negotiations to spread the Abraham Accords which may end up including Saudi Arabia.
Before the Saudis join, Trump will need to show them a peace plan for Gaza and at least progress on a two-state solution.
This will require a Palestinian “partner for peace”, which probably excludes much of the existing Palestinian Authority hierarchy under Mahmoud Abbas and requires the complete removal of Hamas.

Oh go on Major, go the full hog. The solution surely is to exclude Palestinians from Palestine ... you know, the full ethnic cleansing bit, what with a complete genocide not easily achievable without a few noticing and complaining.

Cue a snap, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech on Thursday. Picture: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP

The Major then did his best to fit in all the bits suitable for a piece in the Australian Zionist Daily News:

It’s worth looking at the response of media in the Arab world to the strikes on Iran.
MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) on June 2 quoted a series of Saudi journalists supporting the US and Israeli strikes.
Journalist Abd al-Aziz Al-Khames wrote: “Iran wasted billions that went down the drain at the expense of its people’s livelihood. Will reason prevail, with Iran launching an economic development project instead of a military one?”
Saudi journalist Wafa Al-Rashid wrote: “Some regimes are not only a burden on their own people but on all of humanity. They feed on oppression, export chaos, impoverish the world and destroy the people”.
Yet in Australia, activists such as academic Randa Abdel-Fattah have been portraying the actions of Israel in Iran as evil, even though it did not target civilians and Iran’s retaliation did. She re-posted many pro-Iranian commentators on social media and mocked Israelis for having bomb shelters and safe rooms.
It’s all part of a dehumanisation of Jews that thrives in academia and media in Australia.
Of course, Israelis don’t want to be up to their necks in rooting out Hamas fighters hiding behind civilians and under hospitals and schools. Israelis just want their hostages back and don’t want to risk the lives of any more young Israeli soldiers, 879 of whom have been killed since October 7. Nor do they want to starve Palestinian civilians.
The majority of Australia’s media do not accept what has been obvious for 18 months: Hamas is behind the killings at food drops because it steals aid and resells it at inflated prices to pay for its munitions.
Can anyone really be stupid enough to believe that the new joint US-Israeli food provider GHF (Global Humanitarian Foundation) is spending tens of millions of dollars on aid just so Israeli soldiers can shoot people who arrive to collect it?

Of course, of course, and soon as they stop the tooth fairy looting those trucks, Gaza will bloom into a new Riviera, just trust Benji, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the IDF 48 hours to come up with a new plan to ensure GHF aid was not stolen by Hamas. Picture: X

And so to the final gobbet, full of Major distortions in the Major way ...

It supports GHF because UN aid was being commandeered as soon as it arrived.
Netanyahu, on Wednesday, gave the IDF 48 hours to come up with a new plan to ensure GHF aid was not stolen by Hamas.
Yet on ABC’s 7.30 last Wednesday, stand-in host David Speers gave UNICEF spokesman James Elder eight minutes to claim, with no primary source evidence, that the IDF was shooting civilians. No mention of the Israeli military’s own publicly available video evidence of Hamas stealing this aid and at times shooting at Gazans who did not want to surrender their food parcels.
Israelis wonder why Western journalists believe the health employees of an Islamist death cult but not representatives of a democratically elected government that allows Palestinians to vote and takes in Palestinian gay refugees who Hamas wants to execute.
Trump’s Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday criticised the media for raising doubts about the effectiveness of the US strikes.
He had a point when he claimed too many US journalists were more concerned with denigrating Trump than reporting the facts.
Conversely, journalists should seek the truth: has the Iranian nuclear program been destroyed and were its 400kg of 60 per cent enriched uranium destroyed with it? We will no doubt find out eventually from Israeli intelligence.
By Friday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei was out of hiding and proclaiming a glorious Iranian win over Israel and a slap in the face for the US. The regime was ramping up executions of Iranians suspected of supporting the Israeli and US attacks.

As for the alternative, there's always Haaretz, where this day you might see this story ...

Israeli Settler Violence in the West Bank: Inside a Parallel Universe of Impunity

The latest episode of settler violence in the West Bank, where a mob assaulted soldiers for hours, reveals Israel's ethnonationalist rules of engagement: Jews are arrested unharmed for crimes that would get Palestinians killed (* archive link)

A sampling of the opening text:

Few things expose the grotesque ethnonationalist segregation in the West Bank more clearly than the impunity Israeli settlers are afforded after committing violence – against both Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.

Between Friday and Saturday, while many Israeli settlers in the West Bank were observing Shabbat at home, around 70 settlers – described by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as "a small minority that does not reflect the vast majority of the settlers" – assaulted Israeli soldiers for around five hours.

Near the Palestinian village of Kafr Malik, the attackers choked one soldier, attempted to run over others, rammed military vehicles with cars, and even threw a Molotov cocktail. No soldiers were injured, though one settler was lightly hurt by a sponge-tipped bullet.

The attack drew condemnation from Defense Minister Israel Katz and Prime Minister Netanyahu, who said settlers "cannot take the law into their own hands." This is the same Netanyahu who blocked Shin Bet investigations into suspects in Jewish nationalist crimes, and the same Katz who scrapped detention without trial for settlers while maintaining it for Palestinians.

Meanwhile, centrist opposition party leaders Yair Lapid and Yair Golan labeled the settlers who assaulted the soldiers "Jewish terrorists."

Yet describing settler violence as "terror" remains taboo in mainstream Israeli discourse. While Palestinians – for far less – are routinely labeled terrorists, settlers who commit violence are described instead simply as "Jews," or "rioters," "vigilantes," or "radicals."

This selective outrage was also notable for what it omitted: Just 48 hours earlier, the same settlers had raided and torched Kafr Malik, resulting in the deaths of three Palestinians by IDF fire.

A damning admission came from an IDF commander who was attacked during the Friday evening assault, confirming that the same settlers had assaulted Palestinians two days earlier. He revealed the IDF's current priorities in the West Bank: "Ninety percent of our time is spent trying to stop the settler youth from setting fire to the West Bank," apparently both literally and figuratively.

This raises an unavoidable question: How can settlers approach and physically assault IDF soldiers without being harmed, while a Palestinian would almost certainly be shot dead before even getting close?

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, answered that clearly when he defended the settlers over the soldiers, warning that the use of live fire against Jewish Israelis "crosses a dangerous red line" and must be "prohibited."

And so on and on and on, but don't expect any of that to intrude into the Major's parallel universe of hive mind impunity.

And so to wrap up the proceedings this day with a celebratory offering from the immortal Rowe ...