BIG SCOOP: US-Israel goal was to install former President Ahmadinejad as Iran's leader (aka Delcy) An Israeli strike designed to free him from house arrest was part of an effort to bring about regime change and put him in power. w/ @MarkMazzettiNYT @julianbarnes @ronenbergman nytimes.com/2026/05/19/us/po…

Regarding Inea Bushnaq: During the Ottoman Empire’s final century, the Sublime Porte lost vast territories in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and North Africa as a result of wars with the Russian Empire, various local rebellions and wars of independence, and the imperial expansion of European powers. In some instances the new rulers ethnically cleansed their territories of Muslim subjects. This was most prominently the case in the North Caucasus. In arguably the largest genocide of the nineteenth century, more than ninety per cent of Circassians were killed or forcibly expelled by the victorious Russians. 21 May, the Circassian Day of Mourning, continues to be observed in remembrance of the genocide and exile. Hundreds of thousands of surviving Circassians found refuge in Ottoman territory at a time when Istanbul was engaged in a campaign to centralize and consolidate its rule in its remaining possessions. In addition to Anatolia, Circassian communities were settled in Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine, where they remain to this day. The Jordanian capital Amman, known as Philadelphia in Roman times, re-emerged as a city during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries largely on the strength of Circassian settlement. This was in turn related to Ottoman efforts to secure key transportation routes from Damascus to the Hijaz and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In other cases, the Muslim population was not actively expelled or persecuted by the new rulers, and either remained, fled, or pursued a combination of the two. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the 1878 Congress of Berlin ended several centuries of Ottoman rule and replaced it with that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Whether out of fear of oppression by their new Christian rulers, opposition to conscription by the Habsburg army, or a preference to remain under Ottoman rule, a minority of Bosnian Muslims emigrated from their homeland. Among those who left were the grandparents of Inea Bushnaq, the Palestinian-American translator and oral historian who has among other works compiled a highly-regarded volume of Arabic folk tales. The Bushnaq family settled in the Palestinian town of Tulkarm and then Jerusalem, where Inea was born in 1938. Like every other Palestinian family in what became West Jerusalem, bar none, the Bushnaqs were expelled during the Nakba in 1948, when Inea was nine years old. She would later complete her education in Britain and after the 1967 June War settled in New York, where she remains to this day. A sprightly woman in her mid-eighties, Inea Bushnaq is currently the object of the latest meltdown by Israel flunkies. With the hysterical frenzy produced by @NickKristof 's @nytimes report on Israel’s rape regime yet to subside, a new and equally dire threat to Israeli national security has erupted. This time it comes in the form of @NYCMayor Zohran Mamdani’s 15 May commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba, which his official social media account highlighted with a four-minute profile of New Yorker Inea Bushnaq, described as a “Nakba survivor”. “For Palestinians," it concludes, "their displacement and the Nakba continues to this day." The responses were fast and furious, essentially a replay of the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra’s Greatest Hits: There was no Nakba, so Bushnaq couldn’t have survived anything; there was no Nakba but they deserved it; neither the Bushnaqs nor any other Palestinians were forcibly displaced; the Nakba was an attempted genocide of the Jews; Palestinians didn’t and don’t exist; what about the Holocaust, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and the millipede in Vanuatu with a broken leg; Islam, Muslims, Islam, Muslims; FAFO; etc. etc. etc. The talking point that most amused me is that Inea Bushnaq (and by extension Mamdani) is an imposter because Bushnaq is actually a “Bosnian” and “European settler” with “zero connection to the land” and therefore cannot be Palestinian. Her surname apparently definitively settles the matter. I have no idea whether and, if so, to what extent the Bushnaqs inter-married with the local Arab population. Let’s assume for the sake of argument they never did and kept strictly to themselves. What we do know is that they became part of the local society and made it their own. Theirs is the story of virtually every immigrant known to history, and it is how the societies that exist today were formed. But to Israel flunkies, one cannot be a Palestinian of Bosnian descent, because such individuals are really Europeans, Bosnians. If there is even the slightest connection to any foreign territory, no matter how distant in time, it means one is from there, and has no connection to and certainly no rights in Palestine. This principle of course applies only to Palestinians. On the other side of the ledger we have “Your home has been mine for 3,000 years and it’s blood libel if you ask me to prove I was ever here”. This particular gander is allergic to what is good for the goose. Are all these Israel flunkies, and the Americans first and foremost among them, really making the argument that a family that arrived in a particular country during the late nineteenth century cannot legitimately claim to belong to that country? Really? Would this not also have to mean that Inea Bushnaq, who arrived in the US as an adult in the late 1960s, similarly cannot legitimately claim to be American? And would it not also mean that any of her US critics whose ancestors can identifiably be traced to Europe, or Asia, or Africa, or indeed anywhere abroad also cannot claim to belong to or in North America? Most importantly, if Bushnaq is an imposter who has no place in Palestine because, although born there, her family emigrated from Europe to the Middle East during the nineteenth century, what are we to make of the hundreds of thousands who arrived from Europe during the twentieth century, most of whom were born abroad? Is it really that difficult to confirm that people have equal rights irrespective of their identity or background? Zionism is identity politics on steroids.

This. The problem is not that “he’s a gift to anti Zionists” but that there’s a systemic structure of abuse and inequality in Israel/Palestine sustained by the help of many in the U.S.-Jewish establishment.

It’s the 40th anniversary today of Keating’s prophecy, that without free market reform Australia would become a Banana Republic. Ironically in a week when Albanese and Chalmers have returned Labor to the Pre-Keating spite of hating people who have invested well and accumulated wealth. Keating got his nation building economic reforms through by force of personality but as he once told me, of his Labor colleagues, “Mark, they never really believed it”. That’s so true today, tragically for Australia 🇦🇺

Protest outside the @nytimes HQ in New York. Not surprised. Their libellous piece about Jewish rape dogs was one of the most egregious things I’ve ever read in my life.

🕊️ A message of peace in Tel Aviv A large banner displayed in Arabic and Hebrew in Tel Aviv reads: “The time has come - peace, shalom.” Created by artists Mira Awad and Ben Sperber.

Quillette Founder, Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon), explains that many people now follow a moral framework in which the oppressed can never be guilty.