Having been carrying out its ongoing genocide of the Palestinians for almost two years, wrecking Lebanon and Syria, repeatedly assaulting Iran and Yemen, and using subversion of Western political, economic, intellectual, and media elites to stifle its opponents wherever they speak up, Israel has now launched its most serious effort yet to either cripple or destroy Iran, its last remaining opponent with the potential to do it serious harm.

As Russia for one has stated, Israel’s massive attack on Iran is unambiguously criminal. It violates the UN Charter and international law in general. In particular, it does not fulfill the narrow – and rightly so – legal criteria for a justifiable defensive preemptive strike. Israel’s shameless attempts to deploy this phrase to shield its actions are pure information warfare. They are insultingly brazen – propaganda that can “work” only on the willingly obtuse – and as absurd as the repulsive Israeli habit of trying to pass off genocide, including by starvation, as self-defense.

Incidentally, against this background, it comes as no real surprise that Israeli tactics against Iran have included the same perfidious – as in literally, technically criminal under the law of armed conflict – method recently deployed by Ukraine’s Zelensky regime (and its Western helpers): Israel as well used sneak drone attacks from inside its opponent’s territory.

In reality, if any state did have a good case for claiming the right to........

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