imagine the Moslem world’s response
The 2022 China-GCC Summit was one thing, and China’s strategic partnership with Iran another, both Saudi Arabia and Iran applying simultaneously to BRICS and the SCO? Plus the idea of a BRICS Coin as a commodity-weighted neutral reserve asset that encourages members to pledge their commodities to the BRICS cause? The combined force of those four changes may prevent inflation from slowing and interest rates from falling in the West until 2030. Zoltan Pozsar, Credit Suisse.
After President Xi’s MENA diplomacy last year and his unification of Palestine’s factions in Beijing I wrote, “It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which China has transformed the Middle East from a region of squabbling, unstable states into a semblance of Mohammed’s ummah, a supra-national community with a common history and a shared destiny. All it took was decades of diplomacy, many kept promises and a trillion dollars in ready cash. But, as far as Western media were concerned, nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. But in real life, it did happen and it was interesting and it is becoming more interesting by the day”.
Two events and one non-event this week demand an update.
Hot (news) flashes
Top of the news: last night, Hezbollah fired 320 Katyusha non-ballistic missiles, at $20,000 apiece, into
The content below was originally paywalled.
Israel, destroying Unit 8200–where Fuad Shukr’s assassination was planned–and four electronic warfare sites. The attack left Israel low on ammunition, half-blind and surrounded by angry neighbors and, though Iron Dome stopped 260 of the missiles, the 35-minute engagement cost the IDF $150,000 per interception, or $50 million. So precise were the strikes, so lopsided the costs and so grave was the damage that Israel banned all coverage of the attack and its aftermath1, which makes it invisible to most of us. So thorough is censorship of the aftermath that British ME correspondent, Alastair Crooke, the source of this news, is censored so that the YouTube link to his story will not work on Substack. Now that’s thorough! The attack ensured that, after the airports reopen, the millionth Jew–one of the top ten percent of tax-paying citizens–will leave Israel permanently for homes in Florida or the Mediterranean.
The second item is President Abbas’ response to Russia’s invitation to the BRICS summit in October: Palestine will apply for membership and immediate access to mBridge, BRICS’ e-currency trading platform. This would give Palestine control of its own currency for the first time and be a significant step towards Palestinian statehood.
The third item is the dog that didn’t bark: the US Navy withdrew all its carriers from the Pacific in order to keep three on station in the Mediterranean, which suggests that China enjoys effective carrier parity with the USA. The average USN carrier been policing the globe for 30 years and is difficult and expensive to maintain. To their increasing costs, add the $10 billion budget hole created by the still-unready Gerald Ford, a manpower shortage that has mothballed seventeen ships, and the dearth of shore construction and maintenance facilities, and it is clear that the PLAN has reached it long term goal to total dominance of the West Pacific.
But thanks to our media’s triumphal narrative, we will never know how badly we are losing our war with China until it’s lost.
France this week arrested the owner of Telegram, the only non-Chinese communications platform they do not control, after Twitter’s IDF officer, who handles censorship, blocked the video on Twitter.
