Who'll Stop the Rain?

A view of the bombing of Iran from eight thousand miles away

This afternoon, I was about to start researching the topic originally scheduled for tonight’s post.

Then I saw this at Hawaii News Now Nausea:

I considered not writing about that. What could I contribute from Hawaii, over eight thousand miles (13,000 km) from Iran?

What could I say that hadn’t already been said better by

Neoliberal Feudalism

?

So think about it: five of Israel’s longstanding enemies destroyed with the last one [currently in the process of] being destroyed all in a year and a half period.

[…]

Note how the dates of the attacks cover both Biden and Trump administrations; it doesn’t matter which party is in power for certain actions, as discussed in my post Red Lines of the Counter-Elite. Regardless of which party is in power, Israel has widespread, bipartisan support, in part due to gentiles adopting Yahweh as their God and in part due to the power of both AIPAC and the bribery/blackmail networks like Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

[…]

This also reminds me of General Wesley Clark’s comments after 9/11, where he stated that Bush’s neocon team wanted to invade and destroy seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, none of which had anything to do with the supposed 9/11 attackers

Greater Israel is Happening: Part 2

Or

Rurik Skywalker

?

Neoliberal Feudalism on Rurik:

And the way the eschatology of the other Abrahamic religions feeds into the Jewish one. They're sprinting to tap into the very deepest well possible -- that of a belief structure going back thousands of years, for their own goals (control and brutal domination to a level never seen before in human history). Boy is this going to be ugly in the sprint to 2030.

There's basically no one else on the internet pointing this out that I see (other than Rurik), which means basically no one in the world.

That’s why there’s no one on Substack whom I pay other than Rurik. (Neoliberal Feudalism has “paid subs turned off”.)

I tried to get people I know to read Neoliberal Feudalism and Rurik. In vain. Everyone in my circles is addicted to copium - political and/or Abrahamic. One man like me from outside that “belief structure going back thousands of years” cannot undo their generations-long programming.

I can only look back and shudder at my own programming.

At how I used to be a neoCON for three ugly years (2002-2005).

I recall seeing a supposedly Iranian woman in full Islamic costume on USSA TV ‘news’ in the fall of 2002. She was begging to be bombed. Conveniently in English for the camera (unless my memory is wrong and she was subtitled).

English native speakers take it for granted when people from all around the world speak English. I fear most don’t even realize how hard it is to really learn a foreign language - as opposed to sit through a perfunctory course to get rid of a requirement at school. I myself didn’t question how some seemingly random woman on an Iranian street was able to make the neoCON case in accented but otherwise perfect English.

How many people thought it was suspicious that “Nayirah”¹ gave her testimony in perfect American English a decade earlier?

I’m guessing that her English was so American because she had probably been educated in the USSA since she was about six in 1981 (emphasis mine):

In January 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah had never been a nurse and that she was the daughter of Saud Nasser Al-Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States [from 1981 to 1992] at the time the testimony was made [1990]. She and her father were members of the House of Sabah, the ruling family of Kuwait. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of a wider public relations campaign conducted by the Kuwaiti government-in-exile's Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which sought to encourage American military involvement against Iraq's occupation of Kuwait through coordination with the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton.

The “Nayirah” scam was exposed when I was living in Japan and had cut myself off from the news. So I don’t think I knew her testimony was fake until after I ditched the neoCONs.²

Unaware of the truth about the original “Nayirah”, I swallowed the Iranian “Nayirah’s” message without hesitation. It reinforced my then-new belief in neoCONnery. I never liked Dubya and found validation in her. Surely if an Iranian wants to be bombed, bombing must be good! As if one person - possibly an actor filmed in the US - could justify an attack on an entire country that might not even have been theirs. She wants freedom so badly she’s willing to die in an American bombing! I used to be so obsessed with free-dumb.

I roll my eyes at my ‘logic’ twenty-three years later.

At how I once wanted what Iranians call بمباران bombārān ‘bomb-rain’.

بمب bomb ‘bomb’ is in red. The rest in black is اران ārān. One might think اران ārān means ‘rain’, but the actual word for ‘rain’ is باران bārān beacause bomb-bārān ‘bomb-rain’ has fused into bombārān with just one -b- in the middle.

The rain has already fallen once.

Last weekend’s No Kings protests did nothing to stop the king.

When the clouds grow dark again … who’ll stop the rain?

1. Representative Tom Lantos said at the start of the C-SPAN clip that “Nayirah” was “using an assumed name”, but apparently “Nayirah” was her real name, judging from how Wikipedia and others refer to her as “Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ”.

“Nayirah” may have been coached by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, from whom Lantos’ Congressional Human Rights Foundation rented space at a reduced rate.

The New York Times wrote,

It’s plainly wrong for a member of Congress to collaborate with a public relations firm to produce knowingly deceptive testimony on an important issue. Yet Representative Tom Lantos has been caught doing exactly that.

2. The Christian Science Monitor published this look back at “Nayirah” on September 6, 2002, around the time I believe I saw the Iranian Nayirah on TV.

The babies in the incubator story is a classic example of how easy it is for the public and legislators to be mislead during moments of high tension. It’s also a vivid example of how the media can be manipulated if we do not keep our guards up.

I doubt I had read it at the time because I had just sealed myself inside the neoCON infobubble. That bubble did have a crack - I secretly read antiwar material while I was warblogging - and that crack eventually expanded, shattering the bubble. However, neither the pro- nor antiwar material I was reading online came from mainstream sources like The Christian Science Monitor. I generally ignored TV news and had only seen the clip of the Iranian “Nayirah” by accident.