The Payroll Armies’ Graveyard

Kabul, Damascus and Mokha did not fall because Islamists discovered a mystical substitute for money. They fell because their defenders were paid by patrons, commanded by competing bosses and asked to die for states that had already been privatized.

The Taliban, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Houthis differ in doctrine, social base and foreign sponsors. Taliban fighters had Pakistani sanctuary. HTS grew under a Turkish umbrella. The Houthis received Iranian technology and military support. None of them won alone.

They shared something more practical. Each had spent years building a system in which the gunman, the tax collector, the judge and the local administrator answered to the same political order. Kabul had payrolls.

Assad had Russian air power and Iranian militias. Yemen’s Joint Forces had Saudi and Emirati cash. Their enemies had a chain of command that reached beyond their own countries.

America spent about $88 billion building Afghan security forces. Saudi Arabia budgeted billions to pay Yemeni soldiers and civil servants.

Assad raised military salaries days before fleeing Damascus. The money kept arriving because the sponsors mistook the payroll for the army.

The Houthis did not beat a richer enemy by abolishing interest. They beat a fragmented enemy because their own administration, coercion, taxation and recruitment were controlled by one movement. The financial doctrine matters because it tightens that control. It does not turn theology into logistics.

The lesson for Washington and the Gulf is not that Islamism has a magic formula. It is worse: states cannot rent a national army from men whose loyalty is divided between salary, tribe, commander and foreign sponsor.

#Yemen #Afghanistan #Syria #Houthis
#IsraelElections #Knesset #Bennett #Netanyahu

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Bennett’s Bnei Brak Campaign Stop

Naftali Bennett went to Bnei Brak to speak with yeshiva students. The event ended with objects thrown, a staff member struck in the head and the former prime minister escorted from the restaurant.

Police said a passerby threw an object at a public figure and missed. Officers from the Bnei Brak–Ramat Gan station arrested the suspect immediately. Bennett’s Beyachad party gave a fuller account: after about 30 minutes of conversation with the students, a group of political activists arrived, and two objects thrown toward Bennett struck a female staffer in the head.

Magen David Adom treated her at the scene. She was released without needing further medical care, and Bennett later said she was feeling well. Bennett himself was unhurt. The party said the conversation with the yeshiva students had been “good and substantive” before the disturbance.

A magistrate initially extended the suspect’s detention through Monday. The Tel Aviv District Court accepted his appeal and shortened it by a day, ordering his release on Sunday while the investigation continues.

Bennett said he would keep holding meetings across the country. That is the correct answer to a bottle or salt shaker thrown in a restaurant. Bnei Brak did not become a political no-go zone. It became another campaign stop where Israel’s conscription argument left the panel discussion and entered the dining room.

#IsraelElections #Bennett #BneiBrak #Politics

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Hormuz, Paid in Advance

Iran offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz after six days. First, the United States would halt military operations, lift its naval blockade, ease oil sanctions and release at least $12 billion in frozen Iranian assets. Tehran’s sequence was simple: Washington moves first, then the oil route opens.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi presented the proposal in New York through Qatari mediators. It called for a regional ceasefire, including Lebanon and Yemen, followed by a seven-day sequence. Washington would meet Iran’s conditions during the first days. Iran would reopen Hormuz on day six. Nuclear talks would begin on day seven.

Araghchi said shipping could not return to normal by decree after Iran had been bombed, threatened with annihilation and subjected to a naval blockade. Tehran closed the route because its own routes were closed.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had rejected the offer and told aides he expected U.S. attacks on Iran to resume after the November midterm elections. Trump says Iran wants a deal because it is “losing so badly,” while presenting the U.S. blockade as control of Hormuz.

Pezeshkian says Iran is ready for nuclear talks but will not accept what CBS translated as “bullying or coercion.” He also told Al Jazeera that Iran no longer trusts talks with Washington because previous rounds brought sanctions and military action.

That leaves the Iranian president asking why he should meet Trump if an agreement can be signed and then ignored.

Iran treats the Strait as leverage against a blockade. Washington wants the Strait open before it offers Iran anything. Both sides say they want negotiations. Their opening positions are built to make the other side surrender first.

#Iran #Hormuz #Trump #Nuclear

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The CDC’s Managed Decline

The CDC has gone from 9,279 employees in March 2025 to 6,683 in May 2026: a 28 percent fall in 14 months.

Washington did not merely cut a public-health agency. It kept the agency’s logo, stripped out its capacity and placed political supervision where scientific judgment used to sit.

The first Trump administration cuts removed 18 percent of the workforce. Retirements, resignations and continuing hiring limits pushed the loss further.

The National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion fell from 968 employees to 501, a 48 percent reduction.

Centers responsible for emerging and zoonotic diseases, respiratory disease, HIV and sexually transmitted infections, workplace safety and injury prevention all lost staff.

The management structure followed the same logic. Of the 11 CDC center directors in place in March 2025, only one remained by September 2026, according to the New York Times.

Acting directors fill positions that once belonged to senior public-health leaders. The agency has deployed roughly 100 staff members to the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo. During the 2014 West Africa outbreak, it sent about 2,000.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s political appointees now review communications and direct scientists toward projects outside ordinary CDC practice.

A no-bid contract worth $362,000 went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to examine whether vaccination during pregnancy causes autism, using money from a program that supplies free vaccines to roughly half of U.S. children. The premise has been rejected by numerous studies.

The consequence is visible before the next emergency arrives. State and local health departments once received answers from CDC grant officers in less than a day.

The response time has risen to more than 10 days after staffing cuts left three project officers where there had been 20.

Vaccine advisers have not met since December because of litigation, and the agency has not issued updated respiratory-vaccine recommendations for the coming season.

Kennedy talks about rebuilding trust in public health while the institution that produces public-health guidance is hollowed out, politically screened and sent to investigate his preferred theories.

That is not a reform program. It is a controlled demolition with a wellness slogan.

#CDC #PublicHealth #RFKJr #UnitedStates

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Ireland Plays, Then Boycotts the Ritual

Ireland will play Israel on Sunday in Debrecen, Hungary. Goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu will not. The squad voted by a “significant majority” to fulfill the fixture, then decided that handshakes, pennants and ordinary pre-match politeness were apparently too much football.

Bazunu withdrew from the squad, saying participation would be wrong because of his personal conviction that “the killing of innocent people is wrong.” He was the only player to leave the team. Reports that seven other players had also refused to play were not borne out by the Football Association of Ireland’s statement or by manager Heimir Hallgrímsson, who said the rest of the squad trained.

The Ireland players will wear black armbands “in recognition of all lives lost in the conflict.” They will not take part in some elements of the pre-match ceremony, will not exchange pennants or shake hands with Israeli players, and will suspend media duties for the rest of the international window. The FAI and players also plan to donate match fees and proceeds from Ireland’s October 1 match against Austria to charity.

A collective boycott would have forfeited the match and exposed the association to UEFA sanctions. The players chose a narrower version: play the 90 minutes, reject the ceremony and turn the warm-up into a political statement. UEFA gets its fixture. Ireland gets its protest. Bazunu gets the only act that costs a place on the team.

Israeli midfielder Dor Peretz said Israel would offer handshakes regardless. Coach Ran Ben Shimon said he planned to shake Hallgrímsson’s hand and did not want to “make a big story” out of it. That leaves the Irish squad preparing a gesture meant to deny normality while the Israelis prepare to act normally.

Ireland is not boycotting Israel. It is boycotting the part of football where opponents pretend the match is only football.

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🐓🪓Ben-Gvir’s Prison Theatre

Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the cell of Hassan Salameh, one of Hamas’s highest-profile prisoners, surrounded by masked guards and cameras. He told Salameh: “I want to kill you. I want to execute you.” Then he published the footage himself.

Salameh has been in Israeli custody since 1996 and is serving 48 life sentences for his role in Hamas suicide bombings that year, including attacks on Jerusalem’s No. 18 bus line. Dozens of Israelis were killed in the campaign that followed Israel’s killing of Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash.

Ben-Gvir told Salameh that the prison conditions were his doing and that he had made the prisoner’s life “hell.” He said that if appointed defense minister in the next government, he would work to execute prisoners convicted of killing Israelis and advance “voluntary migration” from Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas called the video a public death threat and said Israel had turned prisons into sites of “direct physical liquidation.” It said the footage would not weaken Salameh or other Palestinian prisoners and renewed its commitment to secure their release.

A minister publicly tells a handcuffed prisoner that he wants to kill him. Hamas broadcasts the threat as proof of Israeli brutality. Each side gets material for its audience. The only person who cannot leave the set is the prisoner in the cell.

#Israel #BenGvir #Hamas #Prisoners

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Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, sat down for an interview with Axel Springer and Matthias Döpfner.

In it, Thiel reflects on good and evil and, quite seriously, argues that the Devil may not be all that bad. At the very least, he’s effective.

The guy genuinely seems to have a thing for Satanism

#Thiel #Palantir #Springer #interview

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52–52, Until the Court Counts

Kan 11’s latest poll gives Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar! 23 seats and Likud 21. Netanyahu’s bloc and the “change” bloc each land on 52. The remaining 16 seats include 12 held by Ra’am and the Joint List, the same two Arab lists the Central Elections Committee has moved to remove from the ballot.

The headline gap between Yashar! and Likud matters inside the opposition. Eisenkot, not Bennett, would lead its largest party. It does not change the government arithmetic. No bloc is near 61. The government depends on a handful of seats, the legal status of the Arab lists and the willingness of parties to sit with one another after election night.

On September 23, the Central Elections Committee voted 18–5, with one abstention, to bar Ra’am. The petitions came from Likud, Otzma Yehudit and the Choosing Life forum of bereaved families. The same 18–5 result barred the Joint List, which combines Hadash, Ta’al and Balad. The Attorney General’s Office opposed both bans, arguing that the evidence did not meet Israel’s demanding legal standard for disqualification.

The committee also barred two individual candidates:

Hadash MK Ofer Cassif, by 19 votes to five with two abstentions. The committee accepted the Likud petition on the ground of alleged support for armed struggle.

Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh, by roughly 30 or 31 votes to four. Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, the committee chair, joined that vote, breaking the customary restraint of chairs in candidate-disqualification cases.

The court must approve a ban on an individual candidate before it takes effect. Parties have to file their own appeals against a ban on their list.

That procedural difference matters: Cassif and Abu Shehadeh reach the Supreme Court automatically; Ra’am and the Joint List must ask it to reverse the committee.

If both lists are ultimately excluded, their seats do not vanish. The Knesset still has 120 seats, and the votes redistribute among lists that pass the 3.25 percent threshold.

A simple proportional redistribution puts each major bloc roughly five or six seats higher, still short of 61. Actual results would depend on Arab turnout, whether Arab voters move to the Democrats or another eligible list, and which smaller parties clear the threshold.

Lower turnout also reduces the raw vote total needed to pass the threshold, raising the relative value of disciplined electorates, especially Haredi and religious-Zionist voters.

The political effect is stranger than the arithmetic. Ra’am can, at least in theory, help a change bloc reach a working arrangement. The Joint List cannot plausibly be the coalition partner of Bennett, Eisenkot and Liberman. Their 12 poll seats therefore look like one coalition resource only from a distance.

Disqualifying Ra’am and the Joint List would remove Likud’s favorite accusation: that the opposition intends to govern through Mansour Abbas.

It would also remove an internal fracture inside the opposition, where Yair Golan is open to Arab participation while Eisenkot, Bennett and Liberman reject it.

That gives the opposition a cleaner story: a Zionist cabinet of the center and moderate right. It especially helps Eisenkot, whose party leads the field but whose coalition has no natural path through the Arab lists.

Netanyahu gets a different benefit. The exclusion fight turns the campaign toward security, loyalty and representation.

Even if the Supreme Court restores the lists, Likud can say the court enabled the coalition it warned about. If the bans stand, Arab turnout may fall and the right’s disciplined base becomes more valuable.

#IsraelElections #Knesset #Raam #Yashar

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Gaza’s Real Estate Comeback

Thousands of Israeli activists, ministers and lawmakers drove toward the Gaza border on Sunday demanding the return of Jewish settlements to the Strip.

They brought housing equipment to the edge of a territory where more than 2 million Palestinians are still supposed to be the population.

The convoy was organized by the Nachala settlement movement. Its leader, Daniella Weiss, said activists were preparing to restore a presence at Nisanit, a northern Gaza settlement dismantled in the 2005 disengagement, as well as elsewhere in the enclave.

Their argument is clean: Israel cannot secure Gaza without settlers inside it.

Activists can drive to the Gaza border. Only the government can provide military control, permits, infrastructure and political cover for a settlement inside Gaza.

Netanyahu has backed what his government calls “voluntary emigration” from Gaza, while calling renewed Jewish settlements there unrealistic.

Defense Minister Israel Katz has said Gaza has no “real solution” without migration.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wants an emigration ministry and a seven-year plan to move 1.86 million Palestinians out, beginning with 250,000 in its first year.

This is the new postwar sequence. First comes “voluntary” departure. Then comes an office to manage it, foreign countries to receive people, incentives for those countries and a timeline for removing almost the entire population.

The settlers arrive last with caravans and a security argument. Nobody calls it expulsion because the paperwork has chosen a nicer word.

Trump’s Gaza plan says no Palestinian will be forced to leave. Netanyahu has refused withdrawal until Hamas is fully disarmed.

The settlement movement does not need to resolve that contradiction. It only needs the army to keep control of enough land while politicians debate whether Gaza’s residents left freely after their homes, jobs, borders and future were removed.

The 2005 disengagement evacuated about 8,000 Israeli settlers and removed 21 settlements from Gaza.

Ben-Gvir named his plan “Disengagement 710” because it promises to reverse the meaning of that word: Gaza without Palestinians, then Gaza with settlers.

#Gaza #Israel #Settlements #BenGvir

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The Warning, the Denial, the Slogan

A report says Egypt warned Israel repeatedly before October 7. Netanyahu says he never spoke to Egypt’s intelligence chief, received no Egyptian warning through Israeli channels and will sue. The statement ends with an election slogan: “It’s either the Right or Palestine.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Abbas Kamel, then head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, delivered at least three warnings about signs of a Hamas attack.

Its sources said Kamel made a secret visit to Israel about 11 days before October 7, then called Netanyahu days before the attack after earlier warnings drew no response.

Egyptian and Emirati warnings reportedly continued until roughly 48 hours before the massacre, without a precise date or scale of attack.

Netanyahu’s response denies the personal connection, not the existence of Egyptian intelligence. His office said Netanyahu neither met nor spoke with Kamel in the months before October 7, and that no Israeli intelligence official passed him an Egyptian warning. Netanyahu also said he never speaks with a foreign intelligence chief without Israeli intelligence counterparts present.

The Emirates now sit inside the same argument. Haaretz reported that Netanyahu asked UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed during their Abu Dhabi meeting to deny an earlier report that he had warned Netanyahu about Yahya Sinwar’s intentions before October 7. The UAE foreign ministry declined to comment.

Ronen Bar says he will sue Netanyahu for defamation and demand disclosure of documents and the prime minister’s meetings with foreign officials. Netanyahu says foreign and hostile actors, including Arab states, are behind “false blood libels.” The dispute is moving toward a courtroom where the records Netanyahu’s office says do not exist may become the central exhibit.

The prime minister’s promised suit against Haaretz over the Emirati warning has not been filed nearly 20 days after he announced it. Likud officials say the claims over the Emirati and Egyptian warnings will be filed together “very soon.” The practical obstacle is familiar: statements made by a prime minister in the course of official duties usually carry immunity from civil suits.

Egypt says it warned. The UAE allegedly says it warned. Netanyahu says nobody warned him.

#Israel #Netanyahu #October7 #Egypt

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The Secret Flight Everyone Could Track

Netanyahu flew to Abu Dhabi, crossed Jordanian and Saudi airspace, met UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed and returned to Israel.

The Shin Bet later filed a censorship complaint against Channel 12 for reporting the trip 49 minutes before the aircraft landed.

The Prime Minister’s Office said the report at 9:38 p.m. endangered Netanyahu, his wife Sara, the operation and personnel on the ground because the plane was still far from Israeli airspace. It landed at 10:27 p.m.

The Shin Bet said the publication exposed operational methods and could endanger future missions; the Mossad called it a serious security threat.

The delegation included Mossad chief David Barnea, National Security Council head Tzachi Hanegbi, military secretary Maj. Gen. Guy Markizano and the Shin Bet’s head of protective security.

The government made the delegation public while arguing that the flight itself had to remain secret.

Flight-tracking data had already placed Netanyahu’s aircraft in Abu Dhabi at 4:13 p.m. local time. A UAE-owned aircraft landed three minutes earlier after departing Riyadh.

A Qatari government aircraft arrived at 4:18 p.m.; an aircraft linked to Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar arrived at 4:28 p.m. The arrivals do not establish a shared meeting or a coordinated operation.

They establish something simpler: Abu Dhabi airport was visible on open-source tracking systems hours before television reported Netanyahu’s return.

The Emirates offered no public account of the Netanyahu meeting.

The visit came as Netanyahu was reportedly seeking a public Emirati denial that Mohammed bin Zayed had warned him before October 7.

The next day, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan visited the UAE.

Israel’s security establishment says Channel 12 exposed a secret method. The method appears to have involved a private aircraft, sovereign airspace and an airport with public flight data.

#Israel #Netanyahu #UAE #Media

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Ghalibaf’s Parliament, Evin’s Filing Cabinet

Iran’s parliament is supposed to supervise the state. Hamid Rasaei, a hardline MP, has just been sent to Evin Prison for accusing the speaker of manipulating parliamentary documents. The institution has found an efficient way to resolve oversight: jail the overseer.

Rasaei began a 10-month sentence on September 27 after the Special Court for Clergy convicted him of “publishing falsehoods with intent to harm others.” The case began with a 2024 article in the hardline weekly 9 Dey, then edited by Rasaei, alleging that Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf had manipulated parliamentary documents. The judiciary said the allegation had not been established.

The sentence arrives during a public conservative feud. Mohammad Mehdi Mohammadi, Ghalibaf’s adviser, accused former president Hassan Rouhani and reformist figures of sending a message to Washington that killing another tier of Iranian commanders and leaders could create conditions for internal change.

Cleric and politician Mohammad Mehdi Mirbagheri answered by accusing Ghalibaf of a “political massacre” of lawmakers and of trying to complete control over the media by imprisoning parliamentary critics.

The Iranian state now offers an elegant constitutional formula: a parliament can challenge the executive, provided its members do not challenge the parliamentary speaker. The court decides whether the documents were manipulated. The speaker’s office decides which accusation becomes a prison sentence.

Outside the chamber, students at Tehran’s Allameh Tabataba’i University protested rising tuition, poor dormitory and food conditions, unemployment and compulsory hijab. Their chants joined the price of food with the price of obedience: “Until the mullah is in a shroud, this country will not be a homeland.”

Ghalibaf’s allies say reformists invited foreign pressure. His critics say he is jailing parliamentarians. Students say the entire clerical order has to go. In Tehran, everyone agrees the country has a problem. The argument is over which cell should hold it.

#Iran #Ghalibaf #Parliament #Evin

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