The Overton Window shifts on Israel [Video]

There is a shift in the “allowed” narrative from the US “conservative” media regarding Mr. Bibi Netanyahu. The images in this piece were captured at about 5:30AM Moscow time by me upon learning what happened over the last 12 hours.

On 1 June, the headlines featured Iran reneging (yet again) on any kind of agreement with the United States, maintaining that the military action taken by Israel in Lebanon constituted exceeding one of Iran’s own stated “red lines”, blocking a peace deal with the USA.

As we can see, President Trump jumped way off the ranch. Even RT reprinted this stunner from Axios:

Trump allegedly accused Netanyahu of endangering US negotiations with Iran and demanded that Israel halt a planned strike on Beirut, in what Axios described as one of the worst calls between the two leaders since Trump returned to office.

“You’re f***ing crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this,” one official summarized Trump’s remarks to Netanyahu. A second source briefed on the call said Trump was “pissed” and yelled at Netanyahu: “What the f*** are you doing?”

The piece remains prominently visible on RT’s splash page, but unfortunately, Roskomnadzor’s latest Internet restriction shenanigans cut off all my VPN use and I can no longer verify the presence of the images below on Fox. Readers will have to check on this on their own.

Still, I was able to get screenshots of what I saw this morning, and one can see these below:

Iranian president resigns as leadership in Tehran remains divided

Kuwait says it intercepted attacks from Iran after the U.S. launched strikes against military sites within Iran on Monday.

So, what have we got here?

We seem to have more evidence for a shift in the “Overton Window”, a theoretical framework that defines what kind of news reporting is “accepted as true” by the readership. For many years, the acceptable range of information in the USA for all things Israel fell along the lines of “Israel is our only ally in the Middle East”, “We are best friends with Israel”, “Bibi Netanyahu is a heroic leader, the right man for the right time…” and things like this.

However, the window has slipped to a different set of views, one increasingly critical of Israel’s leadership, especially that of Bibi Netanyahu, who has been Prime Minister of Israel several times. This began to slip after the October 7th, 2023 Gaza strike against Israel, one which is commonly believed to have been funded or at least supported, by Iran.

At that time, Bibi was so enraged that he became utterly determined to wipe out Hamas to the last person, and he launched a war that utterly destroyed Gaza, killing over 70,000 civilians, many of them, of course, women and children. This has been widely considered a genocide, and though I think this word is hopelessly overused (for effect) most of the time, 70,000 people dead is an unbelievable tragedy.

This conflict was the beginning of the end for Bibi Netanyahu, for in his rage at Gaza he lost a lot of the pretense of being a civilized, cool, rational leader, and became more widely seen as unreliable, anger-driven and emotionally compromised, to put it mildly. This perception got worse for Bibi once the US and Israeli forced joined in Operation Epic Fury. President Trump and his team reached a stopping point. Mr. Netanyahu went on and tried to push Washington into his own fantasy of how to prosecute this conflict.

However, President Trump and the USA appear to be setting their own course, despite the screams and hysteria of AIPAC-paid for pundits, congressmen and senators. The pressures placed on the Trump Administration are often the worst coming from those people who actually claim to support the President.

The US-Iran conflict gets a lot of attention. It also gets a lot of opinion-setting efforts by pundits, everywhere. The ones who speak for Fox News largely insist that the USA is winning this, though the General-for-hire Jack Keane opines several times a day, maybe even several times per hour, that Trump should “finish it”, meaning, go back into Iran and blow everything up. He is not without support, but General Keane is Old Faithful about this narrative line beating into the heads of many Trump-supporting Americans.

The other side is, of course, the “geopolitically educated crowd”, peopled with some Americans who are dissident with regard to the mainstream journalism, but who largely come down with the American left with assessments like “American has LOST” most notably, or “America is losing” in its conflict with Iran.

For what it is worth, it seems that neither side is correct. Not that my opinion carries too much weight right now, but for what it is worth, here goes:

“Is losing”, “lost”, “won”, “is winning” – These terms demonstrate the newsmedia not as a disseminator of information, but as an entertainment business. It recasts the Iran conflict as though it were no more meaningful than a football game. (American football please; I have no truck with that silly European garbage!)

Now that I have your FULL attention…

Keeping with this entertainment-based point of view, we are not done with the spectacle yet. This war is being called like a football game, but the game is somewhere in the third quarter (American football games have four “quarters” of gameplay), and the score is, I think, rather heavily weighted in the American favor, but there is a lot of gameplay left.

Anyone who watches American football knows that this game can sometimes break out very quickly, and a team down by fifty points can sometimes rally and win the game by the end.

Now my assessment is that the United States delivered a very powerful punch to Iran, but the Iranians are tenacious and very motivated. I think their motivation is theologically driven, which gives them tremendous resolve, for they are not just winning a state vs state conflict, they are fighting with the idea that God is using them to secure his victory and the emergence of the last Madhi. This could be wrong, but this theory, portrayed very well through a report some weeks ago on the Jewish News Service (the JEWS!! The JEWS!! – I can hear the screams of outrage now…) that gives this as a quite cogent supposition. Sure, JNS’ piece may or may not be true, but it does offer a very well-connected explanation for everything Iran is doing, actions which seem irrational to American eyes like mine. As someone interested in the view that we are still playing out Sacred History, the exposition is very interesting and makes a lot of sense. It is worth checking out:

Whether or not, Dear Reader, you are able to stomach something offered by the JEWish News Service is your affair, but personally, I don’t really mind. They are in this; they have a right to their point of view.

But to our current story, what President Trump did with Mr. Netanyahu is amazing. How many pundits have been insisting that Trump is a slave to Israel and its concerns? A lot. Good folks too: Tucker Carlson, Megyn, the Redacted couple (the Morris family) and many others. I love all these folks; they usually do a good job.

But with Iran and with Trump, I suggest that they are all tripping over their own feet because they keep trying to call the game when there is still a lot more time to play. This isn’t a wise course, but the pressure on such people to produce content that will draw clicks and views is significant, because that is how they make a living. In this way, they are much the same as the Big News Media houses because they are not providing information, they are providing entertainment and more so, this is a business, not a service.

Not being so involved, I am a bit more free to sit on the sidelines and just watch what goes on. What I see with this story of Trump exploding at Bibi Netanyahu suggests something surprisingly different to the mainstream thought:

President Trump means what he says. He wants peace, and he is no one’s slave in terms of trying to achieve it.

This isn’t the first time Trump has blown up at old Bibi either. This is the third such time in my memory – all three times Trump did so were because Bibi appears fixated on Iran, determined to destroy it, convinced that destroying Iran will be the thing that changes that nation’s ideological basis. President Trump first lit him on fire last year after Operation Midnight Hammer and the Twelve-Day War. He did it again about two weeks ago, with the “Trump set Bibi’s hair on fire” headlines, and now this. Thankfully, Bibi backed down.

The blowups are part of a larger pattern, one that also gets ignored. President Trump has lightened sanctions against Russian oil sales. He has refused to sign legislation to give Ukraine money or weapons. He has said nothing denigrating to or about President Vladimir Putin. He has eschewed the Green Goblin and while there is some American involvement in the Ukrainian theatre, there has been no increase known to me, and there has been a lot of withdrawal. Further, President Trump is leaving Europe increasingly high and dry, having shown that NATO is of no use to the United States.

Does this mean everything is great?

No.

But these bits of information stand against the narrative-shaping efforts of people both on the right and on the left, narratives that use reality only as touchstones for their own purposes. The story that is actually happening does not follow any particular narrative; we don’t know how it is going to end and we don’t know when. The President’s patience with Iran does not appear to be a sign of weakness. What ‘strength’ would work on a nation devoted to an ideology that is not of this world? Caveat: The Iranian’s ideology is certainly incompatible with Orthodox Christianity’s teachings. They cannot both be right. But even so, religious zeal takes people places they would not go otherwise and this cannot be underestimated.

It would seem to me that President Trump offered Iran a great token in his dealings with Mr. Netanyahu. How the Iranians respond to it, assuming Israel indeed stops its activity in Lebanon, is uncertain. My personal guess is they will pause a moment, wait, and then find something else to delay any true deal-making. I do not think Iran’s leadership is close to making a real deal. Distrust of the USA is way too high. But this still serves as a demonstration of President Trump’s intent put into practice to the extent currently possible. With each move like this, Iran may find that its justification to refuse to resolve this conflict gets weaker and weaker.

So, who will win? We will know when it is all done.