Pope Leo XIV condemned the “imperialist occupation of the world” in a mass on Thursday, just days before Easter, in a continuation of his anti-war preachings as the Catholic leader continues to advocate against the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran. “The cross is part of the mission. The imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within; the violence that until now has been the law is…
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As I headed to my local “No Kings” protest on March 28, I tuned in to the livestream of the far right Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to listen to a man who is currently cheering on a war in order to rule as a monarch over my homeland. “Can you imagine Iran going from ‘Death to America’ to ‘God bless America?’” Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, asked the CPAC crowd…
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This story originally appeared in Jacobin on April 01, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.
Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the New Yorker ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.
What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.
The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union —
Austria says it’s banned the U.S. military from using its airspace, adding to a growing list of countries denying requests from the U.S. military amid its joint war on Iran with Israel as President Donald Trump lashes out at allies for refusing direct participation in the atrocities. The Austrian Defense Ministry cited its wartime neutrality policy for the decision. “There have indeed been…
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President Donald Trump gave a primetime televised address Wednesday to discuss the war on Iran, his first since the United States and Israel launched attacks on February 28. Trump gave few clues about when or how the war could end, but he boasted about killing top Iranian leaders and degrading the country’s military. He threatened to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong.”…
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President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vowed to bomb Iran into the “Stone Ages” in concerning statements on Wednesday night harkening to Vietnam War-era atrocities, as the U.S. and Israel carry out strikes on life-supporting infrastructure in Iran. In his prime time remarks to the U.S. public on Wednesday night, Trump said that, over the next two to three weeks, the U.S.
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