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By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
When pirates fall out over their loot, and one tips the Black Spot to another, that’s the summons to give up the map of Treasure Island with the location of their buried treasure; or die.
The Black Spot, scrawled on a page torn from a bible, was the summons which opens Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883); causes the fatal stroke of Billy Bones, the pirate who kept the map of the buried treasure hidden in his sea chest; and led on to the adventure which millions of children have read, and I continue to read today. I do this because the story of the Black Spot foretells the future when evil men get desperate to the point of killing each other.
When American and Israeli naval and air forces combined on February 28 to deliver their biblical Black Spot on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and members of his national security council in Teheran, killing them all, the attackers failed to capture the treasure which had been their purpose. That was the overthrow of the Iranian state and the destruction of that state’s will and its capacity to inflict comparable destruction on Israel.
The evidence of the US and Israeli failure on February 28 and in the fifteen days of the war since then, is that retaliation by Iran has reduced both US and Israeli missile defences, broken through dozens of times, and on March 1 and again on March 9 – according to this uncorroborated report [3] with simulations, projections, and guesswork, from Minute 5 — targeted the Israeli military base of Sdot Mikha, near Tel Aviv. That is the site of Israel’s nuclear warhead bunkers, vertical launch silos, and mobile truck launchers of the Jericho-2 and Jericho-3 missiles [4].
Whether or not these were actual hits or near-misses by the Iranians, or calculated warnings, and whether or not Sdot Mikha was in fact the target, the outcome now, after fifteen days, is the consensus of many sources: Iran’s missile launch capacity and munition stocks have survived and now threaten to inflict on Israel a level of destruction which neither Sdot Mikha’s defences nor the Israeli state’s, can combat, repulse, survive intact.
What happens next? The answer is not a fresh one. It was demonstrated a year ago during the four-day Indian Operation Sindoor against Pakistan between May 5 and May 10, 2025. According to the Indian recounting, it was the Indian detection of Pakistani moves of nuclear warheads from bunker storage to missile deployment which triggered Indian strikes to disable Pakistan’s military command-and-control systems and expose as defenceless all targets, including nuclear missile launch sites, and to paralyse their operational control and guidance.
At that point, according to Indian sources and others, the Pakistan military command asked US Vice President JD Vance to arrange a ceasefire. That’s to say, a pause, not an armistice nor an end-of-war agreement. This was what the Indian government accepted.
Whether or not the Indian account is to be fully or partially accepted, the lesson is plain, ominously plain for now. As the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi has repeated in his US television network interviews, no humanitarian pause, no ceasefire will be accepted for negotiation; only a complete end of war agreement [5].
On the Israeli side, however, the failure of their war aims leaves Israel’s military capacities, together with those of the US bases and air defence systems in the Middle East, in much worse condition than they were when Israel and the Trump Administration proposed, and Iran accepted, the ceasefire of June 24, 2025, or the terms negotiated with Aragchi by Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Muscat and Geneva last month, between February 6 and February 17, 2026.
“That race to a nuclear bomb, President Trump will never allow it,” Peter Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, said [6] in a briefing with General Daniel Caine on March 10, “not now, not ever, not on our watch.” Three days later, in another briefing with Caine, Hegseth repeated [7]: “We’re on plan to defeat, destroy, disable all of their meaningful military capabilities at a pace the world has never seen before.” Asked if “Iran [is] expected to meet demands of both countries [Israel] or just the US? And what are those demands?” Hegseth replied: “we’re proud to partner with the incredible capabilities the Iranians — or excuse me, the Israelis have, but our objectives are our objectives. So when those are met, as we meet those, we’ll set the — we’ll set the tempo of when those are met.”
The implication of the reporter’s question, and also of Hegseth’s answer, is that Israel may decide to escalate to achieve its war objectives at the same time as the US has decided to declare its war objectives have been achieved, cease fire, and withdraw. However, if Israel, or at least Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (lead image, right) and his associates, are on their own race to using their nuclear bomb, then that is a course of action the Trump Administration “will never allow”.
What will happen – is happening now – if Netanyahu tells Trump that in the present circumstances he has no choice but to escalate to launching a Jericho missile attack on Iran with nuclear warheads numbering from at least 20 to as many as 120?
Last May, when that step on the nuclear escalation ladder was reached in Islamabad, Washington and Delhi, this is what the Indian chief of the Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, said [8] happened next: “There is a lot of space before the nuclear threshold is crossed. There is a lot of signalling before that…The most rational people are people in uniform when conflict takes place. That’s because they understand that conflict can swing either way. In every step which happened…I found both sides displaying a lot of rationality in their thoughts as well as their actions. Why should we assume that in the nuclear domain there will be irrationality on someone else’s part?” For analysis, click [9],
In the present war – just as it was in the genocide of Gaza since October 2023 — it is unclear how much difference in what Chauhan called rational calculation there may be between Netanyahu, his civilian advisors and political allies, and the Israeli military chiefs –or if there is measurable difference in rationality among them at all.
If there is such a difference, and if it also exists between the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Israel-First group around Trump, and between the Pentagon (perhaps the CIA too) and the Israelis, who will there be to tear out the page of a bible, draw the Black Spot, and put it directly into Netanyahu’s hand, or through the ceiling of his bunker?
The Black Spot isn’t always a death sentence that cannot be survived, not even in the original Treasure Island. Netanyahu may have disappeared [10] mysteriously for several days; he may be alive today to drink coffee with both his five-fingered hands intact [11]. But has Netanyahu been given a warning from the White House or from his own men, which was so surprising that, like the pirate Billy Bones in Treasure Island, he disappeared from sight, took to his bed, played dead?
For discussion with Rasheed Muhammad on his podcast The Red Pill Diaries, click to watch when it begins later today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_moCr7h66Kk [12]
[13]Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_moCr7h66Kk [12] And for more from Red Pill Diaries, click on the archive: https://www.youtube.com/@TheRedPillDiariesOfficial/streams [14]
[15]Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJcTkVTqybQ [5]
[16]Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvwUnzpm5gM [3] This Youtube platform, calling itself Money Hand, appeared just two weeks ago; it is drawing modest audiences; the presenter, speaking with an American accent, is anonymous. Other video platforms, named “Blackbox Money and Collapse Codex” and “Finance Atlas”, also provide in similar style and with the same presenter, very recent productions. They share in common a pro-Iran, anti-US, anti-Israel orientation. The main AI systems, Chat GPT, Grok, Google, and Deepseek, cannot identify the source, financing, or nationality of these videos.
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[18]Source: https://x.com/netanyahu/status/2033190035764232360 [11]Video analysts and web commenters claim that this is an AI fabrication, pointing as evidence to the failure of the Netanyahu figure to swallow after apparently sipping from the coffee cup, and to the level of the liquid remaining c