Ashley Rindsberg on X - "Wikipedia's article on Khamenei is a master class on narrative framing. The all-important lead section makes no reference to the fact that Khamenei murdered up to 80,000 of his own citizens in a two-day massacre. Instead, it:
+ Calls him a *pragmatic* hardliner
+ Elevates him as a religious figure
+ Softens the resistance into "faced many protests"
The only reference we have to Khamenei's numerous crimes against humanity is framed by "critics viewed"—not as actual objective fact, but as bias. This is carefully crafted narrative positioning. It looks and sounds neutral, which is precisely what makes it so effective."
🇮🇴WilliamTheBonqueror on X - "Being drafted to fight Israels wars is handmaid's tale for groypers"
Frank McCormick on X - "The “Israel made us do it” argument is for podcast bros too stupid to imagine U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East that have nothing to do with Israel. To be sure, Israel benefits from our involvement in defanging Iran, and yes, we can debate how close Iran was to arming its 2,500 km range missiles with nuclear warheads, but there is no debate about how catastrophic it would be to allow Iran to reach a point where it could plunge the entire region into chaos with a few well-placed missile strikes, not to mention its growing drone capabilities. Again, I’m asking you to forget the existential threat to Israel for a moment and consider the national security risk presented by an anti-American Islamic theocracy aggressively attacking us through proxies while possessing the capability to plunge the U.S. and the world into a recession. Most people have no clue that nearly 20 million barrels per day, about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption, move through the Strait of Hormuz, that 20% of global LNG trade also transits Hormuz, or that the Suez Canal handles 12–15% of global trade. Iran has a history of pushing the region toward the brink, including by arming proxies that attacked our troops and bases, while fielding missiles reported capable of a 2,500 km range. Now imagine that same behavior backed by a nuclear deterrent or longer-range delivery systems. That would mean more proxy escalation, more coercion of shipping, higher odds of miscalculation, and our economy taking a major shock. That is the definition of a national security threat. It may be comforting to believe we can simply withdraw from the Middle East and let events play out without consequences for our economy or the standard of living we’re unwilling to sacrifice, but the real world does not work that way. Maturity means accepting that. Strive to understand the world as it is, not as you wish it were. Accept that there are no perfect solutions, only trade-offs."
Jay Hubbard | Facebook - "4D CHESS??? THIS TIME, I ACTUALLY AGREE.
---------------------------------
Honestly, that feels weird to say, because I usually roll my eyes anytime Trump-fanatics claim he's playing 4D chess. But when it comes to foreign policy, that truly is what he's been doing. How do you weaken Cuba without firing a shot? Turn off their oil supply from Venezuela. How do you rein in Venezuela without starting a full scale war? Arrest their president and let his successor know it'll happen to them if they don't play ball. How do you work towards peace in Gaza? Weaken what's left of Hamas by decapitating the source of their funding. How do you leverage Russia in the hopes of forcing them into peace negotiations with Ukraine? You isolate them by defenestrating their allies (Syria - check, Cuba - weakened, Venezuela - check, Iran - weakened). How do pursue possible regime change without starting a full scale ground war? Killing the Supreme Leader on day one of the attacks, including his successor, and sinking a hefty portion of the navy on day two, after previously crashing their economy and currency via sanctions. All this adds up to a weakened and isolated Russia, who may now lose the source of their high-tech war drones (Iran). Contrary to what Tucker Carlson and other prominent leftists say, rather than this leading to another "never-ending-war," these efforts might actually culminate in a leveraged peace agreement. If it doesn't, fine, it'll still have succeeded at severely blunting the world's main aggressors while re-aligning previously non-committed middle-eastern countries AGAINST Iran. (Which is good for us) Iran's strategy has been to lash out in desperation by striking their neighbors. Their retaliatory strikes have hit Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, and the United Arab Emirates, NOT "just Israel." If their goal was to push those countries towards liking us and away from defending them, great job idiots. Trump's aim is peace through leverage, rather than peace through begging and bribery. I know that may concern some people who are still wary of W. Bush's penchant for nation building, but Trump's military successes were achieved WITHOUT an occupying ground force. Each move he's made in the past year has positioned us to better exploit the next move he made, all leading up to a world where our enemies are isolated, demoralized, diminished, destroyed, or dead. GOOD. People need to start giving him credit for how well he's played this."
Al Jazeera Breaking News on X - "BREAKING: Qatar announces arrest of Iranian IRGC sleeper cells"
AG on X - "It has been incredible watching Al Jazeera, which is essentially run by Qatar, not only directly dismiss Tucker Carlson's invented conspiracy about Mossad bombers, but also report on the arrest of IRGC sleeper cells. All while Tucker was trying to sell his audience on the idea that Iran wasn't really targeting the Gulf states, and Israel is behind everything."
Mike Bales 🫡🇺🇸 on X - "Democrats are suddenly worried that Iranian terror sleeper cells will now attack the USA from within—the same Democrats who let them all in, the same Democrats who want you to be unarmed."
Commentary Donald J. Trump Posts From Truth Social on X - "🚨For those of you who were not around in 1979, here is how it all started when the radical Mullahs overtook the Iranian people and took hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran."
Wayback Machine - "No, 'it' started in the 1953 coup. The CIA, along with British intelligence, orchestrated a coup that deposed Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh on August 19, 1953. Known as Operation Ajax, the plot was designed to restore absolute power to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, following Mossadegh's nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which threatened Western interests. "
Eli Lake on X - "This is an ignorant talking point repeated by people who want to sound like they know the history. Mossedegh had dissolved the Majles, replaced the army leadership and Supreme Court and closed newspapers by the time the Shah used his constitutional authority to fire him."
soonerhokie on X - "IIRC correctly from your podcast, wasn't most of this based on serial fabulist Kermit Roosevelt? And, while his memoir may have proved consequential in 1979, his actual actions were far less consequential?"
Emily Thornberry on X - "Wars are only ever resolved through negotiation. It’s tragic that calm heads did not prevail in the US when the Omani Foreign Minister said, just hours before the bombing started, that a peace deal was within reach. And now hotheads in Iran think it’s a good idea to bomb Oman."
Robert Lyman 🇺🇦 on X - "Military historian here: this is a widespread but erroneous assumption, propagated by people who don’t understand war. Wars are won by winning them, in most cases by bringing about the military defeat of the enemy. And, by the way, if you think that Iran was going to give up its millenarian fantasies because of a deal with Oman, you don’t understand jihad and shouldn’t be the chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee."
James Woods on X - "This is how the Washington Post eulogized the dirt bag who murdered 40,000 innocent civilians this month. This is not satire: "With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor, and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic Western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s 'Les Misérables.' ... Some Iranians who knew Ayatollah Khamenei before he became supreme leader described him as a 'closet moderate'' ..."
Hans Mahncke on X - "While this paragraph is probably the worst, the entire Washington Post obituary of Khamenei, which is really just a hagiography, is riddled with astonishing distortions and absurd relativism. It claims that he was high minded in making the deal with Obama, that his doubts were totally justified because Trump undid the deal, that he would have been a responsible leader if not for Trump, that he only wanted nuclear energy and not weapons, that he never aimed to wipe Israel off the map but only sought a peaceful transition to the “Palestinians,” and on and on it goes. It is so spectacularly bad and proves, once again, that Jeff Bezos can fire as many Washington Post stenographers as he likes and nothing will change, because that place is corrupt to its very core."
Socialists for an Officers Coup Against Trump on X - "My statement on recent events: I am calling on the US military to declare martial law, arrest Trump for treason and round up every Israeli citizen in the US"
HowlingMutant on X - "These are the same people who think it’s a violation of human rights to deport an illegal alien"
Frank J. Fleming on X - "So leftist think anyone can murder CEOs in the street if they don’t like them but freak out when a murderous dictator gets blown up? They’re just really bad people."
memetic_sisyphus on X - "There’s only one thread that ties progressive beliefs together and that’s hatred for the United States and her people."
Ian O'Doherty on X - "I still find it baffling how many Irish and Western Leftists are throwing their allegiance behind the same regime that killed all the Leftists when they took over. That's a form of cognitive dissonance I genuinely cannot understand. Can they even explain it?"
Iran Military Daily on X - ""It is better to die STANDING than to Live on your knees." ~Che Guevara"
shevereshtus on X - "Fun fact: he was captured because he threw away his gun and shouted ‘Please don’t shoot I’m Che Guevara I’m worth far more to you alive than dead’ to the Bolivians he had just attempted to murder."
Ben Rhodes on X - "Among all the risks, one certainty is that U.S. taxpayers are spending tens of billions of dollars on something they overwhelmingly oppose."
Marc Thiessen 🇺🇸❤️🇺🇦🇹🇼🇮🇱 on X - "Speaking of spending tax dollars on something Americans overwhelmingly oppose, you sent Iran planes loaded with pallets of hard currency which they used to fund terror across the Middle East. Sit this one out."
Ben Rhodes was nicknamed "Hamas" after all
Liam Out Loud on X - "Here's why leftists are suddenly defenders of Iranian sovereignty. Within a worldview that adheres to objective morality, it would not make sense for leftists to support the Iranian regime. Women were beaten for showing their hair. Protesters have been jailed, tortured, and killed. Gay people face prison or worse. Silence. Now Trump strikes the regime, and we're supposed to be upset about Iranian sovereignty. This disparity in outrage doesn't make sense through an objective moral lens, but it does through a leftist worldview of power. In their view, Western patriarchal capitalist Christian nations are the cause of all evil, while everyone else is a helpless victim. Anything that harms the cause of all evil is good. Anything that helps the cause of all evil is bad. This is leftist morality in a nutshell. Herbert Marcuse called it "liberating tolerance": tolerate movements that weaken the West, be intolerant of those that strengthen it. Even Michel Foucault openly cheered the Iranian Revolution—not because he loved Islamism, but because he saw it as a revolt against Western hegemony. For leftists, morality is not universal but strategic. If a regime opposes the West, it's complicated, nuanced, and contextualized. If the West opposes any non-Western nation, it's imperial aggression. That's the entire moral architecture. Without double standards, they'd have no standards at all."
Pope Leo XIV on X - "I am following with deep concern what is happening in the Middle East and in Iran during this tumultuous time. Stability and peace are not achieved through mutual threats, nor through the use of weapons, which sow destruction, suffering, and death, but only through reasonable, sincere, and responsible dialogue."
leekern on X - "Thanks Pope. You put it so reasonably. I’m sure the Islamic fundamentalists who want to cut off people’s heads for Allah will sit down for a cup of tea and a nice old chinwag with some biscuits to resolve this like gentlemen after reading your tweet."
Wasson Watch Co. on X - "If you go to Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex )'s page, and search "Iran" all of his "appeals" seem to be about moderating or holding back the response of the US as it defends itself from Iran. Never direct appeals to Iran to "think things through" and "abandon the madness of their nuclear program" or maybe "stop chanting death to Israel and America." Nothing about Iran slaughtering their own civilian population in the streets. Makes you wonder..."
hasanabi on X - "if there’s any “terrorism” that happens on us soil now, you will never be able to convince me nor millions of other americans that it wasn’t israel and america conducting it together to rally the masses to support an insanely unpopular war."
Max K on X - "They *always* push this line, it’s such sinister bollocks. If jihadists only attack us ‘because of Israel and America’ why are they putting Yazidi girls, with nothing to do with Israel or the West, in cages and burning them to death? Why are they slaughtering Pakistani atheists, and wiping out hundreds of thousands of African Christians, and bombing British schoolgirls, and murdering French cartoonists and teachers, and machine gunning Hindu tourists and Sri Lankan kids, and tossing gays off of buildings, and shooting Jews in synagogues…they do this stuff because they are part of a religious-fundamentalist death cult. They want to kill us, they always have, and they always will. Everybody knows this. The relentlessness with which Islamo-leftists seek to spin all of this so that the real enemy here isn’t the jihadists themselves, or their ideology, but US - for RESPONDING to the jihadists’ aggression, is one of the most nauseating trends in contemporary politics. Truly sick."
The greater game: Trump’s ultimate target in this war is China - "The United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping’s decade-long project to build an alternative to the American-led order died with him. For years, Beijing quietly assembled a network of dictatorships and client states designed to blunt American power. Iran supplied China with cheap oil and kept Washington bogged down in the Middle East. Russia waged war on Ukraine with Chinese materiel support, a gamble that was supposed to cement a powerful anti-western axis but has instead bled Moscow into dependence on Beijing. Regional proxies from Lebanon to Gaza added just enough chaos to stop Washington focusing on China. The Chinese Communist party (CCP) propped up Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela, too, as it funnelled narcotics and other ills into America. That network has now suffered damage so severe that no trade deal – no matter how many soybeans China agrees to buy from the US, or how many Boeing jets it orders – can disguise the devastation. And at the end of this month, Xi must sit across from Donald Trump, the man who greenlit the strike on the Ayatollah in Tehran and the seizure of Maduro in Caracas... China is the largest buyer of Iranian oil on Earth. It imports more than 70 per cent of the crude it burns, and Iran has been one of its cheapest suppliers. Khamenei’s death throws the terms of that arrangement into doubt and the US is now threatening tariffs on any country that trades with Tehran. Beijing has yet to find a coherent response. I spent the better part of the past decade watching this network take shape, reporting from North Korea, Xinjiang, Turkey, Russia and Ukraine as the architecture grew. I walked the streets of Kashgar documenting a surveillance state being built in real time, and sat with Uighur exiles in Istanbul who told me what it was like to live inside it. Xi built a coalition, loose and transactional and deniable, that would give China strategic depth if it ever needed to withstand serious American pressure. The line I heard constantly when I was in China, and still read in CCP sources today, is that the West is declining. Xi built his foreign policy on that premise. By most visible metrics, he was succeeding. Trade between China and Russia hit a record $245 billion in 2024, and Beijing was flooding Moscow with the microelectronics and drone components that kept Russia’s war machine running. Beijing overtook the combined West as the largest trading partner of the Gulf oil states, long an American sphere of influence. Every-where Xi looked, the system was transforming in his favour. But even as the trade figures climbed, the foundations beneath them were giving way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago has now cost it more than a million military casualties by most credible estimates – losses on a scale unseen in European warfare since the second world war. Moscow has gone from a partner capable of projecting power to a dependant surviving on Chinese goodwill. Iran’s regional proxies were wiped out, with Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, and Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh killed in response to the horrors of 7 October. Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, was toppled. And now Khamenei, the linchpin of Tehran’s revolutionary state, is dead... China’s 25-year partnership with Tehran, signed with fanfare in 2021, promised $400 billion in investment. Almost none of the money arrived, because it didn’t need to. What China took from Iran was oil. An average of nearly 1.4 million barrels a day in 2024 and 2025, according to tanker-tracking data from the commodities firm Kpler, often bought at $8 to $10 per barrel below market price, through a shadow fleet operating outside western sanctions. Now Xi faces a problem he cannot talk his way out of. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning called the killing a ‘grave violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security’. But the Gulf states are watching what Beijing does, not what it says. And so far Beijing has offered Tehran no materiel support, no weapons, nothing that would cost China anything. Beijing’s own spending reveals which side it has chosen. Last year, Iran received almost no investment from Belt and Road, Beijing’s flagship programme for building infrastructure and buying influence abroad. Saudi Arabia received nearly $20 billion in contracts. Xi cannot say so out loud but the money has moved to Riyadh, and Tehran gets little of it... What Xi has lost is harder to replace than a trading partner. Iran kept Washington tied down in the Middle East, unable to focus on China. That was extraordinarily useful, and it cost Beijing almost nothing... Xi arrives boxed in on every front. He cannot defend Iran without alienating the Gulf states. He cannot abandon Iran without appearing weak to the remaining members of the coalition he spent a decade assembling. He needs a trade deal to stabilise China’s economy, which is slowing far faster than Beijing admits. Official figures claim 5 per cent growth, but Rhodium Group, a widely cited independent research firm, puts the real number at closer to 2.5 to 3 per cent. He needs Trump in a generous mood. The deepest damage, though, is something Xi cannot afford to acknowledge: what losing Iran means for Taiwan. Most analysts think about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in military terms. Can Beijing’s forces actually land there and take the island? But invading Taiwan would also trigger western sanctions far worse than any-thing imposed on Russia. And after what happened to Khamenei, Beijing knows that escalation does not end with sanctions. To survive all that, China needs countries willing to sell it oil off the books, help it move money past western banks and provide political cover. Iran and Russia were supposed to be those countries. China could still invade Taiwan, but not with any confidence that the CCP would survive the consequences. Some will argue that makes Xi more dangerous, that a leader who sees his options shrinking might act before they disappear. But everything he is doing points the other way. He is shoring up his economy, not preparing for war. The summit will be conducted in the language of trade. Iran will hang over every session, but don’t expect that in the communiqué. Every government from Tokyo to Riyadh will read the subtext. Xi will sit across from Trump and speak the language of a strong and ascendant China. The image is no longer the reality."
Trigganometry on X - "𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐀'𝐒 $𝟏𝟎𝟎 𝐁𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐈𝐑𝐀𝐍 𝐃𝐈𝐒𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑: Every Iranian missile aimed at the Middle East carries Chinese fingerprints. The components. The guidance systems. The technical expertise. All from Beijing. Peter Schweizer just exposed the hidden axis arming Iran—and how Trump's strikes obliterated China's strategic position overnight. 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐁𝐞𝐢𝐣𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐨 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰: China provided their most advanced air defense systems to Iran. U.S. and Israeli forces decimated them completely. Over $100 billion in Chinese investments in Iran—mostly loans Beijing will never recover. Iran and Venezuela? That was 20% of China's oil supply, bought at massive discounts, paid without U.S. dollars. Trump just eliminated both sources in one move. 𝐍𝐨𝐰 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐚 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐚 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐨: Forced back to global oil markets. Paying in American dollars. 40% of their oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz—which Trump now effectively controls. Any move on Taiwan? Catastrophic for Beijing. Remember 2020 when China threatened to withhold PPE during Covid? Remember their rare earth threats? Trump just reversed every bit of leverage they had. China armed Iran with 5,000 missiles by 2027, potentially 10,000 by decade's end. Precision guidance systems that transformed inaccurate rockets into weapons capable of striking downtown Abu Dhabi. They industrialized Iran's capacity to hold the Middle East at gunpoint. Then Trump destroyed it all. Spring negotiations with President Xi are coming. Trump's sitting at the table holding every single card."
Bin Xie on X - "Chinese are now leaving Iran like crazy, the price of a one-way ticket to Beijing has gone up to 3M Yuan ($425,000). What are the Chinese so afraid of? According to a Taiwanese news, they have done too many bad things in Iran (such as helping Iranian regime to crack down the protests), Iranian people hate them."
David Walpiri on X - "Some 80% of Iran’s illegal oil exports are delivered to the Chinese market. That's 13.4% to 14% of China's total seaborne crude oil imports. First Venezuela. Now Iran."
Michael Ron Bowling on X - "If China does not have access to discounted oil it becomes much harder to subsidize its massive fishing fleet. Which in turn will protect the environment and help countries being pillaged by China's distant waters fishing fleets."
James Clark 📈📉¯\_(ツ)_/¯ on X - "Spare a thought for all the Western NGOs that will go silent over the next few months as they run out of funding but can't quite explain why it stopped being paid."
The Atlantic on X - "The U.S. bombardment of Iran was launched without a real plan for the Iranian people, @anneapplebaum argues: “We don’t have any tools to communicate with the Iranians, and we don’t have any tools to help build a legitimate state” determined by them."
John Ʌ Konrad V on X - "“What really disturbs me is… we don’t have any tools to build up a legitimate state” Translation: Trump’s not allowing a single NGO to grift"
liel leibovitz on X - "Hi, I'm part of the group of people who have been getting everything wrong for the last 70 years. And now that an American president exercised American power and won, I'm very troubled. Please read my essay in the magazine for fellow whiny losers."
Trust the Experts, even though they've always been wrong! Because "qualifications" are more important than achievements
DataRepublican (small r) on X - "Working on a write-up. Whatever your feelings on the Iranian strikes are... Note that the "our democracy" crowd who has interfered in hundreds of elections around the globe and waged endless wars is opposing the removal of Ali Khamenei, whose regime massacred 36,500 people. The "rules-based international order" doesn't actually care about democracy. They had a system with Khamenei. They knew what he wanted: sanctions relief, recognition, a nuclear deal, regional influence. Their entire identity depends on existing power over those channels. Their track record in creating actual democracies is awful. But they sure do have a good track record in installing NGOs that waste endless amounts of money on "democracy." Oh, by the way, @anneapplebaum is one of the architects behind the "Soul of the Nation" Biden speech which labeled half of America as threats to the Republic."
Adam Mossoff on X - "The same media that explicitly ignored the mass protests in Iran for first few weeks and then claimed it couldn't cover the regime's mass murder of these protestors because it didn't have reporters in Iran to verify the facts is back to its Hamas playbook from the October 7th War in Gaza. @AP *immediately* publishes propaganda claim by Islamic regime of Iran of a "strike" on an elementary school. Just like with the false Hamas propaganda that AP told its readers was fact with the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion caused by a failed Hamas rocket launch at Israel, there is video evidence that the elementary school in Iran was hit by an Iranian missile that failed after launch. You can't hate AP enough."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "This is an interesting example of "how the political left do." This is a tragic case, sure. But, in the context of (1) an almost totally and rather gloriously victorious war against (2) an Ayatollah-led state that just butchered 30,000-60,000 people while raping a bunch of young female fighters, probably 50-60% of all MSM coverage I have seen has focused on this one - prrrrobable - US mistake. That is clearly not how a sane, unbiased person would cover this conflict. But, it IS how fairly mainstream American sources ("A People's History," etc) cover ALL of our history. And, that is important to remember."
Goldie Ghamari | گلسا قمری 🇮🇷 on X - "‼️IMPORTANT The Islamists, Jihadis, and Balestinians (aka everyone who supports the terrorist Islamic Republic occupying Iran) are claiming that a civilian school was "randomly attacked" by USA and/or Israel. This isn't Gaza and we Iranians are not a bunch of savage inbred Jihadis who lie about what's going on. You can't make up lies about us or our country. This school was being used as a military base, and if the news about the children is true, that's because the terrorist Islamic Regime occupying Iran was using them as human shields. They are a murderous death cult. Every single civilian casualty in this conflict is because of the terrorist Islamic Regime, no one else. It's incredibly shameful that supporters of the terrorist Islamic Regime are trying to use this incident to smear the allies and liberators of Iranians: USA and Israel. Here's the truth about the situation with the school: "What I found is that the school was built on this land, which belongs to the IRGC Navy and all the branches of the Shajare Tayyiba schools in all the cities belong to them. The Seyyed al-Shohada Cultural Complex of the IRGC, near Mahdi Town, has several buildings with a football field, an administrative section, and a specialized clinic. Even the IRGC Medical Command is there. The school building is located at the end of Resalat Dahm Alley, at the top of the picture, and you could say it is part of the complex. Its name is not even registered on Google Maps. The strange thing for me is that its address was announced everywhere as Dahm Corner, meaning Sarkocheh. I am waiting to see if more buildings from there were hit or just that building. I sincerely hope that the statistics that the IRGC officials are giving are wrong and false and that the children are safe... I am very sad for the children.""
