Togs's Place.Com.: Mehdi Unpacks Israel's REAL Goal for Iran and Lebanon by Mehdi Hasan and Prem Thakker

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Mehdi Unpacks Israel's REAL Goal for Iran and Lebanon by Mehdi Hasan and Prem Thakker

Click on Mehdi Hasan and Prem Thakker answer your questions on the latest stories on the Iran War, Donald Trump, Gaza, Lebanon, and much more.

Donald Trump is losing the war he started. But he’s doubling down… Why? Well, there’s Epstein, and there’s the midterm elections, and there’s the fact that Israel isn’t backing down. And when it comes to Israel, what exactly is Benjamin Netanyahu’s aim here? “I think his goal is ‘Greater Israel,’” says Mehdi to Prem on ‘Ask the Editor,’ Zeteo’s live show where the two answer subscriber questions on Substack and Youtube every Monday. Watch the full video above to hear Zeteo’s editor-in-chief break down…

How Trump is “gaslighting” and “bullying” us about the Iran war – and how this is the one time “it’s not working”
What’s happening on the ground in Lebanon
How Trump could be planning to avoid the midterm elections (!)
The long-term impact on US relations with the Gulf

…and much more.

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John/Togs Tognolini

A major part of journalism is good research, and I've been doing that with reactivating my blog Togs's Place.Com. With its reactivation, I’ve been posting YouTube vodcasts and other podcasts. I've gone through Minns's Police Riot on Monday, 9-2-26. I was at the Gadigal/Sydney Herzog Rally and I breathed in the Capsicum Spray. All my post are under the label Mossad Minns's Police State, and it includes: Michael West, Joshua Barnett, Zack Scho, Crikey’s legal correspondent, Michael Bradley talking to Crystal Andrews, Jan Fran and Antoinette Lattouf, and Antony Loewenstein as well as my Comrades in the Socialist Party/ Vic & NSW Socialists, with The Party Line: Anneke Demanuele, Jordan van den Lamb, Omar Sherrife & Josh Lees And Red Flag Radio with Chloe Rafferty & Emma Norton . The historical significance of Minns's Police Riot has been compared to the NSW Liberal Party's Premier Robert 'Run The Bastards Over' Askin, with US president Lyndon Baines Johnson's visit to Sydney in 1966. However, Askin nor any of the other Liberal or National Party state premiers of that era never attacked their citizens en masse with the police against the massive demonstrations opposed to the Vietnam War. The various state premiers were violent during the 1971 Apartheid Selected South African Rugby Springbok Tour against Anti-Apartheid activists, although these were big protests, they were not the massive size of the Anti-Vietnam Moratorium Marches. It's also been compared to Queensland National Party Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen's ban on Street marches in Brisbane in 1977. I was at one of those demos in 1977, but the Queensland Police did not do the widespread violence and bashings that we witnessed on Monday Night in Gadigal/Sydney. Mossad Minns wanted a Square Up with us over the success of the Harbour Bridge March last year, and he let the Cops of the leash to do it with their Kettling the tactic of making cordon around people for hours, Mass charges of Police throwing people to the ground, Riding Horses into people, Bashing and Capsicum Spraying En Masse, all against NSW Citizens who don't approve of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza of at least 70,000 Palestinians, Over twenty thousand of them children. For what? To appease Herzog, a major player in this Genocide and a man who should face charges in the ICC for his role in it. Minns, the Police Minister and Police Commissioner, must be sacked for the 9-2-26 Sydney Police Riot. This will not go away. When I studied journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney 1988-1994, I was told to stay away from New Journalism as practiced by writers such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, and I’ll write that way with my own take on it. I've been a lifelong Unionist and Socialist since I was 16. I became a founding member of NSW Socialists/Socialist Party in 2025. And I’m opposed to war, racism, sexism, fascism, bigotry, and injustice. There are many things that have shaped me into the political individual, activist and writer that I am today at the young age of sixty-seven. I will write and vodcast about them here on my blog as well as post the work or journalists I like. I’m now a retired high school teacher of twenty five years service. I’ve been working for fifty years and have always been an active unionist, twenty five years a blue collar unionist and twenty five years as a teacher unionist, Life Membership in two unions, the Painters & Dockers from when I worked at Sydney’s Cockatoo Island Dockyard and NSW Teachers Federation. Part of that has been my work with First Nations Peoples from working with the families who lost family in nation’s police and prison custody, that forced prime minister Bob Hawke to set up the 1989 Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission and the 1988 Sydney Anti- Bicentenary Protests to supporting First Nations Australian Football League Footballer, Adnyamathanha and Narungga Man Adam Goodes against the racist booing that drove him out of the game, to campaigning for the Voice in 2024. I have also been regularly attending the protests in Gadigal/Sydney and Katoomba against Israel’s Genocide in Gaza since it started. I’m also going to start doing reviews of books that I’ve listened and read: Firestorm:Battling Super-Charged Natural Diasasters By Greg Mullins, A Matter of Honour by David McBride, The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? By Bruce Pascoe, Black Witness: The Power of Indigenous Media By Amy McQuire, Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music By Archie Roach, Killing for Country By David Marr, Working Class Man by Jimmy Barnes, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire By Akala, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade By Andrew Feinstein, The Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking by Mehdi Hasan, The Boy from Boomerang Crescent by Eddie Betts, Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein, Technofeudalism-What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis, Rambling Man: My Life on the Road by Billy Connolly, Stalin Ate My Homework & Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexei Sayle, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein, Too Migrant, Too Muslim, Too Loud by Mehreen Faruqi, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah by Benjamin Zephaniah, The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke, Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry by Richard Flanagan. I will also cover health issues such as heart disease, stroke, mini-strokes/ters and Bowel Cancer, sharing my personal experiences of these major health killers of many people. Also, I’m going to do a road map of my learning of the French language and other languages I plan on learning. As well as acting. Before I became a teacher in 2000. I worked in a variety of blue-collar jobs since 1975 as a labourer including working for two years in General Motors Holden’s Melbourne car plants at Fisherman’s Bend and Dandenong. I've also been a scaffolder, rigger, dogman, railway fettler (track worker) on Sydney's railways, (including the Sydney Harbour Bridge) and a ship's painter and docker at Sydney's Cockatoo Island Dockyard. I still a proud and retired member of the New South Wales Teachers Federation/Australian Education Union. I was NSWTF Federation Representative at Katoomba High from 2018 to 2025 and was NSW Teachers Federation State Council from 2017 to October 2025. On May 11th, 2023, I was awarded Life Membership of the Mighty NSW Teachers Federation by then NSWTF Senior President Angelo Gavrielatos. I was a high school teacher for over twenty-five years and my last day of teaching at Katoomba High School was on July 4th 2025. I'm a historian, geographer, writer, actor, musician & poet. My blog is named after the farm owned by my Swiss/Italian grandfather/nonno, Antonio Tognolini from Tirano, Sondria, Lombardia and my Van Dieman’s Land grandmother Annie Phillips. Antonio came to Australia as a passenger on the ‘Northumberland’ when it docked in Naarm/Melbourne in 1874. Antonio built the two massive stone buildings on it with my Uncle Henry Phillips and it was called Togs’s Place, they finally attained council approval in 1906, in Yandoit, Central Victoria, on Dja Dja Wurrung Country. It served as Cobb & Co waystation as well as Yandoit Creek Primary School. It was immediately adjacent to the main coach route from Yandoit to Castlemaine. It delivered mail to the mainly American Gold Miners of American Gully. It’s where my father Vic was born in 1910, the youngest of 16 children between Antonio and my grandmother Annie Phillips. Annie was single mother with her one son/my uncle Henry Phillips, when her and Antonio got together. Annie was the granddaughter of a Irish Migrant and English Convict from Hampshire,Thomas landed in Hobart/Nipaluna in 1830 and Irish Woman Mary McCarthy, from Cork, they both arrived in the 1830’s to Hobart, Van Dieman’s Land, (Van Dieman’s Land became Tasmania in 1856). Her mother was Catherine Batt who married an English Convict from Norfolk William Phillips. William was sent to Port Arthur for hard labour and flogged there with the cat and nine tails whip fifty times, after attempting to escape from Wedge Bay. I've produced four radio documentaries for the ABC's Radio National/RN: Bush Fires, Ups and Downs of Scaffolding, The Last Ship Built in the Dockyard, the HMAS Success built in Sydney’s Cockatoo Island Dockyard, the navy gave a me a sea ride on it from Hobart to Sydney. Underground about Lithgow Mine Rescue in New South Wales's Western Coal fields. I've made the films The Occupation of Cockatoo Island Dockyard 1989. As well as my film The Deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation-the Victorian Story 1986-1992. They were both disputes I was directly involved in and these films are on YouTube. I've also been involved in community radio since 1987 and worked as a journalist for the ABC Radio’s Triple J. I have a First Division, Second Class Honours Degree in Communications from the University of Technology, Sydney where I also majored in Journalism and Social and Political Theory and a Diploma of Secondary Education from the University of Western Sydney. I've also been a Marker for the NSW Higher School Certificate’s Ancient History Examination, three times. I completed the TAFE Certificate in Fire Fighting Operations and was a volunteer bush fire fighter for seventeen years and retired from this after I joined the Zipper Club when I had a mechanical heart valve inserted in 2011. In 2018 I endured a stroke that nearly killed me. After recovering I decided to take a break from writing until I retired. I'm originally from Naarm/Melbourne’s Brunswick, Wurundjeri Country and lived in Sydney on Gadigal and Darug Lands and the Central Coast on Darkinjung Country at Long Jetty & Umina Beach before moving back to Sydney, and then to the Blue Mountain’s town of Katoomba on Darug and Gundungurra Lands in 1992. I was there for sixteen years before moving to Wellington Wiradjuri Country in Central West, New South Wales near Dubbo in 2008. The Mountain City Murders, my first book was published by Adelaide’s Ginninderra Press in 2010. My autobiographical account of heart disease Singing Johnny Cash in Cardiac Ward, A Personal Story of Heart Disease and Music was published in 2013. My first historical novel Brothers Part One: Gallipoli 1915 was published in 2014. Since I retired I’ve been updating Gallipoli book and started writing an autobiography drawing on my 2015 book A History Man’s Past & Other People’s Stories: A Shared Memoir. Part One: Other People’s Wars. This is a shared history in many ways. It’s where part of my story reflects the people I’ve interviewed with my media work over thirty five years. My interview with retired Australian SAS Warrant Officer Dr Brian Day, who served with the US Special Forces in Vietnam and Cambodia. He was also a founding member of the Australian Vietnam Veterans Association. I interviewed him in 1992 on Anzac, Racism, and the Madness of the Vietnam War. My interview with Stan Goff, a retired US Army Special Forces Master Sergeant and Vietnam Veteran who served in the US Army up until Haiti in 1996. He became involved in Military Families Against War that was formed when George W.Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. My question to Veteran Journalist, Writer and Filmmaker John Pilger, at a public meeting in Katoomba's Gearins Hotel, in the Blue Mountains about history being memory in 2008. My question to then Activist, Academic, Writer and Linguist, now disgraced Noam Chomsky, because of his relationship with Jeffery Epstein. I covered of his Sydney Press Conference, when he visited Australia in 1995, campaigning for an independent East Timor, then under the murderous Indonesian Occupation. I’m disgusted by Noam Chomsky being in the Epstein Files and have posted under the label The Epstein Files 4-2-26.: Owen Jones on Chomsky, on the Epstein Files in general: Antoinette Lattouf and Jan Fran, Michael West, Medhi Hasan with Naomi Kline & Prem Thakker, Lowkey, Francesca Fiorentini, Owen Jones with Paul Holden, Antony Loewenstein as well as a Socialist perspective with my Comrades in The Party Line: Anneke Demanuele, Jordan van den Lamb, & Omar Sherrife And Red Flag Radio with Chloe Rafferty & Emma Norton . Back to book I’m working on I will argued here that Australia’s Frontier Wars against our Indigenous Peoples should be recognised in the Australian War Memorial. On the Australian War Memorial itself it should be cleared of the Arms Industry Corporations and be a proper place of remembrance and commemoration. I'm against the AUKUS Alliance and Nuclear Submarine purchase. Prime minister Anthony Albanese has signed away Australian Sovereignty to be part of the United States containment of China. My book is an attempt to answer that big question, why has Australia been at War so much in so many places normally as junior partner to Britain or the United States? I'm currently completing the Brothers historical novela series with the following three parts concentrating on the Western Front in France and Belgium from 1916 to 1918. I’m also working on a one man fifty-minute fringe theatre play on heart disease, stroke and bowel cancer. John/Togs Tognolini, Katoomba, Blue Mountains.

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Mehdi Unpacks Israel's REAL Goal for Iran and Lebanon by Mehdi Hasan and Prem Thakker

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