RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theeditors.com/p/we-are-in-the-midst-of-a-war-of-revival?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

Yesterday Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, in Hebrew, offering context and a progress report on the war. At least one longtime nonpartisan observer of Netanyahu’s long career described it as superb and one of Netanyahu’s best speeches. An official English translation isn’t yet publicly available but thanks to the magic of artificial intelligence I was able to muster this rough but fluid and rapid translation of the speech. If readers have corrections to the text, by all means send them along and I will update.

The honorable President Yitzhak Herzog; Distinguished Speaker of the Knesset, Amir Ohana; Deputy President of the Supreme Court, Justice Yitzhak Amit and his wife Rivka; dozens of Knesset members; Leader of the Opposition, Member of Knesset Yair Lapid, Members of Knesset, my brothers and sisters, To the bereaved families, relatives of the abducted men and women who stand relentlessly before our eyes, distinguished guests, everyone. We are in the midst of a war of revival. 

On Simchat Torah, on October 7th, a year ago, we suffered a severe blow, but we got back on our feet. We did not break, we did not fall apart, and not only did we not surrender, we launched a powerful counter-offensive against our attackers, a war that is changing the face of the Middle East. 

From then until today, alongside the terrible pain that is the lot of the entire nation, we are defending ourselves with high spirits and supreme determination for the revival of Israel. 

Whoever attacked us brought upon themselves an unprecedented disaster. 

There is a line of similarity in the current war to the War of Independence. Then we faced seven Arab countries, and today we are facing seven fronts of terror. 

But I must emphasize, today we are facing a completely different challenge, against a cruel and barbaric enemy that threatens not only us, it threatens the entire Middle East, it threatens the entire world. Its evil intentions are to kill, destroy, and annihilate. The axis of fanatical evil, led by Iran, which has killed thousands in the past year with its cruelty, threatens to destroy our country and threatens to capture more and more territories. It seeks to take over our region by force and from here threaten first of all the West, not only the West, first of all the West. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/the-biden-iran-scandal-gets-worse/

The source of last week’s leak of U.S. intelligence about Israel’s plans to strike Iran, which has occasioned an investigation, isn’t yet known. What should be obvious, though, is that no individual who has had extensive contact with Iranian intelligence and diplomatic officials, and who has deferred to the direction of those officials before, should have ever been put in a sensitive position in the first place.

The Biden administration has ignored this rather simple rule.

The most glaring example of its questionable handling of the Iran portfolio is Biden Iran envoy Robert Malley’s continued employment by the State Department amid a probe into his handling of classified materials and the possibility that he shared information with the regime. Though Malley has since been suspended, it’s noteworthy that the administration has opted to technically keep him in the role, no doubt wishing to avoid the political fallout that would come with terminating him.

Possibly worse than Malley’s appointment is that of Ariane Tabatabai, an academic turned State Department and Pentagon official. She was part of the now-infamous Iran Experts Initiative — a program used by Tehran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to cultivate relationships with foreign academics who could carry water for the regime.

At one point, according to reporting from Semafor, which revealed the program’s existence, Tabatabai opted to skip a conference in Israel after an Iranian official instructed her not to go. She also consulted with this same Iranian official regarding how she should testify in hearings before Congress. Her job today — chief of staff to the Pentagon official who oversees special operations.

It’s true that the leak of documents from the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency could have come from any number of places. According to a former official who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon last week, they appear to have been available to “thousands upon thousands” of U.S. officials via a classified system.

But it’s also true that since October 7, pro-Hamas ideologues within the State Department have labored to leak information that would help their cause and damage Israel’s war effort.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/senior-hamas-official-arrives-in-moscow-for-talks/

A senior member of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzouk, has arrived in Moscow on a planned visit, Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti reports, citing a diplomatic source.

Hamas politburo member Abu Marzouk intends to hold a series of meetings with Russian officials, RIA says, without providing any further details.

Russia has ties to all key players in the Middle East, including Israel, Iran, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

Moscow has repeatedly blamed the current crisis in the Middle East on the failure of US diplomacy, and called for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and the resumption of talks aimed at finding a peace settlement.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2024/10/22/the-fbi-makes-an-announcement-about-the-pentagon-leaker-n2646567#google_vignette

The Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed Tuesday morning the law enforcement agency has launched a probe into the Pentagon and who leaked top secret Israeli strike plans against Iran over the weekend. 

“The FBI is investigating the alleged leak of classified documents and working closely with our partners in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community,” Fox News reported Tuesday morning. “As this is an ongoing investigation, we have no further comment.” 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21037/political-elites-mourn-hezbollah

[T]he West’s political “elites” condemned Israel for defending itself by targeting Hezbollah’s leadership.

There was no mention of international law for Hezbollah’s unprovoked, year-long attacks: bombardments of missiles and attack drones every day at a country smaller than New Jersey.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell lamented Israel’s continued successful attempts at destroying one of Iran’s proxy armies.

When Israel took out Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, one of the world’s most dangerous arch-terrorists, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres could barely hold back his disappointment, counterfactually calling Hezbollah’s unprovoked war against Israel and the IDF’s response a “cycle of violence.”

Only Argentina’s President Javier Milei displayed a reaction fitting the removal of a terrorist mass murderer…

Israel, as has been noted, is doing the entire world an enormous service by taking out Hezbollah.

Iran, just since October 2023, through its militias in Syria and Iraq, has launched more than 160 attacks on the US forces in the Middle East.

[W]hen Israel killed Ibrahim Aqil, the mastermind of the 1983 attacks and a member of Hezbollah’s Jihad Council, its highest military body, the US could not even bring itself to thank its ally.

The world’s political elites apparently cannot forgive Israel for seeking to defend itself, and rid the world of terrorists working to destroy both America and Western civilization. Could these elites, wittingly or not, be working towards the same result?

It took the world community nearly a year to condemn the war in Lebanon, but they got the wrong mark. Instead of condemning Hezbollah, the world’s largest Iranian proxy terrorist army, with an estimated 40,000 – 50,000 fighters, for starting a year-long war on October 8, 2023 in support of the terrorist organization Hamas, the West’s political “elites” condemned Israel for defending itself by targeting Hezbollah’s leadership.

The UN Security Council called an emergency session on September 20, during which UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk told ambassadors that he was “appalled by the breadth and impact” of the attacks on Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/21/the-tragedy-of-palestine/

That footage of Yahya Sinwar’s last, gasping breaths before he was justly shuffled off this mortal coil was extraordinary. Here we had the death agony of a fascist broadcast to the world. Crooked and hunched in a chair coated in dust, in a building bombed almost to nothing, he stared forlornly at his final foe: an Israeli drone. He used his one working arm – the other withered by injury – to toss a stick in the drone’s direction. It was a suitably primitive gesture from the leader of a gang of medieval militants who made the grave error of starting a war with the Jewish State. The stick did nothing, of course. Moments later, their drone having confirmed the presence of a terrorist, the IDF fired a tank shell into the ruins and the architect of the bloodiest pogrom since the Nazis was dead.

Not since the execution of Benito Mussolini by the Italian Resistance had the world been granted such a battle-side view of the death of a fascist. We have all seen the photograph of Mussolini hanging by his feet in Milan in 1945 following his summary execution by partisans and the pelting of his body with rotten vegetables by crowds of righteous, free Italians. Now we have seen the execution of the man who organised the largest slaughter of Jews in 80 years. It was less chaotic – the IDF troops who happened upon Sinwar’s hideout observed his body but did not desecrate it – but no less momentous. A little over a year since Hamas’s pogrom, justice had been served against the plotter of that racist outrage. The young Jews of the IDF had toppled the most notorious Jew-killer of our age.

Yet there was a tint of tragedy to the events of last week. Not in the death of Sinwar – no one should mourn a pogromist. But in that drone footage we also glimpsed the consequences of Sinwar’s murderous vanity. All around him we saw the wages of his futile war against the Jews. We saw the devastation of a patch of land, and of a people, that Sinwar clearly viewed as expendable entities, as mere chess pieces in his game of hate against the Jewish nation. It was brutally confirmed: courtesy of the hijacking of the Palestinian issue by the Islamist demagogues of Hamas, the very idea of Palestine is now as pulverised as that building Sinwar perished in.

The response of the woke West to the death of Sinwar has been mad, even by their standards. In the grimmest nooks of online Israelophobia, there is actual mourning. Even mainstream voices are saying Israel lied and Sinwar wasn’t in fact scurried in a tunnel underground but was on the frontline, fighting with his men. Shorter version: hero. Others say it is a grave folly on Israel’s part to think it can crush a ‘national liberation movement’ by bumping off its leaders. Honestly, the speed with which Western leftists went from saying ‘The only good fascist is a dead fascist’ to saying ‘We can’t just kill everyone in Hamas’ has been mindblowing. From puffed-up anti-fascists who fancied themselves the heirs to the International Brigades to snivelling weepers at the coffins of the fallen fascists of Hamas – it would be funny if it were not so tragic.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/very-concerning-mike-johnson-reacts-to-leak-of-u-s-intel-on-israels-plans-to-strike-iran/

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) is alarmed about the leak of highly classified U.S. intelligence documents on Israel’s plans to strike against Iran.

“The leak is very concerning. There’s some serious allegations being made there, an investigation underway, and I’ll get a briefing on that in a couple of hours,” Johnson said Sunday during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.

Johnson is currently undertaking a swing-state tour to help Republicans fight to preserve the party’s extremely narrow House majority. He will receive a classified briefing on the intelligence leak Sunday and spoke with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I talked to my friend Bibi Prime Minister Netanyahu, yesterday to encourage him,” Johnson said, while reaffirming U.S. support for Israel’s multi-front war in the Middle East.

“If he had taken Joe Biden’s advice, I think they’d be in a much weaker position right now. I think the United States needs to stand unequivocally with our ally there right now,” Johnson added. He called for a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran and criticized the Biden administration for trying to micromanage Israel’s military strategy.

The leaked U.S. intelligence documents started circulating online Friday when a pro-Iran account posted them on Telegram and claimed to have received them from a source inside the intel community, according to multiple reports. The top-secret documents were only meant to be seen by “Five Eyes” U.S. allies: Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

One of the documents appears to be an intelligence report created by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and contains details on munitions transfers. Another document appears to be attributed to the National Security Agency and shows Israeli air force exercises.

https://www.aol.com/us-investigating-unauthorized-release-classified-001118308.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is investigating an unauthorized release of classified documents that assess Israel’s plans to attack Iran, three U.S. officials told The Associated Press. A fourth U.S. official said the documents appear to be legitimate.

The documents are attributed to the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, and note that Israel was still moving military assets in place to conduct a military strike in response to Iran’s blistering ballistic missile attack on Oct. 1. They were sharable within the “Five Eyes,” which are the U.S., Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

The documents, which are marked top secret, were posted to the Telegram messaging app and first reported by CNN and Axios. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The investigation is also examining how the documents were obtained — including whether it was an intentional leak by a member of the U.S. intelligence community or obtained by another method, like a hack — and whether any other intelligence information was compromised, one of the officials said. As part of that investigation, officials are working to determine who had access to the documents before they were posted, the official said.