RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-killing-of-nasrallahand-the-virtue?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

What Israel has managed to accomplish over the past two weeks will long be studied by military historians.

In a series of brilliant operations—beginning with the simultaneous explosion of encrypted pagers belonging to Hezbollah’s commanders, and culminating with the coup de grâce on Friday that eliminated the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and the rest of his high command—Israel managed to decapitate the entire leadership of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet. In so doing, it ignored the advice of its allies in the West, and radically disrupted the balance of power in the Middle East.

Hezbollah’s war is not just with Israel. It has American, Syrian, and Lebanese blood on its hands as well.

Recall that in 1983, the group killed 241 servicemen with a massive bomb at the Marines barracks in Beirut. The organization was also responsible for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 innocent people were murdered. In 2012, Hezbollah bombed a bus with young Israeli tourists at the port of Burgas, Bulgaria, that left five dead and 32 injured.

But Hezbollah’s bloodiest campaign was reserved for Syria, where it became the shock troops for the country’s tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, during his brutal suppression of a democratic uprising. Hezbollah’s forces led the ground operations in the siege of Aleppo, a vicious campaign in 2015 and 2016 that starved the ancient city and reduced most of it to rubble.

A day after Hamas launched its pogrom of October 7, Hezbollah began raining rockets and missiles into northern Israel, displacing up to 70,000 Israelis. Nearly a year later, those people have not been able to return to their homes.

With this kind of butcher’s bill, one might think the response from the civilized world upon learning of Nasrallah’s death would be jubilation. But Western leaders have responded with reticence. In this they have revealed their profound confusion about the enemy. It is not a nation-state, a terror group, or even an ideology. From Washington to Paris, they seem to believe the real enemy is escalation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20978/a-war-of-choice-and-a-war-of-necessity

The October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas was a war of choice. Hamas was in no mortal danger from Israel, and Gaza was doing relatively better thanks to a fairly long period of calm, growing foreign investment and a tripling of Israeli work permits for Gazan day-laborers. There wasn’t the remotest possibility of Israel wishing to reconquer Gaza and dislodge Hamas.

In practical, that is to say non-ideological terms, Hamas could have chosen to live with and profit from the status quo rather than seeking to upset it in a manner that forced the adversary into a war of necessity.

Whichever way one looks at it, the war of choice that Hezbollah started by breaking the 2006 ceasefire accord and ignoring UN Security Council Resolution 1701 can’t but lead to disaster for Tehran’s Trojan Horse in Beirut.

Soft-soaping the gullible Americans, President Masoud Pezeshkian in New York conjured the peace dove out of his invisible turban. The subtext was: we can call back the hounds of war we unleashed.

Last week, on a single day of an undeclared war, one of the protagonists suffered more than 500 deaths and more than 1,600 wounded, a total of over 2,200 casualties.

The country in question has a population of 5 million. Now imagine if that casualty figure had occurred in a country with a population of, say, 90 million; the proportionate casualty figure would work out at a staggering 34,000.

Well, as you guessed, the first country mentioned is Lebanon, which has been dragged into a war on behalf of the second country, that is to say the Islamic Republic of Iran.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/28/the-death-of-hassan-nasrallah-shows-why-this-is-a-just-war/

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was killed last night in an Israeli air strike on Beirut, as part of its ongoing offensive in southern Lebanon.

Nasrallah’s death exposes the glaring omission in most of the media coverage of the conflict. Few outlets seem willing to recognise the fact that Israel faces an annihilationist threat from the Iran-backed terrorist group and its Islamist allies.

At best, media reports will acknowledge that Hezbollah has fired thousands of missiles into northern Israel since 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas pogrom. This of course is why Israel has had to evacuate 60,000 of its citizens from its northern communities. In rare instances, the media might mention that Hezbollah has flagrantly flouted a UN resolution to stay at least 12 miles from Israel’s border. But Israel’s deeper motivations for its conflict with Hezbollah and allied Islamist groups are rarely taken seriously.

Instead, the media paint a picture of Israel as a malign, irrational actor wilfully slaughtering innocent civilians. This is demonstrated most clearly on Al-Jazeera, an international TV channel based in Qatar. It consistently portrays Israel as indiscriminately attacking Palestinian and Lebanese people, seemingly just for the sake of it. The BBC and Sky are not far behind when it comes to the demonisation of Israel.

The annihilationist stance of Israel’s Islamist opponents ought to be hard to ignore. The absence of discussion about it is one of the strangest aspects of the coverage of Israel’s wars. Hezbollah, literally the ‘party of god’, is very open about its ultimate aim. Its foundational document, the 1985 ‘Open Letter’, states that:

‘Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognise no treaty with it, no ceasefire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.’

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/29/how-hezbollahs-losses-highlight-the-philosophy-of-disaster/

As I sit down to write this, the good news that Israel eliminated Hassan Khalil Yassin, who just hours ago replaced Hassan Nasrallah as the leader of the Iranian-funded terror organization Hezbollah, has been brightening cyberspace.  The fact that Nasrallah was himself eliminated mere hours before the ascension of Yassin is the cherry on the anti-terrorist cake.

It must be nerve-wracking to be a member of Hezbollah these days. You advertise your membership in the terror organization by wearing a company pager and, bang! All the pagers explode simultaneously, killing a handful of your comrades and injuring two or three thousand.

You abandon the pagers for walkie-talkies and, bang! Again, they all explode, propelling many more brothers on to a premature rendezvous with their 72 virgins.

Then the Israelis bomb your headquarters, crossing off almost the entire flowchart of top baddies in your organization. A day or two later, Nasrallah, too, is bagged, leaving the top spot vacant for Yassin, who, a few hours in, also handed in his dinner pail.

Will all this be a spur to recruitment?  Or will it inspire a bit of reflection?

We can hope for the latter while acknowledging that murderous fanaticism and reflection seldom go together.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to step back and note how often disaster is a spur to reflection and stock-taking. Houses of worship across America were suddenly brimming the Sunday after the terrorist atrocities of September 11.  The effect was not particularly long-lasting.  But for a moment, the public was not only galvanized but also ruminative.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/christians-celebrate-media-and-campuses-mourn-death-of-islamic-terror-boss/

“Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: ‘Death to America.’”

Ex-Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah

Iranian dissidents in London and Toronto took to the streets to celebrate the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Christians in Lebanon who had suffered under the Shiite Islamic terrorist group are also celebrating.

Campus Islamist campus hate groups are less happy including ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’ at the University of Michigan which is neither Jewish nor peaceful, and whose account appears to be run out of Lebanon.

And the media is already rolling out its best “austere religious scholar” takes for Hezbollah terror boss Hassan Nasrallah.

The New York Times led the way with the worst possible coverage headlined, “Protesters Mourn Nasrallah’s Death Around the World”.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/ding-dong-nasrallah-is-dead/

When the smoke cleared, six buildings in the quarter of suburban Beirut targeted by Israeli warplanes were gone. They collapsed into themselves, subsumed beneath the underground bunker system that housed Hezbollah’s highest-ranking commanders. It will take days, perhaps weeks, to sift through the wreckage. But when the clearing operation is complete, the Israel Defense Forces believe the salvagers will have recovered the body of longtime Hezbollah commander Hassan Nasrallah. The IDF said early Saturday that Israel had “eliminated” Nasrallah and other commanders.

It would be difficult to overstate Nasrallah’s significance to the terrorist organization he led and the blow to it represented by his death. Nasrallah took the role of Hezbollah’s secretary-general following the demise of his predecessor at the hands of the IDF over 30 years ago. He oversaw the terrorist sect’s councils and sub-councils, its judicial, parliamentary, and jihad assemblies. He led an organization estimated to be capable of fielding upwards of 50,000 fighters with around 150,000 missiles, rockets, and drones at its disposal. He was the most reliable of Iran’s proxies, the commander of its strongest militia in the region. And now he’s gone.

Nasrallah was only the most recent Hezbollah commander to face Israeli justice. In June, a sophisticated intelligence operation culminated in the death of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, a figure partly responsible for the Beirut barracks bombing and the deaths of 241 U.S. soldiers. In recent days, he was joined by Ibrahim Aqil and Ahmed Wahbi, senior leaders in Hezbollah’s Radwan Force. Ibrahim Muhammad Qubaisi, the Hezbollah commander responsible for a deadly attack on IDF soldiers in 2000, was “eliminated” in an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday. And all this follows the spectacularly successful campaign of sabotage that took hundreds of Hezbollah fighters unlucky enough to have been issued communications devices flagged for use in operations against Israel off the battlefield.

Aided by its remarkable penetration of Iran and its terrorist proxies, Israeli technical superiority and tactical brilliance have Hezbollah on the ropes. Even before the strike that killed Nasrallah, the organization was disoriented — reeling from blow after blow and, leery of relying on mass communication technology, incapable of regrouping. Now it is decapitated. If Israel can degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities to the point that both parties would be open to a negotiated cessation of hostilities, its campaign may have been such a success that it forestalls or even forecloses on the prospect of a ground operation.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/killing-nasrallah

Friday evening in the Levant, Israel targeted buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut killing Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. This operation represents a dramatic shift in Israeli strategy. Not only have they finally liquidated an adversary they’ve long been capable of killing, they’ve also turned a deaf ear to their superpower patron of more than half a century. But at this stage, heeding Washington’s advice in war is like taking counsel from the angel of death. Just as the U.S. is no longer willing or able to win the wars it commits Americans to fight, the Joe Biden administration won’t let U.S. allies win wars either.

By ordering the strike on Nasrallah while attending the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored the Jewish state’s independence from the global consensus that has resolved not to confront terrorists but rather to appease them, whether they’re plotting in the Middle East or living among the local populations of Western nations, including the United States. Israel’s attack also shows that almost everything U.S. and other Western civilian and military leaders have believed about the Middle East for the last 20 years was simply a collection of excuses for losing wars. The questions that senior policymakers and Pentagon officials, think-tank experts and journalists have deliberated over since the invasion of Iraq—questions about the nature of modern warfare and the proper conduct of international relations in a multipolar world, etc.—can now be set aside for good because they have been resolved definitively.

The answers are as they ever were—at least before the start of the “global war on terror.” Contrary to the convictions of George W. Bush-era neoconservatives and the pro-Iran progressives in Barack Obama’s camp, securing a nation’s peace has nothing to do with winning narratives, or nation-building, or balancing U.S. allies against your mutual enemies for the sake of regional equilibrium, or any of the other academic theories generated to mask a generation’s worth of failure. Rather, it means killing your enemies, above all those who advocate and embody the causes that inspire others to exhaust their murderous energies against you. Thus, killing Nasrallah was essential.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-accused-of-the-crime-of-defending-itself/

British journalist Brendan O’Neill is appalled at the way so many in the West paint Israel’s efforts to defend itself as “war crimes.” No matter how precisely it attacks its targets — as the Hezbollah possessors of pagers, hand-held radios, and walkie-talkies were — the IDF is accused of “indiscriminate” killing in Lebanon. No matter how many ways the IDF warns civilians in Gaza to leave places and buildings that are about to be targeted, Israel remains accused of “indiscriminate” bombing. For too many people around the world, everything Israel does is “a war crime.” More on this world-wide condemnation of the Jewish state for defending itself can be found here: “This wasn’t a war crime – it was an audacious assault on anti-Semites,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, September 18, 2024:

…All eyes are on Israel, naturally. Experts suspect Mossad intercepted a massive stash of pagers destined for Hezbollah militants and planted explosive material in the batteries. Then they sent a signal, from hundreds of miles away, that caused the batteries to overheat and eventually to blow up. The planning required for such a spectacular op blows the mind – no pun intended. I know Israelophobia is the default position of the influential classes, but surely even they will admit this was an ingenious way for the Jewish State to take out the adherents to a self-styled ‘army of god’ that has sworn itself to excising the ‘cancerous growth’ of Zionism from the Middle East. (They mean Jews.)…

That many in the West view Israel’s every action as criminal is depressing, but not surprising. Fundamentally, they think it is a crime for Israel to defend itself. They think it is a crime for Israel to take any action that might limit the threat posed by the apocalyptic anti-Semitism of Hezbollah and Hamas. And they think this because they think Israel’s very existence is a crime. They view the Jewish State as a criminal enterprise, a vile, law-defying blot not only on the Middle East but also on the reputation of humankind itself. When you harbour such intense, irrational hatred for one nation, it is a short step to telling that nation to down its weapons, lower its defences and let itself be attacked.

https://henryjacksonsociety.org/

The State of Israel is fighting for its future.

It began on the morning of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded Israel. They went on to commit the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. Afterwards, Israel had no choice but to enter Gaza. The goal: eliminate Hamas. 

Cut to a year later, and Hamas has been nearly defeated. But, alas, Israel’s existential war is not over yet. Another terrorist threat looms large: Hezbollah. 

Every day since October 8, 2023, the Islamist group has been firing missiles from Lebanon into northern Israel. Their targets: Israeli civilians living peacefully next to the Israel-Lebanon border. Because of Hezbollah’s reign of terror, more than 100,000 people have had to flee their homes. They are staying in hotels paid for by the government, their lives on pause. 

The situation is no longer tenable. “We will return residents of the north safely to their homes,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

To make that vow a reality, Israel has been going after Hezbollah. 

Last week, it remotely detonated the pagers and walkie-talkies of Hezbollah’s senior operatives. Although Israel has not officially taken responsibility for the operation, it has been widely attributed to its intelligence services. 

And this week, the IDF has been conducting precision air strikes on Hezbollah facilities in Lebanon. Several commanders have been killed, including the head of Hezbollah’s air units. Be in no doubt: the terrorists are on the ropes.