RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/06/israel-is-surrounded-by-genocidal-enemies/

One thing that should now be clear is that Hamas is not the only Islamist group intent on destroying Israel. It is just one of several Iran-backed groups – the self-styled ‘axis of resistance’ or ‘ring of fire’ – determined to erase the Jewish State from the map.

Israel is therefore engaged in a seven-front war, fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, and increasingly heavily armed groups in the West Bank. And stranding behind all of them is the significant regional power of Iran.

Almost immediately after last year’s 7 October pogrom, these groups started their own military assaults on Israel. On 8 October, Hezbollah fired mortars at Israeli military positions in the Mount Dov region on the Lebanon border (sometimes called Shebaa Farms). Two days later, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which often works in conjunction with Hezbollah, claimed responsibility for an armed infiltration into Israeli territory from Lebanon.

Things could have been even worse. It has since emerged that 3,000 terrorists – most from Hezbollah but some from PIJ – were poised on the Lebanese border to attack Israel. Their goal was to implement a longstanding plan called ‘conquering the Galilee’ to seize northern Israel. Fortunately, Hezbollah hesitated before trying to execute its attack on the north, giving Israel time to mobilise its reserves and prevent even more carnage. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that Hezbollah’s plan to attack Israel’s north was the basis for Hamas’s mass attack on the south.

Israel also soon came under attack from the south and the east. By mid-October, the Houthis in Yemen had attempted to launch an aerial assault. A few weeks later, an Islamist militia from Syria launched a drone attack which hit the Israeli city of Eilat. By November, Islamist militias based in Iraq were also mounting attacks on Israel. At the same time, Iran has been pouring weapons into the West Bank in the hope of opening up another front there.

Indeed, since 7 October, Iran has been open about its backing of these Islamist militias. On 17 October, supreme leader Ali Khamenei reportedly told Iranian television that ‘no one will stop the resistance forces’. He mentioned Hezbollah in the north, pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran, he said, ‘will coordinate the attack’ on Israel using missiles and drones to create a ‘siege from all sides’. In April, Iran went a step further and directly attacked Israel for the first time with a mass aerial bombardment. This month, it launched a potentially even more damaging ballistic missile attack.

https://www.thefp.com/p/can-israel-win-back-what-october

“This was a lesson that Jews learned when they were exiled millennia ago, after which the Land of Israel became a ghostly place in mind and memory—and then learned again, when pioneers like the teenagers at Hanita in 1938 put down physical roots, built a wooden tower, and declared they’d never leave. Right now, as Israeli soldiers advance into Lebanon, and as the evacuees wait in their hotel rooms and temporary apartments, it feels like a lesson being learned again. ”

KIBBUTZ HANITA, Israel — In the late 1930s, when the land that is now Israel was under British rule, a young intelligence officer named Anthony Simonds spent time in Galilee, in remote hills that would eventually become the Israel-Lebanon border. He recorded memories of his time there in a colorful but unpublished memoir now kept in the Imperial War Museum in London. Rereading the officer’s recollections now, a year into the war that has devastated northern Israel and southern Lebanon, is an eerie exercise—a reminder of what Jews created in Israel, then lost last fall, and are now fighting to reclaim.

As I write these lines, Israeli infantrymen are pushing into Lebanon to clear Hezbollah guerrillas from the vicinity of the border while the air force, in strikes throughout southern Lebanon and in Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern districts of Beirut, is methodically killing the group’s commanders and destroying the vast arsenal supplied by Iran. A direct Israeli strike against HezboIlah’s patron, the Islamic theocracy in Iran, seems imminent.

None of this would have made sense to Simonds of the Royal Berkshires: When he was a young man in uniform more than 80 years ago, Iran was a distant monarchy ruled by the shah, and there was no Hezbollah and no state of Israel. Lebanon was ruled by France. 

“I have driven my car on rough tracks, sometimes in the Lebanon and sometimes in Palestine,” wrote Simonds. On one page of his typewritten memoir he recalls coming across a new frontier outpost. This kibbutz had been established one night in March 1938, and was inhabited by about 100 young Jews, many of them refugees from Europe, who had erected a wooden tower and stockade in a matter of hours on a plot purchased from Arab landowners by the Zionist movement. After their arrival, the pioneers faced an attack in which two of them were killed by Arab guerrillas. As they dug in and farmed in subsequent months, becoming symbols of Zionist pioneering, eight more of them fell.

https://romirowsky.com/28105/unrwa-refugees-terrorists

There are few constants in American foreign policy. One of them is deference to UNRWA, the internationally funded welfare agency for Palestinians.

This organization is implicated in terrorism. The news that Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, head of UNRWA’s teachers union in Lebanon and Hamas liaison to Hezbollah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, is just the latest example.

As we approach the anniversary of Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 massacre, things have gone from bad to worse. In an official document filed in a U.S. court, the UN — with support from the Department of Justice — has argued that UNRWA employees involved in 10/7 enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution, and the lawsuit should be dismissed.”

The U.S. has long followed the international community in placing UNRWA in a different and higher category, with untouchable funding, unvettable employees, and senior managers who illegally lobby in the U.S. for support. Now it argues that actual murderers should be immune from prosecution.

The U.S. has defined Hamas as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since Oct. 8, 1997. The Department of Justice’s new assertion that UNRWA employees have “absolute immunity” violates common sense and elevates international organizations above American law.

Since the 1960s American lawmakers have focused on UNRWA’s relationship with terrorism. Section 301(c) of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act stated “No contributions by the United States shall be made to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East except on the condition that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency take all possible measures to assure that no part of the United States contribution shall be used to furnish assistance to any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army or any other guerrilla type organization or who has engaged in any act of terrorism.”

https://thespectator.com/topic/iran-attacks-israel-what-does-it-mean-and-what-happens-next/

A few hours before Iran launched missiles at Israel, America’s spy satellite saw Iran moving the weapons onto their launching pads. They told Israel (and leaked to the media) that an attack was “imminent.” They were right.

Within hours, several hundred Iranian missiles were flying toward the Jewish State, just as they had in April. The earlier attack caused little damage — most of the missiles were intercepted — and early reports are that the recent attack met the same fate.

Israel’s success shooting down the missiles is crucial, not only because it saved lives but because it does not require Israel to launch a full-scale counter-attack.

Safety from the missiles did not protect all Israelis, though. A small group of terrorists attacked and killed innocent civilians at a café in Jaffa, a suburb just south of Tel Aviv. We don’t know yet whether that attack was coordinated with Iran or its proxies.

The common theme of the local terrorists, Iran’s Islamic Regime, and Iran’s regional proxies, Hamas (in Gaza), Hezbollah (in Lebanon) and the Houthis (in Yemen), is to kill as many Jews as possible and, they hope, ultimately extinguish the Jewish state. “From the river to the sea,” means the Middle East must be Judenfrei. Virtually all other states across the region already are. Many had large Jewish populations for centuries. No more. Where are the Jews of Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus? They were killed, chased out or fled. Their children are living in Israel, and they don’t have romanticized notions of peace with their antisemitic neighbors.

What gives them hope is not only Israel’s enormous economic and technical progress, but the threat Iran poses to the Sunni Arab countries across the region. Facing that threat, they have increasingly looked to Israel as a strong partner. That was the strategic logic behind the Abraham Accords, forged in the Trump administration.

Iran faces these long-term strategic challenges, compounded by a failing economy and the more recent challenge of its proxies’ defeats. Tehran had to do something in response to those recent losses, and it is hardly surprising they launched a missile barrage. They live in a region that respects “the strong horse,” and they had to show the allies they have armed, trained and funded that they do not stand alone.

The missiles fired at Israel make that symbolic statement. Beyond that, what should we make of the latest attack?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20984/arabs-celebrate-nasrallah-death

“Israel just made all the Middle East happy tonight.” — Israeli-Lebanese Christian journalist Jonathan Elkhoury, X, September 27, 2024.

“As a Lebanese, this is one of the happiest days in Lebanon’s history…. As a human being who holds peace before my eyes, this is the most important day for our region. Nasrallah and Hezbollah have terrorized the Lebanese people since the 1980s…. Every Lebanese and every decent human being should feel joy at the downfall of one of the greatest evils of our time. Now, we have a real chance to look forward… and sitting down with Israelis and the West for genuine negotiations on normalization and peace between our countries—Israel and Lebanon.” — Jonathan Elkhoury, X, September 24, 2024.

“Honestly, Lebanon should toss Nasrallah into the sea like the U.S. did with Bin Laden—no land deserves that filth. Though, I do feel bad for the fish.” — Amjad Taha, United Arab Emirates, to his 571,000 followers on X, September 28, 2024.

All the students at US university campuses who have been protesting Israel’s war against Iran’s terror proxies, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, should hear the voices of these Arabs. These voices demonstrate how many Arabs have also been harmed by terrorism and how they wish for a better future for their children and their people. These voices also show that in the war against Islamist terrorism, a growing number of Arabs consider Israel an ally.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27, was often described by many in the West as a “formidable enemy” of Israel. Nasrallah’s death, however, has shown that many Arabs, including some of his fellow Lebanese citizens, also considered him an enemy and arch-terrorist. The Hezbollah chief was responsible for killing not only a large number of Israelis over the past three decades, but also many Arabs, especially in Lebanon and Syria.

That is probably why the news of Nasrallah’s elimination was greeted with jubilation by many Israelis and Arabs.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/diplomatic-engagement-camouflages-the-betrayal-of-israel/

Addressing the UN General Assembly last Tuesday, President Biden said, “Hezbollah, unprovoked, joined the Oct. 7 attack launching rockets into Israel.” This banal statement at least wasn’t qualified with a scolding of Israel like those that Biden and his foreign policy crew have indulged in for nearly a year.

Equally useless, but more fantastical was the follow-up statement: “a diplomatic solution is still possible” and “remains the only path to lasting security.” The West, especially the U.S., has been on a diplomatic snipe hunt for a deal with Hamas to release their dwindling number of hostages, including seven Americans.

Yet, as the Journal points out, “Israel gave those months over to diplomacy on its northern front, even as Hezbollah fired 8,500 rockets and forced 60,000 Israelis from their homes. But the U.S.-led talks went nowhere as Mr. Biden pressed Israel not to hit Hezbollah too hard and allowed billions of dollars in oil revenue to flow to the terrorists’ masters in Iran.” But what should we expect when foreign policy naifs like Biden et al. are seeking an honest deal with terrorists who for decades have rejected any number of “deals,” and blatantly violate every one they’ve signed?

But the lessons of history and the common sense one should learn from experience, cannot penetrate the fog of foreign policy delusions, especially when electoral and ideological self-interests are at work. Biden’s failures with Hamas and Hezbollah are just a few of many on his watch.

As Walter Russell Mead catalogues: “No administration in American history has been as committed to Middle East diplomacy as this one. Yet have an administration’s diplomats ever had less success? Mr. Biden tried and failed to get Iran back into a nuclear agreement with the U.S. He tried and failed to get a new Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on track. He tried and failed to stop the civil war in Sudan. He tried and failed to get Saudi Arabia to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel. He tried to settle the war in Yemen through diplomacy, and when that failed and the Houthis began attacking shipping in the Red Sea, the ever-undaunted president sought a diplomatic solution to that problem too. He failed again.”

But despite that roll of dishonor, Biden wasn’t finished with his “rules-based order” fever dreams: “My fellow leaders, I truly believe we’re at another inflection point in world history,” Mr. Biden said. “Will we stand behind the principles that unite us? Will we stand firm against aggression?” Without mind-concentrating action, such globalist, “rules-based order” boilerplate means weakness to our enemies and bluster followed by inaction. And such pantomimes are despicable when deployed to camouflage the betrayal of an important international friend and ally who has faced inhuman, genocidal aggression for decades.