RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/30/why-is-the-west-so-anguished-over-the-death-of-hassan-nasrallah/

Only one word captures the vibe in the West following Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah: anguish. Everywhere you look there is dread over what Israel has done, and fear of what it might unleash. Disquiet drips from every newspaper. You hear it in the trembling timbre of news anchors. You see it in the feverish warnings of ‘anti-war’ types that the Middle East now stands upon the precipice of apocalypse. You hear it in Guardianistas’ shrill damning of Israel as a ‘pugnacious out-of-control force’ that now even takes out terrorists ‘against the United States’ explicit wishes’. Yes, how dare this uppity state defy our masters in the neo-empire?

You see it most clearly in the hectic fretting over a ‘dangerous escalation’. Apparently, in bumping off Hezbollah’s top dog, Israel has sealed the region’s bloody fate. The New York Times agonises over this ‘escalatory attack on Hezbollah’. Jeremy Bowen of the BBC says the slaying of Nasrallah suggests the Middle East is no longer ‘on the brink of a much more serious war’ – it’s ‘tumbling over it’. An expert at the Middle East Institute in DC was positively overwrought. ‘The hinge of history has turned’, he said. Apparently, this ‘unprecedented’ attack – the idea that it’s unprecedented to target your terrorist foes will be news to many nations – is bloody proof that ‘the threshold for all-out war has been crossed’.

Even Israel’s allies have reached for the smelling salts following Nasrallah’s demise. Yes, the Biden administration welcomed his death, but it felt perfunctory: a timid congratulations that masked a deeper unease about what comes next. As the NYT summed it up, Biden issued a ‘measured statement’ that ‘expressed satisfaction’ but then swiftly warned all sides ‘to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts’. Israel is within its rights to expect a tad more appreciation from the US for dealing with the leader of a terror group that assisted in the Beirut suicide bombings of 1983 in which 241 US military personnel were killed.

We are now in the truly surreal situation where privileged Westerners seem distressed over the death of Nasrallah while Muslims in Lebanon, Syria and Iran are dancing in celebration over it. Moneyed genderfluid kids on the manicured lawns of Columbia in NYC might be experiencing pangs of grief, or at least worry, following the killing of Nasrallah. But feminists in Iran, anti-Hezbollah activists in Lebanon and the families of the Syrians Hezbollah helped to butcher when it sided with Assad in the Syrian Civil War are elated. Surely, nothing better captures the moral disarray of the woke of the West than their bitter tears for an Islamist extremist whose Jew hatred, misogyny, homophobia and rank authoritarianism made him the enemy of every Muslim in the Middle East who longs for the thing these pampered Westerners enjoy: liberty.

The Nasrallah angst of our opinion-forming classes is incredibly telling. It speaks to the staggering double standard by which Israel is judged. One wonders if it is historical ignorance or just brazen hypocrisy that means the puffed-up activist class of the US and UK can rail against Israel’s ‘unprecedented’ toppling of a terrorist mastermind even though their own nations have done likewise for decades. From Osama bin Laden to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, many terrorists have met a grim, just end in recent years. And I don’t recall spittle-flecked rage about it. I don’t remember self-righteous wails of ‘What now?!’. That Israel is pilloried for doing things we do, that killing terrorists suddenly becomes a war crime when Jews do it, is proof of the bigotry that lurks barely beneath the surface of ‘anti-Zionism’.

 bit.ly/4drgASa

Israel’s war on Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthi terrorists – and their patron, Iran’s Ayatollahs – highlights Israel’s unique role as a force multiplier for the US.  It sheds light on the mutually-beneficial, two-way-street of US-Israel cooperation, which yields to the US taxpayer more than US foreign aid to Israel.
For example:

*Israel fights Hezbollah, which is a global epicenter – second only to Iran’s Ayatollahs – of anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking and money laundering, extending from the Middle East to the American continent. As a proxy of Iran’s Ayatollahs, Hezbollah has proliferated terrorist cells in the US – “the Great American Satan” – and has carried out terror assaults on US installations in the Middle East and beyond. Moreover, since the early 1980s, Hezbollah has collaborated with drug cartels in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil; has trained Latin American terrorists (on their way to the US) in the tri-border areas of Argentina-Paraguay-Brazil and Chile-Peru-Bolivia; has conducted a mega-billion-dollar money laundering operation between Latin America, West Africa, Europe and the Middle East; has terrorized pro-US regimes in western, northern and eastern Africa; and has systematically attempted to topple all pro-US “apostate” Sunni Arab regimes, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt and Morocco. Hezbollah and Iran’s Ayatollahs have targeted Israel as the vanguard of the US, and the US’ first line of defense, in the “abode of Islam.”

https://www.jns.org/the-un-chiefs-foul-language/

It’s one thing for terrorist regimes and their fellow travelers to condemn Israel for fighting back forcefully against the mortal threats in and along its borders. It’s even logical for those entities to bemoan the assassination of the mass murderers attempting to fulfill genocidal, hegemonic aspirations through the slaughter of Jews.

But when the knee-jerk reaction of self-proclaimed “human rights” champions with heavy titles and hefty budgets is to blame the Jewish state for defending itself, while making the free world a safer place, a more dangerous phenomenon is at work.

Nor does equating Israel with enemies bent on its destruction disguise the antisemitism at play. An expert at this transparent ploy is U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

Following the Israeli airstrikes on Friday night in the Dahieh suburb of Beirut, Guterres expressed “grave concern.” What he didn’t do was mention the target of those attacks: Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah—the mass murderer whose death was celebrated across the Middle East, including in Lebanon, by the victims of his brutality.

This “cycle of violence must stop now, and all sides must step back from the brink,” he said. “The people of Lebanon, the people of Israel, as well as the wider region, cannot afford an all-out war.”
The cycle of violence. That’s the classic euphemism employed by Israel’s detractors to deny its right—nay duty—to defend itself. And in case Guterres hasn’t been paying attention, an “all-out war” has been raging against the Jewish state for the past year, not including the ongoing battles imposed on it since its inception.

To make an even greater mockery of his role in the farcical international body, he proceeded to “urge the parties to recommit to the full implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701 … and immediately return to a cessation of hostilities.”

https://shoutout.wix.com/so/4aP91zP15?languageTag=en&cid=6d7b5d9a-848f-4a97-a205-5e75871c534e

Overnight, Israel attacked a Palestinian terror base in Tyre, Lebanon.The target was Fateh al Sharif, chairman of the UNWRA teachers’ association there, who was killed in the attack.

 Western media this morning are referring to him as some kind of innocent UN employee.

 What they are not saying is that this morning Hamas published an official proclamation (above) announcing his death and calling him the “martyr leader Fateh al Sharif Abu Al-Amin, the leader of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas in Lebanon and a member of the movement’s leadership abroad.”

 As is the case in Gaza, Hamas in Lebanon is deeply embedded in UNWRA, the UN body supposed to be dedicated to peace, not to murderous Jihadi terrorism.

UNRWA is funded by the British and other western governments

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/11/israels-bad-faith-critics/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Their real goal is to delegitimize the Jewish state

It has become a cliché to point out that there is a difference between criticism of Israel and denial of its right to exist. The former is well within the boundaries of acceptable discourse, as it is with any country; the latter is not, as it entertains the possibility of dismantling a sovereign state (that just so happens to be the world’s only Jewish state), which is not considered a legitimate geopolitical option in any other context. But the distinction can be elided by disguising rejection of Israel’s right to exercise sovereignty — including the right to conduct defensive wars — as mere criticism of its conduct.

Not everyone attempts the disguise. Open Israel-haters like U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese deny that Israel has any right to self-defense, because they consider it an illegitimate state to begin with. Some call Israel’s military actions “genocide” not because of Israel’s conduct but because the war occurred within “the system of settler colonial apartheid that the Israeli government has built and maintained over the past seventy-five years,” as the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote less than a week after October 7.

These extremists deny that Israel has any right to wage war against Hamas, even after October 7. Even if Israel killed only Hamas terrorists, and destroyed only weapons caches, and conducted a miraculous operation without harming a single civilian, Israel would still be in the wrong. Indeed, on this view, Israel could escape such condemnation only by accepting violence against its citizens or ceasing to exist — in other words, by forfeiting its most basic obligations as a sovereign nation. It is easy to see why most other Israel-haters would avoid making such an argument outright: When it is that easy to identify, it is easily dismissed as extreme, immoral, and, frankly, impractical.

What complicates things, however, are the frequent calls for “cease-fire” couched in terms of criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war. Most of Israel’s critics — humanitarians and opportunistic Hamas-sympathizers alike — have adopted this line. This is where classical just-war theory comes in. The theory holds that, for a war to be just, two distinct conditions must be met: First, a nation that resorts to war must do so for legitimate reasons. Second, the war itself must be conducted according to some basic principles that restrain soldiers from needless cruelty. These two parts of the theory have been wielded against Israel in a deliberately confusing manner since it launched its counteroffensive to destroy Hamas. This conflation strikes at the heart of our ability to speak and think clearly about Israel’s war against Hamas, and about what it would take to satisfy Israel’s supposed critics, including, occasionally, America’s most important elected officials and diplomats.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-palestine-of-the-mind

In 1974, the writer Jean Genet, an uncontested celebrity of the French Left, whose works extol the beauty of hoodlums, assassins, Black Panthers, the S.S., and Yasser Arafat’s Fedayeen, explained his attachment to the Palestinian cause: “It was completely natural for me to favor not only the most disadvantaged but those who distill hatred for the West most purely.”

For decades now, the Palestinians—or rather, a mythical view of the Palestinians—have brought together two elements essential to this distillation: they were poor, in contrast with the purported colonizers, who arrived partly from Europe (though a million Jews thrown out of Arab countries, beginning in 1948, also became Israelis); and they were Muslims, that is, members of a religion that some on the left see as the spearhead of the disinherited. Thus, during a time when leftist revolutionary horizons were darkening, a certain orphaned progressivism took up the Palestinian revolt against Israel. Surprisingly, however, what originated as a minority preference has developed into a majority position, winning significant support from the highest reaches of political power and from the academy, in both Europe and the United States—and reshaping the mind of an era.

The extraordinary degree of media coverage devoted to the conflict exemplifies this shift (though a period of relative reduction in attention occurred in the mid-2010s, with the emergence of the Islamic State as an international problem). It is as if the fate of the planet were playing out in a little patch of land between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Gaza. The condemnation of Israel is first an obsession with Israel. The media focus tends to convey little accurate information but is satisfied to reinforce a stereotype: the confrontation between what is deemed a racist and colonial state, a latecomer in the Arab world; and a crushed, dispossessed people. 

The widespread ignorance about this region of the world, far from a handicap, is an asset: no need to know, for instance, what river is referenced in the Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea,” since the point is Justice, with a capital J. Where Western support for the Palestinians is concerned, we find ourselves in the realm of pure ideas—abstractions—not flesh-and-blood human beings.

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.’