RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-at-war/

On Tuesday evening local time, the mad mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran launched 181 ballistic missiles at Israel – the largest ballistic missile attack in history – sending Israelis throughout the entire country to seek cover in bomb shelters.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warned citizens to shelter in place and to follow forthcoming instructions via mobile phone alerts from the Home Front Command. IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari addressed the nation, saying, “We are strong, and we are capable in this attack also.”

Unconfirmed reports on social media suggested that up to 400 missiles had been launched, although almost all had been intercepted by the Jewish State’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, with U.S. assistance.

“During the defense, we carried out quite a few interceptions,” IDF spokesman Hagari said in a short video message. “There were a small number of hits in the center of Israel, and other hits in Southern Israel. The majority of the incoming missiles were intercepted by Israel and a defensive coalition led by the United States.” He added that officials “are unaware of casualties.”

“In accordance with our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security, U.S. forces in the region are currently defending against Iranian-launched missiles targeting Israel,” a U.S. defense official told Fox News in a statement. “Our forces remain postured to provide additional defensive support and to protect U.S. forces operating in the region.”

Three U.S. Navy destroyers are positioned in the Mediterranean Sea along with an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Oman and fighter jets stationed throughout the region to assist Israel if necessary. All are capable of shooting down incoming missiles.

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’.