RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.