Israel turns the pager on terror with ruthless psychological masterstroke against Hezbollah Miranda Devine
Nobody likes to see humans writhing in agony, but Israel’s daring operation to simultaneously explode pagers in the pockets of Hezbollah terrorists and their associates this week was a ruthless tactical masterstroke.
In bloody scenes captured on video on social media, men could be seen shopping or sitting on a motorbike one minute and on the ground moaning and covered in blood the next.
At least 12 people were killed and nearly 3,000 people were injured in Lebanon Tuesday, and a similar detonation of Hezbollah walkie-talkies the next day killed another 20 people and injured 450.
In Hezbollah’s macho culture, the psychological blow of their warriors and officials getting their genitalia blown up is acute, and so is the signal sent to Iran, that no communications devices are safe after Israel managed to kill Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh under the noses of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran by tracking his whereabouts via his cellphone.
Hence the terrorists’ migration to more primitive devices like pagers. The ingenious “Paging Hezbollah” operation was about as surgical a strike on terrorists as you could get, although Lebanese authorities claimed two innocent children were killed in Tuesday’s attack, more tragic victims of a pointless war that Hamas started on Oct. 7 last year.
Dem sympathizers
Of course, the Hamas sympathizers in the Democratic Party like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez immediately condemned Israel with a passion that seems to evade them when Israeli civilians are raped and murdered.
There are no circumstances in which Israel is allowed to defend itself.
Israelis must simply accept the blows from their neighbors in the Middle East who have vowed to annihilate their little country.
Since Oct. 7, Israel has been under siege from Iranian proxies which encircle it, from Hamas in Gaza in the southwest, to Hezbollah in Lebanon to the northwest, to Iranian funded militias in Syria to the north.
On one side of the Red Sea, the Iranian funded Houthi rebel forces in Yemen have been launching drones and missiles at US Navy warships and cargo vessels and threaten to block the Suez Canal, through which 12% of global trade is shipped.
On the other side of the Red Sea comes a new threat from Sudan, where diplomatic ties with Iran were reestablished in October 2023 and the army is now being supplied with combat drones and other Iranian weapons.
“Hezbollah is just one theater of war for Israel,” says Niger Innis, chairman for the Congress of Racial Equality, one of America’s oldest civil rights organizations, who traveled to Africa in 2003 with his father, the late Roy Innis, a famous conservative black activist of the 1960s and ’70s who took a special interest in South Sudanese independence.
Innis’ concern about the growing influence of Iran in Africa has him moderating a symposium for the Gatestone Institute Thursday, with speakers John Ratcliffe, former director of National Intelligence, and professors Victor Davis Hanson and Alan Dershowitz.
“On the western flank of the Red Sea is Sudan,” says Innis.
“On the eastern flank are the Houthis in Yemen and they can use Iranian weapons to attack Israel and create a choke point on commercial shipping. This not only threatens Israel but blackmails the entire world. . .
Iran’s proxy warriors
“The world is focused right now on the technological brilliance of the Israelis, but they are now engaged in a regional war where the Sudanese are a proxy of Iran and that’s something the world needs to be aware of.”
Innis points out that when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office, Iran was broke, “crippled and on its knees,” but they willfully reanimated Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that Donald Trump had sensibly scrapped.
Last year, they released $6 billion in frozen funds to Iran that we were assured would only be used for “humanitarian purposes and medicine.”
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A month later, on Oct. 7, came the depraved attack on Israel by Iran-sponsored Hamas terrorists.
Ever since, Biden and Harris have displayed disdain for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with Harris rudely boycotting his visit to Congress this year, in an effort to appease the Hamas wing of her party.
Biden and Harris have paused the supply of certain weapons to Israel, and demanded its military pull their punches in Gaza, where Israeli and American hostages were taken.
Now, as the anniversary of Oct. 7 nears, we find from the State Department’s inspector general that the administration grossly mishandled the suspension of its virulently anti-Israel Iran envoy Robert Malley, who had his security clearance revoked last April.
Malley, a childhood friend of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his old classmate from École Jeannine Manuel, a bilingual school in Paris, was improperly allowed to access classified materials after his suspension pending an ongoing investigation by the FBI for security breaches, according to accounts of the IG report in the Washington Free Beacon and The Associated Press.
Investigative reporter Lee Smith wrote in Tablet last year that Malley allegedly had helped “fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments” and helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence “into some of the most sensitive positions in the US government — first at the State Department and now the Pentagon.”
Pro-Tehran analysis
Among the policy analysts Malley hired was Ariane Tabatabai, who has been identified as a member of a pro-Tehran advocacy network run by Iran’s foreign ministry and remains a senior Pentagon official with top-secret security clearance.
Despite the obvious concerns, Malley was allowed to participate in a classified White House call on Iran one day after his suspension, but before he was informed about it.
He was still performing official duties after his security clearance was pulled, in breach of State Department protocol, says the IG report.
A month after his suspension, he was included in an email with then-undersecretary for political affairs Victoria Nuland discussing talking points for Blinken, the Free Beacon reported.
“Special Envoy Malley’s advice was also regularly sought and provided on issues including media talking points and Congressional testimony,” the IG found.
In other words, Blinken and his bosses Harris and Biden treated the potential national security threat posed by Malley as a joke.
So did Yale and Princeton, which offered him prestigious teaching roles after he was suspended.
It’s no wonder that Israel didn’t trust Harris or Biden enough to inform them about the Hezbollah pager operation until the last minute.
What a terrible indictment of American leadership.
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