RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.’

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.