RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/iran-attacks-israel-what-does-it-mean-and-what-happens-next/

A few hours before Iran launched missiles at Israel, America’s spy satellite saw Iran moving the weapons onto their launching pads. They told Israel (and leaked to the media) that an attack was “imminent.” They were right.

Within hours, several hundred Iranian missiles were flying toward the Jewish State, just as they had in April. The earlier attack caused little damage — most of the missiles were intercepted — and early reports are that the recent attack met the same fate.

Israel’s success shooting down the missiles is crucial, not only because it saved lives but because it does not require Israel to launch a full-scale counter-attack.

Safety from the missiles did not protect all Israelis, though. A small group of terrorists attacked and killed innocent civilians at a café in Jaffa, a suburb just south of Tel Aviv. We don’t know yet whether that attack was coordinated with Iran or its proxies.

The common theme of the local terrorists, Iran’s Islamic Regime, and Iran’s regional proxies, Hamas (in Gaza), Hezbollah (in Lebanon) and the Houthis (in Yemen), is to kill as many Jews as possible and, they hope, ultimately extinguish the Jewish state. “From the river to the sea,” means the Middle East must be Judenfrei. Virtually all other states across the region already are. Many had large Jewish populations for centuries. No more. Where are the Jews of Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus? They were killed, chased out or fled. Their children are living in Israel, and they don’t have romanticized notions of peace with their antisemitic neighbors.

What gives them hope is not only Israel’s enormous economic and technical progress, but the threat Iran poses to the Sunni Arab countries across the region. Facing that threat, they have increasingly looked to Israel as a strong partner. That was the strategic logic behind the Abraham Accords, forged in the Trump administration.

Iran faces these long-term strategic challenges, compounded by a failing economy and the more recent challenge of its proxies’ defeats. Tehran had to do something in response to those recent losses, and it is hardly surprising they launched a missile barrage. They live in a region that respects “the strong horse,” and they had to show the allies they have armed, trained and funded that they do not stand alone.

The missiles fired at Israel make that symbolic statement. Beyond that, what should we make of the latest attack?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20984/arabs-celebrate-nasrallah-death

“Israel just made all the Middle East happy tonight.” — Israeli-Lebanese Christian journalist Jonathan Elkhoury, X, September 27, 2024.

“As a Lebanese, this is one of the happiest days in Lebanon’s history…. As a human being who holds peace before my eyes, this is the most important day for our region. Nasrallah and Hezbollah have terrorized the Lebanese people since the 1980s…. Every Lebanese and every decent human being should feel joy at the downfall of one of the greatest evils of our time. Now, we have a real chance to look forward… and sitting down with Israelis and the West for genuine negotiations on normalization and peace between our countries—Israel and Lebanon.” — Jonathan Elkhoury, X, September 24, 2024.

“Honestly, Lebanon should toss Nasrallah into the sea like the U.S. did with Bin Laden—no land deserves that filth. Though, I do feel bad for the fish.” — Amjad Taha, United Arab Emirates, to his 571,000 followers on X, September 28, 2024.

All the students at US university campuses who have been protesting Israel’s war against Iran’s terror proxies, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, should hear the voices of these Arabs. These voices demonstrate how many Arabs have also been harmed by terrorism and how they wish for a better future for their children and their people. These voices also show that in the war against Islamist terrorism, a growing number of Arabs consider Israel an ally.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27, was often described by many in the West as a “formidable enemy” of Israel. Nasrallah’s death, however, has shown that many Arabs, including some of his fellow Lebanese citizens, also considered him an enemy and arch-terrorist. The Hezbollah chief was responsible for killing not only a large number of Israelis over the past three decades, but also many Arabs, especially in Lebanon and Syria.

That is probably why the news of Nasrallah’s elimination was greeted with jubilation by many Israelis and Arabs.

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’.

 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.