RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/two-assassinations-hamas-hezbollah-israel?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The past 48 hours have been the most dramatic and consequential of any since Hamas’s war against Israel began on October 7, 2023. More than that: they could reverse the momentum of this war which, until now, has been dictated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies. 

Let’s review the news:

On July 30, as the sun began to set in Beirut, Israel launched a precision air strike on Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah military commander. The strike took place in the Dahiyeh neighborhood, which is Hezbollah’s stronghold in the city. Shukr was wanted for decades by U.S. authorities for his role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. military personnel. But the proximate reason for this hit was Hezbollah’s Saturday rocket attack in northern Israel, which killed 12 Druze children on a soccer field. Milad Bidi, an adviser to the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, was also killed in Israel’s strike. 

Less than ten hours later, more dramatic news came out of Tehran: Israel eliminated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, making him the highest-ranking Hamas official to be killed since the war began. Most significant was how and where he was hit. Haniyeh was taken out in his Tehran apartment in the middle of the night. Yesterday, veteran Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari reported the missile that felled Haniyeh was not launched from the air. According to a New York Times report, Mossad smuggled a bomb into Haniyeh’s home months ago, only to detonate it remotely when the time was right.

These were by far the most high profile of Israel’s strikes on Iranian-backed terror groups and their leadership since October 7. But these are not the only ones. 

Earlier this month, on July 13, the IDF struck Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s top military commander. Deif met his end in an air strike in Mouasi—an area along the Gaza coast—where he attempted to blend in with Palestinians seeking refuge from the destructive war that he himself directed. Deif is credited for transforming Hamas from a tactical annoyance into a terror group that has pushed the Middle East to the brink of a regional war.

So what does all of this mean? 

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/02/the-world-held-hostage-day-300-countering-kamalas-condescension-bibi-bombs-away/

A tragic milestone is reached today: Day 300 of Iran Hostage Crisis II, as reflected on this site.

And developments are moving fast and furious, even if the end of the ordeal has not for five Americans and some 65 other innocent captives still presumed alive.

As the marker approached, dynamic Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an oration for the ages, and took bold, decisive actions that could accelerate a deal to return the women, infants, and men who continue as pawns in Hamas’ cruel machinations.

And dimwitted presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris delivered remarks for the aged (i.e., stepping into the place of her deposed, dementia-ridden boss) that threatened to set the captives’ homecoming back indefinitely.

“The war in Gaza could end tomorrow if Hamas surrenders, disarms, and returns all the hostages,” Bibi boomed during his address before a joint congressional session. “But if they don’t, Israel will fight until we destroy Hamas’ military capabilities and its rule in Gaza and bring all our hostages home.”

Yet why would Hamas’ blood-soaked Caesars wave the white flag and cash in their caches of human poker chips given Harris’ winking assurances in her first appearance as de facto diplomat in chief?

After meeting Netanyahu, whom she had already dissed by skipping his speech – and following a dutiful but disingenuous recitation of the usual homilies about supporting Israel – Ms. Harris laid bare where her real sympathies lie as she embarrassed her guest with a regurgitation of warmed-over Palestinian propaganda:

To wit: 

I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians. And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there, with over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/31/ismail-haniyeh-was-a-monster-not-a-moderate/

Forget ‘centrist dads’, there’s a new political character in town: the centrist fascist. The moderate Jew-killer. The middle-of-the-road cheerleader of mass murder. It’s Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, who was bumped off in Tehran yesterday, presumably by the Israel Defence Forces. Reading the strangely pained media coverage of his death, you could be forgiven for thinking he’d been a pragmatic, upstanding guy, someone who was considered ‘very moderate’, in the words of Sky News crank, Alex Crawford. In truth, of course, he was a militant anti-Semite and we should spend as much time mourning his passing as he did the Jews his comrades butchered on 7 October: ie, none.

The m-word I expected to see in the commentary on Haniyeh was ‘murderous’ – the m-word I got was ‘moderate’. For all his ‘tough rhetoric’, he was actually ‘moderate and pragmatic’, says BBC correspondent, Yolande Knell. That ‘tough rhetoric’ included calling the 7 October pogrom a ‘victory’, agitating for a further ‘jihad of the swords’ (that is, more Jew murder), and chanting about the ‘army of Muhammad’ returning to wreak vengeance on Jews. BBC types will damn you as a crazy extremist if you say women don’t have cocks, and then straight-up depict a man who wanted to draw swords against Jews as a moderate.

He was ‘pragmatic’ and ‘open to negotiation’, says the Guardian. CNBC at least had the decency to caveat its insane commentary, only calling Haniyeh a ‘relatively moderate figure’. He was seen ‘as a moderate’, says Reuters, certainly in comparison with ‘more hardline’ Hamas leaders. Seriously, what does ‘moderate’ even mean in the Hamas context? This is a terror outfit whose founding charter committed it to the murder of Jews. And which slaughtered more Jews in one day on 7 October 2023 than anyone else had since the Nazis. A fascistic act Haniyeh celebrated. Perhaps he only wanted to kill some Jews, not all of them? Is that ‘pragmatism’ in Hamasworld?

The killing of Haniyeh has sent shockwaves around the world. He joined Hamas upon its creation in 1987. He swiftly moved up its ranks and by the late 1990s, following various stints in Israeli jails, he was running the office of Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He became Palestinian prime minister in 2006, after Hamas won the most seats in the Palestine-wide elections, but he was dismissed by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in 2007. In 2017, he was elected leader of Hamas’s political wing, though he swiftly went into exile in Qatar where he lived it up as ordinary Gazans suffered in the various wars started by his cronies.

During the 2000s, as he soared to power in Hamas’s political wing, the movement’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, was murdering hundreds of Israelis. They detonated suicide bombs in discotheques, pizza restaurants, on buses. And they did so from a belief that ‘the Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth’, in the words of Hamas’s one-time minister of culture, Atallah Abu Al-Subh. Imagine if someone had told you, while all that racist slaughter was taking place 20 years ago, that one day the political head of the movement behind it would be borderline gushed over as a ‘moderate’ in the mainstream media. You’d have thought them mad. Yet here we are.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/israel-settles-some-scores?skip=1

On July 30, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh attended the inauguration ceremony of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, where attendees chanted “Death to Israel, Death to America.” By the following morning, Haniyeh was dead, eliminated in a targeted strike on his Tehran home.

The strike, almost certainly conducted by Israel, was a stunning display of military precision and strategic prowess, made all the more astonishing by the fact that Fuad Shakr, effectively Hezbollah’s second in command, was taken out by Israel less than 12 hours earlier. Just two weeks ago, in Gaza, Israel appeared to have done the same to Mohammad Deif, the head of Hamas’s military brigades, with another targeted strike. These operations underscore a truth forgotten by Israel’s enemies, and even to an extent by Israel itself: when it chooses to be unencumbered by international pressure, Israel is an unstoppable force in the fight against terrorism.

Its recent series of targeted assassinations should send a stark warning to terrorist leaders worldwide: they are not safe. The moment they leave the safety of their underground bunkers—or their fancy accommodations in Qatar, in the case of Hamas leaders—they may find themselves in Israel’s crosshairs. To drive this message home even more powerfully, however, the international community, particularly the United States, should unequivocally express support for the strikes. Better yet, the U.S. should leverage its influence and pressure Qatar to expel the remaining Hamas officials enjoying safe haven in Doha.

Critics of the targeted assassinations will doubtless voice concern over potential escalatory responses from Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as other Iranian-backed proxies like the Houthis and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But these critics forget that the escalation already occurred—on October 7, to be exact, when Hamas led thousands of terrorists in the most devastating mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-7-29-settler-colonialists-in-israel-and-the-united-states

Of all the epithets of the left that don’t make any sense, the term “settler colonialist” is one of my favorites. We live in a world where the ability of people to relocate, even to places thousands of miles distant, has increased greatly over time. These days, many millions of people per year pick up and relocate, or try to relocate, from one country to another. By far the biggest mass migrations going on currently are into the U.S. and into Europe from various poorer countries. This November 2023 piece from NPR puts the number of “migrants” crossing the U.S. Southern border illegally in 2023 at about 2.4 million. That would be in addition to about 1 million legal immigrants to the U.S. each year. The European Commission at this site from April 2024 gives a figure of 42.4 million people living in the EU who were not born there, about 9% of the population. That would suggest something like 1 million or so new arrivals per year.

So are all these people “settler colonialists”? Try to find that term applied to any of these millions of annual migrants, and I will bet that you cannot. The legal entry of millions into the United States, and the illegal invasion of millions more, is cheered on by all on the left. Meanwhile the derogatory term “settler colonialist” is reserved for much smaller numbers of migrants who have been designated as disfavored based on criteria that I have never seen rationally articulated.

And yet, find yourself in a disfavored group making a relocation, and get ready for an unrelenting stream of invective. Of course, Jews are the ultimate such disfavored group.