RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://jinsa.org/tragic-mistakes-are-common-during-war/

Tragic mistakes happen in wars—particularly those fought in dense urban areas against adversaries who hide behind human shields—but they are not a reason to end conflicts before they are won. That is especially true when those wars are justified, fought by law-abiding, professional militaries, and waged again barbaric adversaries. Israel’s unfortunate, accidental strike that killed seven aid workers only shows how important it is that Israel finish the job against Hamas, not finish the war now.

Even though the advent of precision-guided munitions, GPS, satellite imagery, and other high-tech tools, couple with discussions of surgical strikes, can make modern warfare seem like its sterile, accurate, and infallible, as battlefield commanders we know otherwise. The reality of high-intensity warfare in a compressed battlefield is that commanders make rapid-fire decisions on sometimes imperfect information. The awful and brutal fact is that mistakes happen, even among the most advanced, law-abiding, and careful militaries in the world.

Indeed, in every conflict since the introduction of precision-guided munitions, the United States military has still made regrettable and tragic mistakes. In Operation Desert Storm, over 400 civilians were killed when the United States bombed what intelligence indicated was a command-and-control bunker but turned out to be an air-raid shelter. Rather than a Yugoslavian military target, in 1999 the United States mistakenly hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

The margin for error has only grown smaller as the United States and our partners turned to fight adversaries that wear no uniform, respect no laws, and hide among civilians. In Afghanistan, for example, the United States mistakenly struck a hospital in Kunduz, believing it was harboring Taliban fighters.

Such mistakes are not a reflection on the evil character or intentions of the military that commits them. Instead, militaries should be judged not on whether they commit mistakes, but on the steps they take in the aftermath of such tragic incidents.

https://www.jns.org/us-rift-with-israel-emboldened-iran-to-attack-directly-analysts-say/

On April 14, Iran for the first time broke with its longstanding policy of attacking Israel only by proxy. The question is, why?

Analysts offer a variety of explanations, but all agree that Iran’s perception that the United States had distanced itself from Israel was a key driver.

While Iranian proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria did participate in Saturday night’s attack, the vast majority of the more than 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles launched at Israel came straight from Iranian territory.

“This is a very strange event. Iranian strategy is to send someone else to get killed,” said Eyal Pinko, a researcher and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, who served for years in Israeli intelligence services.

Iran’s pretext for the attack was retaliation for the April 1 assassination of one of its generals, a targeted killing attributed to Israel. However, Pinko told JNS, “Iranian generals have been killed before. It doesn’t explain the change in doctrine.”

According to Pinko, “Iran perceived Israel as weak on several fronts, foremost among which is that it saw a significant decline in U.S. support.”

He noted the Biden administration’s growing criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas, culminating in America’s failure to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, told JNS that there’s “no doubt” that Iran concluded that it could attack Israel directly without fear of U.S. reprisal.

“It’s the number one reason,” he said. “Iran calculated accurately that there would be huge American pressure on Israel not to respond.”

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/p/world-seeks-stability-israel-seeks?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

“[Israel’s] leaders and people are forever being entreated to avoid escalation and to act proportionately. They are hectored, lectured and told to act responsibly. No other country in the world is required to behave in this way when it is attacked by states that want to wipe it off the face of the earth.”

So said a Telegraph editorial on April 14, the morning after Iran’s massive missile and drone attack on Israel. The Telegraph’s retort was aimed at an instantaneous US and European reaction to the events of the early morning hours of the 14th—“Israel, it’s terrible that you should be attacked this way. Now, don’t do anything!”

An Israeli military retaliation to the attack would be seen, of course, as a threat to “stability”—than which, unfortunately, a worn-out, dissolute West sees no higher value. “Stability” means allowing Iran to continue spreading its tentacles throughout the Middle East, creating a ring of fire around Israel, arming, training, funding, and inciting its terror proxies, and marching along almost untrammeled toward nuclearization.

That approach is evident in the US–British very limited, ineffectual warfare on the Houthis’ assault on global shipping in the Red Sea. The unspoken rule is that Houthi targets alone get hit—but no targets on the soil of the Houthis’ sponsor, Iran. Even the Iranian spy ship in the Red Sea that helps guide the Houthis’ attacks is out of bounds. (Update: the ship is now reported to be heading back to Iran for fear of an Israeli strike.)

Worried European leaders indeed trooped to Israel this week to hector and lecture its leaders not to do anything in response to an unprecedented Iranian onslaught of hundreds of projectiles, including a swarm of 120 enormous ballistic missiles some of which were intended to destroy Israel’s Nevatim airbase.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20586/the-better-civilians-of-gaza

Among the so-called innocent “civilians” who Hamas claims have been killed by Israel, there are thousands of guilty and complicit civilians without whose assistance Hamas could not have succeeded in their barbarisms.

When Hamas provides its self-serving numbers of those allegedly killed by Israel, they refuse to distinguish between combatants and civilians. They certainly do not identify complicit “civilians,” nor do they indicate how many were killed by the “friendly fire” of Hamas and other terrorist groups, whose rockets routinely misfire and land within Gaza. In a deliberate effort to mislead, Hamas instead purports to list the number of women and children who have been killed. But they include terrorists under the age of 19 as “children” and female terrorists as “women.”

All in all, the number of absolutely innocent Gazans — babies, children and adults who are not complicit in Hamas crimes — is a fraction of those claimed by Israel’s enemies, including so-called human rights groups.

It is time for a thorough and objective investigation of the actual status of all those allegedly killed by Israeli military actions. The results will show that Israel has achieved a remarkably low and unheard of ratio of combatants and complicit civilians to innocent civilians.

“The crimes committed by the Germans are horrible and one hears on every corner of the misery and losses they have intentionally brought over the peoples. The strangest thing is that even the better people among the Germans are not conscious of their heavy responsibility for all these crimes committed by the government they have chosen themselves, and that the outside world is rather inclined to forget about it.”

Those words were written by Albert Einstein on September 16, 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, in a letter I was fortunate enough to acquire.

That letter could have been written to the so-called innocent adult civilians in Gaza. They too bear “a heavy responsibility for all these crimes committed by the government they have chosen themselves.” They elected Hamas and, according to recent polls, continue to support it and would vote for those terrorists again.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/15/how-woke-leftists-became-cheerleaders-for-iran/

How quickly the ‘Ceasefire Now!’ lobby turned into frothing warmongers. No sooner had Iran began its criminal bombardment of Israel than these phoney peaceniks were leaping up and down with delight. This is ‘true solidarity’, said one ‘pro-Palestine’ group in response to Iran’s raining down of missiles on the Jewish State. We can now glimpse the truth behind their fake pacifism. We can see their yearning for war on Israel that they cynically dress up as a campaign for peace in Palestine. It’s not a ceasefire woke Westerners want – it’s the humiliation and taming of the Jewish nation.

Iran launched its felonious assault on Saturday night. It fired hundreds of cruise missiles and aerial drones at Israel. Mercifully, Israel, with the help of Britain, America and Jordan, was able to intercept the murderous fusillade, meaning very little damage was done. But that should not detract from the seriousness of this act of war. This is the first time Iran has attacked Israel directly. Normally, the theocratic tyrants do their Israelophobic bidding through proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. That Tehran has now turned its own war machine in Israel’s direction is profoundly concerning.

And what are our self-styled radicals saying? The kind of people who’ve been clogging up the streets of LA, New York, London and Berlin these past six months to wring their hands over war? They’re not saying ‘Ceasefire Now!’, that’s for sure. In fact, some are saying ‘War Now!’, or at least are making craven excuses for Iran’s attack. A member of the International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America went so far as to offer ‘full solidarity with Iran as it retaliates against the Zionist entity’. From solidarity with Palestine to solidarity with warmongering Islamists: it’s so clearly hate for Israel, not love for peace, that motors these people.

Asa Winstanley, the oddball who runs Electronic Intifada, described Iran’s attack as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ – it’s like Blairism with a Marxian veneer – and said ‘THANK YOU IRAN’. The Palestinian Youth Movement praised Iran for daring ‘to take action to bring an end to genocide [sic]’. The Palestine Solidarity Alliance at Hunter College in New York City offered Iran ‘solidarity’. A professor at California State University said ‘Iran did what all Arabs could not do’ – that is, teach uppity Israel a stern lesson. The cry for peace has morphed into sympathy for war – if it’s war on the ‘Zionist entity’, that is.

https://jewishworldreview.com/0424/steyn041524.php

The conventional wisdom of the media and think-tanks agreed its line around the time the two-hundredth drone was shot down: Iran’s assault on Israel was a flop.

A record number of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles were launched by the mullahs against the Zionist Entity: For the flight from Persia, a drone takes nine hours, a cruise two hours, and a ballistic missile about twelve minutes. Not a single drone or cruise missile made it to Israeli soil. A few of the ballistics penetrated the country’s air space, lighting up the sky over the Temple Mount yet killing not a single Jew. An unlucky seven-year-old girl in a Bedouin encampment in the desert was injured by shrapnel, but for Tehran that’s one lousy return on investment. For purposes of comparison, the usual West Bank bloodletting racked up a higher body count: a fourteen-year-old Israeli shepherd was found shot in the head yesterday.

Meanwhile, after six months in geopolitical Coventry, Israel is once again flush with allies:

(April 14, 2024 / JNS) The United States, United Kingdom and Jordan downed many of the over 300 projectiles launched at Israel by Iran overnight Sunday, while France also played a role in defending the Jewish state against the unprecedented attack.

The Jordanians were mostly concerned to protect their own territory from carelessly targeted incoming, the French are said to have confined their efforts to patrolling the airspace and giving a friendly head’s up, and the British dispatched jets from the RAF base at Akrotiri to take out Iranian drones over Syria and Iraq. Whether any of these efforts were militarily necessary to Israel’s defence, they’re not likely to be politically popular on their respective home fronts. Yet all were eager to be perceived as in on the operation, and their participation is being hailed as the emergence of a new Israeli-Sunni-western regional security force:

https://www.jns.org/irans-attack-was-a-casus-belli-not-a-retaliation/

Following the April 1 strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, threats of retaliation against Israel—widely assumed to have been behind the attack—promptly emerged from Tehran. Seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed in the bombing that reportedly destroyed the building that housed them next to the embassy compound.

Among the dead were Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and his deputy, Mohammad Haj Rahimi. Zahedi was a top commander in the IRGC’s Quds Force, designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization, who oversaw all terrorist operations against Israel from Syria, Lebanon and Palestinian-run territories.

Dubbing their headquarters in Syria a “diplomatic mission,” therefore, is like calling Shifa in Gaza a hospital. Indeed, according to international law: “Any object that serves a military purpose, even if used for both military and civilian activities, is a legitimate target.”

Despite this, or because of it, most analysts were skeptical about the likelihood of a counter-offensive from the soil of the foremost state sponsor of terrorism. After all, the ayatollah-led regime has spent decades cultivating proxies to do its dirty work around the world.

And at this very moment, some of those surrogates are actively engaged in their sponsor’s aim to wipe the Jewish state off the map, while others are sporadically contributing to the effort.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are fighting Israeli troops and holding hostage 133 mostly Israeli civilians in Gaza, while targeting Israel with rockets; Hamas and PIJ are fighting soldiers and civilians in Judea and Samaria; Hezbollah missiles have caused the evacuation of citizens in northern Israel; and the Yemen-based Houthis occasionally join in the multi-front assault through UAVs launched at Eilat.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20581/christians-prefer-israel-not-palestinian-authority

Among the top 50 countries in which Christians were persecuted in 2023 were Yemen, Libya, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco, Qatar, Egypt, Turkey, and other Middle Eastern and Muslim-majority countries. Israel, needless to say, was not on the list.

Despite these disturbing statistics, US television personality Tucker Carlson, in his interview with the Bethlehem pastor, chose to single out Israel, the only country where Christians feel safe and where their number is increasing every year. Carlson did not bother to ask the pastor about the persecuted Christians of Egypt.

Carlson chose to interview Isaac, who has long history of promoting falsehoods about Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict in his roles as pastor, academic dean of Bethlehem Bible College (a self-identified “Palestinian Christian Evangelical university college” that promotes a “Palestinian Christian theology”), and director of the “Christ at the Checkpoint” conferences — the infamous venue where anti-Israel libels are proclaimed in the name of Christian love, justice and peace.

“[T]hose of us who track these things know that Munther Isaac has long been the high priest of antisemitic Christianity; sadly, he spreads his hate from the city of Jesus’ birth.” — Rev. Johnnie Moore, president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, jewishinsider.com, April 11, 2024.

“We have a mafia here that is seizing Christian-owned lands. I protested against this Muslim mafia, and I even called a large gathering. I invited 80 people to my home. That same night, fliers were distributed in Bethlehem threatening to kill me. Of course, I am worried about the future of Christians here. Looking at the facts on the ground, you can see that there is no future for the Christians here. We are melting; we are disappearing. I fear the day will come when our churches will become museums. That is my nightmare.” — Samir Qumsieh, prominent Christian leader near Bethlehem, to Gatestone, April 2024.

Since the Palestinian Authority (PA) assumed control of Bethlehem in 1995, the Christian share of the population has dropped from 65% to only 12% today. By contrast, the Christian population in Israel has been on the rise in recent years. “Most of us 180k Christian Israelis prefer to live under Israel freely rather than under a Palestinian Islamic Authority regime controlling Bethlehem. Israel gives us freedom while living under Arabs has been genocidal for Christians all across the Middle East,” says Shadi Khalloul, a Christian Maronite who describes himself as a “patriotic Israeli.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20569/hamas-destroys-gaza-victory

The prospect of Hamas declaring or celebrating “victory” worries not only Israel, but many Arabs — including Palestinians — who want to see the terrorist group completely destroyed and removed from power, but are often afraid to speak out for fear of retaliation.

“The continuity of Hamas’s rule in Gaza is an ultra mega major disaster for the Palestinian people’s aspirations, cause, hope for the reconstruction of the battered coastal enclave, and prospects for a new path forward to bring about progress, reconciliation, coexistence & peace.” — Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, “Proud American from Gaza City; pro-Palestine, pro-peace, anti-Hamas”, X, April 8, 2024.

Hamas, clearly buoyed by having the US on their side, has unsurprisingly hardened its position. It is now and is saying it wants Israel to make even more concessions.

Where is any US pressure on Hamas, Iran or Qatar?

“Yes, Hamas thanked the United States. When a terrorist group is thanking you, you’re probably doing something wrong.” — Joe Truzman, senior research analyst, X, April 9, 2024.

The Hamas terrorists have only been emboldened by the Biden administration’s growing hostility towards Israel and its demand that Israel end the war, a move that would effectively be a surrender to Hamas.

“What victory are you talking about? Are you in your right mind? [Hamas has brought] complete devastation; thousands killed and displaced…. This is what the terrorist Hamas group, Iran’s puppet, brought upon the people of Gaza. The leaders of Hamas defeated the people of Gaza and exterminated them without mercy.” — Omar Shaybalras, X, April 9, 2024.

“Gaza has been destroyed, starved, slaughtered…. The people of Gaza are cursing Hamas, [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad, and Iran…. The members of Hamas’s armed wing use children as human shields.” — Osama al-Ali ,member of the Palestinian National Council, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, television interview, X, December 7, 2023.

“As long as [Hamas leaders Ismail] Haniyeh, [Yahya] Sinwar and [Khaled] Mashaal are alive, it is a victory for them, As for the destruction and the blood of the women and children of Gaza, it is a profitable enterprise as far as Hamas is concerned.” — Abdallah Abou Aymen, April 9, 2024.

Unlike the Biden administration and anti-Israel protestors in the West, these observers understand that Hamas, Iran and Qatar are fully and solely responsible for the mass destruction and high casualties in the Gaza Strip…. We are already seeing calls for “Death to America” in America. A ceasefire would save Hamas, allow it to continue preparing for future massacres against Israelis, and enable Iran and Qatar to “export the Revolution” even more aggressively.

Above all, a US-bestowed, fake “victory” for Hamas would assure China, Russia and other predators that belligerency works and incentivize them to put the finishing touches on what many perceive as an “ultra mega major disaster” of a presidential legacy.

The Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is reportedly preparing to hold “victory” rallies if and when the war in the Gaza Strip ends. Many Arabs, however, have scoffed at Hamas’s expected celebrations and accused the terrorist group and its patrons in Tehran of destroying the Gaza Strip.

“A friend in the City of Rafah told me he saw large signs and banners being printed/prepared by Hamas to hold ‘victory rallies’ that the Islamist group plans on having when a ceasefire/hostage deal is announced, highlighting the withdrawal of IDF troops from Gaza as an achievement,” said Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who describes himself as a “proud American from Gaza City; pro-Palestine, pro-peace, and anti-Hamas,” who lost 31 family members in the Israel-Hamas war.