Why Arabs Are Celebrating the Death of Hassan Nasrallah by Bassam Tawil

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.

The fight for free speech in Ireland isn’t over yet The government has shelved its proposed hate-speech laws, but this is not the end of its censorious agenda. Lorcan Price

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/01/the-fight-for-free-speech-in-ireland-isnt-over-yet/

Lorcán Price is an Irish barrister and legal counsel for ADF International. He has been advising a coalition of Irish politicians opposed to the hate-speech bill.

The Irish government’s mission to make Ireland the wokest place in the Western world suffered a setback late last week, when justice minister Helen McEntee quietly announced that the government was dropping its plan for highly controversial new hate-speech laws.

These proposed speech restrictions were included in the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill. McEntee has now conceded that ‘the incitement-to-hatred element [of the bill] does not have a consensus’. Describing these proposed hate-speech laws as lacking ‘consensus’ is a piece of masterful understatement. The legislation – which will live on with the hate-speech elements removed – has attracted criticism for its far-reaching implications for free speech, not just in Ireland but also across the West.

And with good reason. Dublin is home to the European HQs of various major tech and social-media companies, such as Meta, Google and X. If it had been introduced in its original form, the bill would have had a huge impact on social-media users across Europe and further afield, as those companies based in Ireland would have been regulated under the new laws. This would have given the domestic Irish legislation outsized global significance.

The original bill criminalised ‘incitement to hatred’, but its definition of hatred was completely circular. Ministers rejected all attempts to introduce a more workable and clear definition into the law, because doing so would make convictions ‘significantly more difficult to secure’.

The vague definitions didn’t stop there. The bill would have criminalised ‘hatred’ expressed against someone on the basis of their ‘gender identity’, which was defined as the ‘gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female’.

Bizarre and confusing passages such as this were not drafting mistakes. They were a central feature of the proposed law, designed to create a state of uncertainty as to what would constitute illegal ‘hate speech’.

Christopher F. Rufo Unmasking the “Whole-of-Government” DEI Agenda The real-world effects of the White House’s diversity initiatives will soon be revealed.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/unmasking-the-whole-of-government-dei-agenda

Every nation has an operating ideology. In a country that hews faithfully to the principles embedded in its written constitution, that ideology is overt. In a tyrannical government, however, it is concealed, as the regime preaches one set of values in principle but pursues the opposite in practice.

Most Americans believe that our nation today lives up to its founding principle that all men are created equal. The letter of the law seems to provide for colorblind equality, according to which individuals are judged on their talents and virtues, rather than on their ancestry, religion, or place of origin.

This has not held true in practice, however. Most obviously, of course, was the long American history of slavery and disenfranchisement of African Americans. Since 1965, however, when Lyndon Johnson first implemented the policy of affirmative action in federal contracting, the United States has racially discriminated in favor of minority groups—maintaining discrimination, but changing the target.

The old rationale was that achieving equal rights for the previously disenfranchised required a short period of favoritism on their behalf, which would wither away. But the withering never happened. Instead, our institutions intensified their commitment to racial favoritism, right up to the present day, and most recently under the mandate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

One prominent proponent of that policy is Vice President Kamala Harris, who rose to power on the coattails of racial politics and, as vice president, has worked to entrench DEI into every aspect of the federal government.

This agenda was made explicit by her running mate. During the Democratic primary campaign in 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden committed to choosing a woman as vice president and to appointing an administration that “will look like the country,” a polite way of saying that he would consider identity first and merit second. The following month, he noted that among his list of potential VPs were “four black women,” and amid a pressure campaign to select one, eventually chose Harris, then senator from California.

A Confident J. D. Vance Keeps Tim Walz on His Heels in First and Only Vice-Presidential Debate By Ryan Mills

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/a-confident-j-d-vance-keeps-tim-walz-on-his-heels-in-first-and-only-vice-presidential-debate/

Ohio Senator J. D. Vance turned in a confident and controlled debate performance Tuesday night, seemingly making a stronger case for the reelection of his running mate, former president Donald Trump, than Trump himself has in either of his two debates this year.

Vance kept Democrat Tim Walz on his heels for most of the night, arguing that the country was safer, and more prosperous during Trump’s first term in office than it’s been under nearly four years with Kamala Harris as vice president. He swatted away Walz’s contention that Harris has plans to fix the border crisis and strengthen the economy, saying that as vice president she “ought to do them now.”

Walz, who has mostly avoided the media spotlight since he was tapped by Harris, appeared nervous when the bout began, stumbling over his words and taking long pauses to collect himself. Vance, by contrast, seemed poised after sitting for near daily interviews with adversarial journalists.

Defying the media’s arch-conservative caricature, Vance was compassionate to women who are facing unplanned pregnancies, and suggested that his Republican Party needs “to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back” on the issue of abortion.

Kamala’s Fear of the Media How, exactly, does she intend to engage with Putin, Xi and Kim Jong Un? by Gary Franks

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamalas-fear-of-the-media/

Fear. If you are afraid to engage the media, how can you be expected to engage with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Jinping Xi, Iran’s leaders, or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un?

Vice President Kamala Harris has been reluctant and has refused to hold a news conference in more than 66 days or give any one-on-one interviews with members of the national press, even before becoming the Democratic nominee for president.

President Joe Biden is Harris’s role model. He is another person who did not fully engage the media. Biden held the fewest news conferences than any modern-day president; facetiously, he ran his campaign in 2020 from his basement allegedly due to COVID.

So, why change? It has worked thus far. The liberal media is “OK” with that, apparently.

You can count on one hand in four years (and have fingers left over) the times Biden has had one-on-one meetings with Putin, Xi, Kim or any other American adversary. And how has that worked out? The world is in chaos.

In contrast, former President John F. Kennedy went eyeball to eyeball with Russia’s President Nikita Khrushchev over 60 years ago. Kennedy had news conferences and interviews with the press regularly. He forced Russia to remove its missiles from Cuba. Former Presidents Ronald Reagan and H.W. Bush met with Russian leaders and won the Cold War. Peace through strength.

Biden-Harris? Well, no. Either they do not like being challenged by adversaries (even the press), or they cannot respond to questions with their true feelings. Former President Donald Trump has never had that problem.

‘Diplomatic Engagement’ Camouflages the Betrayal of Israel The folly of diplomacy as the way to lasting peace in the Middle East. by Bruce Thornton

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.

Israel at War “Iran made a grave mistake this evening – and it will pay for it.” by Mark Tapson

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.

Defeating Hezbollah Will Strengthen the West by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20983/defeating-hezbollah

An Israeli victory against Hezbollah’s terrorist infrastructure in Lebanon is vital to guaranteeing the security of the entire Western alliance. It will send a clear signal to Iran — Hezbollah’s paymasters — that the ayatollahs’ unremitting campaign against the West and its allies is ultimately doomed to failure.

[A]n estimated 90,000 Israelis being forced to flee their homes, leaving large swathes of northern Israel deserted. Hezbollah has said that those Israelis will not be able to return to their homes, raising concerns that Hezbollah, which had been planning to invade northern Israel, might also be planning to occupy it.

[United Nations Secretary-General António] Guterres, referring to Israel, announced that the war “did not happen in a vacuum.” Ironically, it is Guterres himself who is responsible for creating the non-vacuum that ignited the situation. According to UN Security Resolution 1701, it was the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, under the direction of Guterres, that was tasked with “maintaining security and stability throughout south Lebanon….” It didn’t.

Since the IDF launched its military campaign against Hezbollah, Israel has faced the usual barrage of criticism over civilian casualties.

The reality, though, is that the group most responsible for causing casualties is Hezbollah which, like its Iranian-backed ally Hamas in Gaza, has no qualms about putting innocent Lebanese civilians in harm’s way.

Israel’s offensive to destroy Hezbollah, therefore, is very much in the West’s interests in terms of safeguarding its future security, a consideration Western leaders should take on board when seeking to address the deepening crisis in the Middle East.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20983/defeating-hezbollah

An Israeli victory against Hezbollah’s terrorist infrastructure in Lebanon is vital to guaranteeing the security of the entire Western alliance. It will send a clear signal to Iran — Hezbollah’s paymasters — that the ayatollahs’ unremitting campaign against the West and its allies is ultimately doomed to failure.

[A]n estimated 90,000 Israelis being forced to flee their homes, leaving large swathes of northern Israel deserted. Hezbollah has said that those Israelis will not be able to return to their homes, raising concerns that Hezbollah, which had been planning to invade northern Israel, might also be planning to occupy it.

[United Nations Secretary-General António] Guterres, referring to Israel, announced that the war “did not happen in a vacuum.” Ironically, it is Guterres himself who is responsible for creating the non-vacuum that ignited the situation. According to UN Security Resolution 1701, it was the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, under the direction of Guterres, that was tasked with “maintaining security and stability throughout south Lebanon….” It didn’t.

Since the IDF launched its military campaign against Hezbollah, Israel has faced the usual barrage of criticism over civilian casualties.

The reality, though, is that the group most responsible for causing casualties is Hezbollah which, like its Iranian-backed ally Hamas in Gaza, has no qualms about putting innocent Lebanese civilians in harm’s way.

Israel’s offensive to destroy Hezbollah, therefore, is very much in the West’s interests in terms of safeguarding its future security, a consideration Western leaders should take on board when seeking to address the deepening crisis in the Middle East.

End of Empire: Careful What You Wish For Mervyn Bendle

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/civilisation/the-end-of-empire-careful-what-you-wish-for/

“The Future So ended civilization in the once thriving Roman province of Britainnia. The lessons for Australia seem obvious: the collapse of an Imperial order brings only economic and political chaos, death and destruction, and regression into an era of civilizational darkness from which it takes many centuries to emerge, if ever. Perhaps those shrill ideologues, academics, teachers, media propagandists, and other useful idiots demanding the end of American Imperialism, and an ill-defined ‘End of Empire’ should do some historical research or, at the very least, should be challenged to justify their nihilistic demands. The global reality is clear, we live in an increasingly dangerous and uncivilized world where the sole guarantor of our liberal democratic system and way of life is the United States: Make America Great Again!”

The End of Empire For many years it has been de rigueur on the Left to denounce ‘American Imperialism’ and demand the end of ‘the American Empire’, usually in favour of an ill-defined ‘socialist alternative’, or some global socialist system (modelled on the European Union, or the United Nations, or Communist China) or, at an even more extreme level, a global Islamist theocracy (modelled on Iran or the Taliban). Such demands are quite shrill in Australia and are emitted with monotonous regularity by the Greens, the Socialist Left of the ALP, Islamist organizations, the various Trotskyite groupuscules, most academics and teachers in the humanities and social sciences, and much of the media and the arts. But what has been the historical experience when empires die? And, specifically, how has such an event impacted on nations, such as Australia, that exist on the periphery of an empire?

Case Study: Roman Britain  The fate of Roman Britain provides a case study of this traumatic experience. Indeed, it provides a particularly vivid example of what happens on ‘the edge of empire’ when that empire dies, and it is not at all a re-assuring picture. The Fall of Rome and the sacking of the eternal city had ramifications not only for the Italian Peninsula but for all the Roman provinces, which were closely integrated into the Imperial system; as the centre fell apart they found themselves exposed to unprecedented internal stresses and external threats, which they were ultimately unable to resist, plunging into the Dark Ages from which it took a millennium to emerge.

Britannia Perched in the Great Ocean, on the farthest margins of the Empire, by the beginning of the 5th Century, the island province of Britannia had enjoyed some 300 years of the Pax Romana. In that time, its settled and cultivated area had expanded inland from the southern and Channel coasts across fertile and productive fields to the frontiers of Scotland and Wales, beyond which lived ancient tribal societies with little interest in being integrated into an Imperial system, the immensity and complexity of which they couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

Why is the West so anguished over the death of Hassan Nasrallah? Our elites really have no clue that civilisation itself is on the line in Israel’s war with its tormentors. Brendan O’Neill

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’.