RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/killing-nasrallah

Friday evening in the Levant, Israel targeted buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut killing Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. This operation represents a dramatic shift in Israeli strategy. Not only have they finally liquidated an adversary they’ve long been capable of killing, they’ve also turned a deaf ear to their superpower patron of more than half a century. But at this stage, heeding Washington’s advice in war is like taking counsel from the angel of death. Just as the U.S. is no longer willing or able to win the wars it commits Americans to fight, the Joe Biden administration won’t let U.S. allies win wars either.

By ordering the strike on Nasrallah while attending the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored the Jewish state’s independence from the global consensus that has resolved not to confront terrorists but rather to appease them, whether they’re plotting in the Middle East or living among the local populations of Western nations, including the United States. Israel’s attack also shows that almost everything U.S. and other Western civilian and military leaders have believed about the Middle East for the last 20 years was simply a collection of excuses for losing wars. The questions that senior policymakers and Pentagon officials, think-tank experts and journalists have deliberated over since the invasion of Iraq—questions about the nature of modern warfare and the proper conduct of international relations in a multipolar world, etc.—can now be set aside for good because they have been resolved definitively.

The answers are as they ever were—at least before the start of the “global war on terror.” Contrary to the convictions of George W. Bush-era neoconservatives and the pro-Iran progressives in Barack Obama’s camp, securing a nation’s peace has nothing to do with winning narratives, or nation-building, or balancing U.S. allies against your mutual enemies for the sake of regional equilibrium, or any of the other academic theories generated to mask a generation’s worth of failure. Rather, it means killing your enemies, above all those who advocate and embody the causes that inspire others to exhaust their murderous energies against you. Thus, killing Nasrallah was essential.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-accused-of-the-crime-of-defending-itself/

British journalist Brendan O’Neill is appalled at the way so many in the West paint Israel’s efforts to defend itself as “war crimes.” No matter how precisely it attacks its targets — as the Hezbollah possessors of pagers, hand-held radios, and walkie-talkies were — the IDF is accused of “indiscriminate” killing in Lebanon. No matter how many ways the IDF warns civilians in Gaza to leave places and buildings that are about to be targeted, Israel remains accused of “indiscriminate” bombing. For too many people around the world, everything Israel does is “a war crime.” More on this world-wide condemnation of the Jewish state for defending itself can be found here: “This wasn’t a war crime – it was an audacious assault on anti-Semites,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, September 18, 2024:

…All eyes are on Israel, naturally. Experts suspect Mossad intercepted a massive stash of pagers destined for Hezbollah militants and planted explosive material in the batteries. Then they sent a signal, from hundreds of miles away, that caused the batteries to overheat and eventually to blow up. The planning required for such a spectacular op blows the mind – no pun intended. I know Israelophobia is the default position of the influential classes, but surely even they will admit this was an ingenious way for the Jewish State to take out the adherents to a self-styled ‘army of god’ that has sworn itself to excising the ‘cancerous growth’ of Zionism from the Middle East. (They mean Jews.)…

That many in the West view Israel’s every action as criminal is depressing, but not surprising. Fundamentally, they think it is a crime for Israel to defend itself. They think it is a crime for Israel to take any action that might limit the threat posed by the apocalyptic anti-Semitism of Hezbollah and Hamas. And they think this because they think Israel’s very existence is a crime. They view the Jewish State as a criminal enterprise, a vile, law-defying blot not only on the Middle East but also on the reputation of humankind itself. When you harbour such intense, irrational hatred for one nation, it is a short step to telling that nation to down its weapons, lower its defences and let itself be attacked.