Getting your balls blown off by a primed pager has got to be the most ‘f**k around, find out’ thing that has ever happened. It took place in Lebanon yesterday. To the approval of both supporters of Israel and meme-makers everywhere, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives suddenly exploded. The footage coming out of Lebanon is extraordinary. A man’s trouser pocket erupting in a supermarket, a man writhing in agony in the middle of the road after his trusted comms device turned on him. The battle of the pagers will surely be recorded as one of the most unusual and audacious acts in the entire history of human warfare.
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.)
Much remains unclear about the operation. Israel has not claimed responsibility. It is reported that 12 people were killed. Tragically, two of them were children. The others included Hezbollah fighters. Around 3,000 were injured, including Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani. Of course, the West’s leftists are too busy slamming evil Israel to ask why an Iranian official was in such close proximity to a Hezbollah pager. But then, we all know why. Yet for all the questions that still hang over this techno-assault on medieval militants, some observers seem unshakeably certain about one thing: it was terrorism. It was a war crime. It was yet more proof of what a uniquely nasty nation Israel is.
Invective is flying and tears are flowing across social media. The demonic state strikes again, radicals wail. Even a presenter on Sky News looked shook, describing the operation as ‘scary’. I suppose it is scary, if you’re a member of an anti-Semitic army with a pager in your pocket. The double standards are shameless at this point. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October. These missiles have destroyed homes, scorched earth, caused 60,000 inhabitants of northern Israel to flee, and butchered 12 Druze kids. It is a strange ‘anti-fascist’ who weeps more for the testicles of a racist terrorist than he does for the lives of innocent Israeli children.
Yet beneath the double standards, which are painfully predictable, there is something else, too. Something even worse. It’s the flagrantly bigoted belief that everything Israel does is a war crime. This nation can’t do right for doing wrong. If it fights its Islamist foe from the air, as it is doing in Gaza, it is committing a crime. Yet if it plants deadly weapons directly in the pockets of the Islamists who want to destroy it, that is also a crime. If it bombs neighbourhoods in Gaza where Hamas lurks, that is ‘indiscriminate slaughter’. Yet if it behaves in a highly discriminating fashion and puts mini-bombs in the trousers of terrorists, that is ‘barbarism’.
The list of things that become ‘crimes’ when Israel does them grows longer every day. Following the butchery of 7 October, when Hamas’s pogromists raped, kidnapped and murdered Jews in southern Israel, Western leftists described Israel’s bombing of Hamas positions in Gaza as criminal. Yet when Israel went to extraordinary lengths to warn Gazans to leave the places it planned to bomb, dropping tens of thousands of Arabic-language leaflets from the sky, that was called criminal, too – it was the crime of ‘forced displacement’, apparently. Kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal; try not to kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal. Likewise, when Israel bombed Aleppo in Syria earlier this year to take out the Hezbollah militants based there, it was noisily damned as the vilest of military aggressors. Yet now its meticulous planting of mini-bombs in Hezbollah pagers is branded wicked aggression, too.
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.
Make no mistake, this is what the radical accusers of Israel are saying when they tell it to stop bombing Hamas, stop attacking Hezbollah militants, stop arming itself, stop everything. They are saying leave your enemy be, and let your people be murdered. They can call this ‘anti-Zionism’ as much as they like, but to many of us their bizarre and cruel singling out of the world’s only Jewish nation as the only nation that is forbidden from fighting its enemies smacks of anti-Semitism. If you are stony-faced when Jews are murdered, but furious when their murderers have 20 grams of explosives put in the batteries of their pagers, then please remove the word ‘anti-fascist’ from your social-media bio, please refrain from calling yourself ‘anti-racist’, and please cease all future use of the word ‘progressive’.
Through those weaponised pagers, Israel sent an important message not only to Hezbollah but also to the world. It let the world know that you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. Those days are gone. Kill Jews now – as Hamas and Hezbollah have both done, as part of their fascistic war on the Jewish State – and there will be consequences. You might lose a bollock, you might lose your life. That the racist militants of Iranian-sponsored Islamism are peeved that Jew-killing is no longer acceptable makes sense. That so many ‘progressives’ in the West also seem put out by the fact that killing Jews is a riskier business today than it was in earlier centuries is more disturbing. Paging the Western left: racist terrorism must always be resisted.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
Much remains unclear about the operation. Israel has not claimed responsibility. It is reported that 12 people were killed. Tragically, two of them were children. The others included Hezbollah fighters. Around 3,000 were injured, including Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani. Of course, the West’s leftists are too busy slamming evil Israel to ask why an Iranian official was in such close proximity to a Hezbollah pager. But then, we all know why. Yet for all the questions that still hang over this techno-assault on medieval militants, some observers seem unshakeably certain about one thing: it was terrorism. It was a war crime. It was yet more proof of what a uniquely nasty nation Israel is.
Invective is flying and tears are flowing across social media. The demonic state strikes again, radicals wail. Even a presenter on Sky News looked shook, describing the operation as ‘scary’. I suppose it is scary, if you’re a member of an anti-Semitic army with a pager in your pocket. The double standards are shameless at this point. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October. These missiles have destroyed homes, scorched earth, caused 60,000 inhabitants of northern Israel to flee, and butchered 12 Druze kids. It is a strange ‘anti-fascist’ who weeps more for the testicles of a racist terrorist than he does for the lives of innocent Israeli children.
Yet beneath the double standards, which are painfully predictable, there is something else, too. Something even worse. It’s the flagrantly bigoted belief that everything Israel does is a war crime. This nation can’t do right for doing wrong. If it fights its Islamist foe from the air, as it is doing in Gaza, it is committing a crime. Yet if it plants deadly weapons directly in the pockets of the Islamists who want to destroy it, that is also a crime. If it bombs neighbourhoods in Gaza where Hamas lurks, that is ‘indiscriminate slaughter’. Yet if it behaves in a highly discriminating fashion and puts mini-bombs in the trousers of terrorists, that is ‘barbarism’.
The list of things that become ‘crimes’ when Israel does them grows longer every day. Following the butchery of 7 October, when Hamas’s pogromists raped, kidnapped and murdered Jews in southern Israel, Western leftists described Israel’s bombing of Hamas positions in Gaza as criminal. Yet when Israel went to extraordinary lengths to warn Gazans to leave the places it planned to bomb, dropping tens of thousands of Arabic-language leaflets from the sky, that was called criminal, too – it was the crime of ‘forced displacement’, apparently. Kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal; try not to kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal. Likewise, when Israel bombed Aleppo in Syria earlier this year to take out the Hezbollah militants based there, it was noisily damned as the vilest of military aggressors. Yet now its meticulous planting of mini-bombs in Hezbollah pagers is branded wicked aggression, too.
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.
Make no mistake, this is what the radical accusers of Israel are saying when they tell it to stop bombing Hamas, stop attacking Hezbollah militants, stop arming itself, stop everything. They are saying leave your enemy be, and let your people be murdered. They can call this ‘anti-Zionism’ as much as they like, but to many of us their bizarre and cruel singling out of the world’s only Jewish nation as the only nation that is forbidden from fighting its enemies smacks of anti-Semitism. If you are stony-faced when Jews are murdered, but furious when their murderers have 20 grams of explosives put in the batteries of their pagers, then please remove the word ‘anti-fascist’ from your social-media bio, please refrain from calling yourself ‘anti-racist’, and please cease all future use of the word ‘progressive’.
Through those weaponised pagers, Israel sent an important message not only to Hezbollah but also to the world. It let the world know that you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. Those days are gone. Kill Jews now – as Hamas and Hezbollah have both done, as part of their fascistic war on the Jewish State – and there will be consequences. You might lose a bollock, you might lose your life. That the racist militants of Iranian-sponsored Islamism are peeved that Jew-killing is no longer acceptable makes sense. That so many ‘progressives’ in the West also seem put out by the fact that killing Jews is a riskier business today than it was in earlier centuries is more disturbing. Paging the Western left: racist terrorism must always be resisted.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
12 comments:
Why do non-Jewish conservatives, like Brendan O’Neill (an Irish Catholic no less!), staunchly & blindly defend Israel?
And why is it they continue to conflate anti-Israel with anti-semite, even when it is Jewish people who are objecting to what any logical person would call a terrorist State?
What is it about conservative politics that drives them to draw broad brushstrokes over very complex issues?
For Brendan, perhaps it’s Catholic guilt as we know that historically, the Catholics have always been anti-semite - Germany being case in point.
“It is a strange ‘anti-fascist’ who weeps more for the testicles of a racist terrorist than he does for the lives of innocent Israeli *correction* Palestinian children”.
Three things can be true at the same time - Hezbollah, Hamas & the State of Israel are terrorists.
The author’s bemoaning Hezbollah’s actions while deliberately disregarding Israel’s very obvious war crimes against the Palestinians, is an extraordinary example of confirmation bias.
As for the claim Israel has the right to defend itself - to what point? So far, they have killed 34,344, most of whom were civilians as 11,355 were children, 2,955 were aged 60 or older, and 6,297 were women.
Meanwhile Israel still have not got all their civilians back that were taken by Hamas last October, some have been mercilessly killed ~~ where is your outrage on that?
Anonymous 9.10 quotes various statistics purporting to identify "civilian" deaths in Gaza. And where do these numbers come from. Why, from HAMAS of course. The same HAMAS that had no compunction about murdering over 1200 innocent Israeli civilians on 7 October last year. The same HAMAS that deliberately uses hospitals, schools and mosques to cover their military operations. The same HAMAS that has the destruction of Israel baked into its Constitution, not to meet the aspirations of the Gazan people, but to further the cause of Islamic Jihad. HAMAS has every reason to inflate their non-combatant casualties precisely to weaken the Israeli position in the eyes of the world. So how could any intelligent observer believe HAMAS is telling the truth about casualties?
And even in the unlikely event that the totals were correct, never forget that Islam considers it the duty of every true believer to fight in a Jihad. HAMAS expects non-combatants to die. They enable the process by deliberately using their non-combatants as human shields. Safe in their boltholes in Qatar, HAMAS' leadership is prepared to fight to the last Gazan to destroy Israel. The Holocaust gives Israel 6 million reasons to believe them. Useful idiots like Anonymous 9.10 just facilitate that process.
Excellent article, Brendan.
Just noting for the anti-Israel anons above:-
Since the October 7, 2023, terror attack by Hamas on Israel that killed over 1,200 people, there have been near-daily attacks by Hezbollah, another Iranian-backed terror group based in Lebanon. Hezbollah has fired over 7,500 rockets at Israel.
i guess if nothing else it proves that some Jews are uncommonly clever .But the chance of such a scheme to be nipped in the bud at some stage woud seem colossal .Possibly all sealed in epoxy but assessment options must have existed. And they wonder why many persons are afraid of flying.
Anonymous 11:59
"HAMAS has every reason to inflate their non-combatant casualties precisely to weaken the Israeli position in the eyes of the world. So how could any intelligent observer believe HAMAS is telling the truth about casualties?"
You could say exactly the same thing about Israel, except on steroids.
A great many of the "1,200" were actually killed at the hands of Israeli forces, which was always obvious from the telltale ballistic evidence, but which has since been admitted , in Israeli media no less.
Then there's the fanciful lies about "40 beheaded babies" for which there is zero evidence, other than reports by people with every motivation to provide a pretext for their own intended savagery, which is all too real.
When I think of a group who shamelessly and incessantly plays up their position as history's greatest victims for the sympathy, excuses and concessions it entails, all while dismissing anyone else's rival claims with disdain, I think of Jews, far more so than Arabs.
The writer ingenuously equates 'Zionism' with 'Jews'. Not so. Zionism is an ideology formulated in the late 19th century that regards Israel as having a right to occupy all the lands it did at the time of King David & Co. Zionists do not recognise the 1948 borders of the modern State of Israel. Accordingly they build settlements outside those borders are use force of arms to displace any Arabs who may be living there regardless of how many centuries they may have done so, all in violation of international law.
The 1948 borders of Israel are acknowledged as a fait accompli by most Arab statesmen. Not so the ongoing expansionism exercised through those settlements.
I would not go so far as to say that the current hassles are entirely attributable to those damned settlements but they have certainly stoked the fires of resentment for a very long time leading up to present events.
Interesting that the only response by those who object to Israel being called war criminals, is to go on about the actions of other terrorists.
They not only conflate anti-Israel with anti-semite, but Hamas and innocent Palestinians, thereby trying justify the displacement, persecution, torture, imprisonment, murder, rape and bullying of innocent people.
A question for those who blindly support Israel: can you be truly innocent if you are benefitting from the suffering and displacement of innocent people?
I pose a question - to Anon @ 3.44 PM. Good person, your comments are noted, but sadly like many - you could be wrong.
I thus ask, this question - "Why do - Egypt, Jordan, Syria & Saudi Arabia [and this includes Turkey] - not advance assistance to the Palestinians in their hour of need" - nor let them cross the borders to re-settle!
Secondly, since the inception of Gaza, why did Egypt create a border wall, between Gaza & Egypt (on the Sinai Desert)- that Donald Trump would be proud of, that controls the flow of people/ vehicles etc into and out of Gaza, for which they have recently updated the border wall, and placed a large contingent of Egyptian troops in this area. Strange that.
Denis Prager - Prager U. has recently posted a video on YouTube that explains why, I suggest you seek and view.
Is Anonymous 1.59 seriously suggesting the 7 October massacre was really a false-flag operation by the Israelis? What on earth would s/he suggest was the motivation for Israel to do such a thing? And what about the thousands of rockets that were fired into Israel by HAMAS. Didn't that happen? What about the self- proclaimed intention of HAMAS to wipe Israel off the map. Why would Israel not take them at their word? Seems to me everything Israel is throwing at them is in self-defence and thoroughly justified. So perhaps Anonymous 1.59 would like to nominate some other people that would qualify for the title of "History's Greatest Victims". Six million Jews murdered in less than one decade of the 20th century alone would seem to make a compelling case.
If you choose to play hardball with the Israelis, you should expect to get hurt.
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