Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 02, 2024

Iran's attack proves it is a dysfunctional, unprofessional mess - and that is perhaps the scariest part

This video of some of the missiles shot from Iran towards Israel was reportedly taken from a British Airways flight to Dubai.

At 0:26, you see a large flash. Which looks a lot like one of the ballistic missiles exploded soon after launch.

Iran is proud of its domestic arms industry. But this looks more like a ballistic version of Hamas' home manufactured rockets - of which some 10% tend to fail - than the type of weapon you can export.

The video shows another shocking piece of unprofessionalism from Iran: it didn't warn airlines not to fly in the area (a NOTAM, Notice to Airmen.) According to the tweet with this video, the airline immediately turned around after seeing these missiles, but they are obviously a hazard to any airplane in the vicinity.

News reports show that there was infighting between Iran's IRGC and its president about whether to strike Israel. The IRGC does not report to Iran's army - meaning there are two, independent armies. The IRGC is a designated terror group. These missiles belonged to the IRGC, which characterized the strike not as deterrence or defensive but as "revenge."

This is not how a professional army acts, or how a professional army speaks.

Being unprofessional does not mean Iran isn't dangerous. It is a nuclear threshold state with an advanced military. This makes its unprofessionalism even more frightening: if ballistic missiles could explode prematurely, maybe a nuclear bomb could as well.

Regime change would make he world - and Iran itself - a much safer place.

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During last night's vice presidential debate, the first question was asked by CBS' Margaret Brennan:

Earlier today, Iran launched its largest attack yet on Israel. But that attack failed thanks to joint U.S. and Israeli defensive action. President Biden has deployed more than 40,000 U.S. military personnel and assets to that region over the past year to try to prevent a regional war. Iran is weakened, but the U.S. still considers it the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and it has drastically reduced the time it would take to develop a nuclear weapon. It is down now to one or two weeks time. Governor Walz, if you are the final voice in the situation room, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran?

Walz' answer was very telling, in more ways than one:

Well, thank you. And thank you for those joining at home tonight. Let's keep in mind where this started. October 7th, Hamas terrorists massacred over 1400 Israelis and took prisoners. Iran, or, Israel's ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental, getting its hostages back, fundamental, and ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there. You saw it experienced today, where, along with our Israeli partners and our coalition, able to stop the incoming attack.

Walz' response is a mess. Walz twice mixed up Iran and Israel. Imagine the headlines today if Trump or Vance did that. And even if he had accurately said Iran in the second highlighted sentence, his answer sounds just as muddled and nonsensical as the worst of Joe Biden's performances.

Once you decode what he is saying, though, the answer is even worse - and it reflects current mainstream Democratic policies. Israel can defend itself and the US will help, but Israel cannot go after its enemies. It must remain in defensive mode and do nothing to actively deter those who are sworn to destroy it.

Which means, under the Harris/Walz administration, Israel's enemies can keep attacking with impunity with no fear that the war might end up on their territory.

This has been the mantra from Democratic administrations since Obama - "Israel has the right to defend itself" does not mean Israel has the right to deter attacks. On the contrary, nearly everything Israel does when it goes on the offensive is criticized, either publicly or behind closed doors.

Vance's answer, once he got past his personal history and his claim that Trump brought peace through strength, was straightforward and refreshing:

Now, you asked about a preemptive strike, Margaret, and I want to answer the question. Look, it is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe. And we should support our allies wherever they are when they're fighting the bad guys. I think that's the right approach to take with the Israel question.

The contrast is clear. Vance said his administration would support whatever Israel decides is in its best interests. Walz emphatically did not say anything close to that.

On the contrary, in the Harris/Walz administration, as with the Obama administration and to a large extent with Biden, they would tell Israel what is best for Israel.

Both of them claim to be "pro-Israel." But only one side treats Israel as a partner, while the other treats her like an unruly child who must be taught the proper way to act.

One side treats Israel with respect and the other with condescension. In no way can he latter be considered "pro-Israel."

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10/01 Links Pt1: A Headless Superpower In a Time of War; Iranians Kill One Palestinian in Missile Assault on Israel; Six killed in Jaffa terror shooting

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: A Headless Superpower In a Time of War

The only time we see Harris acknowledge her current status as the incumbent is when her debilitating fear of social interaction kicks in. This week she had to make a choice: preside over a photo-op FEMA meeting about the devastation Hurricane Helene is visiting upon the American Southeast, or actually visit North Carolina or Georgia. She chose the bloodless and rather weird FEMA option, which didn’t involve possibly unscripted interactions with the public.

The combination of Harris’s social anxiety and her self-seriousness has made her distant when she is reading from a teleprompter and unintelligible when she isn’t, so she relies on preloaded canned lines. The result is that the rest of the world is moving too fast for her to be anything but a spectator.

Which means national-security imperatives are being handled by Cabinet secretaries who will soon be out of a job, like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The latter, you might remember, disappeared without explanation for a couple weeks at the beginning of the year to get treatment at Walter Reed without telling the president. The Pentagon appeared to be running on autopilot and yet Biden didn’t fire Austin, making them both look absurd.

Here’s what’s happening in the Middle East today: Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel while the IDF sent ground troops into South Lebanon to dismantle the terror infrastructure Hezbollah built to launch an attack similar to the one launched by Hamas on Oct. 7. Israel is being attacked by Iran or its proxies now from five separate countries.

Today alone, just before that missile barrage, a shooter killed six Israelis in Jaffa and injured about ten others. A couple rounds of rockets were fired from Lebanon at Israeli population centers. Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen attacked two ships in the Red Sea, one with missiles and the other with drone boats.

It has been quite the afternoon in the Middle East so far. Yet it wasn’t unusual. Every day seems to bring this amount of news from the conflict in one form or another. And that’s without zooming out to the ongoing land war in Europe thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or China’s militaristic stunts in which Beijing’s coast guard ships have been swarming and ramming Philippine boats and most recently a Vietnamese fishing craft.

It’s not a good time for the American superpower to be rudderless, but here we undeniably are. Let’s hope the damage can at least be contained until we have a president.

Caroline Glick: Israel, ignoring Biden’s gripes, does the job the UN won’t: Beat back Hezbollah

For 10 months, Hezbollah launched up to 20 projectiles at Israel every day. They killed scores of Israelis, including 10 children killed by a missile while playing soccer on a Saturday afternoon.

Hezbollah’s missiles destroyed hundreds of homes, devastating farms and livestock. They have torched forests and nature preserves, causing environmental devastation. And they targeted and hit sensitive military installations along the border.

Over the summer, Hezbollah escalated its assaults. The number of projectiles increased, reaching 50 to 120 per day. The range expanded to the lower Galilee and the Gulf of Haifa.

Clearly, Iran had decided to transform Lebanon into the new center of gravity in its multifront war against Israel after Israel successfully decimated most of Hamas’ military power and seized control over the international border between Gaza and Egypt, preventing Hamas from rebuilding its forces.

Instead of waiting to be invaded again, Israel chose to win the war.

And for the past two weeks, it has been doing just that.

Instead of discussing another cease-fire that will leave Hezbollah intact on the border and in control of Lebanon, Israel has begun to destroy the most powerful terror army in the world — an army controlled by Iran with tentacles that extend throughout Europe, North America, South America and Asia.

If Israel wins, not only will it secure its own borders and citizenry, it will secure the stability of the region and protect the entire world from the scourge of Iranian-backed Islamic terrorism.

If Israel falters, if it wobbles under US pressure and accepts a premature cease-fire, it will remain in mortal danger.

The region will be destabilized and the infrastructure of American power in the Middle East will crumble as every Arab state rushes to make deals with Iran — and with its allies, China and Russia.

It’s obvious why Israel needs to win. Its survival and the lives of its 10 million citizens are on the line.

What is hard to understand is why the Biden administration refuses to back that existential victory.

Seth Frantzman: Israel and its Western allies should now strike back against Iran

Iran must be deterred from more attacks. It is time for Israel and Israel’s partners and allies to strike back. The strikes on Iran should not just be a quiet operation because a quiet small precision strike will leave Iran feeling it has still won because it can pretend the incident didn’t happen. What this means is that a “cyberattack” or some kind of small explosion somewhere, is not enough. Iran needs to feel a setback to its ballistic missile program or to its energy facilities or some other kind of strategic infrastructure.

The Iranian people, most of whom oppose the regime, should see the response. This will threaten the regime more than any attack on a regime S-300 battery or on some regime bunker in a mountain somewhere. When Iranians see that their regime is a paper tiger they will be emboldened. This means a response to the attack should involve something that doesn’t harm Iranian civilians but which civilians can see. Israel retaliated against Houthi missile attacks by striking a port in Yemen. Israel has retaliated against Hezbollah by eliminating Hezbollah commanders in Beirut. Israel was also blamed for exploding pagers that harmed thousands of Hezbollah activists. This is how Lebanon sees that Hezbollah is a menace and also a weak organization that cannot protect its own.

The Iranian regime is a menace to the region. Its use of long range missiles has threatened the Gulf and many western allies. Iran even got China to broker reconciliation with Saudi Arabia over the last two years. Iran is on the march in the region with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps precisely because most countries are afraid of Iran and don’t think the west or others will protect them. For instance, anyone sitting in a Gulf country today can see videos of the ballistic missile attack on Israel and imagine such an attack on the gleaming towers of the Gulf. They know Iran can lay waste peaceful cities. They also see that Iran is conducting a joint military drill with Oman, according to a report at Iranian state media on October 1. They know that Iran’s president is flying to Qatar. They see how Iran is on the march. For this reason the region needs to see a response to the Iranian attack on Israel. They need to see that Iran can no longer get away with attacks on every country in the Middle East.

Iran’s ballistic missile program is now a major threat to the region and the world. Iran is working with Russia to export military technology and drones to Moscow. Iran is threatening the Gulf and the US. Iran’s missiles could one day carry nuclear weapons. Iran has shown its strength and likely hides more surprises in its missile facilities at home. It is time for Iran to receive a response.

10/01 Links Pt2: BHL: Israel Acts Alone; The choice was between civilisation or barbarism; UN has betrayed its founding principles; The racist protocols of Ta-Nehisi Coates

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Israel Acts Alone

In short, the free world, the real one, the one that stretches from New York, Paris, and Rome to the crowds that, from Tehran to Ankara and from Moscow to Beijing and Kabul, do not resign themselves to living under imbecilic and bloody dictatorships, can breathe a little easier and see the signs of possible change.

Of course, nothing is yet decided.

Hezbollah still has tens of thousands of missiles pointed at Israel.

And history having, as Marx said, to remain in the same metaphorical register, more imagination than man, the “five kings” that are Iran, Russia, the Islamist International, Turkey, and China are not without recourse, far from it.

But the Israelis have delivered a lesson in determination and courage.

They did the opposite to what the European and American Munich Agreement cheerleaders were repeating like broken records: “De-escalate! De-escalate!” After all, according to the theories of just war, and after that, according to Clausewitz, there are situations in the world where, alas, escalation is necessary and the only option.

And the Israelis reminded the world that there are moments in history, when your (Israel’s) survival is at stake, when entire peoples (Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraqi and Syrian Kurds) are taken hostage and threatened, when the strategy of compromise is taken by the enemy (formerly Nazi Germany, today the Islamic Republic of Iran) as an invitation to hit even harder—moments, then, where one of those strong acts that the cowards call “escalation” can turn the tide, redraw the power map, and save lives.

The IDF acts alone because that is, today, its situation.

But it acts—contrary to what armchair strategists castigating an “Israel now out of control” repeat everywhere—with measure and without hubris.

It breaks the operational capabilities of a state within a state that terrorized the world. And it does this, as always, while trying to do everything it could to spare innocent civilians.

And, as we all now know since the fall of the great empires and, more recently, of the USSR, dictators fear, not just failure, but the external humiliation that leaves them naked before their internal opposition—such that Israel may well be in the process of fulfilling in Iran itself the great dream of Western republics, moderate Arab countries, and, again, heroines of democracy who have courageously paraded for two years now in Tehran to the shouts of “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

For these reasons, Israel’s allies must urgently regroup to support it, not just in defense, but for victory.

Melanie Phillips: The choice was between civilisation or barbarism

For decades, the West said nothing while Hezbollah assembled its 150,000 rockets pointing at Israel from civilian areas of southern Lebanon in flagrant disregard of UN resolution 1701. It said nothing for the past 12 months as Hezbollah bombarded northern Israel with missiles every single day. It said nothing for more than 20 years while Hamas fired hundreds of rockets from Gaza to kill Israeli civilians, forcing them to all but live in bomb shelters and their children to suffer enduring trauma.

But when Israel finally defends itself, the West suddenly finds its voice and tells it that it mustn’t do so.

Why is this? Several reasons. There’s the way left-wingers and Islamists unite in an attempt to wipe Israel off the map. There’s the endemic Jew-hatred, whose latest mutation is the wish to eradicate the collective Jew in Israel. There’s the liberal article of faith that all conflicts can be ended through negotiation and compromise, so the notion that sometimes war may be unavoidable to defeat fanatics with non-negotiable agendas is simply never acceptable. And there’s the destruction of the West’s moral compass under the impact of ideologies aimed at destroying its identity, values and culture.

Now we understand how the Holocaust could have happened. It’s not just that there are people who want to exterminate Jews. They can only do so with the active connivance or indifference of the rest of the world.

October 7 presented the West with a clear choice: civilisation or barbarism. It has not chosen to defend civilisation. But as the West disintegrates under the weight of moral bankruptcy and collapse of self-belief, iron has entered the Israeli soul. Israel made a different choice. It said never again would it allow its people to be invaded, slaughtered, raped, beheaded and burned alive. This would be the last war in which it would have to fight for its existence.

The Israelis are deeply traumatised. Their grief and anxiety are off the scale. At the same time, their spirit is unbroken. Yes, many deeply dislike Benjamin Netanyahu and there are large demonstrations aiming to get him out of office. But Israelis are remarkably united in their determination to inflict total defeat upon the enemies who want them gone.

Yet there’s more. The astonishing, heroic commitment of the young conscripts at the front derives from their belief that they aren’t just fighting for their nation and for those who were slaughtered or kidnapped on October 7, but also for all those Jews who came before them and kept the Jewish people alive despite the centuries of such slaughter.

Israel will win this terrible war – whatever the cost – because it knows what it is, loves its Jewish identity and is proud of it. As a result, it is determined to live. The opposite is true of the West that has abandoned it.

Melanie Phillips: The Hamas Broadcasting Corporation

This is not just a question of the BBC failing to discharge its charter obligation to be fair and balanced, serious as that dereliction of journalistic duty is in itself. The vicious media coverage in the west, produced by Hamas and its fellow travellers in the Palestinian cause and consisting of serial falsehoods, malicious distortions and blood libels designed to demonise, delegitimise and destroy Israel, is an absolutely essential weapon in the Hamas armoury.

Through the totally false narrative of Israeli interlopers in “Palestine” who first drove out the “indigenous Palestinians” and are now illegally and oppressively occupying their land — every part of which is untrue — the western public was softened up during many decades for the big lie that’s been pumped out for the past year that the IDF has been wantonly killing and starving civilians in Gaza.

That is the very opposite of the truth. This lie has helped incite hysteria and violent hatred against both Israel and diaspora Jews, and ramped up pressure on western governments to dump on Israel while giving Hamas an easy ride. And while much of the media has been complicit in this — Sky News has been particularly disgusting — the most influential and powerful media outlet that has led the pack in this incitement has been the BBC. whose coverage of this terrible war has been, in general, utterly monstrous.

As Cohen and Deech write:
Military analysts and experts across the world will tell you that Hamas cannot win the war it started with Israel by force of arms alone. Anti-Israel propaganda isn’t merely a tactic for Hamas; it is integral to its war effort. Indeed, it is a war aim in and of itself. Hamas must convince the world, through media outlets like the BBC, that Israel is brutal, indiscriminate, and unjust; that the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians are something that Israel wantonly pursues, rather than a tragic consequence of Hamas turning the Palestinian people into human shields.

Hamas has embedded its terrorist infrastructure amongst civilians, including in former school buildings (often mistakenly described as working schools in news reports), hospitals and mosques. With an iniquitous disregard for the truth, Hamas even lays the false charge of ‘genocide’ against Israel in responding to the attack on 7 October - the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust and an indisputably genocidal act.

Through these tactics, they seek to claim that Israel is actually fighting a war of aggression, rather than taking necessary defensive action in an existential fight against Iran and its proxies.

As this report comprehensively demonstrates, the BBC all too often accepts Hamas’s distortions as fair framing or fact. Worse than that, it then sells them on to a credulous world as news burnished by the BBC’s authority and reputation.

Among the examples the report lists:
On the day of the October 7 pogrom itself, while the rest of Britain’s media were detailing the brutality of Hamas’s attack on Israel and before Israel went to war in Gaza, the BBC led its coverage with a headline about “Israeli revenge attacks”.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 pogrom, it broadcast interviews with Hamas apologists who used this platform to make comments which the BBC was forced to admit were “offensive”.
It reported that an “Israeli strike” killed “hundreds” at the Al Ahli hospital: thereby repeating, legitimising and reinforcing entirely false claims that directly caused unrest in some European and Middle Eastern countries, including serious arson attacks upon synagogues in Germany and Tunisia.
It failed to remove articles suggesting the same hospital blast may have been caused by the Israeli military, even after the BBC admitted it got its reporting wrong.
It reported that Israeli soldiers had been “targeting” medical teams and Arab speakers as they hunted Hamas terrorists in a hospital, when instead they actually had brought medical teams and Arab speakers with them to help the patients during the military operation.
It published an article that wrongly claimed a UN report had warned “half of Gaza’s population is starving” and peddled a false Hamas propaganda line that Gaza had become a “polio epidemic zone”.
At the height of the conflict, BBC Arabic was forced to correct articles on average every 48 hours, including copy that referred to Hamas as the “resistance”.
BBC Arabic platformed one guest who had previously referred to the October 7 massacre as a “heroic military miracle” and another who described Hamas atrocities against innocent Israelis as “necessary”.
It failed to remove graphs from its website that purported to show that 70 per cent of Gazan fatalities were women and children – after those figures were shown to be inaccurate.
It routinely quoted figures produced by the Hamas Health Ministry without highlighting it as a terrorist-run organisation, and routinely failed to stress in reporting that Hamas fatality figures are unverifiable and include thousands of Hamas terrorists.
It repeatedly reported Israeli strikes on Hamas command centres based inside school buildings as “strikes on schools” and repeatedly failed to explain the terror group’s use of innocent Palestinians as human shields.
It used freelance journalists and eyewitness reports without due diligence on their social media accounts which would have revealed clear anti-Israel bias.
A senior BBC executive admitted inaccuracies had “real world consequences” for British Jews but were inevitable because of the “fog of war”.

I mentioned that, as of Saturday, the Lebanese health minister said he was only aware of 11 victims of the massive airstrike that destroyed four buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

It has not increased since then.

How could that be?

Lebanese newspaper L'Orient le Jour (French) looks for the presumed hundreds of victims, and cannot find them.

But they do find a number of people who say that the entire neighborhood was already empty before the airstrikes.

Following the attack, the site was sealed off by Hezbollah security services as they searched for their leader. ...Most of the neighborhood’s residents had reportedly left the area the week before the attack, in a “natural evacuation,” according to the rescuer. “As the airstrikes (against the southern suburbs in recent days) increased, people fled. When the Maamoura neighborhood was bombed, there was no one there, and it was the same in Jamous and Kafa’at,” he said, referring to the strikes that took place throughout the night of September 27.

The deadly strike came after a week of unprecedented attacks on Hezbollah, including the detonation of thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies that killed some 30 people and wounded thousands more across the country. In response, members of the Shiite party went door-to-door in the southern suburbs and advised people to leave their homes and seek shelter elsewhere.

Rukaya, who has lived for 40 years in Burj al-Barajneh, the neighborhood beside Haret Hreik where Nasrallah was killed, told L’Orient Today that people knew the place was vulnerable to attack from the Israelis and had started to leave earlier that week. "You could hear crickets across the Burj" she said.

Twenty-four hours after the strike, the Health Ministry announced that 11 people had been killed and 108 wounded in the Israeli strikes the previous day, but it did not specify where or when the deaths occurred, or whether Nasrallah and other possible Hezbollah victims were included in the death toll. The enormity of the damage caused by the strikes raised fears that the death toll could be much higher. The day after the attack, outgoing Health Minister Firas Abiad said at a press conference that the death toll could rise.
Saad el-Ahmar stressed that on September 30, the search operations were almost over. The teams continue to clear the roads and sweep the area "to make sure that no bodies have been forgotten," the rescuer explained. However, he believes that the toll provided by the ministry should not increase significantly, given that it seems that very few people were present.

The airstrike the previous week that killed some 15 members of Hezbollah's Radwan unit was in the same neighborhood, so that might have prompted residents to flee.

At any rate, Israel's airstrikes killed far fewer people than anyone expected - seemingly less than 15 civilians - - making any claims of indiscriminate bombing ludicrous. Clearly Israel knew the buildings were empty, and possibly the timing was specifically meant to ensure a minimum of civilian casualties.

If Israel's claims that over 20 Hezbollah members were killed are true, that means more terrorists were killed than civilians! And Israel named at least five of them, besides Nasrallah himself and the IRGC general who was there.

I'm wondering if those Hezbollah party members going door to door urging people to leave were really Israeli spies who wanted to minimize casualties.

This small detail makes an amazing operation even more impressive. Too bad most media hasn't reported on this, preferring to leave people with the impression of a huge civilian death toll.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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Ali Akbar Ahmadian, the head of the Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said today "Surely, after the martyrdom of Seyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leadership of Hezbollah will continue with a more open hand and with the support of God, and the heroic Hezbollah will shine more than before. "

This is what everyone expects.

Last night, Israel started the limited ground invasion of Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon. Interestingly, Hezbollah denies this is happening.

So why haven't there been thousands of rockets from Hezbollah into Israel since Nasrallah was killed?

There have been dozens of rockets to the north, as had been the case every day for months. And Hezbollah sent a few medium range rockets to the center of Israel. But the expected attack of swamping Iron Dome with hundreds or thousands of rockets has not happened yet.

Maybe the IDF has caused far more damage to Hezbollah's weapons inventory than we knew.

Yesterday, Israel destroyed a large cache of surface to air missile launchers near Beirut's airport.

כחלק מגלי התקיפה הנרחבים בלבנון, בתקיפה מדויקת של חיל האוויר, מטוסי קרב תקפו תשתית משגרי טילי קרקע-אוויר שהוצבה בסמוך לנמל התעופה הבינלאומי של ביירות תשתית זו, כמו תשתיות נוספות של מערך ההגנה האווירית של חיזבאללה>> pic.twitter.com/S1Uq7AzcYl
— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) September 30, 2024

Or maybe Hezbollah does not have as many missiles at experts have assumed for years.

Or maybe Israel destroyed Hezbollah's command structure, and the communications infrastructure, so thoroughly that a response cannot be panned or coordinated.

Or maybe Hezbollah is still holding back, for some reason, knowing that a major attack would be met with an even more major response. Meaning - Israel has re-established deterrence.

Honor would demand that Hezbollah hit back hard after Nasrallah's death. People who respect or idolize Hezbollah are seeing this lack of response and it is affecting them. More and more of them are almost certainly becoming spies for Israel.

We don't know how much we don't know. But it seems apparent that the IDF and Israeli government know exactly what Hezbollah can do to respond to Nasrallah's assassination, and they included that in their calculus of whether it was worth attacking.

So far, it looks like it is Hezbollah that is the paper tiger.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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New @UNRWA report says Israel attacks "education" in Gaza, does not mention Hamas teachers or terrorists using schools

UNRWA issued a press release last week:

The ongoing war in Gaza will set children and young people’s education back by up to five years and risks creating a lost generation of permanently traumatised Palestinian youth, a new study warns.

The report, by a team of academics working in partnership with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is the first to comprehensively quantify the war’s toll on learning since it began in October 2023. It also details the devastating impact on children, young people and teachers, supported by new accounts from frontline staff and aid workers.

The study was a joint undertaking involving UNRWA and researchers at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge and the Centre for Lebanese Studies.

Professor Pauline Rose, Director of the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre, University of Cambridge, said: “Palestinian education is under attack in Gaza. Israeli military operations have had a significant effect on learning.”

The 51 page report is titled "Palestinian Education Under Attack in Gaza," making its bias clear from the outset, suggesting Israel is deliberately attacking schools for no military purpose.

The entire report does not mention Hamas once.

It does not say a word about Hamas using schools for military purposes - to hide weapons, for meetings to plan attacks. it does not mention that civilian facilities used for military purposes become legitimate targets under international law. Even the word "militant" is not to be found.

Moreover, it does not mention once that many teachers in Gaza were and are also terrorists.

Someone reading this report would think that the entire war is Israel attacking Gaza schools and civilians for no reason whatsoever.

Seth Frantzman at FDD detailed Hamas' use of schools over a two month period over the summer. Excerpts:

On July 6, the IDF struck terrorists at the Al-Jaouni school in central Gaza and on July 4, the IDF also said that it “struck terrorists who operated from UNRWA schools in the area of Gaza City – the Alqahirah school in Al-Furqan and the Musa School in Daraj Tuffah.”

In June, the IDF [said], “As part of operational searches of civilian structures converted into terrorist infrastructure, the soldiers raided a UN school that the terrorists of the Shejaia Battalion were using as a hideout and a warehouse.”

Hamas was operating a compound that the IDF said was “embedded” inside the UNRWA school in Nuseirat. Furthermore, the IAF also “targeted Hamas terrorists operating from a container inside the grounds of the Asmaa UNRWA school in Shati.”

Then, on June 4, the IDF also said that it “struck a Hamas compound embedded inside UNRWA’s Abu al-Hilu school in El-Bureij, located in the central Gaza Strip, from which Hamas terrorists operated and planned numerous attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops operating in Gaza.”

On May 30, the IDF said that a terrorist fired an anti-tank missile from a UNRWA school in Rafah.

On May 22, the IAF targeted “a compound located inside a UNRWA school where Hamas terrorists, including an anti-tank missile operative and a Nukhba terrorist, were operating,” the IDF said.

In another incident on May 14, the IDF declared that it carried out a precision strike “on a central Hamas war room commander embedded inside a UNRWA school in the area of Nuseirat. The war room was used by terrorist operatives in Hamas’s military wing. The strike was carried out using precise munitions in order to minimize harm to uninvolved civilians.”

Yet Hamas is not at fault in this report. Hamas doesn't even exist.

Beyond that, the report includes unattributed quotes of claims that are demonstrably false.

A pull-quote says, “Since October 7, all educational materials and stationery have been rejected by the Israelis. We need to lift restrictions on needed materials and required stationery as soon as possible."

UNRWA's detailed reports on aid to Gaza shows that shipments of notebooks (and toys) were delivered to UNRWA in Gaza on April 16, and UNRWA also received stationery in July as well as September.

Clearly Israel is not rejecting stationery and school materials. UNRWA is just not requesting them very often.

This report is just another of endless examples of how anti-Israel propaganda works, disguised as serious research. Everything is seen through a prism of assumed unrelenting Israeli evil, so the authors can't even imagine checking facts that agree with their prejudices.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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Mahmoud Abbas remains solidly on the side of the terrorists

According to Lebanese reports, Israel tried but failed to assassinate Major General Munir al-Maqdah in his home in the camp of Ein al-Hilweh in Lebanon. He was not at home at the time of the alleged raid.

Al Maqdeh is not Hezbollah or Hamas. He is the head of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Lebanon.

They are part of Mahmoud abbas' Fatah party.

Munir al-Maqdeh has been smuggling weapons from Iran to terrorists in the West Bank. His brother was assassinated by Israel earlier this year. Munir has cooperated with both Hamas and Hezbollah.

Fatah in Gaza has also been active. Its Telegram channel is filled with attacks it claims on Israeli soldiers, curiously always using a 107mm mortar.

Abbas pretends to the West that he is a man of peace and against terror, while his own Al Aqsa Brigades are his terror wing.

Of course, after Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated, Mahmoud Abbas sent condolences to Hezbollah.

In every case where Abbas had to choose between Israel and the most despicable, raping, murderous terrorists, Abbas chooses the terrorists.

And the West pins all their hopes for peace on him.

(h/t Irene)

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09/30 Links Pt2: The Cold War Against the Jews; The self-induced downfall of the ICC; Why Are Iran’s Thugs Free to Walk the Streets of New York?

From Ian:

The Cold War Against the Jews

In November 2023, I became involved in a small community of Jewish academics who were concerned about these developments. Rather than expending our effort on debating with academic associations, we decided to focus on developing one of our own. In January 2024, I joined 22 North American scholars on a solidarity mission to visit academic campuses in Israel. Our group consisted of faculty members representing Yeshiva University, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Hebrew Union College, as well as Emory University, Bard College, Washington University at St. Louis, and other colleges across North America.

Our visits to campuses across Israel were sobering. As we listened to Israeli professors and administrators share story after story about their exclusion from global academic communities, we became increasingly attuned to the situation’s tragic irony. The same faculty and administrators who had been boycotted as progenitors of apartheid had devoted their careers to producing pluralist campuses. Twenty percent of the undergraduate population of Achva College, which is just a few miles from the Gazan border, is Israeli Bedouin. Tel Aviv University, one of the most elite universities in the world, also serves a diverse student population, 16% of whom are Arab Israelis. Forty percent of the University of Haifa’s student body is Arab Israeli.

The trip convinced us that we are dealing with a global issue that runs not only up and down the educational ladder, but also around the globe. Excluded from journals, conferences, and public gatherings, pressured to change their public writings to conform with others’ sensitivities, and gaslit by administrators who inform them that all of this has nothing to do with antisemitism, we had discovered that to be a Jew in academic spaces was to embody provocation—and that provocation, we were told, had to be suppressed for the sake of everyone’s comfort.

This trend was also surfacing in literary circles outside of academia. In March 2024, the journal Guernica greenlit Joanna Chen’s essay “From the Edges of a Broken World,” a reflective memoir by an Israeli leftist that expressed empathy with both Israeli victims of Oct. 7 and with Palestinian people. The essay’s publication sparked a mass resignation of Guernica’s staff that culminated in a public apology from the journal’s editor for publishing “Genocide apologia”—though there is no evidence of a genocide being committed by Israel, nor was Chen writing apologetics for Israel or the actions of her government. Most recently, Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was blacklisted among booksellers for being tainted by the Zionism of its author. Zevin, though Jewish, has made no public statements in support of Israel.

Around the same time that my children were told that the Nazis were coming for them, and that the Jewish teacher working across the street was fired, something else happened to me. A representative of the Jewish Publication Society, a historic press with a reputation for bringing outstanding Jewish scholarship to wide English-speaking audiences, contacted me about applying for the position of their editor-in-chief. Aware of what had been taking place in Jewish literary circles, I jumped at the chance. I was offered the position three months later.

When news of my new position was shared in July, I was inundated with hundreds of emails, text messages, and phone calls from authors of children’s books, poetry, young adult novels, fiction, philosophy, ethics, Bible, religion, and history. All of them sent warm congratulations, but many were more interested in sharing their concern. What was the Jewish Publication Society going to do to meet this critical moment?

I’ve been thinking about this question myself. It’s clear that some of what JPS will achieve in the coming years is going to depend on partnerships with other organizations and institutions. With the right allies, JPS can develop an authors’ cohort, a college research internship, and maybe even a podcast. But more than anything, the question of how JPS is going to meet this moment depends on books. And to publish books, we need Jewish authors to keep writing. In response to exclusion, Jews must build their own centers of knowledge. Every person who cares about Jewish ideas, moreover, should view themselves as a repository of creative knowledge, and view the production of knowledge as an act of resistance against the scourge of antisemitism wending its way through academic circles.

As Jews continue to find themselves isolated in schools, professional spaces, and even in their front driveways, we must recommit ourselves to building communities that foster the production of great Jewish ideas. This is my answer to well-wishers who have reached out to me voicing their concern about the Jewish future: Be creative. Build communities. Go write.

Seven in ten Jewish students “uncomfortable” revealing their religion

A survey of Jewish students published today has revealed that 7 in 10 are “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” revealing their Jewish faith.

In its first report, “I have never felt less protected as a Jew”: Antisemitism at UK Universities since 7th October 2023, the Intra-Communal Professorial Group (ICPG) - which was formed earlier this year “in response to a significant rise of antisemitism across academia globally and in UK higher education” - has found that just 22 per cent of Jewish students are comfortable revealing their faith - a dramatic decline since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Prior to that, the survey finds, 79 per cent of Jewish students had no problem saying they are Jewish.

The ICPG spoke to 500 Jewish students between May 29 and July 3. Although it is not a formal poll was “not a formal statistical sample of the population”, the ICPG says its findings are “broadly representative”.

63 per cent of the students surveyed had seen Jewish students being harassed because of their faith, both on social media and on campus - in contrast to just three in 10 who witnessed it before the current conflict.

41 per cent had been subject themselves to such behaviour over the past year – nearly twice the 21 per cent who said they had experienced antisemitic abuse before last autumn. 5.2 per cent said they had been physically attacked. Others said they had suffered verbal insults, harassment and Nazi imagery. One student said she was “spat at” for wearing “a JSoc [Jewish Society] jumper on campus”, while others said they had been

“chased by a man with a large glass bottle”, been pelted by eggs after hearing the Chief Rabbi speak on campus, had their Star of David necklaces grabbed from their necks and had rubbish thrown at them,

The ICPG said the government should launch a special task force to combat antisemitism in universities.

The self-induced downfall of the International Criminal Court

The idea of creating an International Criminal Court to prosecute the world’s worst offenders, who committed the worst crimes, was a noble one. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Israel and Jews were among the leading proponents of establishing such a court. In practice, however, the ICC has proven to be a colossal failure. Now, as a result of the actions of the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, and his predecessor Fatou Bensouda, the court, as an establishment, is reaching ever-deepening lows.

Bensouda was distinctly hostile to Israel. She was the one who generated the ICC prosecution theory of a non-existent “State of Palestine.” She pushed the court into taking upon itself jurisdiction that it does not possess, to define the borders, de novo, of this non-existent state. She was also the one to officially adopt, lock, stock and barrel, the Palestinian narrative regarding Israel’s actions and to allege that Israeli officials had committed serious offenses.

As regards the Palestinians, Bensouda was quite forgiving and focused mainly on the actions of the acknowledged terrorists. She did however have one saving grace.

In her “Report on Preliminary Examination Activities” (2019)1 Bensouda noted, inter alia, that the Office of the Prosecutor had also received allegations that the “Palestinian Authority has encouraged and provided financial incentives for the commission of violence through their provision of payments to the families of Palestinians who were involved, in particular, in carrying out attacks against Israeli citizens, and under the circumstances, the payment of such stipends may give rise to Rome Statute crimes.”

Bensouda was of course referring to the P.A.’s terror-rewarding “pay-for-slay” policy. This decades-old policy consists of two elements: a) the payment of monthly allowances to injured terrorists and the families of dead terrorists; and b) the payment of monthly salaries to terrorists who have been arrested by Israel. Even though the two elements are technically separate, their common goal is to encourage and incentivize participation in terror. While the payment of allowances to injured terrorists and the families of dead terrorists is mandated by internal policies of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the payment of the salaries to the imprisoned and released terrorists is fixed in a P.A. law—Law of Prisoners and Released Prisoners No. 19 of 2004—and accompanying P.A. government regulations. According to analysts and commentators, every year, the P.A. spends an estimated one billion shekels ($270 million) on these terror rewards. The terror-rewarding payments are not concealed by the P.A. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has openly declared on the world stage and in the P.A. media that even if the P.A. is left with only one penny in its coffers, it would pay that penny to the terrorists.

09/30 Links Pt1: Phillips: A seismic moment; Hamas Leader in Lebanon Eliminated, Was UNRWA Union Leader; Nasrallah’s Killing Reveals Depth of Israel’s Penetration of Hezbollah

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: A seismic moment

Given how the Americans have been undermining and sabotaging Israel’s defence for the past year, it is fervently to be hoped that Israel is telling the Iran-genuflecting Bidenites precisely zero about what it’s doing.

The west doesn’t realise how this abominable reaction demonstrates that it has now lost the geopolitical plot big time. For while western media and politicians were eulogising a genocidal tyrant and spitting on his designated Israeli victim for not agreeing to commit national suicide, the Arab and Muslim world was reacting very differently.

Although the Islamic death cultists had a meltdown over Nasrallah’s demise, there were scenes of wild jubilation among thousands of Arabs and Muslims.

In Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran Arabs and Muslims distributed celebratory sweets and cakes and danced in the streets to express their unbridled joy at Nasrallah’s removal from this earth and thanked Israel for “getting rid of our garbage”.

In Lebanon, people cheered and clapped, drivers honked their horns and fireworks exploded in the sky in the north-western region where Nasrallah was seen as a key ally of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and was thus responsible for assisting Assad’s brutal crackdown on opponents and helping turn the tide of the civil war in his favour.

A video went viral on Arab social media celebrating Israel's dominance over Hezbollah. Many users dubbed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a hero, referring to him as “the king of the Middle East”. Syrians celebrating in the streets held up a sign reading: “Thank you very much Netanyahu. By killing Nasrallah you light the path of peace”. In a striking reversal of the obscene anti-Jewish hate marches that have been taking place ever since the October 7 pogrom, Iranians gathered outside the Israeli embassy in London to thank the IDF for removing Nasrallah from the world.

Israel has been getting rid of the west’s garbage too, since Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is the military arm have been attacking western interests for decades through both terrorism and subversion. And of course, Iran is the west’s arch-enemy — and if Israel neutralises the Iranian regime, that will get rid of the most putrid garbage of all.

The Arab and Muslim reaction suggests that Israel’s spectacular military successes have the potential to be a geopolitical game-changer. For what Israel has achieved in Lebanon over the past couple of weeks has illuminated the utter bankruptcy of the approach pushed by America, Britain, France and the rest of the supine and in every sense de-moralised west: that all conflict must be dealt with through negotiation and compromise — and in the great battle between good and evil, you split the difference.

For Israel, this pressure for a negotiated ceasefire was tantamount to offering its throat to an enemy which never stops announcing its intention to remove Israel’s head from its shoulders.

Israel Hayom reported of the American displeasure at Israel’s military adventures:
The officials stressed that diplomacy remains the only viable long-term solution to the conflict, even if military action sets the stage for negotiations.

This attitude has been lethal for the world order and for peace in the Middle East. The Arab and Muslim world respects strength. It regards negotiation and compromise as signals of surrender which incentivise its fanatics to ramp up their aggression. Using diplomacy to deal with non-negotiable fanaticism is an unforgiveable category error.

America’s appeasement of Iran, first by the Obama-Biden administration and then by the Biden-Harris administration, has been catastrophic in signalling to the Iranian regime that it is aiming at an open goal.

That was why the October 7 pogrom happened. It's why the subsequent war has dragged on for a year; it could have been stopped on October 8 had America bombed the Iranian oil refineries, or told Qatar that unless the hostages were released unharmed within 24 hours all relations with Qatar would cease.

But it didn’t do that. Instead it put pressure on Israel to surrender — as Biden is doing even now — and punished it when it refused. As a result, Iran and its proxies believed they were winning.

It’s taken Israel — in extremis — to show the spineless west that sometimes you have to make war to prevent a worse war; that in a war, you only win if the enemy is totally defeated, otherwise the enemy wins; and that you can only win if you fight with that aim in mind.

Israel has achieved more in two weeks against America’s enemy Hezbollah — which has so much American blood on its hands — than the US has achieved in more than two decades.

More significant than that, Israel has now been seen to have faced down America. This will have a dramatic and very deep impact on the Arab world.

The Arabs think that America has abandoned them for Iran — which indeed it has. Accordingly, the Arabs have come to regard America as their enemy. Now they are looking upon Israel — for whom America has also become a lethally false friend — as their brave and valorous defender.

As a result it is Israel, not the United States of America, which is now emerging as the major player in the Middle East and the chief defender of civilised values in the world. That’s quite an achievement. And it’s happened because of the civilisational collapse of America and the west.

Israel’s current celebrations are necessarily muted. More than 100 hostages remain in the hellholes of Gaza. Yahya Sinwar is (presumably) still alive and is still using the hostages as blackmail. Hezbollah and Iran still have many lethal missiles in their arsenals. Israel is still under attack from Yemen, Iraq and Syria — not to mention from within the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. The head of the snake is Iran. This evil will not be defeated until and unless Iran is neutralised.

Yet despite these manifold dangers, it’s impossible not to feel that something momentous is now unfolding. Rub your eyes. As things stand at present, the line-up is Israel and the Arab world versus America and Iran.

Here in Israel it feels as if this is a seismic moment for the Jewish people, a hinge of history which is opening up a new world order in which Israel will win — because it has no alternative — and the west that so disdains it will lose.

Seth Mandel: Nasrallah’s Killing Was No Mere ‘Decapitation’ of a Terror Group

It’s not inaccurate to say Israel decapitated Hezbollah. But let’s not forget that Hezbollah’s torso was obliterated as well.

The stark warnings from “experts” stand in stark contrast to the celebration from actual civilians in the region, especially with reports that the IDF may have also taken out Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad’s brother, Maher. Hezbollah played a key role in the Assads’ immiseration of Syria, where over half a million have been killed in the civil war that began when Bashar al-Assad sought to violently quash protests.

As analyst Seth Frantzman summed it up: “Syrian regime destroys Syria with the help of Hezbollah, causing millions of Syrians to flee war to Lebanon; the regime turns Syria into a conduit of Iranian arms going to Hezbollah which leads Hezbollah to attack Israel…then Syrians have to flee again because Hezbollah brings ruin on Lebanon due to Iranian arms.”

The story of this part of the Levant in the 21st century is one of Iranian colonial warlords forcing civilians into a constant state of flight.

Which is why it makes no sense to treat Hezbollah as a “normal” terrorist group when it comes to predicting the effects of Israel’s targeted strikes. It’s an army and an imperial administrator in an empire of blood. Despite what campus bobbleheads in America might say or think, Hezbollah is not a resistance movement. It is the vanguard of an expansionist regime based a thousand miles away in Tehran.

And when an imperial army surrounds you and declares war on you, what’s the proper response? Do you analyze which soldiers and generals and commanders might, based on spurious comparisons with random armed terror groups, be replaceable? Do you refuse to fight back because, throughout history, so many victories have been temporary?

The premise of so much criticism of Israel’s actions seems to be that the Jewish state’s military leaders are sitting around in a bunker with cameras on every single terrorist in the world and choosing when to zap them. The reality is that Israel was invaded less than a year ago, and Hezbollah has since joined forces with the invading army.

That’s what this is: an extensive, multi-front defensive war. People seem confused by the magnitude of Israel’s successes, as if that means the IDF brass are playing a video game. Israel’s impressiveness does not change any of the underlying facts of the conflict. It does, however, suggest that maybe invading armies ought to think twice.

Eli Lake: The Killing of Nasrallah—and the Virtue of Escalation

A day after Hamas launched its pogrom of October 7, Hezbollah began raining rockets and missiles into northern Israel, displacing up to 70,000 Israelis. Nearly a year later, those people have not been able to return to their homes.

With this kind of butcher’s bill, one might think the response from the civilized world upon learning of Nasrallah’s death would be jubilation. But Western leaders have responded with reticence. In this they have revealed their profound confusion about the enemy. It is not a nation-state, a terror group, or even an ideology. From Washington to Paris, they seem to believe the real enemy is escalation.

This united front against escalation began before the strike that killed Nasrallah.

At the United Nations last week, twelve countries—including America, France, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—presented a plan for a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon without mentioning Hezbollah, the terror army that holds Lebanon hostage. A joint statement reasoned that Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah’s leadership presented an “unacceptable risk of a broader regional escalation.”

President Joe Biden and French president Emannuel Macron later urged Israel to accede to a “settlement on the Israel-Lebanon border that ensures safety and security to enable civilians to return to their homes.” Meanwhile, British prime minister Keir Starmer called on “Israel and Hezbollah to stop the violence, step back from the brink.” An immediate ceasefire, he said, was necessary to “provide space for a diplomatic settlement.”

Even after Hezbollah confirmed that Nasrallah had left this mortal coil, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock warned that the strikes “weren’t in Israel’s security interests.” Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made sure to say that Nasrallah’s killing provided justice to his many victims. But they too kept pushing for de-escalation as the way forward. “President Biden and I do not want to see conflict in the Middle East escalate into a broader regional war,” Harris said.

The trouble is that the Middle East is already engulfed in a regional war. The party behind that war—Iran, which funds Hezbollah, Hamas, and other proxies—just suffered a devastating blow thanks to Israel.

Indeed, by refusing to heed the council of Biden, Macron, and Starmer, Israel has brought the Middle East far closer to peace than it was before.

What are the Saudis thinking? It sounds like they are tacitly supporting Israel

Middle East Eye reported:

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that he does not personally care about what he referred to as the "Palestinian issue", according to a report in The Atlantic.

Published on Wednesday, the report gave a picture of 11 months of Washington's negotiation efforts in the region after the outbreak of war in Gaza, citing "two dozen participants at the highest levels of government in America and across the Middle East".

It stated that during a visit to Saudi Arabia in January, Blinken and the crown prince met in the Saudi city of al-Ula to discuss the prospect of the Gulf kingdom normalising relations with Israel amid the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza.

According to The Atlantic, Blinken enquired whether the Saudis could tolerate Israel periodically re-entering the territory to strike the besieged Gaza Strip.

“They can come back in six months, a year, but not on the back end of my signing something like this,” Mohammed bin Salman responded.

“Seventy percent of my population is younger than me,” the crown prince explained to Blinken.

“For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.”

There is indirect evidence that this is true.

For example, the (Saudi) Arab News interview I previously mentioned with Lebanon's health minister, the interviewer Katie Jensen pushed hard on Hezbollah's responsibility for the war in Lebanon.

But another story I looked at today may also shed some light.

Sheikh Mohammad Ali Al-Husseini is a Shiite cleric who used to be part of the anti-Israel resistance in Lebanon who worked together with Hassan Nasrallah. The two had a falling out and Husseini was arrested, but eventually released. He ended up going to Saudi Arabia where he eventually was granted citizenship, a rare honor for only those who have helped Saudi Arabis in a huge way.

Husseini is now considered a moderate who seeks dialogue with Jews.

Husseini is in a unique position where he can say things that would normally be considered outrageous to the general Sunni Arab public but he can get away with it as a Shiite. Just like Iranian media will try to avoid direct antisemitism but will eagerly interview American or British antisemites, Saudi Arabia may be using Husseini as a means to float ideas to see what kind of reaction they get.

It seems highly unlikely that Husseini would publicly say anything that the Saudi Crown prince would disagree with. He is a popular guest on interview shows in Saudi Arabia.

So when you goes through Husseini's Facebook page, you see that he says that Jerusalem has no holiness under Shiite Ja'afari thought.

By examining the narrations and hadiths relied upon in the Ja'fari school of thought, we found no definitive evidence or authentic narration proving that Jerusalem (the Dome of the Rock) holds special sanctity in our school. The absence of such narrations confirms its lack of consideration as one of the religious sanctuaries, as it might be in other schools of thought.
Furthermore, there is no report from the Imams of Ahl al-Bayt (The House of the Prophet, peace be upon them) indicating any virtue for Jerusalem (the Dome of the Rock). The narrations filled with great virtues for Jerusalem are all through narrators other than ours.
Conclusion
From the above, it becomes clear that Jerusalem (the Dome of the Rock) does not enjoy a legitimate basis that confirms its sanctity within the Ja'fari school of thought. This does not mean that we diminish its historical and cultural status, but here we are discussing what is well-known among the Ja'fari jurists, urging Muslims to adhere to sound religious principles and not be swayed by myths or traditions that lack a clear Sharia basis.
We emphasize: there is no particular sanctity for Jerusalem (the Dome of the Rock), and it is problematic for any movement by followers of the Ja'fari school towards Jerusalem, and any slogan or action or banner raised for Jerusalem and blood shed for Jerusalem or on the way to Jerusalem is a Sharia issue and a heresy without a Sharia basis according to the prominent jurists of Ahl al-Bayt (peace be upon them). This is what was stated in the responses to the legal inquiries we sent to the authorities, and their response was: "There is no religious consideration for the Dome of the Rock, and we did not find in the narrations of Ahl al-Bayt (peace be upon them) anything indicating its importance" and another response: "The Dome of the Rock has no special sanctity according to us."
Thus, Jerusalem holds no sanctity for us, and we see that the rock of the dome has no consideration or status in Islam.

He writes about Nasrallah and how close they were, expressing sadness that he chose to be more loyal to Iran than to the Arab nation. He talks about terrorism. He talks about Lebanon.

But I could not find a single negative word about Israel.

This is almost unbelievable - in Arab media, one is expected to denounce Israel as routine. I don't see that here.

Given how much the Saudis have detested Hezbollah and Iran over the years, it seems likely that they are just waiting for the war to end, then wait a few more months, in order to establish relations with Israel as they had planned to before the war.

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Lebanese people mostly hate Hezbollah. But Lebanese officials and media refuse to say anything bad about the terror group that hijacked their country.

There seems to be a huge disconnect between how Lebanese media and officials are talking about Hezbollah, and how ordinary Lebanese are.

Criticism of Hezbollah is almost non-existent in every Lebanese newspaper I can find. At best, they maintain a careful balance of reporting the facts but no op-eds denouncing Hezbollah.

The Lebanese health minister, Firass Abiad, was interviewed by The Arab News yesterday. The interviewer tried very hard to get him to say anything negative about Hezbollah and he steadfastly refused, blaming everything on Israel accepting Hezbollah's absurd excuse for building up a separate army in southern Lebanon contrary to UN resolution 1701, and even accusing Israel of targeting civilians:

Interviewer: Israel actually withdrew from Lebanon back in 2000 and Lebanon had a chance to be neutral and protect its interests, but Hezbollah simply wouldn’t let that happen. Isn’t that true?

Abiad: No, that’s the exact opposite. If you go back to the UN resolutions — especially 1701. In 1701, it was very clear that, first of all, Israel has to withdraw from all the areas in Lebanon, which did not happen. And up till now, Israel still occupies Lebanese territory. Secondly, it very clearly mentioned that Israel should not violate Lebanese airspace, which also did not happen; Israel has been violating Lebanese airspace continuously since the 2000 partial withdrawal from Lebanon. So, indeed, unfortunately, these actions by Israel gave the pretext for Hezbollah to continue today what it is doing now. But let’s be very clear, Israel didn’t fulfill that part of 1701. And even now, Lebanon is saying we are ready to abide by the UN Security Council resolutions.

Interviewer: But is the Shebaa Farms worth what is happening right now, minister? Because surely a negotiated deal would have been a far better option?

Abiad: But that depends on the other party accepting a negotiation. And, up to now, it has been very clear that Israel is not interested in a negotiated outcome.

These are all lies, and Abiad knows it. In 2006, Nasrallah justified Hezbollah staying in southern Lebanon and defying 1701 by falsely claiming that it was not meant to be implemented immediately, and that the Lebanese army wasn't strong enough to defend Lebanon. The border dispute wasn't his excuse.

Abiad is toeing the Hezbollah line and spouting Hezbollah propaganda, which is something most Lebanese politicians are doing.

When you look at what Lebanese people themselves are saying, though, you get a different story. In places like Reddit and comments section on newspapers, there is anger at Hezbollah and Iran for dragging Lebanon into their own adventures (although they also generally hate Israel, but they hate Hezbollah and Iran more.)

For example, this thread on Reddit started off with:

I don't seek validation, but I wanna be on the right side of history. I totally admire kicking out the israelis 2 times 2006 and before, thanks hezb. But after that the epitome of human greed consumed hezbollah and messed the country internally.

I simply asked my friends, do you support nasrallah taking lebanon and its citizens to war to free palestine? They said yes he is the only one who stood up for them. I claim that had they not done that, lebanon wouldn't be in flames and explosions. The thousands of lebanese wouldn't have died. They say well israel is evil and they wanna occupy lebanon regardless because of the "greater israel" plan

For 18 years, we had no beef with israel, everytime they attacked us was because they had missiles fired into their country, here is where i was called a zio. Because i said it's natural israel retaliates. Never said it was okay, but you can't expect someone to stay shut when you send rockets over. Hezb shouldn't have started it on Oct. 8, not forgetting the syrians and sunnis; everyone that were killed by him because they opposed him for decades.

Lots of reactions, most anti-Israel but mostly also anti-Hezbollah:

Think about it this way. Israel and Israelis up until the war cared mostly for the economy, and war is bad for business. Also, in 2000, Israel left Lebanon due to internal pressure, so a long term occupation of Lebanon is not popular among Israelis. And if Israel actually wanted to settle or annex Lebanon, I think it would have happened between 1982 and 2000.

Any sane person would be against Hezbollah. A country cannot function when they have a militia that doesn't answer to the government, especially when the army is scared of that militia.

What’s crazy is people still think that hizb was “protecting us” and they’re “10x stronger” than they were in 2006 yet they just got dismantled and defeated within a week.
Lots of people saying “the hizb protected us” “the hizb saved us” wlak why did we need protection in the first place ya maneyek.
In 2006 the IDF came in destroyed the country’s infrastructure and massacred 10,000 civilians then walked out like nothing happened. Where was our victory?

Save from what? Lebanon was a paradise of freedom before hamas/ Hezbollah decided to bite the hand that helped them by accepting Gaza refugees years ago. They thanked them by overthrowing the government an having a civil war cos Allah.its so sad to watch these fuckwits screaming about how bad everyone else is while repressing there own civilians. Do people honestly think Lebanon wouldn't be better off if Hezbollah were gone?

Or this thread:

Praying for a time like this again

Amen. Inshallah.
But first, the Iranian puppets must go.

Israeli puppets first and foremost

Israel isn't the one controlling the Country. Nor are they the extremists that have perverted our land for decades causing my family to flee.

Israel needs to emphasize, again and again, that it wants to see an independent Lebanon free of Iranian influence and that it has no territorial designs on the country. People there can listen.

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