Israel’s message to terrorists is simple: ‘Just stop attacking us’
Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah via exploding pagers and now walkie talkies are one of the most extraordinary, if not deadly, feats of arms in the modern Middle East.
The technical proficiency, and what it says about how deeply Israeli intelligence has penetrated both Hezbollah and Iran, are powerful dynamics in their own right.
But first, at the conventional level, the attack serves several straightforward purposes.
It significantly disrupts Hezbollah. A few of its operatives are dead, but thousands of Hezbollah’s key personnel are injured in a way which means they won’t be taking part in military operations for a long time, or perhaps ever.
It also forces Hezbollah to create a new communications system for its internal use. It had moved away from mobile phones because Israel’s hi-tech capabilities meant it was able to spot and follow every senior Hezbollah leader who used a phone, as well as intercepting many of the communications on those phones, whether text, voice or email.
Most people would hardly be aware that pagers still exit. They’re a relic of a bygone age.
Former CIA Middle East official Norman Roule how the loss of Hezbollah's pager network has affected the group's ability to communicate covertly.
Hezbollah has been the best organised of the terrorist groups and its internal communications are an important part of that. They will be severely disrupted now for some time.
Secondly, Israel is once again sending a message of deterrence and making deterrence a reality.
Every group in the Middle East now, from Hezbollah to Iran and all their allies, knows that Israel will reach out and hurt any entity that attacks Israelis.
The lesson is simple: the best way to avoid such harms is by not attacking Israel.
The move also reinforces the mystique of Israeli intelligence, which has been itself a significant factor in Middle East politics for decades.
Then there is the perplexing question of timing. Why did Israel do this now? Israel’s war cabinet recently added to its war aims the objective of moving back the more than 60,000 evacuated Israelis who normally live in northern towns and villages of Israel near the Lebanese border.
They have been evacuated since Hezbollah began its accelerated program of rocket attacks on Israel, following the Hamas slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7 last year.
Israel has now made it clear that it won’t tolerate the indefinite rocket attacks on its northern territory.
This particular attack, via the pagers, may also be designed as a way to encourage other Lebanese to put pressure on Hezbollah to pull back. A big war between Israel and Hezbollah would be damaging for everyone. It would be utterly devastating for Lebanon, an extremely fragile economy these days, most of whose people have no truck with Hezbollah. But the Lebanese government is completely unable to control Hezbollah.
One central question, then, is this: do the device attacks signal that Israel is about to take much more decisive action against Hezbollah to push its effective operations further back from the border, or is it a complete episode in itself, designed to have specific operational and political consequences?
The attacks would seem to combine both technical intelligence and human intelligence on Israel’s part.
That Israel was able to assassinate the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, while he was a guest of Iran in Tehran, and did so using Iranian agents, similarly demonstrated both technical competence and deep human penetration of internal Iranian security procedures and decision making.
The same is true of this latest operation in relation to Hezbollah.
The Israelis not only pulled off the frankly astonishing trick of somehow getting access to these pagers before Hezbollah did, and inserting triggered explosives into them, it also plainly knew a great deal about what Hezbollah was doing, when and where.
These explosions were co-ordinated from southern Lebanon to Beirut to Damascus.
Penetrating mobile phone networks has been at the core of Western counterterrorist success. This has certainly been true of the Australian Federal Police and has been the heart of the effective technical assistance Canberra has given to Indonesia over many years now in its battle against terrorists.
The terrorists are aware of this and have many ways of responding, including by going to lower-tech communications systems such as pagers. But the Israelis may well have been able to penetrate even the radio frequencies that pagers use.
Pen and paper are still the safest and most secure form of communications for terrorists, but resort to such methods slows terrorists down greatly.
Hezbollah has vowed to respond. The better response, and one their countrymen would dearly wish for, would be to stop attacking Israel so that Israelis and Lebanese alike can live normally and in peace.
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The SHOCKING Story of Thomas Roberts
In the early hours of March 12, 2022, Thomas Roberts, a 21-year-old aspiring Royal Marine, was stabbed twice in the chest. One incursion sliced through his heart and he was soon dead.
The man who murdered him in cold blood was Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai —an Afghan asylum seeker who had illegally entered Britain a few years earlier.
Thomas Roberts will never fulfil his dream to serve his nation. He will never grow up to start a family, or drink another pint with his friends. He will never see his parents again, or laugh, or cry, or love.
And while the blame for the tragedy of Thomas Roberts’ murder lies with Abdulrahimzai, he is not the only person with blood on his hands.
Why do I want to write about this case? Because at every stage the British state and the elite class, through their policy of open borders and a series of truly shocking failures, let Thomas Roberts and his family down. And somebody needs to call this out.
This week, Rachael Griffin, a coroner in Dorset ruled that a full inquest into the circumstances surrounding Roberts’s death was not required, thereby sparing the Home Office from proper scrutiny.
While Griffin admitted there had been “individual errors” from the State, she said, quite unbelievably, they “do not amount to a systemic failure”.
If the following series of events is not systemic failure, then I do not know what is.
This is the appalling story of how Thomas Roberts’ attacker, who had already murdered two people in Europe, gained entry to Britain, and how the authorities failed at every stage to do their basic duty: to protect the British people.
The first failure of the British state occurred on Boxing Day in 2019, when Abdulrahimzai smuggled himself in a vehicle on a ferry from Cherbourg.
As soon as Abdulrahimzai entered Britain illegally he should have been detained and deported.
Instead, he told Home Office officials he was a 14-year-old from Afghanistan and they simply believed him.
No age assessment was carried out, and the authorities sent Abdulrahimzai to a secondary school in Dorset.
But who is Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai?
If the state had been more curious as to who they were sending to study alongside Year 9 pupils, they would have found out that Abdulrahimzai was not 14, but 19.
A few weeks after his entry into Britain his fingerprints were taken, and it was discovered he had links to Norway and Italy, but no further inquiries were made.
If they had been, the Home Office would have found out that he was lying about his age, and if the British state had really been thorough they would have found out something even more damning: Abdulrahimzai had already murdered two people just eighteen months before.
At the end of July 2018, the illegal migrant teenager shot two Afghan men where a group of refugees and migrants were staying in a shed in Serbia.
But it was too late, and the brutal murderer was now sitting alongside young English teenagers studying for their GCSEs.
Abdulrahimzai was also given foster care, and in January 2020 his foster parent reported that a dentist had raised concerns that the migrant was lying about his age, but the Home Office still did not do an age assessment.
Abdulrahimzai was kicked out of his first school within months of his arrival in December 2020 after various concerns were raised that he was carrying knives.
It was even alleged that he had chased a student with a knife, which he denied.
A few months before Abdulrahimzai murdered Roberts he would post images of himself on TikTok with ten-inch blade knives, which he said he uploaded to gain followers.
At his second school in Dorset he assaulted another pupil, resulting in injury.
At around the same time the illegal migrant assaulted his foster mother, who had unwittingly volunteered to host a murderer in her house.
The foster mother said that Abdulrahimzai was spoken to by the police while he was in her care for carrying knives, which she says he believed he could carry to defend himself.
Then in January 2022, the British state finally began to act.
It was decided an age assessment would be carried out, two years after the Afghan had smuggled himself into the country.
The decision had been made because Abdulrahimzai was refusing to attend school and was bringing women back to his accommodation.
The last chance the British state had to save Roberts from his murder occurred on 10 March 2022, less than two days before the stabbing.
The police received a call about Abdulrahimzai carrying a machete, but they failed to take further action after they were unable to gain access to his residence as the front gate was locked.
By now it was 12 March and Roberts’ fate was sealed. After a drunken night out Roberts’s friend decided to take an e-scooter home, which angered Abdulrahimzai who got into an argument with Roberts. Within 30 seconds the young aspiring marine was dead.
It was only after his death, and Abdulrahimzai’s third murder, that the Afghan’s fingerprints were shared with Interpol, which revealed in September 2022 that he was on the run from a double homicide in Serbia.
A young Brit was murdered, several school children were terrorised, and an innocent foster mother who was trying her best to help a man she believed was a child whose parents had been killed by the Taliban was assaulted. All because the British state failed to keep them safe.
The words of Roberts’ family are equally devastating as they are concerning.
Peter Wallace, his step-father, said: “There were so many warning signs that he should not be here yet the Home Office did nothing about it.”
“We will never be able to bring Tommy back but they still let in thousands of people without proper checks and this will keep happening.”
Meanwhile Roberts’ mother, Dolores, slammed the Border Force, the Home Office, Dorset Police and Bournemouth Council for failing her son.
“Everything is wrong in this country and it will continue to happen again,” she said.
The immigration debate can sometimes seem abstract. Discussions can focus on macroeconomic data around GDP, or vague notions of “cultural enhancement”.
London liberals like Sadiq Khan laud the Notting Hill Carnival as a great example of how immigration has benefited Britain while downplaying the two murders that resulted from the festival, a series of stabbings and injured police officers.
However, mass migration, both legal and illegal, is not an abstract issue. It has real world consequences. It directly led to the murder of not just Thomas Roberts, but countless others who have been killed by immigrants, both legal and illegal.
And it led to the rape and sexual abuse of thousands of young white English girls, which yet another court case in Rotherham this week, which saw many Muslim men sentenced after abusing two young girls, once again underlines.
Consistently, what evidence we have from places like Germany, Sweden, and Denmark shows that illegal and legal migrants are disproportionately more likely to commit these kinds of hideous crimes.
In the UK, however, the establishment and the state simply refuse to collect or even publish what little data they have on crime by nationality and immigration status, so we don’t really know what is going on in the country.
As I wrote last week, the elite class blame the masses for “misinformation” while consistently refusing to make this basic information available to them. If the elite class is confident that this radical political experiment is not putting many British people at disproportionate risk then why don’t they just release the data?
For all of the “cultural enrichment” we supposedly gain from having access to more foreign restaurants and diversity festivals, it is young innocent English men like Thomas Roberts who end up being sacrificed on the altar of liberal progressivism.
I don’t think anybody who is part of this Substack community would have a problem with a small amount of legal immigration that is properly controlled and contributes to our national economy and society —myself included.
But I do think all of us share a deep unease and instinctive opposition to the kind of mass, illegal and uncontrolled immigration that is now flowing through Western states, ushering in outsiders who have completely different values, ways of life, and attitudes and who often seem to hate who we are.
Any serious government, any serious and decent society which cares for its citizens, would have launched a full scale public inquiry into the death of Thomas Roberts.
The name of Thomas Roberts would be known just as widely as the names George Floyd and Stephen Lawrence.
But it is not, hence why I am writing about Thomas Roberts with no paywall. I want people to know about this case. And I want you to tell others about this case.
Because the blunt reality is that Thomas Roberts is an inconvenience for the British establishment, who will not be held accountable for their part in allowing his murderer to enter the country.
I hope there will be no other cases like Thomas Roberts’. But the fact of the matter is that since 2018 more than 135,000 illegal migrants have entered Britain to join some 1.2 million who are already in the country, many of whom we know nothing about.
Mass migration is not inevitable, but I fear another case like Thomas Roberts’ is.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/the-shocking-story-of-thomas-roberts ?
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100 dignitaries sign open letter condemning Brazil
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADL) have launched an open letter, condemning Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes’ attacks on X.
More than 100 professionals in the fields of journalism, theology, medicine, politics, and government have ‘urged’ Brazil’s government to an end their assault on free speech via ‘judicial overreach’.
Megan Basham, Seth Dillon, Riley Gaines, Wayne Grudem, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, were among the line-up of dignitaries taking point on the issue.
Also listed are Ezra Levant, Albert Mohler, Jnr., Samuel Sey, Michael Shellenberger, Liz Truss, and Tammy Peterson.
Requesting Brazil’s far-left government repeal its regressive lockout of the social media company, the open letter called for the restoration of ‘the free flow of information’.
This included a call to ‘respect the rights of its citizens to express their views without fear of retribution’.
Condemning Alexandre de Moraes’ late August ban, ADL said:
‘We, the undersigned, condemn the recent attack on free speech in Brazil.’
The letter then described the shutdown of X as ‘a dangerous escalation in the troubling global trend censoring speech’.
Singling out government retribution for any Brazilian not complying with the virtual lockdown, the ADL added:
‘On 30 August, the judge ordered the immediate nationwide blocking of X and threatened fines of around $9,000 USD per day for anyone using a VPN to access the platform.’
This, the group of 100 agreed, was an illegal act.
This alleged judicial overreach, they explained, ‘…punishes, both the platform and its users, stifling free discourse, and violating Brazil’s own constitution, which prohibits ‘[a]ny and all censorship of a political, ideological, and artistic nature.’
‘The decision also violates international agreements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.’
ADL’s open letter also warned about the dangers of gagging freedom of speech for political convenience, stating:
‘This situation extends far beyond Brazil, serving as a striking example of a growing trend of censorship by government officials, who are becoming increasingly aggressive in suppressing speech they find objectionable.
‘If this censorship in Brazil is allowed to persist, it could set a dangerous precedent that quickly spreads.’
ADL’s protest also targeted the largely left-wing push to control the flow of information by letting bureaucrats decide who gets to speak, what they get to speak about, and when they get to say it.
Indirectly referring to the Australian government, ADL’s Open Letter On the Free Speech Crisis in Brazil, explained:
‘Recently, other world leaders have expressed pro-censorship sentiments, and there is no quicker path to the demise of democracy than the erosion of free speech.
‘Freedom of expression is not negotiable, nor is it a privilege – it is the cornerstone of every democratic society.
‘We must,’ the group concluded,’ defend it whenever it is under threat, whether in Brazil or anywhere else in the world.’
ADL’s concerns are justified.
Regimes in Russia, Iran, and China – Brazil’s key partners in the economic alliance known as BRICS – have bans in place, stopping ordinary citizens from using X.
Egypt, another BRICS member, banned the platform in 2011 for political reasons. Uzbekistan did the same in 2021.
Both of these countries banned X during, close to, or after elections.
They are an example of politicians banning free speech platforms because those democratic platforms are a threat to those who want to stay in, or take, power.
There is a growing concern that factual events may be censored for political reasons by governments.
Additionally, if the tone of the last week is indicative of what the Australian government’s regime socialists have planned, X could be banned here too.
Elon Musk slammed Albanese’s revised, draconian ‘misinformation and disinformation’ bill as ‘fascist’.
The X boss took issue with Labor legislating fines of up to ‘5 per cent of its revenue’ for any social media company failing to fall in, salute, and goose-step in unison with Labor’s ‘can say this, can’t say that’ thought police.
Aided by Australia’s legacy media, who considered the one-word response juvenile, Albanese fired back, saying, ‘Musk has a social responsibility.’
Not overlooking Albanese’s own salute to the collective hive mind, instead of retreat, Musk doubled down, stating:
‘Far left fascists love censorship.’
Like Brazil, if socialists running the Australian government want Musk shut down they will create a law to do so.
As ADL have reminded us, in this sense the fight for freedom of speech isn’t even close to being won, it’s only just beginning.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/100-dignitaries-sign-open-letter-condemning-brazil/
****************************************************Don’t Jail Parents for School Shootings. Arm Teachers
Understandably, we want to blame someone besides the 14-year-old who murdered four people Sept. 5 at Apalachee High School in Georgia. People are shocked and upset that the father taught the boy to shoot and hunt, and bought the boy a rifle for Christmas.
But that doesn’t mean it made any sense for police to arrest the father the day after the school shooting on two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children.
This isn’t the first time that parents have been held liable for their children’s actions.
Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to prison for 10 to 15 years after their son perpetrated the 2021 Oxford High School shootings in Michigan. Their crime? Letting their son have access to the father’s pistol, which was used in the murders.
The problem here is that there are a lot of mistakes to go around, and all too frequently, many fail to identify these murderers before they commit their crimes. As I will discuss later, the question is, what policies do you put in place when you know that we won’t identify these killers before they strike?
Georgia police interviewed the boy in May 2023 after he used the Discord communication platform to threaten to shoot up a school. Making a threat to murder people is a crime. But police concluded they didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest. The boy claimed he had stopped using the platform months earlier and “promised I would never say something [like that].”
Because the police couldn’t directly tie the boy to the messages, the bodycam footage of the interview reveals an officer saying: “I gotta take you at your word.” But why he says that is a mystery. The police knew the IP (internet protocol) address of the home where someone made the posts, which is how they found the boy.
And although the boy and his father had recently moved from there, all the police needed to know was the posts’ dates to see if the boy lived in the house at the time.
The officers didn’t even need the level of proof required in a criminal case. If a judge finds that someone is a danger to himself or others, there is a range of options, including outpatient mental health care. Gun confiscation or involuntary commitment may also be options.
If law enforcement officers took the Georgia boy at his word, how can we blame the father for doing the same?
If anything, the boy’s mother should be commended. Thirty minutes before the attack, she called her son’s school to warn of an “impending disaster.”
“I told them it was an extreme emergency and for them to go immediately and find [my son] to check on him,” the mother said in a screenshot of the message that she sent to the boy’s aunt.
But the high school didn’t act. Isn’t the school mainly at fault for that?
Red flags are always easier to notice in hindsight. Indeed, since 1998, 51% of mass public shooters were seeing mental health professionals before their attacks. But none of the mental health professionals ever identified these murderers as a danger to themselves or others.
In many cases, people had raised concerns about these killers before they carried out their attacks, but the professionals never recognized the threat. If experts miss the danger signs, how can we blame a parent for not seeing them?
Should the families lock up their guns so only adults have access? Not surprisingly, crime rates rise when governments prevent people from defending themselves. When people are required to lock up their guns, criminals more frequently invade people’s homes and then are more successful in murdering or otherwise harming their victims.
If locking up guns could have prevented all five of the mass shootings committed by minors since 2000, including this latest shooting, there would have been 25 fewer deaths and 19 fewer people wounded. Of course, these killers may very well have obtained weapons in other ways.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that all those attacks simply would not have occurred. The number of lives saved would still be only about one-fourteenth of the number of lives lost in just a single year because mandatory locks kept people from getting to their guns in time.
The horrific deaths and injuries from school shootings rightly get a lot of attention. But we don’t hear about the deaths that occur because people can’t readily access guns to protect themselves and their families. Those deaths are no less horrific.
The national media rarely mention defensive gun uses, even when young children use guns to save lives. But dozens of recent cases have been reported by local news outlets.
>>> Related: Defensive Gun Use Shows Second Amendment Remains Necessary, Even After Tragedies
Fortunately, there was a security officer at the school, though Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ presidential nominee, has argued for banning all guns from schools, even for law enforcement.
But even when school resource officers are in the right place at the right time, they have a tough job. Uniformed guards may as well be holding neon signs saying, “Shoot me first.” Attackers know that once they kill the security officer, who is the only person with a gun, no one else can stop them.
Having armed teachers carrying concealed firearms takes away that tactical advantage.
Twenty states allow this under a variety of rules. Outside of suicides or gang violence in the middle of the night, there has not been one instance of a death or injury from an attack at a school that has armed teachers.
Not surprisingly, the attacks in Georgia and Michigan both occurred in schools that banned teachers and staff from having guns. Other schools in Georgia have armed teachers, but not Apalachee High School.
We could blame law enforcement, schools, mental health experts and the parents. But, politically, it seems to be easier to blame the parents instead of the “experts.” The bottom line is that if we keep failing to identify these murderers, what is the backup plan? Let’s take real action to protect our schools and arm teachers.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/17/dont-jail-parents-for-school-shootings-arm-teachers/
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