Posts Tagged ‘terrorism’

Hamas Breathes a Sigh of Relief all the Propaganda, None of the Danger

Posted: October 18, 2023 by datechguy in Israel vs Hamas, middle east
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Batman: (To himself as the Joker uses a girl as a human shield and puts a gun to her head) No Joker, you’re playing the wrong game, the old game. Tonight you’re taking no hostages, tonight I’m taking no prisoners.

Batman the Dark Knight Issue 3

When I first heard about the Hospital in Gaza being hit in passing at work my first thought was: Israel Has reached their Dark Knight moment. The moment when they are not playing the old game anymore. A Hamas HQ in a Hospital doesn’t mean a thing to them anymore. If Hamas is there Israel will kill them.

For Hamas such a situation would mean that there is no longer anywhere that is safe for them. No amount of hostages would save them, Yeah they would play the propaganda card but no amount of propaganda would save them, and with all the various middle east countries saying they want no part of the Palestinians of Gaza (which tells you all you need to know about them) it meant they would get their chance to be the martyrs that they claimed they always dreamed of being and I suspect the thought scared them shitless.

But when I got home I got the facts. Apparently an Islamic Jihad rocket fell short and hit the Hospital which produced a bunch of secondary explosions (why it’s as if the Hospital was a gigantic ammo dump or something) and killed a bunch of people. I suspect quite a few of them Hamas.

And Hamas now can breathe a sigh of relief, because now they have the best of both worlds:

  1. Israel still being blamed for the attack giving a propaganda card they can play with the Muslim world that will believe anything they say against the Jews anyways.
  2. Israel not actually crossing the line indicating they are willing to pay any political price to kill them.

Now I actually think that Israel is ready to cross the line and had decided to starve them a bit more before moving in and want them in the maximum state of exhaustion because you can’t stay on full alert for an invasion forever, particularly when your leadership is being decapitated at the same time. When Israel comes they’re going to come big and terrible.

But at least for now Hamas and their sponsors in Iran can breathe a sigh of relief that the end that I believe is coming is not yet a confirmed fact.

At least not yet.

Update: I guess I mixed up my Hospitals in terms of the Hamas Base From Hotair:

Besides, if Israel wanted to target a hospital, it would have been Al-Shifa in Gaza City. Why? Hamas has its command headquarters in Al-Shifa, an open secret for more than a decade. The Washington Post wrote about it in 2014 during the last major Israel-Hamas conflict. Guy Benson also wrote about it here nine years ago, linking a Tablet blast against the media for ignoring it — even though reporters routinely met with Hamas propagandists at Al-Shifa:

Five Fast Thoughts Under the Fedora: Pre-Sedgwick Syndrome, Watching a Republic Die, I’ll Never Tell, Still getting it, The Old Man’s Burden

Posted: June 23, 2023 by datechguy in catholic, culture, Israel, middle east, News/opinion, under the fedora
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 The death of the maker of the Titanic Sub and those who traveled with them is not unremarkable as those with wealth have been taking large risks for centuries but when I heard that in interviews he had stated he rejected hiring experienced submariners because he didn’t want a bunch of 50 year old white guys all I could think of was General John Sedgwick saying about rebel snipers with new rifles with telescopic sights: “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” just before being shot by one.

The primary difference being that Sedgwick lived long enough after he was hit to appreciate the irony of his word, reports now coming out state there was an implosion and all those aboard died instantly.

RIP

The more I see of what is happening on the national level the more I’m amazed at the country doing its level best to go along with national suicide.

Of course historically this is consistent with republics, but what a difference between reading about such things and living it.

Mind you in a generation with the left spaying their own kids that managed to survive the womb it might be moot as the future still belongs to those who show up.

There’s that Tom Hagen math again.

Yet another futile terrorist attack has taken place in Israel.

As always Israel will survive it and do their level best to go after those who helped out but in the end none of these things are going to bring down the state, nor frankly will Iran’s nuclear dreams as Israel, particularly with Biden in the White House is not going to allow itself to be destroyed to sate those who own him.

For Nearly 80 years the Arabs have dreamt of the destruction of Israel. As a supporter of Israel, I ironically see the obvious way for them to achieve those ends and have done so for a long while but it has never has and likely never will occur to them.

How you ask? That’s a secret I’ll take to my grave.

Attended my Godfather/Uncle’s wake yesterday taking a day off work for the final relative of the generation ahead of me to die. I was sitting praying my rosary as people reached the receiving line and I heard an interesting exchange as a couple greeted My uncle’s son who lead it. They had not seen them for years and marveled at their son and daughter now near 30 and asked:

“Any Grandchildren?”

“No they’re not married.” answered my cousin’s wife.

The friends noted that these days that’s not necessary and while my devout Catholic Uncle’s dead body naturally did not flinch at the exchange in my mind’s eye his soul was fist pumping that his son and daughter in law had brought up their children right.

Finally today I’ll be having lunch with some friends from work who no longer see since I’ve been transferred to another building down the road. It’s important to keep up in person contacts like this in a digital world when possible but I must confess it’s very weird in the sense that of the friends I make the vast majority are young enough to be my children and some young enough to be my grandchildren.

Sometimes this is very hard because I’m very aware of my faults and failings and grateful for the sacrament of confession to be absolved of them but when I’m with these young folks it’s incumbent on me to carry myself in such a was as to set an example rather than in the relaxed way friends can be.

That’s a sentence that is rejected by those who spent a lifetime treating their kids as friends and doing all they can to pretend they will now grow old and die, but I suspect if they worried more about setting a good example our society and republic might not be dying before our eyes.

The ghosts of Beirut

Posted: April 25, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

When Showtime announced that it was releasing a miniseries about “the untold story of the greatest terrorist the world has never known,” it reminded me how 40 years ago this month, that man started to etch his name in blood in Beirut. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQkXeSnY_KU

At 21, Imad Mughniyeh (pronounced E-mod Moog-nee-yah) planned a suicide car bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1973, that left 63 people dead, including 17 Americans. Among the dead were seven CIA officers, including the head of the CIA’s Near East Division.

The son of a poor farmer from South Lebanon, Mughniyeh joined the Palestine Liberation Organization as a teenager and eventually became a member of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s security detail. As a Shiite Muslim and non-Palestinian, however, Mughniyeh eventually gravitated toward Lebanese politics and helped found Hezbollah, the powerful organization that basically runs Lebanon today.

An accomplished bombmaker, Mughniyeh worked with Syria, which provided logistical and operational support, and Iran, which funded his operations.

I spent several years of my journalistic career trying to track down Mughniyeh without success. But I did investigate many of his activities in the 1980s, which included the following:

–The truck bombings on October 23, 1983, against French paratroopers and the U.S Marines barracks in Beirut–attacks that killed 60 French soldiers and 241 Marines and sailors.

–The assassination of Malcolm Kerr, the president of American University, in Beirut in January 1984.

–The kidnappings of Westerners in Beirut in the 1980s, including journalist Terry Anderson, British negotiator Terry Waite, and CIA station chief William Buckley, whom Mughniyeh executed.

–The hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in June 1985 during which he executed a U.S. Navy diver and tossed his body on the tarmac of the Beirut airport.

–The 1992 bombings of the Israel embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 29, and of a Jewish cultural center there in July 1994, killing 85 people.

–The Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which left 19 U.S. Air Force personnel dead in 1996.  

“Mughniyeh is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else,” former CIA agent Robert Baer wrote. “He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are loyal to him that he can fully trust. He doesn’t just recruit people.”

Milton Bearden, another CIA man, said: “Both [Osama] bin Laden and Mughniyeh were pathological killers. But there was always a nagging amateurishness about bin Laden—his wildly hyped background, his bogus and false claims. … Bin Laden cowered and hid, and Mughniyeh spent his life giving us the finger.”

In a reported joint operation by the CIA and Mossad, Mughniyeh was killed on February 12, 2008, by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria.

The Ultimate Iranian Irony

Posted: January 12, 2020 by datechguy in middle east
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There seems to be a lot of outrage over Iran’s admission that they accidentally shot down a Ukrainian airliner full of Iranians, Ukranians and Canadians during their “attack” on our bases.

The outrage seems to be coming from all over the world from Canada to Ukraine to within Iran itself to the point where, much to the shock of Michael Moore, they are even defacing posters of a certain late Iranian general.

I’ll readily concede that people have a reason to be outraged. A lot of innocent people were killed, and this accident might have been preventable if Iran had grounded flights during their attack, or informed those manning batteries that the plane was going up, or had better trained their battery peole etc etc etc and the fact that this was an accident doesn’t make the people involved any less dead.

But the irony of the situation really hits me.

Since the Islamic Revolution Iran has been the #1 or #2 exporter of terror in the world (behind the soviets for a while) there are literally thousands if not tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people who are dead because of the action of the Iranian Mullahs and their proxies, not to mention the millions who have suffered because of it. Their actions have deliberate, methodical and calculated but most importantly Iran’s actions have been an open secret known worldwide from Krakow to Khartoum.

Despite this knowledge the world had to be dragged kicking and screaming to get even weak sanctions applied to them to Iran. Diplomats were happy to look the other way as Iran did what it did.

Forty years of deliberate murder and the world didn’t bat an eye, but now Iran finds itself isolated not because of all those decades killing people on purpose, but for the one batch of people whose deaths they didn’t intend.

The world is a very strange place.

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