The IDF has just uncovered a massive Hamas data center, located
directly underneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters. This news comes soon
after the revelation that at least 12 UNRWA staff members took part in
the Hamas atrocities on October 7, that 3,000 UNRWA teachers sharing a
Telegram channel exulted in the October 7 attack, and 12,000 members of
UNRWA were found to have links to terrorist groups. UNRWA has decided to
use the Lie Direct, denying any knowledge of that vast Hamas data
center underneath UNRWA’s headquarters. More on this latest blow to
UNRWA’s reputation can be found here: “Directly beneath UNRWA’s Gaza
headquarters, IDF uncovers top secret Hamas data center,” by Emanuel
Fabian, Times of Israel, February 10, 2024:
Beneath the Gaza Strip headquarters of the controversial
United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, known commonly as UNRWA,
the Hamas terror group hid one of its most significant assets, the
Israeli military has revealed.
The subterranean data center — complete with an electrical room,
industrial battery power banks and living quarters for Hamas terrorists
operating the computer servers — was built precisely under the location
where Israel would not consider looking initially, let alone target in
an airstrike.
The Israelis knew before October 7 that Hamas had built tunnels under
Gaza, but had no idea of their enormous size, depth, and extent. The
IDF has now discovered that there are between 350 and 450 miles of
tunnels under Gaza, a far more extensive network than had previously
been believed. The Israelis have also located at least 5,700 separate
shafts leading to Hamas’s underground network, with more being unearthed
by the IDF every day. The tunnels are far bigger than what Israel had
believed: the IDF has been posting pictures of these mammoth tunnels,
many of which are sufficiently wide to accommodate small trucks. And the
tunnels are built much deeper than the Israelis had assumed, to an
average depth of 50 meters. At that depth they can withstand airstrikes,
and have to be destroyed from within, which requires the IDF soldiers
to go into the tunnels, filled with boobytraps and explosives left by
Hamas, and sometimes with Hamas operatives lying in wait for them — a
hellish undertaking, but not an impossible one. The IDF now estimates it
has destroyed, or rendered inactive, between 20 and 40 percent of all
the Hamas tunnels, mostly in the northern Gaza Strip.
The revelation of the server farm comes amid other
accusations of UNRWA collusion with the Gaza-ruling terror group and the
entanglement of the UN body that provides welfare and humanitarian
services for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars and their
descendants.
Israel last month accused 12 staff with the UN Palestinian refugee
agency of taking part in the October 7 massacre by Hamas-led terrorists,
who killed 1,200 people and took 253 hostages in the murderous rampage.
Since the allegations became public late last month, UNRWA has seen
many of its top donor countries announce funding freezes, leading to
concerns that the agency could stop operating in Gaza and elsewhere in
the Middle East within weeks.
Israel’s first revelations about the 12 UNRWA staff members who took
part in the atrocities were enough for sixteen countries to suspend
their aid to UNRWA, which will not be renewed until UNRWA completes an
investigation of itself, to determine how many of its staff are
implicated in terrorism, whether by taking part in terror attacks, or
praising and encouraging them, or knowingly allowing Hamas to use UNRWA
schools, hospitals, and other facilities to hide weapons and combatants.
If the investigation by UNRWA turns out to be insufficient, or even a
whitewash, those countries will not resume that aid that UNRWA insists
is “critical” for the people of Gaza.
But the IDF’s recent discovery of the Hamas data center
while UNRWA is under increased scrutiny appears to be merely a
coincidence….
UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters is located in Gaza City’s upscale Rimal
neighborhood, an area that the IDF had previously operated in,
dismantling the local Hamas battalion, and from which it had withdrawn
its troops.
Acting on ISA intelligence, the forces discovered a
tunnel shaft near an UNRWA school, leading to an underground terrorist
tunnel beneath UNRWA’s main headquarters. The forces found electrical
infrastructure inside the tunnel connected to UNRWA’s main HQ,
suggesting it was supplying the tunnel with electricity—generated by the
fuel provided through humanitarian aid….
UNRWA says it had “no idea” that a huge Hamas data center was located
right underneath UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza. How likely is that?
Didn’t anyone from UNRWA notice the unusually large amount of
electricity that was supposedly being used by its headquarters, but
which was also being used to fuel operations at the gigantic data center
underneath? Surely this would have put UNRWA on notice that there was
something going on below its Gaza City headquarters.
And what about the amount of water that Hamas’ data center used —
water that came from the same pipes that supplied UNRWA’s headquarters?
Either the electricity, or the water usage, or both, would have alerted
UNRWA that there was a Hamas center underneath. Besides, UNRWA knew for
years about the vast network Hamas’ tunnels. It knew about the nearly
6,000 entrances to those tunnels. It must have seen the heavy machinery
being used to build those tunnels, the massive bulldozers, the trucks
bearing away the mountains of earth that were being excavated. There was
no way that Hamas could have hidden its gigantic Big Dig, carried out
over many years, and in every part of the Strip, from UNRWA. And surely
the very best place for Hamas to place its data center, so critical to
its war effort, would be directly underneath UNRWA’s headquarters in
Gaza, always full of civilians whose presence would, Hamas assumed, have
prevented Israeli airstrikes.
This vast area was not only the data center for Hamas, but also
contained a treasure of information about the tunnel network, including
their exact location, size, depth, and the placement of possible
boobytraps and explosives. The IDF has been analyzing all this
information, which should help it to uncover still more tunnels and
entrances to them (5,700 of these have already been found by the IDF).
Furthermore, it was also used as a weapons storehouse; with weapons
hidden in the data center’s offices, all of which have now been removed
by the IDF. Should we also ask UNRWA how it was that is headquarters
staff never noticed anyone entering or exiting the entrances to the
underground data center? Or did those staff members notice, but had been
instructed never to discuss what they saw?
This discovery by the IDF of the Hamas data server facility directly
underneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters is conclusive evidence that UNRWA
was knowingly helping Hamas to hide its men, weapons, command centers
and data services. It will be fascinating to see how UNRWA attempts to
convince its ever more doubtful donors that it simply had no idea that
Hamas had these tunnels underground,, and was shocked — shocked! — as
much as anyone to discover that Hamas had built such a facility right
under the innocent, unsuspecting noses of UNRWA’s staff.
“In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany, the Nazis and
Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever
ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.”
That was Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian father and German mother, in Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. British author Paul Johnson didn’t grow up in Nazi Germany, but his landmark Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, takes up the “virtually indistinguishable” theme in considerable detail.
By the dawn of the 1930s, “Stalin had already begun to perfect the
dramaturgy of terror.” The decision to collectivize by force, “was taken
suddenly, without any kind of public debate” and Stalin set out to
“smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class.” This was “the green light
for a policy of extermination, more than three years before Hitler came
to power, twelve years before the ordering of the ‘Final Solution.’”
The Thirties was “the age of the heroic lie,” Johnson writes, and
“the competition to deceive became more fierce when Stalinism acquired a
moral rival in Hitler’s Germany.” Stalin’s agents “were always quick to
learn anything the Gestapo and SS had to teach. But the instruction was
mutual.”
The Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939 was the “culmination of a series of
contacts between Soviet and German governments.” For two decades “this
evil stream of exchanges had flowed underground. Now at last it broke to
the surface.” During the Pact, Stalin handed Jewish communists directly
to Hitler’s Gestapo. At the height of the SS extermination program in
1942-45, “there were many more Soviet camps, most of them larger than
the Nazi ones.” Early in 1941, Johnson notes, “Stalin began quietly to
accumulate military reserves of his own, the Stavka, which he commanded personally.”
As in all totalitarian systems, Johnson explains, “a false vernacular
had to be created to conceal the concrete horrors of moral relativism.”
The SS terms for murder included “special treatment,” “resettlement,”
and above all “sending East.” Before Hitler died, “he had largely
committed the greatest single crime in history, the extermination of the
European Jews.”
As Johnson shows, Stalin’s Soviet Union “was in essentials as
anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been.” After WWII, “the tale was resumed
where it had left off when Stalin and Hitler signed the pact of August
1939, and Soviet Russia represented the acquisitive totalitarian
principle on the world stage.”
Stalin branded Jews as rootless “cosmopolitans,” the same term he
used for Westerners. Wall street bankers in Soviet cartoons suddenly
sported Jewish features. The Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels,
chairman of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was murdered in a
fake car accident. By second half of 1952, “Stalin was seeing
Jewish-tinged conspiracies everywhere.” Jewish doctors attached to the
Kremlin were arrested and accused of murdering Zhdanov.
Stalin had “lost touch with the normal world” which Johnson found
“curiously reminiscent of Hitler’s last years.” The climate of moral
corruption, Johnson concludes, “operates a satanic Gresham’s Law, in
which evil drives out good.” Jump ahead to the 2020s in America under
the Biden Junta.
The people find imprisonment without trial, political prisoners kept
in solitary confinement, and show trials, all in the best Stalinist
style. The government establishes a Disinformation Governance Board, and leverages media companies to take down posts that disagree with the government line.
Hitler had his SS and Gestapo, and Stalin his Stavka and NKVD. In similar style, the CIA, supposedly on guard for America’s security, is now a political force deployed against Donald Trump and other possible candidates. The FBI, charged with counterintelligence, now makes no secret of its deployment against Biden’s domestic opposition. Biden’s September 1, 2022 speech
was like something staged by Leni Riefenstahl. Recall too the events of
October 7, 2023, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
“From the River to the Sea,” is basically a call for a second
Holocaust, and pro-Hamas activist shout it loud in the streets, on Ivy
League campuses, and in the halls of Congress. The Biden Junta is harder
on the Israeli response than the Hamas terrorists of 10/7, basically an
Islamic Einstatzgruppen.
Elements of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR are now on display in
the United States of America. At this point, as Hans Massaquoi
discovered growing up in Nazi Germany, they are pretty much
indistinguishable.
After World War II, Massaquoi came to America and found Harlem
“peopled by active working-class folks not much different from those in
my old Hamburg neighborhood. The only difference was that everyone –
from the mailman to the barber to the police man to the garbage
collector to the occasional big shot in a Cadillac convertible – was
black.”
In the U.S. Army, “we black recruits got on well with our white
comrades, and many interracial friendships formed.” In a military band,
“we and our white buddies were like peas in a pod” and “our new
integrated band not only looked like one harmonious ensemble, but it
sounded better than either of the two groups had sounded alone.” Such
positive portrayals of America explain why Destined to Witness is not featured during Black History Month.
Hans Massaquoi passed away in 2013 and Paul Johnson carried on until January 2023. Modern Times remains a work for current times, when totalitarianism and anti-Semitism are on the march at home and abroad.
Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Yes I Con: United Fakes of America, Barack ‘Em Up: A
Literary Investigation, Hollywood Party, and numerous other works.
"The South African government is the same thing as Hamas. It's an Iranian proxy, and its role in the war is to fight the ideological and ideas war to stigmatize Jews around the world." — Dr. Frans Cronje, former CEO of the South African Institute for Race Relations, justthenews.com, January 26, 2024.
According to NGO Monitor,
South Africa's case at the ICJ is built on reports from groups with
links to terrorist organizations. "South Africa's submission to the
court contains no fewer than 45 references to NGO publications,
including several from outfits linked to the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization." — Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2024.
"The South African government is the same thing as Hamas. It's an
Iranian proxy, and its role in the war is to fight the ideological and
ideas war to stigmatize Jews around the world." — Dr. Frans Cronje,
former CEO of the South African Institute for Race Relations,
justthenews.com, January 26, 2024.
While the ICJ refused to throw out the case against Israel and is
likely to spend the next many years deliberating on Israel's purported
and imaginary "genocide," John Spencer, who is both chair of urban
warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and a retired
US military officer, argued that Israel minimizes civilian casualties
more than any military in history, and listed numerous examples of the
lengths that the IDF goes to in order to protect civilians, such as
warning before launching military strikes.
"Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm
than virtually any other nation that's fought an urban war.... No
military in modern history has faced over 30,000 urban defenders in more
than seven cities using human shields and hiding in hundreds of miles
of underground networks purposely built under civilian sites, while
holding hundreds of hostages... The sole reason for civilian deaths in
Gaza is Hamas. For Israel's part, it's taken more care to prevent them
than any other army in human history." — John Spencer Newsweek, January
31, 2024.
Action is reportedly being taken to bring Iran before the
International Court of Justice on charges of Genocide. The move is long
overdue.
Iran called for Israel to be prosecuted at the International
Court of Justice, and South Africa promptly delivered, directly serving
Iranian interests with its genocide case against Israel. Pictured:
Basem Naim (L), a Hamas leader who is a former Gaza health minister and
Khaled Al-Qaddumi, Hamas' representative in Iran, speak during a press
conference in Cape Town, South Africa on November 29. (Photo by Rodger
Bosch/AFP via Getty Images)
Sometime after October 2015, Hamas, following a high-level meeting
between South Africa's governing party ANC and Hamas leaders, opened an office in South Africa.
ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe said at the time that Hamas was going to "learn a lot" from the South African government.
"We are discussing whether Hamas should not open up offices in South Africa so that we can talk," Mantashe said,
adding that the opening of the office was partly to "improve
communication" between the ANC and Hamas.... It requires stepping out of
our solidarity and stepping up the struggle of Palestine itself."
South Africa "stepped up the struggle" for Hamas recently when it
took upon itself to wage lawfare on behalf of Hamas and accuse Israel of
"committing genocide" at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). According to NGO Monitor, South Africa's case at the ICJ is built on reports from groups with links to terrorist organizations.
Naftali Balanson of NGO Monitor wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
"South Africa's submission to the court contains no fewer
than 45 references to NGO publications, including several from outfits
linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist
organization. Staff and board members of these PFLP-linked groups were
part of the South African delegation to public hearings in mid-January
and helped prepare South Africa's case.
"Among the references in South Africa's court petition is a report
titled 'Israel Apartheid. Tool of Zionist settler colonialism' from
al-Haq, a Palestinian NGO that Israel designated a 'terror organization'
in 2021. According to Israel, al-Haq is part of a network that operates
on behalf of the PFLP...
Al-Haq director Shawan Jabarin was part of South Africa's delegation
to the ICJ... On Oct. 10, Ziad Hmaidan, head of al-Haq's training and
capacity-building unit, celebrated the Hamas attacks, writing on
Facebook: 'It is written in the Hadith: 'You must wage jihad. The best
jihad is preparing for war, and it is best to prepare for war in
Ashkelon,' an Israeli city."
South Africa's foreign minister Naledi Pandor spoke
to the leader of Hamas just 10 days after the Iranian terrorist proxy
group launched its massacre on Israel to assert "South Africa's
solidarity and support" and to express "sadness and regret for the loss
of innocent lives on both sides." In the past, Pandor has called for Israel to be designated "an apartheid state."
In December, a Hamas delegation, led by Basem Naim, a leader in Hamas's political office, visited
South Africa. The delegation included Hamas' representative in Iran,
Khaled Al-Qaddumi, and paid visits to the South African Parliament, met
with ANC politicians and Nelson Mandela's grandson, Mandla Mandela.
"The South African government is the same thing as Hamas. It's an
Iranian proxy, and its role in the war is to fight the ideological and
ideas war to stigmatize Jews around the world," said Dr. Frans Cronje, former CEO of the South African Institute of Race Relations.
Iran called for Israel to be prosecuted at the ICJ and South Africa
promptly delivered, directly serving Iranian interests with its genocide
case against Israel.
"The usurping Zionist government must be taken to court. In the
context of Palestine, the entire world is witnessing the crime of
genocide being committed by the usurping regime. The usurping Zionist
regime must be prosecuted for it today..." Iran's Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei said on October 17, just 10 days after the October 7 massacre.
A few days later, on October 22, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein
Amir-Abdollahian held a joint press conference in Tehran with his South
African counterpart, in which he said
that the two had "held important discussions about the bilateral
relations and several international issues," and that the two countries
"have joint positions and views on international matters."
"[South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor and I]
also discussed the ongoing war crimes of the [Israeli] regime. We are
thankful for the strong positions of the people and government of South
Africa in their support of Palestine and the fight against the
[Israel's] apartheid. A South African delegation will visit Tehran next
week. In addition, President Raisi will visit South Africa and the
latest agreements will be signed by the relevant elements in the
presence of the presidents of both [countries]."
Pandor practically admitted that South Africa is working with Iran against Israel:
"South Africa has constantly declared its support for
Palestine. Nobody should suffer injustice. We must do more to support
the Palestinian people... Countries should act more decisively. We are
eager to achieve these goals with Iran; this is a joint objective of
Iran and South Africa."
Aside from Chad, South Africa is the only African country to have recalled its ambassador and diplomatic mission to Israel. South African lawmakers voted
in favor of severing ties completely. The South African parliament also
voted in favor of closing down the Israeli embassy in South Africa,
with Israel calling home its ambassador for consultations in November.
While the ICJ refused to throw out the case against Israel and is
likely to spend the next many years deliberating on Israel's purported
and imaginary "genocide," John Spencer, who is both chair of urban
warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and a retired
US military officer, argued that Israel minimizes civilian casualties
more than any military in history, and listed
numerous examples of the lengths that the IDF goes to in order to
protect civilians, such as warnings before launching military strikes.
"Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless
civilian harm than virtually any other nation that's fought an urban
war. In fact, as someone who has served two tours in Iraq and studied
urban warfare for over a decade, Israel has taken precautionary measures
even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan...
"No military in modern history has faced over 30,000 urban defenders
in more than seven cities using human shields and hiding in hundreds of
miles of underground networks purposely built under civilian sites,
while holding hundreds of hostages... The sole reason for civilian
deaths in Gaza is Hamas. For Israel's part, it's taken more care to
prevent them than any other army in human history."
Action is reportedly being taken to bring Iran before the International Court of Justice on charges of Genocide. The move is long overdue.
Robert Williams is a researcher based in the United States.
The Biden administration's passive response to Iranian aggression is imperiling the region, the United States and the Free World.
"No one ever said it better
than Osama bin Laden: When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,
by nature they are attracted to the strong horse." — Thomas Friedman,
newyorker.com, July 5, 2010.
Especially in the Middle East, leaders are looking for who will protect them.
The Biden administration's passive response to Iranian aggression
is imperiling the region, the United States and the Free World. Iran,
along with Qatar, have brought all the mayhem to the Middle East.
When Iran achieves nuclear weapons capability, as it appears on the
verge of doing, just think of what mayhem it will be able to bring then.
Stop Iran now.
The Biden administration's approach to dealing with Iran has
been marked by a series of delayed responses, ineffective actions, and
cosmetic sanctions that have clearly failed to deter the Islamic
Republic's aggressive behavior. Pictured: Protesters and members of
Iranian paramilitary's Basij forces march next to the fourth generation
Khorramshahr ballistic missile Khaibar in Tehran on November 24, 2023.
(Photo by Hossein Beris/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
The Biden administration's approach to dealing with Iran has been
marked by a series of delayed responses, ineffective actions, and
cosmetic sanctions that have clearly failed to deter the Islamic
Republic's aggressive behavior. This passive stance not only bolsters
the Iranian regime but also jeopardizes the safety and security of
Americans and their allies. A thorough reassessment of strategy and a
commitment to assertive diplomacy would seem necessary to say the least.
When Iranian assets have been targeted, or even when a serious intent
to do so was conveyed, Iranian leaders have relented from launching
attacks on other countries, including the US and its allies. The most
recent example occurred last month when Iran launched a missile strike into Pakistan. Pakistan, maintaining diplomatic relations with Iran, responded
swiftly by launching multiple strikes into Iran shortly after the
attack -- in contrast to the delayed responses often observed from the
Biden administration. Pakistan's retaliatory strikes resulted in
casualties; Iran has appeared to reconsider its aggressive stance. Iran adopted a softer tone; its foreign ministry issued statements expressing a commitment to fostering good neighborly relations with Pakistan.
When, during the Trump administration, Qassem Soleimani, the leader
of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a designated foreign terrorist organization, was killed by a drone
strike on January 3, 2020, Iran issued threats against the United
States. President Donald Trump responded by cautioning Iran that any
harm inflicted on Americans would prompt an even more forceful response.
"[T]he United States," he said,
"will hit 52 Iranian sites, some at a very high level and important to
Iran and the Iranian culture, very fast and very hard." Emphasizing the
asymmetry in perceived consequences, Trump even emphasized
the asymmetry in his proposal: "They're allowed to kill our people...
and we're not allowed to touch their cultural sites? It doesn't work
that way." Iran did not attack US assets or kill Americans throughout Trump's tenure.
In addition, history provides much evidence of the effectiveness of
firm action in deterring Iranian aggression. During the Bush
administration, shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan, the
Iranian regime, evidently fearing being targeted for its support of terrorist activities, initiated a confidential proposal to the US. Iran's proposal, communicated through Swiss diplomatic channels, outlined
a "grand bargain" that offered full transparency regarding its nuclear
program and a cessation of support for terrorist groups such as Hamas
and Hezbollah. In return, Iran sought
security assurances from the United States and the normalization of
diplomatic relations. The proposal came in response to the credible
threat of force and demonstrated Iran's willingness to negotiate when
confronted with strength.
Similarly, Operation Praying Mantis during the Reagan administration dealt a decisive blow to Iran's maritime capabilities, that led to a cessation
of Iran attacking ships. Reagan's message had been clear: aggression
will be met with overwhelming force, and the security of American
interests will be fiercely defended.
A fundamental truth about the Middle East -- one that differentiates
it from Western thinking in the United States or the United Nations – is
that the only language respected is that of strength and resolve. As the journalist Thomas Friedman noted:
"No one ever said it better than Osama bin Laden: When people see a
strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they are attracted to the
strong horse." Especially in the Middle East, leaders are looking for
who will protect them. Anything less than strength invites aggressive
behavior and endangers innocent lives. The Biden administration's
failure to send a strong and unequivocal message to Iran only invites
further its aggression and destabilizing the region.
A more assertive stance towards Iran is essential. Responses need to
include strengthening and enforcing existing sanctions; imposing
restrictions on Iran's oil exports and imposing penalties on those who
engage in trade with the regime. One might also consider targeting
Iran's oil facilities, naval assets, and bases belonging to the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps. Strong action against Iran itself -- not its proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis -- would also serve as an effective deterrent against future Iranian aggression.
The Biden administration's passive response to Iranian aggression is
imperiling the region, the United States and the Free World. Iran, along
with Qatar, have brought all the mayhem to the Middle East. When
Iran achieves nuclear weapons capability, as it appears on the verge of
doing, just think of what mayhem it will be able to bring then. Stop
Iran now.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and
advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of
Harvard International Review, and president of the International
American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US Foreign Policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
Globally, in the context of a developing worldwide multi-theatre and multi modal contest between the Free World and the dictatorships, the most humane and swiftest route to peace is controlled escalation on our terms which reaches out and helps Iranians to end the shaky and bloodstained regime of the Iranian ayatollahs.
Israel's cause is the cause of the Free World as is Ukraine's and Taiwan's.
Domestic supporters of Hamas, trying to constrain Israel by
"lawfare" and by noisy street and media politics, are therefore a fifth
column for our enemies and should be treated as such.
Unsuccessful "lawfare" at the International Court of Justice
served to narrow and make harder the road out of Gaza for all local
parties. The biggest losers are those Arabs who are neither Islamists
nor anti-Semites: for their territorial hopes have been written out of
history at present by Hamas and Iran. Prosperity and tranquillity for
them will only return with resumption of the Abraham Accords....
Netanyahu is surely correct in stating that any attempt to push for a
two-state solution at this moment would endanger Israel.
Globally, in the context of a developing worldwide multi-theatre
and multi modal contest between the Free World and the dictatorships,
the most humane and swiftest route to peace is controlled escalation on
our terms which reaches out and helps Iranians to end the shaky and
bloodstained regime of the Iranian ayatollahs.
The right sort of war – meaning war on Western terms, in which we
and not our enemies have escalation dominance -- is sometimes the most
peace-friendly option....
Unsuccessful "lawfare" at the International Court of Justice
served to narrow and make harder the road out of Gaza for all local
parties. The biggest losers are those Arabs who are neither Islamists
nor anti-Semites: for their territorial hopes have been written out of
history at present by Hamas and Iran. Pictured: ICJ President Joan
Donoghue (second from right) confers with colleagues at the court in The
Hague on January 12, 2024. (Photo by Remko de Waal/ANP/AFP via Getty
Images)
There are always dire consequences when the two strands of the double
helix of "history as facts" and "history as beliefs" are torn too far
apart. Chaos ensues. Dark forces are liberated.
Just this has happened for Israel and its neighbourhood since Hamas
perpetrated the pogrom of 7/10. In the hundred days until the world
turned upside down with the South African led attempt to weaponise the
UN's International Court of Justice (ICJ) to tar the victim of a
transparently genocidal attack with charges of genocide -- an attempt
which failed, but only just -- all routes out of the dark chaos have
steadily narrowed. After the ICJ's vexatious ruling which tried but was
unable to declare Israel to have committed genocide, even moreso.
Locally, those Arabs who are not Salafist Islamist anti-Semites have
for the moment lost their road to normalisation with Israel. Their hopes
for tranquillity have been written out of possibility by Iran and its
proxies until the Abraham Accords regain their traction. That in turn is
contingent upon the IDF being able to follow the advice of Britain's
great fighting General of the Second World War: Field Marshal
Montgomery's Second Law of War: Maintenance of Aim. Until then, look
once more at the July 1922 map of the British Mandate as the likely
guide.
Globally, the centrality of Iranian sponsorship of its proxies and
the active hand of its military arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps (IRGC), in planning and executing the atrocities of 7/10 and in
mobilising their proxies, the Houthis and Hezbollah, mean that the
safest route is now via the rescue of Iranians from the shaky regime and
bloody hands of the ayatollahs. This cannot be achieved by minimal,
sequential pin-point military actions. They will be viewed as signs of
Western weakness. In fact the policy of US President Joe Biden is more
likely to increase the possibility of a full-scale but
dis-coordinated attack on Iran which would be the worst course of
action. What is required is a competent theory of victory which
understands the inter-relatedness of all the global theatres in the
current, developing world war and, understanding this, which takes and
controls the terms of battle by planned escalation. Escalation by the
West in response to the escalation has been done or sponsored by Iran is
both necessary and right.
This final part of the series maps and explores the local and the
global roads to safety for Israel, the Free World in its multi-theatre,
multi-modal confrontation with the Northern Middle and Eastern
dictatorships and for the resumption of the Abraham Accords. Both roads
involve the destruction of anti-Semitic enemies of peace and
civilisation, just as it did when confronted with the Nazi antecedents
of Hamas and the other spawn of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Third Reich SS officer Otto Ohlendorf's tu quoque – literally
"you too" -- "Dresden defence", that the Allies were just as bad as he
had been, by also killing civilians and children with their carpet
bombing of Dresden (with which Part III ended), made no impact on his judges at Nuremberg. They saw the Dresden bombing to be covered (as it is) by a Shermanite ethical exclusion:
that it is moral and humane to increase the intensity of force the
sooner to end it. They also found his argument to be futile because his
case was entirely different in motive and in scale. In short it was a
category error. The same token the Hamas' apologists' even more
offensive and inappropriate claims that the IDF's demonstrably
discriminating operations are a form of genocide should not be
entertained either. The BBC's dog-whistling with repeated and almost
voyeuristic reports of individual dead or maimed children in Gaza, which
evokes the medieval anti-Semitic blood libel, is a disgrace.
Ohlendorf's last throw of the dice in his defence at Nuremburg was
the "Posen line": to advance a frank and much darker line in
self-justification. In his verbatim record in Case 9, he said:
"I believe that it is very simple to explain if one
starts from the fact that [the Führer] Order not only tried to achieve
security, but permanent security, lest the children grow up and
inevitably, being the children of parents who had been killed, they
would constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents."
It is derivative of Himmler's 1943 Posen "secret speech"
to his close subordinates justifying the Holocaust, "the extermination
of the Jewish people", which he, Ohlendorf, had heard. It was different
only in that Ohlendorf was willing to voice in public (quoted above)
what Himmler had said, repeatedly, should be forever unspoken and it is
the authentic voice of the genocidaire. It is seen in Salafist ideology, to be read in Qutb's Milestones, or the Hamas Charter (note especially clauses 7, 22, 32); and it was seen in grisly action on 7th October.
At Nuremberg the judges gave that line of defence – the "Posen line"
-- short shrift as they had also given to his "Dresden defence". They
found Ohlendorf guilty and sentenced him to hang. In June 1951, a decade
after his crimes and icily composed to the last, he was executed at
Landsberg gaol, the same gaol where Hitler had been held in detention
for eight months in 1924 and where he had dictated Mein Kampf.
At first sight, but already beyond reasonable doubt on their own evidence – the terrorists actually documented
their atrocities on video - Hamas's men committed the gravest war
crimes against civilians on 7/10 under Geneva 4 Article 147 (discussed
fully in Part 3),
including wilful killing, torture, inhuman treatment and the taking of
hostages. Assuredly, they will all be hunted down, one way or another.
Whether they receive summary justice or justice by due process in
national courts as prescribed by Geneva 4, or a Nuremberg-style
tribunal, time will tell. But if the latter, when their qualitatively worse crimes, while fewer in number, are compared to the lesser crimes of the SS Einsatzgruppen
for which Ohlendorf was hanged (which is a sentence one never expected
to have to write) perhaps capital punishment for such war crimes against
humanity will return? Rule nothing out.
In any event, everything changed for everyone on 7th October and
quietist, non-Salafist Arabs will likely be the greatest losers. That is
because the current unreconstructed anti-Semitic PLO and Hamas leaders,
whose Nazi pedigree channelled through Hitler's enthusiastic supporter
and propagandist, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,
documented in Part 2,
have written their territorial hopes out of history for the foreseeable
future. As the great scholar and diplomat Abba Eban once observed, "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."
At the threshold of 2024, it is therefore worthwhile recollecting the
history of the July 1922 British Mandate for Palestine because, after
Hamas has been obliterated and with any two-state solution reduced to
the fading smile of Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, that map may become
actively relevant once more. David Ben Gurion's 1947 spirit of
compromise may not be so readily extended by any Israelis after what the
Arabs have done and in the face of an apparently concerted diplomatic
effort by the British Foreign Secretary, the EU and Biden to design and
foist a Palestinian state on to the region without Israel's involvement.
Such high-handedness is more likely to produce an opposite reaction: to
consolidate and harden Israeli refusal to accept such conduct.
Once Hamas and the other IRGC proxies are gone and the path of the
Abraham Accords has been resumed, another opportunity may come. But not
before then. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is surely correct in
stating that any attempt to push for a two-state solution at this moment
would endanger Israel. That is the local, regional road after Gaza. It
is within this reality that, as the current British Foreign Secretary is
attempting, by meddling in the internal affairs of the Western world's
bulwark in the Middle East is, as Nile Gardiner states,
not just a knife in the back to the Jewish state. It is particularly
unseemly when Israelis are fighting and dying daily to defend the
freedom of the West in the developing world conflict.
David Cameron was wrong about Brexit,
which has proved to be the opposite of the disaster that he predicted
and, as just indicated, he is wrong about the Israel-Hamas war. His two
errors are linked. He ended his Prime Ministership abruptly when he lost
the 2016 referendum and has clearly never forgiven the 17.4 million
British people who voted to leave the EU in the country's biggest ever
democratic exercise. By suggesting that the UK and UN should
pre-emptively recognise a Palestinian State without Israel's
participation or consent, Cameron aligns with the EU's similar proposal
which looks like a cold revenge for Brexit. Simultaneously he voices the
authentic and deeply entrenched pro-Arabism in the culture of British
Foreign Office officials which to this point had rarely dared to speak
its name. He also delivers a slap in the face to all Israelis and to
Israeli statehood. Now, together with the EU and Biden, instead of
holding Hamas accountable – or even letting Israel hold Hamas
accountable – he apparently wants to give Hamas and Iran a reward
for initiating the pogrom of 7/10. Gardiner describes this performance
as "amateur" -- which is mild -- and as "... among the most reckless
comments made by a British Foreign Secretary in the modern era," which
is not over-stated. Cameron is openly flouting the authority of his
successor, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. This is therefore a moment when
we will discover if the prime minister has steel in his spine. He must
disassociate himself from this free-lancing. He has ample grounds to
sack Cameron for flouting his authority.
The local route out of Gaza is suddenly filled with new danger,
although the pathway to peace and safety thought IDF victory over Hamas
remains clear. Yet because of Iran's involvement through its proxies –
Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Yemeni Houthis -- there
is an unavoidable wider context that demands action, from which it
would be unwise to avert our eyes. It has a global dimension and
solutions and Cameron's bungling -- or worse -- only heightens the risk
to Britain, the Middle East and the USA just as he is trying to inflict
on Israel.
The combined land and air assault by Hamas on 7/10 had all the
hallmarks of a special operation trained by the Iran's Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps. Why would it not have? There is evidence that
the attacks had been in planning for nine years.
Eagle-eyed former US National Security Adviser John Bolton (and not he
alone) noticed just after Christmas, although it instantly tried to
"walk back" the admission, as did Hamas, the IRGC accidentally told the
truth. It described 7th October as an act of revenge for the targeted
assassination of the IRGC Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani, who
was killed by a US drone strike in Iraq ordered by President Donald
Trump in 2020: an action that materially assisted the progress of the
Abraham Accords. Bolton, himself targeted for assassination
by Iran, allegedly in revenge for that same assassination, also
suggested that widening the war by Israel's enemies increasingly looks
like implementation of Soleimani's "ring of fire" strategy to attack
Israel on all fronts.
The Israelis certainly seem to agree and to have planned accordingly.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, a retired IDF General, has spoken of a
seven-front war; and the successful assassination of Seyed Razi Mousavi
suggests that deeds will match words. Mousavi was the senior IRGC
liaison with Hezbollah and a close colleague of Soleimani.
How is all this viewed away from the front line? The reflex view of
politicians with little strategic insight, no military knowledge and
hence no theory of victory is to flinch from admitting that a Shermanite
escalation, of which the Dresden bombings or the atomic bombings that
ended World War II are examples, can sometimes be wiser and more humane
than its avoidance. Timid, limited, pre-announced strikes are not
"prudent" or a sign of humane conduct but of weakness, and evident lack
of strategic purpose. The moment of choice has passed. Now, after Free
World naval escalation against the Houthi threat to innocent passage
through the Red Sea, after more than 170 attacks on US forces just since
October, with three American soldiers killed by drone strikes in
Jordan, that die has been cast.
Widening regional war is reaching out, step by step, from Israel and
its allies to touch directly the shaky regime of the ayatollahs in Iran.
It needs to be both understood and accepted that this escalation is
both necessary and right. It is the safest road to peace and that is no paradox.
No apology is required: Iran is the telephone exchange linking all
three actual and potential theatres -- Ukraine, Gaza, China -- in a
rapidly evolving world war of many interacting theatres and modes of
conflict: "hot" (kinetic), "cold'" (economic) and "grey" (oblique cyber,
information and subversion). The July Crisis of 1914 or the 1930s are
now commonly offered as analogies for this moment; but the best
historical analogy for 2024 is the Seven Years' War in the mid
eighteenth century. In that global contest, British victory over the
French actually built the scaffolding of a world order which endured
until the end of formal European empire and continues to this day in
myriad "soft power" relationships and most actively through the British
Commonwealth and the Anglosphere "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance.
We are, today, at war in different ways, with Russia, with Communist
China and with Iran. They all know this, but our political classes
apparently do not or are wilfully blind. Although the combined strength
of the free-market economies far out-class theirs, our danger and our
strategic risk is that our politicians began to understand this only
late in the day, only few accept it and fewer still actively embrace the
opportunities that it brings us. As so often in recent years, the
old-fashioned parts of the general public, still the majority, seems to
be intuitively ahead of a political class that indulges its luxury
beliefs like "critical race theory" or "Net Zero" and has become
managerialist and self-obsessed. "Where there is no vison, the people perish."
At this point, safety as well as victory lie in skilful escalation to
deter or remove the mullahs who have vexed us long enough. That in turn
demands clear, untroubled and consistent understanding that Israel's
cause is the cause of the Free World (as is Ukraine's and Taiwan's) and
that therefore domestic supporters of Hamas, trying to constrain Israel
by lawfare and by noisy street and media politics, are a fifth column
for our enemies and should be treated as such.
It means that the attempt by the retiring President of the ICJ, Joan
Donoghue, and 14 other judges to reach agreement on the South African
case alleging genocide so that all six provisional measures could be
imposed on Israel, which was prevented by the Ugandan Judge Sebutinde
who alone held that the case was without merit and therefore not
justiciable, should be seen in that light (see p.11 of the Law Gazette).
The united efforts of Cameron and Borrell at the EU to impose
recognition of a Palestinian state without Israel's involvement,
agreement and against its expressed will also fall within the frame of
actions that threaten the security interests of the Free World at large.
This makes them actually dangerous and for that reason if no other,
they should be stopped.
But not all is bleak. There are many arcs that bend out of the events
of 7/10 and if we focus on deeds rather than words, we see that the
deep muscles of the anglosphere flexed at once. Two US Navy carrier
strike groups (the USS Gerald R. Ford and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower
groups) were in theatre soon after 7th October. They were amplified
with a Royal Navy task group, distressingly limited because of
irresponsible hollowing out of the Navy most especially since the
Coalition defence cuts of 2010 when Cameron was Prime Minister. Other
naval units of reliable Allies also joined. All together, this was the
most powerful array of any naval capability to be deployed anywhere for a
generation and, as is the way with naval deterrence, their presence
gave Israel space and cover to form and launch Operations Swords of Iron
as well, no doubt, as quietly providing peerless intelligence support.
The USS Ford group returned to Norfolk after an extended
deployment, but different combinations of naval units brought forward
maintain the means to deter as they are now doing, or to attack, if the
will is firm. The same will happen when the USS Eisenhower has to rotate. There is talk of sending the UK carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth
("Big Lizzie") as replacement, but even with USN escort and logistics
support which the UK cannot provide to an adequate level, lacking a
CATOBAR (catapult and trap) deck, she cannot inter-operate with the F/A
18 Super Hornet supersonic aircraft that are the mainstay of the US
carrier forces.
The Pentagon has formally named Iran as the source of an attack on an
Israeli-related merchantman in the Indian Ocean, which is tantamount to
a declaration of a state of war; and USN helicopters have sunk Houthi
attack craft. A controlled escalation of naval and air actions to
degrade Houthi capabilities to conduct anti-shipping attacks has begun
and will continue with mainly US Navy firepower and British RAF "token
air", absent the Navy.
A united Western front with a clear strategy to deal with the mullahs
once and for all will command tacit Saudi support, rebuff PRC advances
into the global energy nexus and, by way of its "one belt one road"
policy, Chinese Communist economic colonialism. It will help to repair
the alarming damage done by Biden to relations with key regional allies,
above all Saudi Arabia; and it is the logical and safest global pathway
out of Gaza.
Much more is at stake in the cockpit of the Middle East beyond full
support for Israel which, in the hard real world, is the window of the
West in a tough neighbourhood. That means firmly overriding the reflex
fascination in foreign ministries with Obama's ill-conceived and
ill-starred 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) the "nuclear
deal" which attempted to no avail to negotiate controls on the Iranian
nuclear bomb programme which, given the regime's track record for
dissembling and unreliability would, most likely, not have honoured
except in the breach.
The right sort of war – meaning war on Western terms, in which we and
not our enemies have escalation dominance -- is sometimes the most
peace-friendly option, as was once in no need of explanation.
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things", John Stuart Mill wrote in his Principles of Political Economy.
"The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic
feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse.... A
war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to
give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their
own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, is often
the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is
willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does
about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of
being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than
himself."
Si vis pacem para bellum: if you desire peace, prepare for war. Given where we now are, it is the safer option both for Israel and the wider Free World.
Gwythian Prins is Research Professor Emeritus at the
London School of Economics and a past member of the British Chief of the
Defence Staff's Strategy Advisory Panel.
Officials told the Times that Israel also caused a blast in a chemical factory near Iran's capital on Wednesday.
A gas flare on an oil production platform in the Soroush
oil fields is seen alongside an Iranian flag in the Persian Gulf, Iran,
July 25, 2005(photo credit: RAHEB HOMAVANDI/REUTERS)
Two major gas pipelines in Iran were allegedly attacked by Israel this week, according to a Friday report by The New York Times, citing an IRGC-affiliated military strategist and two Western officials.
The two pipelines, which carry gas from Iran's south to their major cities such as Tehran,
were hit in multiple locations simultaneously. The attack "knocked out
about 15 percent of Iran’s natural daily gas production," the Times quoted energy experts as saying.
The
report said that the attack on the gas pipelines caused disruption in
several Iranian provinces, such as Fars and Chahar Mahal Bakhtiari,
regarding "the flow of heat and cooking gas to millions of people."
Israel has targeted Iranian nuclear and military sites in the past, with
assassinations being reported of Iranian commanders and scientists -
whether they were located in Iran or not.
The attack is seen as an escalation
The
alleged attack represents an escalation in what the NYT report
describes as a "shadow war" between the two countries, which has been
fought on different fronts through cyberattacks, land, air, or sea. The
escalation in question that the report notes, citing officials and
analysts, is that part of Iran's energy infrastructure was struck, which
was "relied on by industries, factories and millions of civilians."
Iran flag and Israel flag (credit: Cottonbro Studio/Pexels)
Iranian
Oil Minister told local media that whoever attacked planned to disrupt
gas flow to Iranian provinces and cities but did not publicly blame
Israel or anyone else, NYT reported.
The
attack alleged to have been done by Israel would have required the
Jewish state to have deep knowledge of Iranian infrastructure, and with
two pipelines being hit simultaneously, Israel would have needed to
operate with extreme coordination, the Western officials and IRGC
strategist said.
Little
harm was caused to civilians in the attack, one of the two Western
officials told the NYT and said Iran could easily repair the damage but
noted that the strike could have been a warning of the damage Israel
could inflict. However, Iranian media reported that the strike terrified
residents, who fled into the streets around 1 a.m. local time when the
strike happened, but there were no casualties reported.
Israel also caused a separate blast a day before the report of the attack on the pipelines, the Western officials told the Times, which was done inside a chemical factory near the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Since the October 7 massacre
committed by Hamas, Iran has denied being involved in the attacks,
despite reports of Hamas being trained by them. Other Iranian proxies
include Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Events in the West Bank receive little coverage in Israeli and international media, and it would be a mistake to ignore the simmering tensions in the area south of Jerusalem.
SOLDIERS IN the Etzion Brigade take part in a raid in the Gush Etzion village of Seir al Shuyukh. (photo credit: JONATHAN SPYER)
‘You meet the terrorist at the end of the process, on the road, but
there’s a whole system that leads up to that point, so if you can hit at
what lies behind, and prevent it, then that works too,” Maj. Shlomo
Ohayon tells me, as we sit in his command vehicle.
It
is the very early hours of the morning, outside of the village of Seir
al Shuyukh in Gush Etzion. There is dead silence all around, punctuated
only by the crackle of the communications in the jeep. Ohayon is the
deputy commander of Battalion 910, part of the IDF’s Etzion Brigade. The
battalion, as part of its ongoing mission, has received a list of four
individuals suspected of terror activity in the sector. They are setting
out to apprehend these men.
Battalion
910 is a reserve formation made up of graduates of the Kfir Infantry
Brigade. Mobilized immediately after October 7, they have spent the past
four months in Gush Etzion, between Jerusalem and Hebron.
What is going on in the West Bank?
Events
in the West Bank receive little coverage in Israeli and international
media. With full-scale war underway in Gaza, something close to it on
the northern border, and the region on the edge of conflagration, it
isn’t hard to understand why. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to
ignore the simmering tensions in the area south of Jerusalem.
Battalion
910 has carried out more than 400 arrests of suspects since arriving in
the sector. Those arrested are connected to a variety of organizations,
and to none. The battalion has prevented a series of planned assaults
on the Jewish communities in the area, and ongoing attempts to fire at
vehicles.
Buildings in the Palestinian village of Nazlat Isa near Tulkarm, West Bank, February 2020 (credit: AMMAR AWAD/REUTERS)
This
area, and the nature of its challenges, are somewhat familiar to me. It
takes just 30 minutes on the quiet roads in the early morning hours to
reach 910’s headquarters from my home in south Jerusalem. But more to
the point, I spent a stint of reserve duty here, in a similar winter of
fog and uncertainty, 24 years ago, in the opening months of the Second
Intifada.
The
conditions were different then, but the core issues still remain much
the same. The security of the highways leading to Jerusalem is
paramount. Nowadays, this means intelligence-led operations into the
villages adjoining the main arteries, where support for Hamas, Islamic
Jihad, and other organizations is high.
Back
in 2000, we couldn’t enter the populated areas because of the
provisions of the Oslo Accords. The jeep patrols on the main roads would
be fired at regularly from the villages, with little response. Two
civilians, the engineer Tzachi Sasson and Dr. Shmuel Gillis, were killed
on the road at that time.
IT’S
DIFFERENT now. But nothing is resolved. This becomes quickly apparent.
As the convoy enters Seir al Shuyukh, there is a sudden illumination of
yellow light all around. Our jeep has been hit by a Molotov cocktail.
The response is matter of fact. We keep moving, as quickly as possible
given the circumstances, to the house where the reason for the mission
is located.
The
suspect’s home is located next to a school. The young man that the
battalion is looking for is not connected to any organization. There is
intelligence that he has begun to prepare a private stock of Molotov
cocktails. Another part of the force has approached the house from the
opposite direction. It is quickly surrounded.
The
arrest itself takes place with no particular drama. The target, a young
man, offers no resistance. He is swiftly led away by two members of the
force, his hands restrained by zip cuffs. We continue to El Aroub,
where the next arrests are taking place.
Ohayon
and his driver are both natives of Kiryat Arba, a short drive south of
the Gush Etzion bloc. The IDF spokesperson’s representative in the jeep
with us is from a national-religious family in Jerusalem. This
representation reflects many of the interactions I have had with the IDF
over the last months of conflict – in Gaza and the northern border as
well as in the West Bank.
There
is a very noticeable and very considerable over-representation of
people from Israel’s National-Religious community in the frontline units
of the IDF of 2024. This was mildly apparent even 24 years ago. It is
now very pronounced. It may also be seen through perusal of the casualty
figures.
Ohayon,
however, is dismissive of any suggestion of local affiliations. “I’ve
known this stuff all my life but it’s not what motivates me. There are
people here from Tel Aviv too. And there’s a mission, and we need to
carry it out. The mission is the defense of our home. And our home is
the State of Israel. That’s what motivates me.”
The
910 Battalion has suffered no fatalities since it arrived in the area
four months ago. One soldier was killed in a road accident. Two others
have been wounded. This record belies the level of activity undertaken
by the battalion and is a source of some pride.
“October
7 found us ready, because we’d already carried out active service that
year,” Nomi, a major, and the operations officer for the 910 Battalion,
tells me back at the battalion’s headquarters. Nomi, an immigrant from
France, is a rare example of a female operations officer in one of the
IDF’s combat battalions.
On October 7, when the 910 Battalion was mobilized, she was in Brittany with her family for the holidays.
“I
woke up and saw the messages. And, you remember, the number of dead was
rising throughout the day. So I knew I had to get back.”
She
has been doing reserve duty with the 910 Battalion for six years. They
had already been mobilized. “But only El Al was flying. So I managed to
get to Paris, and I got a Paris-Marseilles flight, and then a flight to
Israel. I got here after two days.” She has been in Gush Etzion since
then.
“We know
that there is weaponry in the villages. And many of the villages are
aligned with Hamas. There was an attempt to run over one of our soldiers
in El Aroub. The terrorist was killed immediately. And there’s firing
sometimes on the Jewish communities. But from a distance, and not
accurately.”
“In
Adura, there was an attempted attack, just a week ago. The terrorists
had M16s and axes. And just two days ago, in Halhoul, we arrested people
from the Islamic Jihad,” Alon, a deputy company commander, another
graduate of the Kfir Brigade, tells me, after the arrests are done and
the night’s business mainly concluded. Alon, a medical student in
Beersheba, has been in Gush Etzion since October 8, like the others.
THIS
IS a snapshot of a simmering potential third front, on which the lid is
currently being kept, with much ongoing effort. The underlying logic of
the situation is identical to that of the other arenas, though the
balance of the sides is very different.
Noted
writer Yossi Klein Halevi, at a recent event in Jerusalem, said that
Israeli society’s response to October 7 and what has followed indicated
that Israelis retain an “intuition of peoplehood.” It is a memorable
phrase. I think he was referring to the instant, instinctive solidarity
and mobilization that was witnessed in the first days, replacing the
fractious divisions of the preceding months.
This
intuition, it seems to me, may be witnessed in its steadiest and purest
form in the frontline units of the army, both regular and reserve.
This
is a consolation for the fact that a quarter of a century on from my
own generation’s turn, some of the best young people of Israel are still
out there in the night, dealing with the machinery of conflict, a
30-minutes drive from downtown Jerusalem.
In the cognitive warfare concept, NATO has embraced and refashioned the leftist ideology of the woke DIE cult, both based upon the communist lie of knowing one’s thoughts better than the individual.
When pondering the ranks of institutions
captured by leftist elitists, one of the most ominous is the American
military. The left is brazenly proselytizing, neutering, and
politicizing the American military with its DEI ideology—an inherently
partisan, divisive assault designed to hollow out its historical
warfighting spirit and value system. That the left would expand its
political proselytizing into affiliated militaries within our alliances
is to be expected. That these politically subversive assaults on our and
our allied military must be opposed is imperative.
To wit: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
A transatlantic military alliance in search of a
reason for perpetuating its existence, NATO was a prime target for
left-wing capture and weaponization; consequently, embracing the left’s
paranoid narratives, NATO seeks a new mission that placates the elites
by asserting that, in stopping nebulously defined authoritarians, the
first line of defense is censoring and controlling member states’ free
citizens.
Thrice annually, NATO’s Joint Warfare Centre’s (JWC) Public Affairs Office publishes a magazine for its 31 members, “The Three Swords.” In Issue 39 of October 2023,
Commander Cornelis van der Klaauw [hereinafter, “the Commander”], a
Royal Netherlands Navy Subject Matter Expert in the Strategic
Communications and Information Operations NATO Joint Warfare Centre,
wrote, “To raise awareness of a new NATO concept that is in its infancy,
but that will have a significant impact on individuals, groups,
societies, and the way future wars are fought: cognitive warfare.”
In 2021, NATO initiated this “new concept’s”
implementation, and the final concept is on the verge of being approved
by NATO’s Military Committee. Evidently, that means it is time for the
alliance to inform the free world that 2024 will usher in 1984.
Cognitive warfare is a fact of the modern age and
everyone, whether civilian or military, is a potential target. Cognitive
attacks are aimed at exploiting emotions rooted in our subconscious,
bypassing our rational conscious mind. This is achieved by exploiting
biases, fallacies, emotions and automatisms, but also through
nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology [NBIC].
Yeah, once that first shovelful of authoritarian
disinformation is heaped upon our unwitting brains, we populist-peasants
could become domestic threats, performing the enemy’s work for them gratis. Enter NATO, who knows what you are thinking even if you do not. As the Commander enlightens us:
In cognitive warfare, the ultimate aim is to alter
our perception of reality and deceive our brain in order to affect our
decision-making. We are commonly unaware of such attacks before it is too late and they have already affected their targets.
Therefore, we must protect ourselves by raising awareness and
developing a system of indicators and warnings that can provide
real-time information. [Italics mine.]
This will sound familiar to those devotees of the
Maoist DIE cult’s unconscious bias canard within the larger
disinformation op of “systemic racism” (which can never end, lest all
those credentialed H.R. apparatchiks lose their sinecures). Per the
Commander, “cognitive warfare” is so pervasive, incessant, and unending
that you do not consciously recognize it and will always need NATO to
sniff and stamp it out.
While cognitive effects are not measurable in the typical sense, they do affect how we think, what we feel and how we act… They are taking place already now, and these attacks will continue to become more sophisticated.
Several countries are developing NBIC capabilities and collecting data
for use in targeting the cognitive dimension. These activities are
supported by aspects such as datamining and data analytics, and are
further combined with artificial intelligence. [All italics mine.]
Apparently, these cognitive attacks are so
sophisticated that the author cannot cite a specific instance, though he
does offer what might (someday) be considered such an attack—the
“Havana Syndrome.” One can only suppose “cognitive warfare” is like
pornography: one knows it when one sees it. But NATO has a handy list of
those who are most susceptible to whatever cognitive warfare may or may
not be employed against the free world’s citizenry:
The most vulnerable are individuals who feel a lack
of belonging, feel marginalized, think they lack the ability to express
their grievances or believe they are deprived of their rights. Usually
this is combined with a lack of trust in governance and social
structures. These perceptions can stem from ethical, racial, religious,
economic or even historical reasons. Vulnerabilities are also the key
when it comes to understanding how we can protect ourselves against a
cognitive attack.
Yes, all pigs are equal, but some populist-pigs are
more vulnerable than others. If you think this is a recipe for political
repression, you are correct. Consider the handy list of potential
domestic terrorists and traitors the Commander provides:
In Western societies, there are four fundamental vulnerabilities to consider:
• Government structure: The Western liberal
democratic structure is vulnerable to cognitive attacks and at the same
time limits the opportunity to detect and defend against these attacks.
Translation: Freedom is dangerous to the free world.
• The media and information landscape: Limited means
or lack of willingness to share information openly, especially in
combination with low literacy or underdeveloped critical thinking
skills, opens up a critical vulnerability that can be exploited by
adversaries.
Translation: The free world needs smart people to
determine what information is safe for we numbskulls to consume. One
cannot say “consider,” because our critical thinking skills are too
underdeveloped to be trusted to do that.
• Social structures: Fragmented social structures and
particularly echo chambers are vulnerable to false and misleading
narratives. The lack of communication between people that only exchange
information within their own communities is an easily exploited
vulnerability.
If you think the Commander’s talking about the
corporate media, progressive blogs, or MSNBC rather than conservative
blogs and Fox News, see item four (below).
• Increasing level of populism: People who feel
that they are not being heard or properly represented in institutions
and that the “elite” is disregarding their concerns see populism as the
solution to their problems, making them especially vulnerable to
cognitive manipulation.
And there it is. As the Sex Pistols
long ago identified: “the problem is you.” Note, too, the use of
“feel”—not “think.” Seems we populist-peasants have this irrational,
erroneous impression that the elites are getting richer and more
powerful at our expense. Crazy, right?
In sum, the Commander argues that in cognitive
warfare, everyone is a potential target, with populists being the most
susceptible. Further, the reason cognitive attacks work is that they
“achieve a specific aim without the target becoming aware of an attack.
Generally, the damage is already done before the target realizes that it
has been targeted.” Worse still, he declares, “In the future, there
will only be one rule in warfare: There are no rules.”
So, how does NATO intend to protect our domestic
one-percenters from we populist-peasants after we have been
subconsciously riled up by authoritarians? By fighting for peace through
censorship to attain “cognitive resilience” and “superiority.”
It bears repeating that, while he cannot cite a
specific instance of the allegedly ongoing cognitive warfare, the
Commander enumerates the technologies that can facilitate the devolving
of free people into our authoritarian enemies’ pawns: social media
platforms, smart devices, digital networks, gaming platforms (and their
subcultures), virtual reality environments, digital spaces serving as
echo chambers, and the Metaverse.
NATO plans on using “science” in the service of monitoring and censoring these technologies:
Knowing one’s vulnerabilities is important, but knowing when a cognitive attack is taking place is just as vital… For example, it is essential to maintain awareness about the information we unknowingly share that can be used against us.
At the same time, technological solutions can help to identify
cognitive attacks through algorithms and artificial intelligence, but
also with real-time pattern and signature recognition. General awareness
and technological solutions may alert us to cognitive attacks in good
time and help us in determining the best way to respond. This brings us
to the subject of creating cognitive resilience. [Italics mine.]
And that “best way to respond” to create “cognitive resilience” would be what, Commander?
Within the Cognitive Warfare Concept, cognitive
resilience is defined as “the capacity to withstand and recover quickly
from an adversarial cognitive attack through the effective preparation of groups and individuals.”
…We must look at the current ways in which cognitive activities are
conducted, and by which means. In order to keep the initiative, we need
to anticipate possible future developments. Currently such future
developments include ways to read thoughts and emotions, which can
enable measurements of the effect of cognitive activities. Based on the result, models can be developed to improve decision-making, but also to identify weaknesses to exploit. [Italics mine.]
If you find this ominous, you are not a member of
NATO’s bureaucracy. In fairness, the Commander does envision a day when
peace through censorship will no longer be necessary. Why? Because one
day science will disarm we populist-peasants before the authoritarian
enemy can tailor our minds to suit its nefarious purposes:
THERE ARE OTHER RAPID developments in the fields of
[NBIC]… One of the most promising projects is the development of
embedded synthetic DNA or sDNA. This can be a useful alternative to
silicon semiconductors. Currently it is possible to store 2.14 × 106
bytes of data on sDNA. This organic material could enable human-machine interfaces and is often seen as the 47th human chromosome.
…Furthermore, neural nanotechnology can be used to bring nano-sized robots close to a neuron via the bloodstream and make
it possible to link the human brain directly (i.e. not intercepted by
our senses) to a computer, making use of artificial intelligence in the
process. But we must keep in mind that this is a two-way street:
such an artificial intelligence will, in turn, be linked to a human
brain. [Italics mine.]
“Hook me up, Commander! I’m ready to defend the brave new world!”
Speaking of “resilience,” in an act of legal
positivism that would make the Warren Court blush, “resilience” provides
the murky rationale upon which NATO justifies its new creepy mission to
police free people and infringe on their liberties:
…Article 3 of the Washington Treaty, NATO’s founding document. It establishes the principle of resilience:
“In order more effectively to achieve the objectives
of this Treaty, the Parties, separately and jointly, by means of
continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, will maintain and
develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed
attack.”
While we are still waiting for an instance of an armed attack, the Commander is not:
Article 3 includes supporting the continuity of
government and the provision of essential services, among them resilient
civil communications systems. This means that cognitive resilience, as
an aspect of promoting and enhancing civil preparedness, requires that
NATO plays a key role – but only in support of its member nations’ own
efforts and not as a standalone actor. NATO nations differ in their
cultural, social, technological and governmental structures and with
that, their susceptibility to cognitive attacks. A tailored approach is needed to provide the right support to the nations. [Italics mine.]
Once more, the Commander insinuates that the freer
the people, the more susceptible they are to being authoritarian dupes.
Still, at least the Commander allows that NATO can only infringe on your
rights if your local authoritarians invite them to do so. And they
would never, ever do that. COVID lockdowns, schmockdowns…
When pondering the paranoiac prophecies and
prescriptions of NATO’s Nostradamus, one could imagine the Commander
being institutionalized. Instead, he will be lionized by his
brass-spackled bureaucratic peers and the soulless sybarites schlepping
the well-groomed grounds at the latest World Economic Forum.
In the cognitive warfare concept, NATO has embraced
and refashioned the leftist ideology of the woke DIE cult, both based
upon the communist lie of knowing one’s thoughts better than the
individual. Ironically, everything the Commander claims about cognitive
warfare can be fairly applied to the woke DIE Cult and its mandatory
proselytization within every aspect of American (and many NATO members’)
life. (As an aside, one cannot help but note how NATO’s cognitive
warfare concept will be approved in 2024, i.e., during the U.S.
presidential election.) But I digress…
Thus, NATO will seek to control the God-given rights
of the free world’s member nations’ citizens (individually and/or
collectively). Collective security devolves into collective suppression;
“peace through strength” into “peace through censorship;” and NATO’s
mission into that of the old Warsaw Pact—the subjugation of free people.
I, too, have a concept, though I admit it requires
multi-tasking and I cannot claim it is new. How about NATO not placate
the elites by censoring and suppressing free people, populist or
otherwise? Instead, how about NATO actually protects America and our
Free World allies’ citizens’ God-given rights and defeats the Axis of Authoritarianism confronting us in this new Cold War?
But what do I know? I’m a Republican populist-peasant
who opposes censorship, communists, authoritarians, tyrants, and all
enemies of our Constitution, foreign and domestic. Hey, wait a minute…
Maybe the Chi-coms made me say all that?!
An American Greatness contributor,
the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) represented Michigan’s 11th
Congressional district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the
Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent
public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday
co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media
appearances.
