The U.S. Sent Over $3 Billion to Hezbollah’s ‘Army’

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

In 2006, after a Hezbollah invasion, Israel launched a military campaign against the Islamic terrorist group. After a month of fighting, the Bush administration forced a ceasefire under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that required the disarmament of Hezbollah and its replacement by the Lebanese Army and a United Nations ‘peacekeeping’ force.

How can Hezbollah claim victory, President George W. Bush wondered, when they were “going to be replaced by a Lebanese Army and an international force?”

The answer was quite obvious. The Lebanese Army and UNIFIL didn’t replace Hezbollah, they were co-opted by it. And nearly two decades later, Hezbollah had far more firepower and attempted to launch its own version of Oct 7 until Israel neutered it with its pager operation.

And then the Biden administration negotiated another ‘ceasefire’ under which Hezbollah is supposed to be replaced by the Lebanese Army and a UN peacekeeping force. Just like Hezbollah, the LAF and UNIFIL were supposed to have done 18 years ago. But didn’t.

To disarm Hezbollah, the Lebanese Army would need permission from a cabinet that includes Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is not likely to authorize a government it controls to disarm it.

Hezbollah spokesman Mohammad Afif responded by bragging that no one would be “able to sever the connection between the army” and the terror group which is “strong and solid and will remain so.” Sizable portions of the Lebanese Armed Forces are loyal to Hezbollah including officers trained by Hezbollah or in Syria so that by funding LAF, we’re funding Hezbollah.

And the United States not only made the mistake of falling for the same failed policy again, but since 2006, Americans have provided over $3 billion to the Lebanese Armed Forces.

That money was not used to disarm or replace Hezbollah. It was not used to bring peace to the region. Even the LAF and Hezbollah campaign against ISIS in 2017 ended with a ceasefire agreement between the Sunni and Shiite Islamic terror groups while the LAF looked away.

And the United States had to fight the ISIS terrorists because the LAF and Hezbollah wouldn’t.

During the same period in which the U.S. poured over $3 billion into the LAF, Hezbollah’s arsenal rose from 15,000 rockets to over 150,000. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that Hezbollah had “dramatically improved its military since 2006” and while much of that assistance had come from Iran, it is all too likely that American military training and weapons provided to the LAF also ended up directly or indirectly benefiting Hezbollah.

Israel’s 2024 conflict with Hezbollah conclusively demonstrated that UN Resolution 1701, the LAF and UNIFIL not only did not disarm the Islamic terror group, but covered up for it. Despite that, the Biden administration turned around and forced a nearly identical agreement on Israel.

What had not worked for the last 18 years was somehow going to work this time around.

After over $3 billion which did nothing but prop up Hezbollah’s front army, the Biden administration pulled money from military aid to Israel and diverted it to the LAF, reprogramming $95 million in security assistance from Egypt and $7.5 million in security aid to Israel to the LAF.

Last year, Rep. Greg Steube introduced the PAGER Act (Preventing Armed Groups from Engaging in Radicalism) to stop “sending U.S. taxpayer dollars to Lebanon when they are complicit in empowering a terrorist organization whose primary mission is to destroy America and Israel.”

“For two years I filed an amendment to the annual State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations bill to eliminate funding to the Lebanese Armed Forces, as the money goes to Hezbollah. Republicans and Democrats continue to vote it down,” Rep. Steube complained.

The State Department has spent nearly two decades selling the myth that empowering the LAF will weaken Hezbollah, but after $3 billion in spending, Hezbollah is more powerful than ever, while American taxpayers are stuck with financing its auxiliary force in the hopes of defeating it.

Hezbollah won’t disarm, nor will the LAF disarm it or prevent it from attacking Israel, because Lebanon’s entire balance of power depends on aiming Hezbollah’s weapons at Israel.

Under the 1989 Taif agreement, all of Lebanon’s militias were supposed to disarm and cede power to the LAF. That’s the basis for UN Resolution 1701 and the latest ceasefire deal. Hezbollah’s basis for an exemption from the Taif agreement is its campaign against Israel. By waging war against Israel, Hezbollah secures its legal right to run a separate army.

If Hezbollah really stopped attacking Israel or if the Lebanese government secured the border, Hezbollah would lose its legal basis for having an army. Then either the Lebanese government would have to disarm Hezbollah or admit that the Taif agreement was a charade that turned over Lebanon to Hezbollah, and to its backers in Tehran. And Hezbollah would have to admit that the real purpose of its military is to dominate Lebanon’s Christians for the Shiites.

Everyone in Lebanon knows all of these things are true, but no one can say them out loud.

Allowing Hezbollah to control the border and attack Israel is the price for keeping the Hezbollah puppet regime in power in Beirut. It allows the various players in the government, including Hezbollah and its Christian Dhimmi puppets, to pretend that Hezbollah doesn’t rule Lebanon.

Actually disarming Hezbollah would lead to another civil war. One that without Israeli military intervention, the terrorist group would win, and that would officially turn Lebanon into another Iran, Syria or Iraq: a nation ruled by Shiite clerics and their terrorist militias. Eventually that day will come, but maintaining the illusion that Hezbollah is an anti-Israel “resistance” movement allows the other factions to delay the moment of truth for a few more years.

Regular wars with Israel are part of the price that they pay for this arrangement.

The $3 billion dollars that America squandered on the LAF, like the even larger sums wasted on arming and training the Iraqi military, didn’t counter Shiite Islamic rule, it enabled it.

Rep. Steube’s PAGER Act would cut off further funds to the LAF until the “Lebanese Armed Forces ceases coordination and support with Hezbollah” and the “Lebanese Armed Forces cease coordination and support with Iran”.

If the LAF is really a counterweight to Hezbollah, then why oppose the bill?

The only reason for opposing the PAGER Act is because the politicians know quite well that the LAF coordinates with Hezbollah, and are content to keep sending money based on the promise that if we arm the Lebanese military enough, it will one day be ready to take on Hezbollah.

That day has not come for 18 years. It will not come. Ever.

The LAF is perpetually short of money, renting out its helicopters for sightseeing tours and delaying payments to soldiers, forcing us to step in and write more checks, because it’s a corrupt organization of toy soldiers who do almost no actual fighting, and are there to shield the terrorists. Lebanon’s government is a Hezbollah puppet regime. The LAF is a puppet army.

It’s time to take away the shield, the excuses and stop sending more money to terrorists. Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. 

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Did Obama Send Missiles to Hezbollah?

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Islamic terrorist group in control of Lebanon, used to boast that it was unbeatable because of its arsenal of over 100,000 missiles and rockets.

That arsenal, which was severely depleted by Israel before the Biden imposed ceasefire, relied heavily on a large collection of anti-tank missiles that could also be used against civilian targets, shelters and even, in the case of a Hamas attack in 2011 with a Russian Kornet, a school bus.

The TOW missile, originally developed in the 1960s, is a mainstay of the terrorist arsenal.

Hezbollah’s TOW missiles come from a variety of sources. The United States sold TOWs to the old Iranian government and after the Islamic takeover, the new regime cranked out copies called ‘Toophans’ which its Islamic terrorist networks have distributed to Jihadists around the region.

The Obama administration had also handed out TOW missiles like candy to Sunni Jihadists across the border during the Syrian civil war. Some of these were captured by Shiite Jihadists, including Hezbollah, fighting for the Assad regime and then transported to Lebanon.

Russia has been passing along to Iran the captured weapons that the United States had sent to Ukraine. Iran will attempt to reverse engineer our more advanced weaponry, but any TOW missiles will be directed to Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas and other allied terror groups.

But there is still yet another troubling question about the source of some of Hezbollah’s TOWs.

In 2015, the Obama administration announced its intention of selling 1,000 TOW 2A anti-armor missiles and 500 bunker buster TOW BGM-71s along with “launchers, containers, spare and repair parts, support equipment, publications and technical documentation, personnel training and training equipment” to Lebanon’s military. But whom was Lebanon’s military going to fight?

The only tanks the Lebanese Armed Forces were likely to meet in battle were Israeli ones.

The State Department claimed that sending anti-tank rockets to Lebanon, “will enhance the foreign policy and national security of the United States”, without actually clarifying how sending missiles into a terrorist state and training the locals to use them would enhance American national security. It also argued that the anti-tank missiles would allow Lebanon to “meet current and future threats and provide greater security for its critical infrastructure” without clarifying who besides Israel might be considered as posing a threat to Lebanon’s infrastructure.

The Lebanese Armed Forces are a threadbare operation which made headlines for selling helicopter tours to tourists. Its military has been hardly active and exists as a jobs program, a way to soak up U.S. foreign aid and is functionally little more than a puppet of Hezbollah. The same military that could only afford $90 monthly salaries for its soldiers and was using choppers for tourism tours somehow needed $245 million worth of missiles from the United States.

Much of the LAF’s officer class came out of Hezbollah and top military leaders have been caught coordinating with Hezbollah. Training and arming the LAF is training and arming Hezbollah. And ultimately aiding Iran’s ability to use its proxies to start another war.

After the first delivery of anti-tank missiles, Obama officials claimed that they were needed to help fight Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria. The Obama administration also sent Bradley fighting vehicles, hellfire missiles, howitzers, laser-guided artillery shells, grenade launchers, 1,100 machine guns, including 800 50-caliber machine guns, 4,000 M4 rifles, half a million rounds of ammunition, and other equipment under the guise of helping the LAF fight ISIS.

The LAF however avoided fighting ISIS for years, apart from a few brief clashes, and then stood aside while Hezbollah engaged in a more prolonged engagement that ended in a ceasefire between the two terrorist groups while the LAF fiddled with the equipment we had given them.

The Obama administration had sent a fortune in weaponry to the LAF for a fake war in which Hezbollah and ISIS cut their own deal, while Hezbollah’s puppet army pocketed our weapons. And all of this armament was only a small part of the more than $3 billion in military aid provided by the United States since 2006 to Lebanon’s military which runs tours rather than fight.

But the real question is how much of that armament eventually made its way over to Hezbollah?

When Hezbollah barraged Israeli frontline communities with rockets and missiles in the months after Oct 7, did any of them come from the rockets that Obama sent to Lebanon?

During the 2006 war with Hezbollah, Israeli forces had captured Hezbollah supplies of TOW missiles carrying U.S. markings that had likely been sold to U.S. Muslim ‘allies’ in the region, but by providing TOW missiles directly to Lebanon’s armed forces, Obama may have cut out the middleman and enabled Hezbollah to benefit directly from U.S. weapons and training.

Obama had sent pallets of cash to Iran and provided an even bigger fortune in sanctions relief, but the transfer of anti-tank and bunker busting missiles to a military organization manned by Hezbollah operatives provided the most direct link yet between the administration’s support for Iran’s axis of terror and the carnage that it wrought in Israel.

Hezbollah attacks on Israel caused the deaths of civilians. And the Obama administration knew what would happen because as far back as the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon under the Clinton administration in 1999-2000, the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center described how “using American-made, tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided missiles (TOWs)”, Hezbollah continued its campaign of attacks on Christian Lebanese and Israeli forces.

American weapons were being used by Islamic terrorists to kill Christians in Lebanon.

The Obama administration was staffed by many veterans of the Clinton administration, including Secretary of State Blinken, who surely knew what would happen and did it anyway, and then went on to promote the same policies, providing yet more weapons to Lebanon during the Biden administration. And yet, as documented in a previous Front Page Magazine article, “The U.S. Sent Over $3 Billion to Hezbollah’s ‘Army”, even at the very end of its time in office, reprogrammed millions in military aid for Israel to the Lebanese Armed Forces.

Rep. Greg Steube introduced the PAGER Act (Preventing Armed Groups from Engaging in Radicalism) to stop “sending U.S. taxpayer dollars to Lebanon.”

“For two years I filed an amendment to the annual State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations bill to eliminate funding to the Lebanese Armed Forces, as the money goes to Hezbollah. Republicans and Democrats continue to vote it down.”

American taxpayer money should not be used to arm Islamic terrorists. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.Thank you for reading.

 

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Hezbollah Killed by Airstrikes; Well, They Didn’t Answer Their Pagers

Israel won’t endure missile or drone attacks and wants citizens back in their homes. 

By Dave Patterson | Sep 22, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

 

(Photo by Mamoun Wazwaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)

In a week of military setbacks, devastating intelligence breaches, and communications disruptions, Hezbollah is back on its heels. Exploding pagers, detonating walkie-talkies, and now precision air strikes on key Hezbollah leadership and subordinate staff are designed to keep the terrorist organization off balance and unable to regroup. The Israel Defense Force (IDF) is bent on reducing the threat to its citizens in the North so they can return to their homes.

Israel Keeps the Pressure on Hezbollah

If Iran’s lackey, Hezbollah, thought the deadly surprise pager messages were a one-and-done operation on Israel’s part to make a point, they were fatally mistaken. The next day, according to the Associated Press:

“Walkie-talkies exploded in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon on Wednesday [Sep. 18] in a second wave of attacks targeting devices a day after pagers used by Hezbollah blew up, state media and officials for the militant group said. At least 20 people were killed and more than 450 wounded in the second wave, the Health Ministry said. Speaking to Israeli troops … Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, ‘We are at the start of a new phase in the war — it requires courage, determination and perseverance.’”

Having experienced an effective and devastating uniquely personal attack on Hezbollah terrorists using electronic devices, a savvy person might surmise that Hezbollah terrorists would be a little suspicious of any hand-held communication equipment now. Look inside, maybe. Not so, apparently. More importantly, what it does demonstrate is that the Mossad and Israel Defense Force (IDF) know the enemy. Additionally, pager and walkie-talkie weapons reveal the military vulnerabilities and intelligence gaps present with the Iran-sponsored Hezbollah terrorist leadership and foot soldiers.

Individually targeted attacks should not be considered isolated military events. When viewed more broadly, what is taking place with Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon is a structured and coordinated campaign. Along with the pager and walkie-talkie attacks on a broad range of Hezbollah members, the IDF has been taking out key leaders. Within the last two months, the IDF has eliminated Fuad Shukr, senior advisor to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Ibrahim Aqil, a member of the Jihad Council, the premier Hezbollah military organization, and Ahmed Wahbi, the leader and trainer of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force.

Aqil and Wahbi were killed in a single airstrike on September 20 by the IDF. In a post on X, IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari explained: “They gathered underground, under a residential building, in the heart of the Dahiyeh, while using civilians as human shield[s]. They met to coordinate terror activities against Israeli civilians.” The posting goes on to say that “At least 10 Hezbollah commanders were killed in the airstrike in Beirut, alongside Aqil.”

Aqil has been one of the most wanted terrorists for more than three decades. “Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah leader behind a trio of bombing attacks that killed more than 250 Americans in the 1980s … Aqil – most recently a member of Hezbollah’s highest military body, the Jihad Council – ‘was eliminated in a targeted intelligence-based strike in Beirut,’ the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement,” the New York Post explained.

 

What the IDF is doing is methodically sowing confusion among the Iran-backed Hezbollah membership by creating distrust in what was thought to be reliable electronic equipment, disrupting the organization’s communications, rendering command and control ineffective, and selectively killing the Hezbollah leaders, effectively severing the head of the serpent. When fighting a war, and one would argue Israel is fighting a war, what the IDF is doing is an effective tactic for seriously degrading the enemy’s ability to endanger Israeli residents. A primary objective of the Israeli government is to create a safe opportunity for the over 62,000 Israeli refugees from the towns and villages along and close to the Israel-Lebanon border to return to their homes.

This can’t happen while Hezbollah is capable and willing to continue its rocket assault on northern Israel. Since October 7, when Iran-supplied Hamas terrorists went on a murderous rampage through southern Israel, more than 8,000 rockets and missiles have been launched at Israel by Hezbollah. The IDF is doing what it can to make it stop. What is America’s reaction to Israeli successes in Lebanon? National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters about his confidence in negotiations, saying, “Our intensive diplomacy efforts continue … We believe, continue to believe that a diplomatic solution is the best way forward, [as opposed to] escalating any of the military conflict.”

Bored? Check This Out!

All the talking heads in the Biden-Harris administration were very quick to explain the US had no part in the pager and walkie-talkie attacks. This is a common refrain whenever Israel takes the initiative against its enemies. The Pentagon and State Department want to distance themselves from what Israel does in defending itself. It’s as if being associated with success is a bad thing.

US Reaction to Operations Against Hezbollah Not Supportive

Pentagon press releases from September 19 and 20 contained readouts of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s phone conversations with Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant each day – the first following the pager attack and the second after the walkie-talkie assault. On the 19th, Austin “expressed his concern over the current escalation of exchanges between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah. He emphasized the importance of making every possible effort to reach a diplomatic resolution”; and on the 20th, Austin “reiterated his concern over the current escalation of exchanges between Israel and Lebanese Hizballah … [and] strongly reemphasized the importance of reaching a diplomatic solution.” Do you see the similarity in the readouts?

The US’s understanding of the conflict is a broken record of repetitious and useless rhetoric. Israel is in a fight for its very existence. The Biden-Harris administration has consistently believed chatting with terrorists will solve the problem. But when has that been true?

The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliate.

~

Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

 

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Cartoon of the Day

 

Once upon a time, terrorists were masters of turning the West's technology against it. Israel has come from behind and turned its tech against the terrorists.

 

Israel is Settling America’s Scores With Islamic Terrorists

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

The exploding pagers that reportedly wounded thousands of Hezbollah terrorists came within 3 days of the 40th anniversary of the Islamic terrorist group’s attack on an American embassy.

On September 20, 1984, a Hezbollah terrorist drove a Chevy station wagon fitted with diplomatic plates and Soviet rockets at the US embassy in Beirut and detonated it, wounding the US ambassador and killing two Americans, Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth V. Welch and Petty Officer First Class Michael Ray Wagner, while wounding five other Americans.

The Biden-Harris administration marked the 40th anniversary of the Hezbollah attack by dispatching Amos Hochstein, its envoy, to pressure Israel into turning over land to Hezbollah in exchange for some temporary quiet. A previous Hochstein deal saw Israel turn over gas fields to Hezbollah only to see the terror group launch thousands of rockets at northern communities in Israel. 60,000 Israelis have been displaced by these attacks and cannot return home.

But the Biden-Harris administration decided that the best way to honor the hundreds of Americans killed by Hezbollah, including the 220 Marines in the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983, the brutal torture of Colonel William R. Higgins, who had his tongue pulled out and was castrated before being dumped in front of a mosque, and Navy diver Robert Stethem who was beaten to death on TWA Flight 847, was by demanding that Israel surrender to the terrorists.

But the Israelis have been settling not only their scores, but our scores for us.

In 2008, an Israeli car bomb took out Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s chief of staff, who had been among the monsters jumping up and landing on Stethem’s body.

“They were jumping in the air and landing full force on his body. He must have had all his ribs broken,” a stewardess on the hijacked plane described. “I was sitting only 15 feet away. I couldn’t listen to it. I put my fingers in my ears. I will never forget. I could still hear. They put the mike up to his face so his screams could be heard by the outside world.”

Mughniyah had been attending an Iranian reception celebrating the Islamic takeover of the formerly free nation, only to find that his car’s tire had been loaded with explosives. The reported joint Mossad-CIA operation was also the last hurrah before the Obama takeover and the beginning of a new D.C. policy of appeasing Iran while undermining the Jewish State.

Fuad Shukr, Mughniyah’s close ally and a top Hezbollah figure, had been responsible for the Marine Barracks bombing that killed 241 U.S. military personnel and wounded 128 others, as well as the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 where Stethem was brutally murdered by the terrorists.

Iran marked the 40th anniversary of the Marine Barracks bombing in October with over 170 attacks on American military personnel across the region. The Biden-Harris administration tried to talk tough, launched a few airstrikes and then backed down. Israel however did not.

After a Hezbollah attack on an Israeli soccer field killed 12 kids, Shukr, who still had a $5 million reward on his head from the State Department for the Marine Barracks bombing, was taken out by an Israeli airstrike.

The Israelis had infiltrated Hezbollah’s communications system and placed a call asking him to go up to the 7th floor of the building where he had been hiding out to escape detection.

He did and never left again.

After Shukr’s death, Hezbollah accelerated its shift away from high-tech communications and toward pagers. Cellphones were banned in favor of pagers. The terror group began performing spot checks to see if its terrorists were carrying phones. “Today, if anyone is found with their phone on the front, he is kicked out of Hezbollah,” a Reuters story claimed.

“Abandon your phone, disable it, bury it, lock it in a metal box, for a week, two weeks, a month,” Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah had warned his terrorists. “Allah knows how long this situation will last.”

Replacing large numbers of phones with pagers however created its own security risk.

The wave of pager explosions that swept through Beirut near the 40th anniversary of Hezbollah’s attack on our embassy should have come from us, but it likely came from Israel.

The Israelis had targeted Hezbollah’s communications system to cripple the terror group’s operations, first infiltrating the hardwired fiber optic landlines set up for it by Iran, then its cellphones and now its pagers. Each attack has forced Hezbollah to retreat from high speed communications methods and to move further toward a dependency on human couriers.

The couriers carrying code words for the day are hard to crack but slow down any response. Forcing Hezbollah to use medieval means of communications will make it difficult for the terror group to operate across long ranges, to coordinate with its masters in Iran and with other members of the Islamic terror network including the Houthis in Yemen and the militias in Iraq.

The pager attack represents the single most devastating targeting of an Islamic terror group in history, taking out hundreds of its personnel and crippling its communications. It’s also a long overdue payback for Hezbollah’s attack on the U.S. embassy some forty years ago.

On September 20, 1984, Hezbollah struck in a Christian area of West Beirut where the American embassy had relocated after the Iranian-backed terror group had bombed the previous embassy location, killing 17 Americans, and kidnapped, tortured and killed other Americans.

The embassy was under the protection of the Christian Phalangist militia members who would later be sold out by D.C. diplomats in pursuit of a deal with Islamic terrorists. Together with the American military personnel and the British ambassador’s security, they tried to stop the car bomb before it hit the embassy. Bullets hit the Islamic terrorist driving it, he fell over, the car bomb turned and blew up before it could hit the embassy and kill hundreds of people.

The blast still blew a massive crater and left rubble everywhere. The British ambassador, who was visiting, was buried under debris and had to be dug out. Two Americans were killed.

A torn part of the American flag from the embassy was brought home to Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth Welch‘s mother who was one of the dead. Welch had volunteered for duty in Vietnam where he earned a Bronze Star. He had been friends with some of the American hostages taken in Iran and had tried to recover MIAs while on duty in China. His last medal was a Purple Heart.

Israel is not just fighting its war against Islamic terrorism, it’s fighting our war too.

On the 40th anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attack against the American embassy in Beirut, the pager attacks that devastated Hezbollah settled not only Israel’s score, but ours as well.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading. 

Hezbollah Violence Intensifies on the Israel-Lebanon Border

US foreign policy is failing to keep Israeli clashes with Hezbollah from growing.

 

By Dave Patterson | Jul 2, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Good Reads, Military Affairs, Opinion

While most of the world is focused on Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah is wreaking havoc. Since the horrific October 7 attack by the Hamas terrorists on southern Israel, the continuous barrage of Iran-supplied Hezbollah missiles and mortar rounds has been more of a sideshow to the Gaza conflict. That is changing rapidly, however, and US policy in the region is not keeping up with the ramped-up intensity.

Taking on Hezbollah Is a Priority for Israel

Israel is in a position where it must counter a growing enemy on its northern border supplied by Iran. As Liberty Nation News explained in its report, “Israel Cannot Give Up the Fight”:

“Sometimes, it becomes all too easy to see events in a conflict like that – started on Oct. 7 by Hamas’ murderous attack on Israel – as a series of isolated incidents…Every day, Israeli security forces are engaging Iran-supported Hezbollah terrorists on the southern Lebanese border, persistent skirmishes with Palestinian militias and independent terrorists in the West Bank, and continuing attacks by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as the Jewish state attempts to pause the fighting in Gaza.”

Hezbollah exists as an Iranian proxy. The United States has declared the organization a terrorist group. However, America has not engaged Hezbollah for its terrorist operations as it has ISIS and Al Qaeda. “Shiite Muslim Hezbollah is part of a collection of Iranian-backed factions and governments known as the Axis of Resistance. It was the first group that Iran backed and used as a way to export its brand of political Islamism,” the Associated Press explained.  As a terrorist group, it plays heavily in Lebanese and Syrian government policies. Additionally, Hezbollah is well organized and has a significant inventory of weapons of growing sophistication. “Israel sees it as its most direct threat and estimates that it has an arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles, including precision-guided missiles,” the AP reported.

As Hezbollah becomes increasingly more aggressive, the potential for an all-out war between Israel and the terrorists appears more likely. In March 2024, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) issued an analysis of the tensions building between Israel and Iran-sponsored Hezbollah. The CSIS assessment, titled “The Coming Conflict with Hezbollah,” explained there have been “more than 4,400 violent incidents” between Israel and Hezbollah at the northern Israeli border with Lebanon and Syria. Some news reports claim Hezbollah has launched over 5,000 antitank guided missiles, one-way drones, and rockets at Israel.

In addition to being a proxy for and doing the bidding of Iran, Hezbollah has a clear objective. “Hezbollah sees itself as a revolutionary organization that is one of the leaders of the broader Muslim struggle against Israel. Destroying Israel has been a part of its core ideology since its founding, and most of its members are sincerely against the very existence of the Jewish state,” the CSIS report observed.

Meanwhile, American diplomats seem incapable of reducing the hostilities on Israel’s northern border. “Efforts by the US special envoy Amos Hochstein to fashion an agreement that would include a pullback from the border by Hezbollah have so far fallen short,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Other nations have considered the risk of a wider war between Israel and Hezbollah too high. “The risk of escalation this week prompted foreign governments including Canada, Germany and the Netherlands to reiterate calls for their citizens to leave Lebanon, with some warning that intensified fighting could lead to the closure of commercial travel routes,” the WSJ explained.

Both Sides May Want to Reduce the Conflict, But Not Yet

There is a widely held belief that Israel and Hezbollah do not want a large-scale conflict. Still, the continuous tit-for-tat exchange of artillery, antitank guided missiles, drones, and rockets are driving the leadership on both sides to an expanded battle. Much of the fear of a widening Israel-Hezbollah conflict is being fueled by intelligence assessments from the region. “A large-scale confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah is likely to break out in the next several weeks if Jerusalem and Hamas fail to reach a ceasefire deal in Gaza, US intelligence indicates,” Politico said.

As Israel faces the prospect of a real war on its northern border, continued fighting with jihadist Palestinian terrorist-militias in Jerusalem’s West Bank, and the prolonged fighting in Gaza against the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists, reliance on the US to broker an effective end to the fighting is waning. The most recent US policy to withhold precision-guided 2,000 bombs was not seen in Israel as a confidence-building decision. Though the US has tried to be the peacemaker, little has come from the effort. Many believe a ceasefire in Gaza will prompt a reduction in Hezbollah raids on Israel. As appealing as that might sound, Hezbollah has been attacking Israel for decades. Short of putting significant pressure on Iran, the sponsor of the conflict, little will convince Hezbollah to stop its attacks on Israel.

The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliate.

 

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Let's Try and Get This Right, Just Once. It's Really All About Iran!

 By Rich Kozlovich

I subscribe to Geopolitical Futures,  which is a paid subscription site worth the expense.  In my opinion the best analysis regarding the Middle East comes from GF's Hilal Khasan.  His analysis of what goes on there always lays a foundation of historical events that lead to understanding the events occurring now in real time.   

His recent offering, The Coming War Between Israel and Hezbollah, offers worthwhile insights, but since it's a subscription article, I'll just outline my take on it for you. 

Hamas attacked Israel believing Hezbollah's claims of military readiness, and Iran's support.  Afterward, Iran found a way to walk back their support, and Hezbollah's readiness was bluster.   Hezbollah allegedly possesses over 200,000 missiles.  According to Hilal that's far more than many NATO countries possess, but the fact is, most of them are worthless short range and inaccurate.  The few quality missiles they have they're not using because to use them is to expose them.  To expose them is an invitation to the Israeli air force to destroy them.   My question is:  How does such a group acquire over 200,000 rockets? 

Hezbollah isn't a nation, it's not a recognized legal entity in any way.  Neither is Hamas, so why is everyone acting like they are?  These groups are terrorists, and terrorists are criminals, organized vile, deadly criminals.  Criminals who should be given no quarter and no mercy, including the nation's that shelter them.  But what about the nation that keeps sponsoring them, Iran?  If their military movements are under the direction of Iran, shouldn't Iran be held accountable?   What I find a bit interesting is the Iranians are Persians who look down on Arabs, and Hamas and Hezbollah are Arabs. 

Recently, as in the past, Israel targeted Hezbollah and Hamas leaders right in the heart of a "Hezbollah stronghold" and even in the de facto capital of Hezbollah, Damascus, making their claims of protection look ridiculous.  Hezbollah was outraged and vented their spleen saying they would respond, and they did, costing them the lives of five of their people, and no Israeli casualties.

Hezbollah finds itself being hoisted on it's own petard.  They must support Hamas or they have no justification for it's existence, and if they attack Israel, Israel will crush them and drive them entirely out of South Lebanon.  They were crushed decades ago but Iran keep them alive in order to "project regional power".  Thank you Jimmy Carter!  

Truth be told it's their big hope the US will negotiate some agreement, especially regarding border issues, and a cease fire.  Any agreement for a cease fire will be considered a victory for Hamas and Hezbollah keeping them alive for just a little longer.  And if that occurs Hilal notes:

"Hezbollah will remain a defining figure in domestic Lebanese politics. But the long game is approaching an end."

In my mind I can only wonder just how much longer Iran will be able to get away with all this before someone decides they need a really good smack in the mouth, and work to overthrow that insane government, and who knows, maybe even bring back the Shah's family.   

Wouldn't that be a real kick in the pants for Jimmy Carter. 

Muslim Brotherhood’s dehumanizing of Jews festered and led to slaughter

It is time for the West, including much of anti-Israel media, to start calling out this dehumanization. The slaughter on October 7 was a breakdown of all civilized norms and ethics brought on by decades of inexcusable dehumanization

By Col. Bill Connor ——Bio and Archives--October 18, 2023 @ Canada Free Press

Cover Story | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us

Editor's Note:  I've not asked for nor have I received permission to publish this in full.  However, this is a piece that needs the widest distribution possible.  If the Author or Canada Free Press object, I will break this down to a link.  RK

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Most Americans have now learned the extent of the atrocities committed by Hamas, and many are in shock and disbelief. Civilian women and children murdered in their homes and even burned alive. Reports of decapitation of babies. Women raped and murdered and desecrated or taken hostage with children. A peaceful gathering of young people turned into hundreds slaughtered..................

Many can’t understand how Hamas terrorists could commit such despicable acts and applaud the slaughter of innocents

The atrocities were so bad that those attempting to defend Hamas have taken to denials of horrendous murders committed. That’s despite the murderers’ gleeful videos of the bloodshed posted in real time. Many can’t understand how Hamas terrorists could commit such despicable acts and applaud the slaughter of innocents. From my experience in the region in 1996-97, going between the Arab side and Israel on peacekeeping duties out of the Sinai, the explanation is the same as for Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s and Rwanda in 1994: The deliberate dehumanizing of a group of people to the point that murders are deemed as justifying the killing of cockroaches. With Arab Muslims surrounding Israel, the dehumanizing has gone on for decades, while so many in the West purposely ignored it or tried to diminish the danger.

First, as with the 1920 book “Life unworthy of life”, which became a blueprint for the Nazi dehumanization of Jews, the Hamas Charter of 1987 similarly dehumanized Jews. 

This type rhetoric goes well beyond Hamas, which is the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian created Muslim Brotherhood 

Among the anti-Jewish quotes of the charter, is the following Hadith from Al-Bukhari: “The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”

The charter also includes the Nazi-ish dribble: “With their [Jews’] money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein… With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

This type rhetoric goes well beyond Hamas, which is the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian created Muslim Brotherhood which has spewed anti-Jewish rhetoric since it was founded in the 1920s.

To give an idea about the extent of the Muslim Brotherhood’s dehumanizing of Jews, in 2011 the Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt, Muhammed Morsi, publicly proclaimed that Jews were “sons of Apes and Pigs.”

"They aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything"

When I was in the region, I was shocked by the mainstreamed “Apes and Pigs” comments about Jews. At that time and since, the fraudulent anti-Jewish “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” were bestsellers in the region and believed. In 2009, Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudais, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, told worshipers that Jews were, “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.” The same year Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya’qub claimed on TV: “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not, the Jews are infidels not because I say so but because Allah does… They aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything.”

Sheikh Ahmad Ali Othman of the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Endowments, explained of the Muslim prohibition on eating pork that “the pigs living today are descended from those Jews [whom Allah turned into swine].” Note that when the Hutu majority in Rwanda slaughtered 600,000 Tutsis with machetes in 1994, the ubiquitous call to slaughter was “kill the cockroaches.”

The Jewish dehumanization goes well beyond an extreme fringe

The Jewish dehumanization goes well beyond an extreme fringe. A 2008 Global pew poll found that an astonishing 95-percent of Egyptians, 96-percent Jordanians, and 97-percent of Lebanese had unfavorable views of Jews.

It’s important to note that after Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence, Jews were expelled from throughout the Arab-Muslim world. Unlike the state of Israel, in which almost two-million Israeli citizens are Arab Muslim Palestinians (with seats in the Knesset and on the High Court), the surrounding Arab controlled countries have no Jews. Hamas has no Jews, as Israel expelled the last Jewish settlers in 2005 for peace with the Palestinians. It becomes easier to dehumanize a group of people you don’t live around all the while being fed hateful propaganda.

It is time for the West, including much of anti-Israel media, to start calling out this dehumanization. The slaughter on October 7 was a breakdown of all civilized norms and ethics brought on by decades of inexcusable dehumanization the media would never ignore if even a portion was by right-wing extremists.

Genesis 1:27 proclaims “God created mankind in his own image in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” No “life is unworthy of living”, no person is a “cockroach” and Jews are not “apes and pigs”. After October 7, we can no longer remain silent.

How U.S. Foreign Aid to Iraq Funds Terrorism Against Americans

By Daniel Greenfield July 09, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In 2020 and 2021, the United States spent over $600 million on foreign aid in Iraq. That’s down from a high of over $2 billion in 2018 and $4.4 billion in 2016. But it still means that we have blown through over $10 billion on Iraq since 2016. That’s long since we officially withdrew.

Meanwhile, where was Iraq’s money going? Iraq’s latest budget dedicates $2.8 billion to Shiite PMU terror militias including Kataeb Hezbollah: an Iran-backed terror group that has been responsible for the deaths of numerous American soldiers.

At the height of the Iraq War, Kataeb Hezbollah was using Iranian IEDs to kill American soldiers. Kataeb Hezbollah is listed as a foreign terrorist organization which makes it a crime for Americans to fund it. But that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from providing massive amounts of foreign aid to Iraq.

While some U.S. conflicts with Jihadists in the region are old news, Kataeb Hezbollah fired rockets at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in 2019, and has bombed U.S. bases in recent years. Kataeb Hezbollah killed two American soldiers in 2020: Army Spc. Juan Miguel Mendez Covarrubias and Air Force Staff Sgt. Marshal D. Roberts.

Politicians and the media have mostly ignored the fact that Americans are continuing to be killed in Iraq, that the Iraqi government is funding their killers, and that we’re funding Iraq.

While Iraq funds Iran’s terror militias, the United States funds the UN Development Programme to “stabilize” Iraq and has invested over $100 million into “conflict, peace and security” funding.

The United States has spent over $1 billion financing the nation’s military while Iraq spends billions financing the Iranian PMU terror militias which are expected to approach a quarter of million Jihadis. The rise of ISIS provided the Shiite regime running Iraq with the perfect excuse for discarding the ISF military built by the U.S. and turning over security to Shiite terror groups.

The foreign policy establishment claims that we need to fund the Iraqi military as a counterbalance to Iran’s PMU militias, but that just allowed Iraq’s government to shift even more defense funding to the Shiite terror groups. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani and his government were backed by the PMU’s and are turning them into an even bigger army.

That’s not surprising since al-Sudani is a second generation member of a Shiite Islamist movement loyal to Iran’s Islamic Revolution. The Shiite Coordination Framework, which is behind the Sudani government, is filled with Shiite Islamists groups with their own militias. For example, the Badr alliance, created by Iran, controls both sizable chunks of Iraq’s military and police forces, as well as one of the larger militias, and has a sizable presence in Iraq’s parliament.

Iraqi democracy consists of Shiite blocs, some Islamists, some fronted by former leaders like Maliki, fighting each other for power and competing for Iran’s favor. Iran has helped them set up militias that, in imitation of Iran’s IRGC and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, also control large portions of the economy, running their own businesses, scoring construction contracts and oil deals.

The foreign policy establishment has refused to acknowledge that Iraq has long since become an Islamic terror state under the political control of Iran and that the only reason it isn’t more of a threat is the constant infighting between the Shiite majority which often turns violent. If Iraq’s Shiite Islamists were ever united under a single leader, like Muqtada Al-Sadr, a perennial player, it will become as much of a threat to the region and the world as Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Instead, we keep sinking more money into Iraq in the hope of a better outcome.

Iraq, until recently, was on the list of the top 5 recipients of U.S. foreign aid. And the Baghdad regime continues to come up with new ways to extract money from U.S. taxpayers.

Last month, Prime Minister Al-Sudani claimed that the Islamic terror state was going green and pleaded for foreign aid to save the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which according to media accounts, was blamed on “climate change”. In fact, the Tigris river is a filthy mess because Sadr City’s Islamists pour tons of filth into it. Five million cubic meters of waste are dumped daily into both rivers from sewage to corpses. That isn’t the work of climate change, but of Iraqis.

The United States provided military aid to the Baghdad regime and its military in order to defeat ISIS. But what we were actually doing was intervening in a Shiite-Sunni civil war while disregarding the fact that the side we were backing was just as much our enemy as ISIS.

While military aid has fallen under the Biden administration after the decline of ISIS, much as in Afghanistan, even humanitarian aid easily finds its way into the hands of Islamic terrorists.

Iran’s PMU militias control large swathes of territory, including farmland, own construction companies and demand payoffs from nonprofits who operate in the areas claimed by them. Humanitarian aid, no matter how seemingly benevolent, to people in terrorist areas, funds terror.

It’s a hard lesson that we have failed to learn in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

Like most failed Islamic terror states in the region, Iraq is perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy. In an effort to crack down on money from Iraq going to Iran, the Treasury Department restricted Iraqi banks from sending dollars to unknown parties. Since much of the Iraqi economy consists of moving dollars to Iran, this has become a real problem.

Despite the existence of the Iraqi dinar, much of the country uses the dollar. And the United States provides pallets of dollars to Iraq that then go on to Iran. Earlier this year, an Iraqi banker warned that if the rules weren’t suspended, “Within one year, most banks will declare bankruptcy”. That says more about what Iraqi banks really do than about our rules.

And yet no amount of economic problems keep the regime in Baghdad from spending billions on its terror militias. That’s a choice and it should not be subsidized by American taxpayers.

Especially when it costs American lives. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles.  Thank you for reading.

Biden’s New Muslim Liaison to Fight ‘Institutional Islamophobia’

ByDaniel Greenfield April 16, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

In 2010, the Islamic Society of North America honored one of the unindicted co-conspirators of the World Trade Center bombing.

Also at the ISNA convention were three members of the Obama administration: Rashad Hussain, George Selim and Mazen Basrawi. Hussain went from working as Obama’s envoy to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to serving as Biden’s Ambassador for Religious Freedom, while George Selim joined the ADL as its VP of National Affairs.

And Mazen Basrawi was brought in as the Director of Global Engagement at the National Security Council under Biden and will now also double as the White House Muslim liaison. The appointment reveals that the Biden administration sees Muslims in America as an adjunct of the foreign Muslim governments and Islamist entities whose cooperation it is trying to solicit.

In a little over a decade, Basrawi has gone from attending an Islamist conference that featured some of the worst of the worst to a role at the National Security Council.

At the ISNA conference, Basrawi may have been in attendance when the Muslim Brotherhood founded group honored Imam Siraj Wahhaj. Wahhaj, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the first WTC attack, has declared, “I will never ever tell people, ‘don’t be violent, that is not the Islamic way’: the violence has to be selected” and predicted, “In time, this so-called democracy will crumble, and there will be nothing. And the only thing that will remain will be Islam.”

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who recently faced rape accusations from multiple women, and had supported terrorist attacks on Americans in Iraq, was a keynote speaker. Other speakers included Hamza Yusuf who had defended the Blind Sheikh, the World Trade Center bombing figure, and warned two days before 9/11 that “this country is facing a very terrible fate.” That fate seems to be here.

Basrawi was one of the many Islamic appointees of the Obama administration traveling through the DOJ and then into the NSC. And Islamic groups are celebrating his latest appointment.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) described itself as being “proud” to announce Basrawi’s appointment and was “excited to see what Basrawi brings to this role.” CAIR cheered that it was looking “forward to working with Mr. Basrawi to address issues of concern to the American Muslim community, including institutional Islamophobia in federal law enforcement.”

Considering CAIR’s history of support for Islamic terrorism, that’s likely to get Americans killed.

Basrawi juggling a role at the NSC and as Biden’s Muslim liaison intersects when it comes to Islamic terrorism. In 2003, Basrawi, then a UC Berkeley law student, signed an ad falsely accusing the War on Terror of depriving Muslims of rights. When John Yoo returned from helping fight terrorism at the DOJ to teaching at UC Berkeley, Basrawi campaigned for his removal.

“They are stripping noncitizens of what is left of their existing rights, and engaging in illegal foreign policy,” Basrawi had ranted. “It’s those sorts of things that have affected our communities.”

Basrawi soon joined the Bay Area Association of Muslim Lawyers which was set up two weeks after 9/11 to fight investigations of Islamic terrorism. BAAML worked with CAIR and agitated to censor law enforcement training materials discussing Islamic terrorism including those by Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer and Stephen Coughlin.

He also began donating money to Democrats including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and former Nation of Islam member Keith X. Ellison. Shortly thereafter, Basrawi was working for the Obama administration at the DOJ where he defended the Islamic mega-mosque in Murfreesboro, TN in court, and regularly attended the administration’s ‘Iftar’ dinners.

At law school, Basrawi had been protesting Yoo’s role fighting terrorism at the DOJ and, in a changing of the guard that was all too typical of the Obama era, he was working at the DOJ.

There Basrawi was able to conduct a tour of anti-American groups with the full backing of the Obama administration. At the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders had defended Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist groups, Basrawi lectured on fighting a mythical 9/11 “backlash” against Muslims and declared, to loud cheers, that, “we can say a man by the name of Barack Hussein Obama is the president of the United States”.

Even though his donations to Hillary didn’t pay off, Basrawi stayed behind at the Justice Department under Trump while donating money to Joe Biden and MoveOn. After maxing out his contributions to Biden, Basrawi moved up the ladder in the new Democrat administration.

It was a long way up the ladder of Islamist activism from the bygone days when Basrawi had started an Islamic culture club at Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School, but even then he had been building the kind of resume that would appeal to Islamists and later to Democrats.

Despite his current sensitive position, Basrawi’s Facebook friends network includes Hatem Bazian, the the godfather of campus Islamism and antisemitism, Keith Ellison, Anwar Khan, the head of Islamic Relief USA, BDS activist Noura Erakat, Hady Amr, Salam Al-Marayati, Wajahat Ali and other hateful personalities whom we have covered elsewhere. They also serve as a map tying together government officials, activists, nonprofits and journalists into a network.

“Though I oppose the undemocratic electoral college, I accept that that is the constitutional form of government in which we currently live,” Basrawi posted after the 2020 election.

That’s the system we “currently live” under, and one that, as Imam Sirraj Wahhaj had predicted, would be destroyed to make way for an Islamic theocracy depriving us all of our rights . “If 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us,” he had predicted.

“Wherever you came from, you came to America. And you came for one reason—for one reason only—to establish Allah’s deen,” the unindicted World Trade Center bombing co-conspirator honored and hosted by the Islamist organizations of America, declared.

Mazen Basrawi is only one of many working his way through the system on a long march through our institutions. They have told us their mission. Now they are carrying it out.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

Iran Builds Its Own Online ISIS in America

Daniel Greenfield August 21, 2022 

The stabbing of author Salman Rushdie by a Lebanese Shiite Muslim from New Jersey may be the culmination of efforts by Iran to imitate Al Qaeda and ISIS by building its own online terror network to carry out attacks inside the United States of America. The latest reports indicate that Hadi Matar, Rushdie's attacker, had been in touch with members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The recent indictment of a member of the IRGC regime terror network for soliciting the assassination of former National Security Advisor John Bolton provided a window into how Iran has targeted former Trump administration members.

The IRGC operative struck up a relationship with an Iranian-American on social media by initially offering $10,000 for photos of Bolton. This is a familiar form of espionage tradecraft in which a foreign spy solicits an American to perform a seemingly harmless and legal act, often involving photography, such as taking photos of individuals or cars, that is then revealed to be espionage committed at the behest of a foreign power. The patsy is then told that he has a choice between committing more serious crimes or being turned in to the FBI as a spy.

The Russians and the Chinese routinely operated this way (which also helps account for the large number of Chinese spies in America, as their citizens coming to this country are compelled to sign papers agreeing to cooperate with their intelligence services that becomes a source of leverage and blackmail), and it now appears that Iran has picked up the same trick.

The IRGC operative promised that Iran would pay $250,000 for hitting Bolton with a car. Indicating that the Iranians had already had their own surveillance operation that they did not want to compromise, the IRGC claimed that Bolton often took walks alone in the park.

The indictment and the Rushdie stabbing cast light on some mysterious incidents including an Iranian woman from Berkeley who catfished an American on a dating site, met up with him at a Henderson, Nevada hotel room, and then stabbed him in the neck as, “revenge against U.S. troops for the killing of Qasem Soleimani". The death of the IRGC terror leader has been the pretext for assorted terror plots against military personnel and Trump administration members.

The media dismissed the March stabbing as oddball behavior. Media accounts suggested that the stabber was mentally ill. But Henderson is close to Nellis Air Force Base which hosts the MQ-9 Reaper: the same model that was used to take out Soleimani. The attack appeared to be a systematic effort to target a U.S. Air Force drone pilot, lure him to a hotel room, blindfold him, and then kill him. It was a terror plan that only looks ridiculous because it failed.

This is certainly not the first time that Iran has tried to pay for assassinations in the United States. A decade ago, IRGC operatives planned to kill the Saudi ambassador with a bomb at Cafe Milano, a prestigious D.C. resteurant patronized by senators, by employing an Iranian used car salesman from Texas in a plot that was arranged through meetings in Mexico.

A decade later, the internet eliminates any need for international travel. Iran’s terror operatives can solicit Shiite Muslims in this country to commit terror attacks for them with no risk.

At least to the IRGC.

The failure of Al Qaeda terror plots after 9/11 amid the invasion of Afghanistan led the terror group to abandon its founding premise of serving as “The Base” and to crowdsource terrorism through the internet. Myspace was created a few months before the invasion of Iraq. A year later, Facebook emerged. Terror 2.0 took longer to arrive than Web 2.0, but it was close.

The vast majority of Al Qaeda and ISIS terror attacks no longer required the expensive and dangerous travel and training arrangements that had undone so many previous operations. Most of the crowdsourced terror attacks failed when Jihadists contacted ISIS and Al Qaeda only to connect with the FBI, but a few, in Boston, San Bernardino, New York and Orlando succeeded spectacularly. The same crowdsourcing momentum that had made Uber and Airbnb into billion dollar companies also made Jihad risk-free and cheap for terrorist organizations. The perpetrators were dubbed “lone wolves”, but are really the Uber drivers of the Jihad.

Iran has been slow to get into the game. Shiite Muslims are a minority and the IRGC has relied on subsidiary terror groups like Hezbollah, the PMU’s in Iraq, or for that matter Sunni Islamists like Al Qaeda and Hamas, to do its dirty work. America, unlike Europe, still doesn’t have extensive terror networks beyond those of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. And Hezbollah utilizes its networks as a money train for smuggling drugs and cigarettes. The Lebanese Shiite Jihadist network may be conducting some of the surveillance, but it doesn’t want to threaten its cash flow from America that also buys it some independence from Iran.

Online crowdsourcing frees Iran from the need to risk the more profitable terror networks. There is evidence that the Islamic terror state is soliciting Iranians and Shiite Muslims in the United States over social media to do its dirty work while offering them sizable sums of money. It’s unknown whether the Rushdie attack came off this way, but the perpetrator’s social media was filled with Iranian Jihadist propaganda. That would have made him a likely recruitment target.

If Iran is working to duplicate its own version of the Al Qaeda and ISIS online training and recruitment system, the threat to Americans could be much more serious than the stabbing of one dissident writer in New York or a man catfished on a date in Nevada. The Islamic regime’s ideal scenario for nuclear weapons would be to detonate them with plausible deniability.

Iranian operatives have carried out direct assassinations of political dissidents in Europe, but have been cautious about putting boots on the ground inside the United States. Despite our weakness and their bluster, Iran still fears and respects us more than Europe. As America gets weaker and our society becomes more fractured, that may not last. For now, Tehran would prefer to carry out attacks by cultivating disposable foreign assets. And once such a capability exists and has been sufficiently tested, it could be used for mass casualty terrorist attacks.

Even nuclear ones.

The Biden administration is rushing to cut a deal with Iran that will legitimize its nuclear weapons program even as the IRGC continues to plot terror attacks in the United States. Obama’s “breakthrough” proposal to detach a nuclear deal from terrorism left us negotiating in bad faith with a regime that made no secret of its determination to kill Americans.

Crowdsourcing Jihad creates further distance between the state sponsors and funders of terrorism, the perpetrators and their victims. The Pulse massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings were traceable to individuals, and then only distantly to the Islamic terror groups providing information and training, and hardly at all to the governments behind them.

Iran would like to replicate this model knowing that America’s morale is much weaker than its military and intel capabilities, and that if there is enough plausible deniability, we will do nothing about even the worst kinds of attacks like September 11. Just ask Qatar and the Saudis.

The gradual uptick in Iran-linked domestic terrorism is a warning that Iran’s efforts to create its own cadre of Shiite ‘lone wolves’ over the internet may be working. And that worse may come.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.   Thank you for reading.

Seven Years Ago the US Handed Him Over to Iraqis; Now Hezbollah Terrorist With US Blood on His Hands Heads Terror Cell in Syria

By Patrick Goodenough | March 15, 2019

Seven years after the Obama administration controversially handed over to Iraqi custody a veteran Hezbollah terrorist accused of executing Americans – only to see him released a year later – Israel says the wanted man now heads a Syria-based terror cell near its northern border.

According to the Israeli Defense Forces Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese national, heads a terror cell comprised of Syrians, based on the Syrian side of the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

Israel vowed to prevent Iran and its Hezbollah proxy from operating against Israel from Syrian soil. In New York, its ambassador warned U.N. Security Council members that Israel “will not ignore the conversion of Syria and Lebanon to a military front against us and will act with force against the aggression from Tehran.”...............To Read More......