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Showing posts with label Exploding Pagers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Exploding Pagers. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

The Revenge of Israel’s Women on Hezbollah

By @ Sultan Knish Blog

Some were shocked to learn that Israel’s successful ‘Pagergeddon’ operation had been the work of a female intelligence operative under thirty. But they shouldn’t have been.

Israel’s digital intelligence capabilities rely on the work of young women operating in arenas like Unit 8200 which monitors enemy communications, plants surveillance devices and puts together intel data to form a bigger picture, and Unit 414, the unarmed observers on the front line, many of whose members were killed and a number captured during the Hamas invasion on Oct 7.

Women from 8200 and 414 had sounded early warning alerts about Hamas training drills and movements that went unheard before Oct 7. And Unit 414 had lost 27 of its own on Oct 7.

Unit 8200, which is 55% female, had taken some of the blame for the failures on Oct 7. The assault on Hezbollah provided a unique opportunity for Israel’s women to strike back.

‘Pagergeddon’ went viral on social media but it was only a piece of a bigger puzzle. The Israelis had deconstructed the lessons of Oct 7 and turned them against the Islamic terrorists. Hamas and its Iranian masterminds had wrecked Israeli battlefield communications in the initial attack. Israeli military units were slow to respond, aerial units were unable to strike and hours passed before the military leadership understood the scope of the terrorist assault on the homeland.

The first thing Israel came after were Hezbollah’s communications. ‘Pagergeddon’ was a crucial last step that began with Israel infiltrating Hezbollah’s landlines and then its other communications. When Hezbollah leaders fell back on the pagers and handheld radios, also favored by Hamas, that had been rigged to explode, communications were fatally scrambled.

Hezbollah leaders were forced to begin meeting in person and retreating to bunkers which made it all too easy to take them out. With a broken leadership and communications structure, Hezbollah lacked the ability to decisively move its forces and quickly respond. Within a week, its protectors at the UN and the White House were frantically urging a ‘ceasefire’.

Destroying communications and the chain of command is standard military doctrine, and Israel’s successful implementation of it within such a short time and against one of the world’s largest Islamic terrorist groups will be studied in military academies for generations, but there was also something feminine about breaking apart Hezbollah’s social bonds before a bombing campaign.

While misleading photos and videos of female IDF soldiers carrying rifles circulate on social media, the burden of front line combat is largely handled by men. The killing and capture of unarmed Israeli female observers from Unit 414 remains a deep moral failure. The true role of Israeli women is to act as the invisible heart and soul of the country’s national defense.

When Iron Dome and other interceptor systems take down incoming attacks, the odds are very good that the country’s female air defense controllers are alert and responding. And the extent to which Hezbollah’s communications were penetrated and turned against the terror group owes much to nameless female ‘keyboard warriors’ who exposed the enemy’s weaknesses.

Hezbollah was uniquely vulnerable to these tactics because it was in the awkward stage between terror group and terror state, too big to hide in tunnels, too small to have an effective air defense system, and too dumb to realize that tens of thousands of rockets were still no match for what a first rate air force could do to all its infrastructure and weaponry.

The Iranian-backed Jihadists who had taken over much of Lebanon’s power structure still thought like terrorists even as Hezbollah had grown much too big to function like one.

Terrorist groups start out as individual cells carrying out lone attacks, recruit more members, build militias, seize control of entire areas, transition to guerrillas and then become states. Islamic terrorists naturally adopted the same model employed by Marxist guerrillas across Asia because it was already innate to nomadic raiding culture and foundational to the rise of Islam.

Western militaries perform badly against terrorists and guerrillas, but very well against states.

Islamic armies never achieved much success against Israel, but their terrorists proved quite effective. Peace accords that turned over territory to the PLO and Hamas created safe zones for terrorists inside Israel in which the terrorists were surrounded by civilians who shared their cause of establishing Arab Islamic supremacy over Israel and the entire world.

Hezbollah’s position in Lebanon was much more precarious. Unlike Gaza, Lebanon is genuinely diverse. Apart from its large Christian population, Lebanon contains Arab Sunnis and groups that hate Hezbollah and resent the country turning into an Iranian and Syrian colony.

Mao had advocated that guerrillas should move like fish in the water among the local population. Hamas does this, Hezbollah, like its Shiite counterparts in Iraq, however built an intimidating sectarian power base by controlling entire neighborhoods and areas. Dahieh, the center of Israel’s bombing campaign, is Hezbollahs’s version of Sadr City. Rubbing shoulders with Christians and Sunni Muslims, every move Hezbollah makes is highly visible and reported to the Israelis by both allies and enemies who are eager to see the Shiite terrorist group fall.

Dahieh was not Rafah, it was the Green Zone in Iraq, and Hezbollah was not moving among the people like fish in the water, but like a widely resented occupying army making a lot of noise.

All of that allowed Israel to infiltrate its communications, track its personnel and strike decisive blows against its leaders. Hezbollah had alienated the local population, built up its forces and assumed that the sheer threat of its rocket arsenal would be enough to deter Israel, allowing it to shell Israel’s north with thousands of rockets in order to depopulate the region in preparation for its own version of the Oct 7 attack. But a rocket arsenal is a very crude tool. Like suicide bombs and other terror weapons, it’s useful for attacks carried out from hiding. But the response to a large visible terrorist group isolated in its areas launching rockets is all too obvious.

The inability of the Biden-Harris administration to stop the similar Houthi attacks by its sister Iranian-backed terror group out of Yemen had given Hezbollah a false sense of confidence.

Not only did Israel take out the Hezbollah leadership planning an invasion of the Galilee, providing a redeeming narrative for Unit 8200 after the horrors of Oct 7, but Hezbollah had made the fatal mistake of planning to invade Israel from a territory it did not actually control.

Everything that Hezbollah had thought was a strength, its arsenal, its power and its numbers, were actually weaknesses. Outside Iran and Dearborn, Michigan, Hezbollah has no friends.

Hezbollah is not only widely hated in Lebanon, but in the Arab world. Even the Sunni Arab Muslims clamoring to save Hamas had little more to offer than disdainful shrugs for Hezbollah. The wounds of the Syrian Civil War run deep and many Sunnis hate Hezbollah more than israel.

Israel isolated Hezbollah’s leaders and cut them out, just as it isolated the terror group.

Iran and Qatar had set out to divide Israel. Hamas took hostages, living or dead, while its Qatari backers pushed for rallies that demanded Israel surrender to Hamas to free them. The terrorists had hoped to fracture Israeli society into factions in order to tear it down the way they had torn apart Lebanon. But Israel turned to Lebanon to divide the terrorists and unify Israel.

By attacking Hezbollah, Prime Minister Netanyahu exploited the divisions among the terrorists and reunified Israel around the mission of defeating them. Syrian Sunni Arabs celebrate the downfall of Hezbollah while Shiites lash out at them. Iran is trying to pressure Syria’s dictator to bail out Hezbollah and Iraq’s Sunnis are taking issue with the Shiites dragging them into a war.

Behind the scenes, Israeli women had played a vital unsung role in dividing the terrorists and uniting the country just as they had done in keeping the nation and families together during the war. Countless wives and mothers had watched their husbands go off on deployment after deployment and had kept households going, sometimes from bomb shelters, and then still found time to volunteer and to pray after putting the children to bed.

Thousands of mothers of families displaced by Hezbollah’s rocket attacks have had to do all this without a home to come back to. As the fires burn in Hezbollah compounds, hope rises that all Israelis will be able to return home, that backyards will no longer have to give way to bomb shelters and that Israel’s families may once again know some measure of peace.

In the Bible, the Prophetess Devorah had predicted that “into the hand of a woman the Lord will deliver Sisera”. And in her song she described Sisera’s mother being comforted with promises that the Canaanite general and his armies were seizing women and loot. “Are they not finding and dividing the spoils? A girl or two for every man?” she imagines them saying and concludes with “So may perish all Your enemies, O Lord.” Once again history repeats itself.

And many a woman has repeated the same words and sentiments tonight in Israel. 

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. 

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Rape is Resistance and Beepers are Genocide

By @ Sultan Knish Blog

The myth that Israel’s tactics not its existence is at issue died with the murdered Jewish families on Oct 7 and the Hezbollah terrorists taken out by pagers on September 17 and 18.

No sooner did the encrypted communications devices handed out to members of the Islamic Jihadist group begin exploding than human rights experts and the UN began condemning the single greatest targeted attack on a terror group as a violation of international law. Those same organizations and activists had nothing to say about the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages that turned tens of thousands of Jews into refugees in their own country.

There is no legitimate way for Israel (or any non-Muslim country) to take out an Islamic terrorist. No amount of warnings, phone calls and dropped leaflets and roof knocking warning bombs were enough of a precaution. Even hostage rescue operations were condemned for killing terrorists who in the usual Hamas medical department parlance turned into innocent children.

And there’s also no such thing as an illegitimate Muslim way to kill Jews. Oct 7 proved that. Nearly a year later, Islamic groups are celebrating the orgy of butchery, kidnapping and rape. The Democratic Socialists of America, which boasts 5 allied members of Congress including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, has taken to arguing in favor of “armed resistance” and Hamas.

More Democrats have taken to social media to condemn a Detroit News cartoon which implied that Rep. Tlaib’s support for terrorism may have led her to worry about her pager than two recent Muslim terrorist plots to massacre Jews in synagogues in Vegas and New York City. The Democrat political establishment can’t seem to get around to condemning the Islamic groups attacking synagogues and marching through the streets praising the rape and murder of Jews.

The liberal establishment accepts the Islamic terrorist cause but rejects the Israeli one.

That’s why when it comes to Islamic terrorism, it emphasizes the cause over the tactics, but when it comes to Israel, it emphasizes the tactics over the cause. Every Israeli tactic is illegitimate because the cause, a Jewish State, is illegitimate, but no Islamic tactic is ever truly illegitimate because its cause, replacing Israel with an Islamic state, is legitimate.

No matter how often the Arab Muslim invaders occupying parts of Gaza and the West Bank pledge their allegiance to terror, we are told that their ultimate cause is just and inevitable. And that the killings, kidnappings and rapes don’t truly represent the moral righteousness of it.

While every time Israel takes out a terrorist, the media links it to the Jewish ‘occupation’ of those parts of Israel that the terrorists demand for themselves. Since Israel’s existence is wrong, any tactic that it uses to fight the terrorists trying to take it over is a human rights violation.

The Marxist mobs in the street are at least honest about their ideological orientation. They define all Jews living in Israel as “settlers” who are fair game for genocide. Whether Israel takes them out with drone strikes, exploding beepers or Barney songs played on a loop doesn’t much matter except as it’s useful for propaganda materials calling for the destruction of Israel.

The liberal anti-Israel establishment in D.C., human rights groups and the media have played a cynical game of focusing on Israel tactics as if they actually cared how Israel takes out terrorists and as if there were any means of taking out terrorists that would win their approval. A generation of the Israeli military jumping through every possible hoop has yielded only angrier and more sanctimonious condemnations every time another terrorist bites the dust.

Israel has wasted a lot of the lives of its soldiers and civilians on its side in the hopes of achieving some phantom ‘purity of arms’ that included an extensive approvals process for strikes that crippled its aerial response on Oct 7. Afterward things got better and worse. The pager attack was brilliantly calculated and yet crippled by an obsessive need to take out specific targets rather than inflicting as much damage on the Hezbollah terrorists as possible.

The painstaking efforts to monitor the terrorists to minimize collateral damage and to focus on specific targets did not change the inevitable condemnations that came rolling Israel’s way.

The real lesson of the pager attacks was that an innovative Israeli attack on Islamic terrorists will be cheered by the right people and condemned by the wrong ones. Israeli Hasbara is a fundamentally misguided effort to explain the need for a war whose hand wringing signals weakness and guilt. What makes people cheer for Israel are accomplishments, winning a war in six days, rescuing hostages from Africa, taking out an Islamic nuclear program on July 4th, and detonating the communications devices of a terrorist group responsible for killing Americans.

No one except the occasional military expert who tours the battlefield is impressed by Israeli restraint. And restraint will win not a single concession from the same establishment that can’t bring itself to condemn by name the mobs waving Hamas flags and assaulting Jewish students.

Israel has been held hostage trying to win over those who cannot be won over. Much of the liberal establishment has either become radicalized into permanently opposing Israel or has become complicit with those who do. The only narrative it will accept is the same demands that Israel be dismantled piece by piece and parceled out to Islamic terrorists in exchange for peace.

That the peace has never come, that the negotiations are worthless and that the only product of two generations of concessions is endless war will not change a single mind. Just as the implication of the revelation that Hamas planned to murder Israeli hostages before handing them over in exchange for live Islamic terrorists was hardly even discussed in the media.

After nine months of demanding a deal with Hamas at any cost, the Biden administration has belatedly decided that the terrorist group is not serious about a deal, but that news hasn’t changed Kamala’s set talking point about the urgent need to end the war and cut a deal. Nor will it change her policy should she be in a position to stop talking and start making the rules.

Israel has been divided by the need to balance winning wars against winning over public opinion, but the public opinion of the establishment was never winnable and if it is winnable, it can only be won by winning wars. The Biden administration’s policymakers will never admit it, but they were far more impressed by the pager attacks than by 9 months of negotiations. The same is more obviously true of Arab Muslim countries who despise Hezbollah and fear Iran.

No one cheers weakness, they only respect strength.

Israel will never have even the grudging acceptance of those who believe that rape is resistance and beepers are genocide. Accommodating military tactics to their accusations has led to a loop of defeatism that culminated in the deadly infiltration, invasion and massacres of Oct 7. But it can best be a player on the world stage by showing its strength rather than its weakness.

One Pagergeddon was worth a hundred Nova documentaries and exhibitions about the unhappy victims who were assaulted at the dance festival to morale, national security and the reputation of a nation built on repudiating the helplessness and victimhood of its long exile.

Oct 7 incited the dark glee of a movement that believes it can taste Israel’s destruction. Protestations of innocence and victimhood only feed its triumphalism. What it fears isn’t a documentary about the atrocities of Oct 7, but the destruction of its Jihadist armies.

The issue was never Israel’s tactics, but Israel’s existence. The only way to win… is to win.

 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. 

Monday, September 23, 2024

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

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

(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.

New Banner Military Affairs 

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.”

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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.

 
Read More From Dave Patterson

Friday, September 20, 2024

Cartoon Roundup: Exploding Pagers

Understanding Israel’s Pager Attack on Hezbollah - Michael Brown Sep 20, 2024 - Can you imagine the level of physical and psychological trauma throughout Lebanon and parts of Syria yesterday as thousands of Hezbollah pagers exploded, leaving many Islamic militants injured, hundreds of them critically, and several of them dead? It sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie more than real life, especially at the scale on which it occurred..... 

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Thursday, September 19, 2024

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