Kosher🎗🧡 on X - "What f*ck is going on? Seriously. Look at both of these images. The BBC have just live streamed Ayatollah Khamenei’s propaganda speech for 40 minutes and put on their banner his quotes: “October 7th was logical and legal” “Missile Attack on Israel ‘legal and legitimate” This, in my opinion, is distributing terrorist propaganda to the UK public, via a channel that is paid for by the UK public. How are the BBC getting away with this?"
Meme - Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby: "Breaking: Students at the University of Michigan are rallying for Hezbollah right now. Notice the Hamas triangles on their banner. This movement went from pro-Hamas, to pro-Iran, and now pro-Hezbollah."
Meme - Khamenei: "Are ya the victor son?"
Crying man on floor with blood and pager: "No, the Jews blew off my testicles with a pager"
Khamenei.ir @khamenei _ir: "Hezbollah is the victor."
Readers added context: "The entire Hezbollah leadership, including Nasrallah, has been eliminated."
Meme - The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome @TheMossadIL: "Let's congratulate Hassan Khalil Yassin on his new role as... never mind."
"HASSAN KHALIL YASSIN IS NOW THE NEW LEADER OF HEZBOLLAH. AND HE'S DEAD"
Blake Flayton on X - "The frantic panic exhibited by antisemites in the past 48 hours is truly something to behold. Hezbollah cannot be characterized as a “Palestinian resistance front.” Israel does not occupy Lebanon and has no territorial claims on Lebanon. The attacks have been so specifically zeroed in on military targets that the surrounding Arab countries and even the Shiite militias have said and done nothing. They’re realizing that the playbook of “genocide,” “colonialism,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” is not a believable explanation for this campaign, and that most people even on the left realize that if you leave the Jews the fuck alone, you won’t get bombed. And they’re not happy."
Tom Cotton on X - "Hezbollah, unprovoked, started launching thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians after October 7. No other country would accept this. Every casualty in Lebanon is a direct fault of Hezbollah terrorists--not of Israel."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Look for a lot of hysterics, but this is literally, factually accurate. The take of a "surprising" number of leftists seems to be that, if small corrupt Muslim countries really suck at war - no one thinks that Turkey or Saudi or Indonesia does - that Israelis or Americans should not be able to kill their fighters. That's not how any of this works."
Meme - Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇨🇾🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou: "Hamas and Hezbollah started this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them."
Mia K. @miakhalifa: "Can someone please tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal"
Mia K. @miakhalifa: "My heart is breaking for Lebanon and for humanity"
Jews are not allowed to defend themselves, and if they do, it's an outrage and a human rights violation
Brianna Wu on X - "Real talk: I am a Democrat. But recent events have convinced me that the Republican Secretary of State @mikepompeo was right. When Democrats are running foreign policy, we need to stop trying to appease Iran. It just leads to this."
Presumably some people will still claim that Hezbollah isn't backed by Iran
Meme - Swann Marcus @SwannMarcus89: "The sheer delusion of "decolonization" twitter is insane Israel steamrolls Gaza, reorients to Hezbollah, blows up their comms, kills Nasrallah, kills his replacement the day after he's chosen, and then shoots down Iran's missile barrage and they think it's crumbling"
@BLAK MENACE: "Other colonies watching Israel get torn to shreds for being a violent settler colony:"
Meme - Graham Linehan 🎗️ @Glinner: "Same. Imagine weeping for Hezbollah."
Frances Weetman @francesweetman: "My entire feed is Middle Eastern people and commentators celebrating and rich westerners with humanities degrees crying"
‘They called us crazy!’: Hezbollah tunnel to Israel ignites outrage among border communities - "The tunnel, dug by the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group, had the potential to allow armed militants to infiltrate Israel. In recent years, Hezbollah has constructed numerous tunnels and amassed weapons near the Lebanese border as part of its strategy to launch attacks on Israeli communities. The IDF discovered the tunnel and neutralized it before it could be used, but the discovery has left residents deeply unsettled... The couple also expressed relief that the tunnel was found before Hezbollah could carry out an attack, particularly in light of the coordinated assault from Gaza by Hamas on October 7. “It’s a miracle they didn’t invade from the north on the same day. Had they done so, the outcome could have been catastrophic.”"
This is violating the Lebanese people's rights of self-defence against Zionist aggression!
Top Hamas commander killed in Lebanon was UNRWA employee placed on administrative leave - "The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said a top Hamas commander killed in Lebanon Monday was one of its employees but had been suspended since allegations of his ties to the militant group emerged in March. Fatah Sharif’s connection to Hamas appeared set to ratchet up pressure on UNRWA, already facing a $80 million funding shortfall this year. Critics have repeatedly blasted the agency, saying it wasn’t doing enough to root out Hamas militants from its ranks... A Hamas statement praised Sharif for his “educational and jihadist work”"
Damn Zionists! By killing a UN employee they show how bloodthirsty and vicious they are! How can aid workers feel safe when they know Israel is targeting them?!
Meme - delian @zebulgar: "IDF: Highly precise attack using pagers, barely any civilian casualties
Woke leftists: How dare they
Iran: Firing missiles indiscriminately into civilian areas, endangering 10m+ lives
Woke leftists:"
Israel Defense Forces @IDF: "Approx. 10 million civilians are the targets of Iranian projectiles." *Whole of Israel covered with red target marks*
This wasn’t a war crime – it was an audacious assault on antisemites - "Experts suspect Mossad intercepted a massive stash of pagers destined for Hezbollah militants and planted explosive material in the batteries. Then they sent a signal, from hundreds of miles away, that caused the batteries to overheat and eventually to blow up. The planning required for such a spectacular op blows the mind — no pun intended. I know Israelophobia is the default position of the influential classes, but surely even they will admit this was an ingenious way for the Jewish State to take out the adherents to a self-styled “army of god” that has sworn itself to excising the “cancerous growth” of Zionism from the Middle East. (They mean Jews.)... some observers seem unshakeably certain about one thing: it was terrorism. It was a war crime. It was yet more proof of what a uniquely nasty nation Israel is. Invective is flying and tears are flowing across social media. The demonic state strikes again, radicals wail. Even a presenter on Sky News looked shook, describing the operation as “scary.” I suppose it is scary, if you’re a member of an antisemitic army with a pager in your pocket. The double standards are shameless at this point. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel since the Hamas pogrom of October 7. These missiles have destroyed homes, scorched earth, caused 60,000 inhabitants of northern Israel to flee, and butchered 12 Druze kids. It is a strange “anti-fascist” who weeps more for the testicles of a racist terrorist than he does for the lives of innocent Israeli children. Yet beneath the double standards, which are painfully predictable, there is something else, too. Something even worse. It’s the flagrantly bigoted belief that everything Israel does is a war crime. This nation can’t do right for doing wrong. If it fights its Islamist foe from the air, as it is doing in Gaza, it is committing a crime. Yet if it plants deadly weapons directly in the pockets of the Islamists who want to destroy it, that is also a crime. If it bombs neighbourhoods in Gaza where Hamas lurks, that is “indiscriminate slaughter. Yet if it behaves in a highly discriminating fashion and puts mini-bombs in the trousers of terrorists, that is “barbarism.” The list of things that become “crimes” when Israel does them grows longer every day. Following the butchery of October 7, when Hamas’s pogromists raped, kidnapped and murdered Jews in southern Israel, Western leftists described Israel’s bombing of Hamas positions in Gaza as criminal. Yet when Israel went to extraordinary lengths to warn Gazans to leave the places it planned to bomb, dropping tens of thousands of Arabic-language leaflets from the sky, that was called criminal, too — it was the crime of “forced displacement,” apparently. Kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal; try not to kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal. Likewise, when Israel bombed Aleppo in Syria earlier this year to take out the Hezbollah militants based there, it was noisily damned as the vilest of military aggressors. Yet now its meticulous planting of mini-bombs in Hezbollah pagers is branded wicked aggression, too. That many in the West view Israel’s every action as criminal is depressing, but not surprising. Fundamentally, they think it is a crime for Israel to defend itself. They think it is a crime for Israel to take any action that might limit the threat posed by the apocalyptic antisemitism of Hezbollah and Hamas. And they think this because they think Israel’s very existence is a crime. They view the Jewish State as a criminal enterprise, a vile, law-defying blot not only on the Middle East but also on the reputation of humankind itself. When you harbour such intense, irrational hatred for one nation, it is a short step to telling that nation to down its weapons, lower its defences and let itself be attacked. Make no mistake, this is what the radical accusers of Israel are saying when they tell it to stop bombing Hamas, stop attacking Hezbollah militants, stop arming itself, stop everything. They are saying leave your enemy be, and let your people be murdered. They can call this “anti-Zionism” as much as they like, but to many of us their bizarre and cruel singling out of the world’s only Jewish nation as the only nation that is forbidden from fighting its enemies smacks of antisemitism. If you are stony-faced when Jews are murdered, but furious when their murderers have 20 grams of explosives put in the batteries of their pagers, then please remove the word “anti-fascist” from your social-media bio, please refrain from calling yourself “anti-racist,” and please cease all future use of the word ‘progressive’."
AG on X - "When Hezbollah was starving entire Syrian towns and murdering civilians for Assad, the world was silent. When Hezbollah was regularly persecuting and attacking Christians in Lebanon, the word was silent. When Hezbollah stockpiled a hundred thousands rockets from Tehran and put them in residential buildings and towns preparing for a war they wanted, the world was silent. When Hezbollah started launching daily rocket attacks and displaced hundreds of thousands of Israelis after 10/7, the world was silent. But when Israel started taking out or blowing the nuts off the group that has been terrorizing the region for decades, suddenly the world is very concerned. Just once it would be nice if the concern started when the terrorizing was happened instead of when the victims of it started fighting back."
Canada announces $10 million for humanitarian assistance in Lebanon : r/canadian - "So, where does the line exist for you? How long does a state need to be attacked before it's allowed to respond in kind? What is an appropriate response to decades of shelling, to you? What do you suggest when a two state solution isn't being accepted, and one side has agreed to never settle or negotiate? I want your honest opinion to what's acceptable. Imagine if the Mexican cartels invaded San Diego, kidnapped, murdered and raped civilians, while Canada was firing rockets all over the northern border. How many missiles would the US allow before responding? What would be the scale of response? Is any response acceptable to you? Like, one side has clearly stated they want to exterminate the other, and has mobilized pieces worldwide to attack non affiliated people simply because of their religion. Your a Canuck, how many times have non affiliated Jewish areas been targeted in Canada? Hezbollah and Hamas have both called for attacks on Jews worldwide, and they've happened. So is it a Palestinian/Israeli issue, or more about hating Jews because they're Jews? So, how long before you are allowed to respond, and why does any state need to wait that long to respond?"
Hezbollah confirms its leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike - The Washington Post - "Immediately after the confirmation from Hezbollah, people starting firing in the air in Beirut and across Lebanon to mourn Nasrallah’s death. “Wish it was our kids, not you, Sayyid!” said one woman, using an honorific title for Nasrallah, as she clutched her baby in the western city of Baabda."
"Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." - Golda Meir
Aviva Klompas on X - "WaPo: Democracy Dies in Darkness
Also WaPo: Allow us to paint a sympathetic portrait of a ruthless terror leader"
Jared Kushner on X - "September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough. I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible. This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel. Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent. President Trump would often say, “Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation.” The Islamic Republic’s regime is much tougher when risking Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian and Houthi lives than when risking their own. Their foolish efforts to assassinate President Trump and hack his campaign reek of desperation and are hardening a large coalition against them. Iranian leadership is stuck in the old Middle East, while their neighbors in the GCC are sprinting toward the future by investing in their populations and infrastructure. They are becoming dynamic magnets for talent and investment while Iran falls further behind. As the Iranian proxies and threats dissipate, regional security and prosperity will rise for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike. Israel now finds itself with the threat from Gaza mostly neutralized and the opportunity to neutralize Hezbollah in the north. It’s unfortunate how we got here but maybe there can be a silver lining in the end. Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the North is wrong. There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance. After the brilliant, rapid-fire tactical successes of the pagers, radios, and targeting of leadership, Hezbollah’s massive weapon cache is unguarded and unmanned. Most of Hezbollah fighters are hiding in their tunnels. Anyone still around was not important enough to carry a pager or be invited to a leadership meeting. Iran is reeling, as well, insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated. Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible. I have been hearing some amazing stories about how Israel has been collecting intelligence over the past 10 months with some brilliant technology and crowdsourcing initiatives. But today, with the confirmed killing of Nasrallah and at least 16 top commanders eliminated in just nine days, was the first day I started thinking about a Middle East without Iran’s fully loaded arsenal aimed at Israel. So many more positive outcomes are possible. This is a moment to stand behind the peace-seeking nation of Israel and the large portion of the Lebanese who have been plagued by Hezbollah and who want to return to the times when their country was thriving, and Beirut a cosmopolitan city. The main issue between Lebanon and Israel is Iran; otherwise there is a lot of benefit for the people of both countries from working together. The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job. It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight. More than 40 years ago, Hezbollah killed 241 US military personnel, including 220 Marines. That remains the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima. Later that same day, Hezbollah killed 58 French paratroopers. And now, over the past six weeks or so, Israel has eliminated as many terrorists on the US list of wanted terrorists as the US has done in the last 20 years. Including Ibrahim Aqil, the leader of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization who masterminded the 1983 killing of those Marines."
Jonathan Kay on X - "Our family spoke to a Christian Arab friend from Lebanon, and asked after her family in Beirut. She said that reports of Israel bombing “Beirut” in general are somewhat misleading, because Hezbollah and its supporters are clustered in a specific notorious neighbourhood which (by her account) most people do their best to avoid. She grew up despising hezbollah for the usual sectarian reasons, and of course because it’s a despicable terrorist group. No one likes to have their country bombed, and I’m guessing there are many mixed feelings at play among hezbollah’s enemies, but the idea that the region’s sunnis and Christians are going to rise up in defence of this terrorist group seem completely misplaced"
Meme - Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇨🇾🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou: "The video shows massive secondary explosions as a direct result of Hezbollah ammunition depots blowing up. Why does Hezbollah get to claim total immunity for ammunition depots in a war they started? Why aren’t they morally responsible for endangering civilians?"
Fathel @fath0039: "We are watching the normalisation of terror bombing as an acceptable doctrine."
"Minorities" have no agency
Saul Sadka on X - "Based on the number of major ammo cookoffs that people are posting, the IDF claim to have destoryed 50% of Hezbollah's stocks doesn't look implausible. The IDF are unlikely to let up now that even the minority of civilians who remained have fled the battlefield."
David Collier on X - "According to media reporting, the population of Gaza and Lebanon breaks down as follows: 40% of the population are journalists. 36% Doctors, nurses or teachers. 22% aid workers. 95% women 82% pregnant women 75% children under 7. 99% want peace The media reporting is atrocious."
António Guterres on X - "The situation in Gaza is a non-stop nightmare that threatens to take the entire region with it. Lebanon is at the brink. The people of Lebanon, the people of Israel and the people of the world cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza."
Haviv Rettig Gur on X - "You have many thousands of UN soldiers in south Lebanon whose job, according to UNSC resolutions, is to stop Hezbollah. But they refuse to stop Hezbollah. You have two UNSC resolutions that demand Hezbollah disarm and leave the border, but you won’t even name them in any of your statements. You have systematically avoided any action that might have prevented this war. You refuse to protect the Israelis, you refuse to protect the Lebanese, you don’t even pretend to try to implement your own solemn decisions. And now, in your moralizing, you effectively run defense for Hezbollah. If you can’t protect us, if you can’t do a damn thing to push back the influence of malign and evil actors, at least shut up."
Morgoth on X - "Pretty wild to consider that Iran fired 200 missiles into Israel and achieved fewer casualties than a single day of the Notting Hill Carnival diversity stab-fest."
Andrew Fox on X - "I’m astonished that Iran’s big retaliation has been “hand Bibi what he wants, on a plate”. As an aside, the US needs to step up now. Iranian oil and nuclear facilities, IRGC sites and regime HQs are all in targeting scope."
Hen Mazzig on X - "Remember when the UN called for a ceasefire for Ramadan? Tomorrow night begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the High Holidays. The holiest part of the Jewish year. Where are the calls for ceasefire now, as the Islamic Republic in Iran prepares to attack Israel?"
Sky News has lost its way | The Spectator - "Occasionally I am told that I go too hard on the BBC. It is an understandable gripe which I sometimes hear from disgruntled journos from Broadcasting House. So let me start by saying that, as an equal-opportunities insulter, I would like to put on the record how completely rancid Sky News in the UK has become. To give an idea of where Sky UK has gone wrong since being sold, allow me to highlight one story as the channel reported it this week. After the targeted strikes on Hezbollah operatives via their pagers and walkie-talkies, Sky ran a story headlined: ‘Hezbollah has been provoked like never before by Israel and may be tempted to unleash its firepower.’ That is truly fascinating framing. For it suggests that the terrorists of Hezbollah should be allowed to fire thousands of rockets into Israel with impunity, and that if Israel responds to this – even in the most targeted and personal way possible – it is being ‘provocative’. Poor Hezbollah. It’s just too beastly – can’t it be allowed to fire missiles at Israeli civilians in peace? Much of the broadcast media in Britain has been similarly skewy. The BBC news website last week led with ‘Lebanon reels from two days of device attacks’. ITV News lamented not just the pager and walkie-talkie explosions but Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah arms dumps. Presenting these as though they were strikes on civilian targets, ITV – in its own footage – showed the secondary explosions in the buildings Israel had hit. Which gives the game away, surely? I have seen all this before. I was on the Israel-Lebanon border 18 years ago during the last Israel-Hezbollah war. Back in 2006 much of the media played the same game. Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets into Israel, Israel responded and before you knew it the world was running headlines about Israel striking Lebanon. I remember being in a hospital on the Israeli side of the border that had been hit by Hezbollah. There was no mention of this in the next day’s media outside of Israel but there were plenty of reports about Israeli ‘aggression’ against Hezbollah. That conflict ended with a UN resolution (1701) which was meant to ensure that Hezbollah would not be allowed to rebuild its stockpile of rockets in southern Lebanon. Over the succeeding years Hezbollah more than replenished these supplies. By last year the group that has done so much to destroy Lebanon – and to decimate its Christian population, among others – was estimated to have around 160,000 missiles in position to launch at Israel. Labour and Conservative governments never had very much to say about this – and certainly did nothing about it. Under successive governments, people who generally enjoy talking about UN resolutions were silent about 1701. Hezbollah more than rebuilt its armoury, and then, from 8 October last year, it started firing its missiles into Israel again, keen as it was not to miss out on the genocidal opportunities opened up by its Hamas colleagues the previous day. Over the past year I have witnessed plenty of this activity for myself. On a normal day a few dozen missiles might be fired by Hezbollah into Israel. On some days – like this past week – hundreds are fired over. This almost never makes the British news. But many thousands of Iranian-gifted rockets have been fired by Hezbollah into Israel in the past year. And all this has happened under the watchful eye of UN ‘peacekeepers’ whose effectiveness approximates to that of a eunuch in a harem. Meantime the court eunuchs in the western media rarely mention that Hezbollah fires the occasional rocket. When they do they tend to suggest it is simply trying – utterly reasonably, of course – to target Israeli military sites. As to why Hezbollah fired rockets into a playground in a northern Israeli town, killing a dozen Israeli Druze children playing football, nobody will say. It’s just one of life’s little mysteries. If there is anyone left in Britain who still watches Sky News then they will be almost uniquely misinformed about what is actually happening in the world. In the past week its crack squad of misinformants, led by someone called Dominic Waghorn and Alex Crawford, did manage to utter the word ‘terror’. But they used it while referring to the ‘two days of terror’ recently suffered by the ‘fighting group’ Hezbollah. I am sure Hezbollah terrorists were terrorised when they found their balls blown off by exploding pager devices. But that is probably one of the job hazards that comes if you make the mistake of joining a terrorist group and then try to wipe out your neighbours on the orders of the Revolutionary Islamic government in Iran. Decisions have consequences, and joining what Ms Crawford calls a ‘fighting group’ should be seen for what it is: a distinctly bad career choice. Worse even than entering broadcast journalism. People sometimes wonder why the media in a country like Britain has gone so partisan on a story which should not be that complicated to report. A number of reasons present themselves. The one I am most prone to is simply that failing television networks attract less and less talent and that Sky, ITV and even the BBC just don’t get the best or brightest any more. The idea that they have been ‘bought’ or compromised in some way seems to me a little too conspiratorial. Then I notice that just about the only regular sponsor of Sky News UK is the terrorist-supporting slave state of Qatar, through its national airline. The Qataris are, of course, not just funders of Hamas but also hosts to the Taliban. But I am sure this is a coincidence and their efforts to provoke their remaining viewers into reaching for the ‘off’ button comes from ignorance rather than anything worse."
Saul Sadka on X - "So here are TWO questions with ONE answer:
1. Why is it so easy for Israel to recruit spies among their enemies?
2. What have been the effects of the efforts by Israel's enemies to wipe it off the map for 80 years on their culture and economy?
The ongoing conflict has reduced the economies of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and others to ruins, turned much of their populations into beggars, and caused tens of millions of their best and brightest to flee to the West. The destruction of a large part of Beirut by carelessly stored Hezbollah explosive precursors—an event that devastated the already failing Lebanese economy—is a perfect encapsulation of 80 years wasted on Jew-hate in the Middle East. The problem with turning a nation into a theocratic terror base is that you inevitably impoverish it. As @Khaledhzakariah points out, it's much easier to bribe desperate, hungry people. (It's also easier to recruit spies in theocracies where, for example, homosexuality might be a capital crime, for obvious reasons.) Ironic, isn't it? Israel is able to use the core values of its enemies—theocracy and terrorism—to undermine them, just as groups in the West attempt to destroy it by taking advantage of its core values—liberty and freedom."
