We’ll hear plenty of stories about what happened — lots and lots of interesting, creative tales of adventure and intrigue — but we won’t learn the truth. Our grandkids might, but this was one of those events that we can only detect by its repercussions.
Y’know, those small, little, innocuous repercussions — like a thousand Hezbollah pagers exploding simultaneously. A Hezbollah official called it its “biggest security breach yet.”
And it came on the heels of Israel’s most disastrous security breach: On Oct. 7, 2023, less than one year earlier, 1,300 Israelis were raped, murdered, and butchered, and 200+ more were kidnapped and taken as hostages; an untold number of hostages were later murdered and sexually assaulted.
It was a humiliating, devastating intelligence failure for the Jewish State. More Jews lost their lives on Oct. 7, 2023, than at any time since the Holocaust. Long admired by its allies and feared by its enemies, Mossad was caught with its tzitzits down. “Never again” became “We’ll try again 80 years later.”
So what did Israel do after Hamas utterly humiliated it on the world stage?
We won’t know the totality of their actions. We’re not being told any of the juicy, sexy details. All we can really do is assess the results. But it certainly seems that after Hamas victimized it in a new and novel terrorist assault, Israel responded with a new and novel anti-terrorist countermeasure.
Arguably, it was the most ambitious — and most successful — covert operation since the Manhattan Project, especially when you consider the logistics: Somehow, Mossad (presumably) intercepted all the pagers that Hezbollah’s leadership uses for communications, rigged them with deadly explosives, and then sent the pagers back without anyone noticing. And yesterday afternoon, at around 3:30 p.m. local time, the pagers all exploded simultaneously — sending 2,750 members of Hezbollah’s leadership to the hospital. At least 12 were killed.
It was a mind-bogglingly successful intelligence operation. And with such pinpoint precision, too, decapitating its leadership while sparing all civilians. No nation has ever done it better. Or more humanely.
When you heard this news report yesterday, your first response was likely, "LOL, they’re still using pagers in Lebanon?!” Yes, they are: Battling terrorists is the ultimate game of cat-and-mouse. When the terrorist rats learned that the Israeli cats had hacked their cell phones, they migrated to pagers. That’s how the game is played.
File this part of the story under “Delightful Irony”: Just a few months ago, none other than the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, told his soldiers to quit using smartphones. After all, Nasrallah was concerned that Mossad might have access to them.
Oopsie-daisies.
Mojtaba Amani, Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, was injured in the explosion, ostensibly outing him as a Hezbollah agent.
Whereas Israel rebounded from its greatest intelligence failure with its greatest intelligence coup, what did the United States of America do after President Donald Trump came within a whisker of having his head blown clean off his neck on July 13?
- Did we respond to this near-miss with an aggressive critique of Secret Service procedures?
- Did we add more field agents to Trump’s security detail?
- Did we direct agents to patrol the perimeter whenever the public has straight-line access to Trump?
- Did we — at the absolute minimum — stop preaching to unstable leftists that Trump is an existential threat to the future of our democracy and that we’d all be better off if he didn’t exist?
Nah.
And then, on September 15, Trump was nearly assassinated again.
The Secret Service falls under the purview of the executive branch. That’s Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And continuing the trend that’s plagued their entire administration, they’ve learned nothing.
Same as it ever was. Nobody will be held accountable. No changes necessary. Continue eating ice cream.
The first step to correcting a problem is honestly and accurately identifying it. Israel took a long, hard, unflinching look at itself in the mirror after October 7. I’m sure it was painful, but it was necessary. And now, Mossad has clearly spearheaded significant tactical adjustments. In this game, he who evolves fastest survives longest.
But Biden and Harris won’t even acknowledge that there’s a serious problem. Instead, they speak in vague P.C. platitudes about “violence having no place in our country” — before turning around and giving a speech that makes violence more likely.
One nation is serious: This is a life-and-death struggle between good and evil. The other is led by an invalid whose protégé is a dimwit.
Guess which is which?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member