After Iran fired over 180 missiles at Israel, Israel considered how to handle synagogue attendance during the Rosh Hashanah holiday. Synagogue attendance typically swells on the holy days, with even more secular Jews attending services. But most synagogues only have small mamads (safe rooms) to protect people during a shelling attack, so hundreds could be left unprotected during an attack.
The situation is even more dire at one of the largest synagogues in the world – the Western Wall Plaza at the Kotel – where thousands of Jews gather in the Old City of Jerusalem. The large outdoor location has few easily accessible places to hide from missiles.
Perhaps the grey-domed al Aqsa Mosque can be used by thousands of Jews as a safe room from jihadi missiles. The jihadists would presumably try to spare their religious building, making the mosque a potential haven for Jews.
Al Aqsa Mosque from outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls (photo: First One Through)
Hamas termed their barbaric slaughter of Israelis the “al Aqsa Flood.” Perhaps it didn’t imagine that the term would become a prophecy inverted, drawing masses of Jews onto the Temple Mount.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has many proxies surrounding Israel: Hamas which controls Gaza; Hezbollah which controls Lebanon; Syria; and farther away, the Houthis in Yemen.
Does it also have cells in the West Bank?
As Iran sent over 180 missiles into Israel on October 1, 2024, two Palestinian Arabs from Hebron shot and killed seven people in Tel Aviv and injured many others. The timing was minutes apart.
This was the first time that Palestinian Arabs shot up Tel Aviv streets during the year long war against Palestinian terrorists. Is it a coincidence that Palestinian Arabs decided to blast Tel Aviv just as Iranian missiles showered from above?
West Bank Arabs have been much more supportive of the October 7 attacks and commitment to destroying Israel than their counterparts in Gaza according to Palestinian polls. Israeli activity likely prevented a two-front war on October 7, which would have resulted in thousands of additional Israeli deaths in cities like Kfar Saba and Ra’anana which are very close to the 1949 Armistice Lines.
While the world is focused on the violent storm between Israel and Iran, Israel’s security will need to investigate how deeply Iran has integrated with the newer terrorist groups in the West Bank like Jenin Battalion, Lions’ Den and Tulkarm Brigades, to clamp down on yet another front of jihadi terrorism.
ACTION ITEM
Write White House and pro-Israel members of Congress like Ritchie Torres, Mike Lawler and Josh Gottheimer or your local representative to get the State Department to label the Jenin Battalion, Lion’s Den and the branches of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade as US designated foreign terrorist organizations.
The escalation of the war between Iranian Proxies and Israel continues to lay bare the alias armies of Iran embedded around the region.
The United Nations is demanding diplomatic negotiations commence between Israel and the Palestinian Authority while only narrowly condemning the Hamas (not Palestinian) savage massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023. For the UN, Hamas is at once distinct from Palestine, and simultaneously a legitimate Palestinian political group, as UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, of course, as you know. It’s a political movement.”
Does the UN think that Hamas is a separate group inside of Gaza or does it acknowledge that Palestine launched a genocidal war against Israel?
In Lebanon, Hezbollah has vast military capabilities, estimated to be around 150,000 missiles. In conjunction with Hamas’s October 7 war, Hezbollah began its attack on Israel. Israel’s response to Hezbollah has been characterized as an attack on Lebanon rather than Hezbollah.
The shifting nouns makes Israel appear to be the aggressor against a neutral party: while Hamas attacks Israel, Israel attacks Gaza; while Hezbollah attacks Israel, Israel attacks Lebanon.
Hamas controls Gaza and has 58% of the seats in the Palestinian parliament. Hezbollah controls southern Lebanon and has 48% of the Lebanese government.
In no other sphere can a country claim that its military is not a functioning arm of the government. Such fictitious divide affords the government a veneer of peaceful intentions while its army wages war.
Simultaneously, both are proxy groups of the Islamic Republic of Iran, colonial outposts on the borders of Israel.
Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel are either 1) a rogue third party terrorist group attack on the Jewish State, 2) a Lebanese attack, or 3) an Iranian attack. If it is a separate entity, than a diplomatic solution must a) have the Lebanese government confiscate all its weapons, b) strip the group of all seats in parliament, and c) expel it from Lebanon. If the attacks on Israel were from Lebanon, than Israel has full right to attack all of Lebanon. If the attacks were spearheaded by Iran, than we have long been in a regional war.
Multiple countries issue a release calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon (people and government), making no mention of Hezbollah or Iran, tacitly accepting that Hezbollah is part of Lebanon and that Lebanon launched an unprovoked attack on Israel.
The same should hold for Hamas and Palestinian territories: Palestinians launched a war against Israel, not Iran or a limited wicked entity.
Labeling armies with unique names distances the governments and population from the violence they perpetrated. It falsely shields the attacking government and people from fault and casts the defensive response as unwarranted and sinister.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez calls members of Hezbollah “innocent civilians” and Israel’s attack a violation of “international humanitarian law,” which implies that she believes that the people and government of Lebanon started a war with Israel and Israel is acting in self defense.
The anti-Israel world does not believe that non-Hamas Gazans who are killed by Israel’s defensive war are civilians caught in a war that its government started, but defenseless targets of an Israeli initiated attack. The “Hamas attacks Israel / Israel attacks Gaza” (not Hamas) narrative obfuscates the culpability of the people and government of Gaza.
The antisemitic jihadists in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza launched a war of annihilation against the Jewish State using alias armies, attempting to shield the people and governments as uninvolved bystanders. Much of the world has ingested the red herring and is defaming Israel’s just war in the latest incarnation of a blood libel.
There are two competing narratives of the war between Lebanon and Israel, one being promoted by the liberal media, the United Nations and Muslim-majority countries (the “Anti-Israel Camp”), and the other by Israel and its supporters. How each side sees the framework of the war will continue to direct the commentary as the war unfolds.
Anti-Israel Narrative
According to one telling of the story, Hezbollah is a “Lebanese militant group” which is “supported by Iran.” The group attacked Israel on October 7, just after the Hamas massacre, “to show support for its Palestinian ally,” and will stop fighting Israel as soon as there is a “ceasefire agreed to by Hamas.”
In this telling of the events, Israel has opened up a new front against Hezbollah for virtually no reason, as the key to stopping the Hezbollah attacks is to end the fighting in Gaza. Israel’s “ferocious assault on Hezbollah” is not only unwarranted but infuriating the United States President Biden who has sought to confine the fighting to Gaza.
NY Times article bemoaning Israel’s attack on Hezbollah, creating a rift between the U.S. and Israel
Hezbollah is portrayed as only a Lebanese ally of the Palestinian group Hamas, whose mission and intentions are unstated. Israel’s mission is seemingly a folly, destined to repeat the “mistakes the United States made after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
Pro-Israel Narrative
The same events are seen very differently by Israel supporters and those who appreciate a truthful account of current events.
Hamas has majority support of Palestinians, with 58% of parliament. It’s goal to destroy Israel is to enable 6 million Palestinians to overtake the Jewish State. Hezbollah is slightly less popular than Hamas, with 48% of parliament and seeks to expel the 490,000 Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) who reside in Lebanon to a new state of Palestine.
Israel was attacked by both Iranian proxies of Hamas and Hezbollah on October 7, 2023 and is fighting a defensive war it does not want against each. The threat of Hezbollah is much greater than Hamas, which has an estimated 150,000 missiles aimed at Israel. Over 80,000 Israelis in the north have been internally displaced to the south because of the Hezbollah attacks and ongoing threats.
These narratives are very different. The anti-Israel camp thinks that the United States waged wrongful revenge attacks after 9/11 and Israel is going down the same ill-advised path. But the pro-Israel view is that the American response wasn’t the problem: it waged the war terribly, first by attacking Iraq which was not involved in the 9/11 attacks, and then spending twenty years in Afghanistan fighting a terrorist group that could not pose an existential threat to the US, for the action al Qaeda took on a single day. That dynamic is not remotely similar for Israel fighting two clear and obvious enemies on its borders that are constantly attacking its citizens.
If the reports you consume tell you that Hezbollah is simply helping its beleaguered Gazan allies who are being crushed by the powerful Israeli army against the wishes of the United States, know that you are absorbing a toxic anti-Israel fake account of the just defensive war Israel is waging against genocidal foes next door.
Around 2,800 members of the Hezbollah terrorist group were injured in an exploding pager incident on September 17, 2024. The tally was almost exclusively Hezbollah militants, as it would appear that the pagers had been purchased by the group some time prior and distributed to its team as a measure to avoid eavesdropping.
Scene from video of Hezbollah terrorist shopping in grocery falling to ground after pager explodes
The world has long known that the Islamic Republic of Iran is the major sponsor of Hezbollah, as well as other jihadi terrorist groups like Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen. To see that the involvement of Iran goes beyond sending money and protecting it at the United Nations, but is an integral part of the terrorist militancy is alarming.
But not surprising.
The world saw that many members of the United Nations agency for Palestinian wards, UNRWA, are members of Hamas. It makes one ask how many UNRWA employees would have been injured had similar pagers been distributed by Hamas?
The line between “legitimate” state actors and countries to murderous jihadi groups is blurred. The question is what to do with those “legitimate” agents of death.
The jihadi-socialist alliance which aims to destroy western democracies is first-and-foremost focused on the Jewish State of Israel. It attempts to mask its deep antisemitism by calling Israel a “European colonial project,” in a sick attempt to strip Jews of their history and heritage in their holy land.
Among the various smears of the antisemitic horde are claims that Israel – and many western countries – engage in a variety causes to shield their deeply racist philosophies. The color-coded lexicon includes “socialist rhetoric around the kibbutzim and labor politics (“redwashing”), environmentalism (“greenwashing”), human rights (“bluewashing”), feminism (“purplewashing”), queer liberation (“pinkwashing”), and religious and ethnic diversity and inclusion (““faithwashing”).” The jihadi-socialists don’t defend the customs of the Islamic countries but simply try to belittle western democracies by ignoring the open societies and focusing on fake charges of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.”
Atop the aggressive assaults on liberal democracies like Israel, the anti-West legions accuse any corresponding finger-pointing back at the radical Islamic countries as a form of “Islamophobia” which uses “racist stereotypes about the Arab and Muslim world as exceptionally and irredeemably patriarchal and homophobic.”
First the antisemites claim Jews have no history in the Jewish holy land, then they accuse the country of “genocide” and “pinkwashing” their crimes. They deflect any Jewish protest as a form of Islamophobia. Quite a mental and ethical contortion.
Perhaps the next step for the antisemitic armies will be to wave the banners of THEIR values more clearly, and defend the public hanging of gays as keeping with their strict interpretation of the Quran. They might site the U.S. State Department’s report that Iranian “lesbian and bisexual women are denied full rights as women,” as a source of pride. Palestinian scholars calling for gays to be thrown off rooftops will be quoted in English at the United Nations.
Maybe they will print t-shirts, hoist placards and use megaphones to quote the Iranian penal code sections 108 to 113 which call for the execution of men who commit sodomy.
To date, the socialist-jihadi alliance is in full attack mode against Israel and the West. When we witness the pivot to “PinkDirtying,” we will know that the Globalize the Intifada jihad is underway.
The president of Iran’s helicopter went down in Iran and the New York Times is very worried about the health of the country.
New York Times May 19, 2024
The Times ran a headline that “Iran is confronting a volatile world,” in a complete inversion of facts. The U.S. labels the Islamic Republic of Iran as a leading state sponsor of terrorism, which has caused thousands of deaths around the Middle East. In the Times retelling of history, Iran is a victim of a volatile world as opposed to the chief architect of death and anarchy.
Rather than accompany the headline with a picture of Iran’s vast nuclear weapons infrastructure, the Times opted to post a picture of a calm but nervous man in a clothing store watching television. This is a common theme of the Times which seems to only have pictures of Iranians shopping for stuff, such as when it wrote about Israel being wary of Iran in 2021, featuring a picture of Iranian women shopping.
The article would continue its bizarre reporting style, noting how the country is facing climate change.
The paper ignored the massive number of executions, including the recent hanging of two women.
The Times did get around to discussing Iran backing terrorist groups around the Middle East… sort of.
The Times simply said that Hamas is “the Palestinian group that led the Oct. 7 assault on Israel.” It did not mention that Hamas is a US-designated terrorist group, or that the “assault” included the raping of women, burning families alive and taking hundreds of hostages. It did not even mention the total number of Israelis killed, even while it quickly mentioned the number of Palestinians who have died according to Hamas.
The Times went on to say that Iran supports other armed groups that also act against Israel, failing to mention that the Houthis in Yemen are principally engaged in a civil war destroying Yemen, and also attacks Saudi Arabia and other ships in the Gulf, including American ships.
Alarmingly, the Times went on to say that “Iran is eager to avoid being dragged into an all-out war.” Seriously? “DRAGGED INTO?” Iran is orchestrating the entire bloody mayhem unfolding throughout the Middle East and the Times tells its readers that it is avoiding war at all costs.
The Times leaned into the narrative and tried a bit of trickery in saying that Iran’s launch of hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in an attack which could have killed thousands of Israeli civilians, was likely designed to fail, absolving Iran of any ill intent or push for war.
For The New York Times, the leading state sponsor of terrorism which has threatened to destroy the Jewish State and is actively building a nuclear weapons arsenal, is a peaceful country facing a volatile region, doing its best to stay out of the fighting. It’s #FakeNews at its most dangerous: shielding terrorists, while lying to the public.
Gamestop is a publicly-traded company with very poor prospects. Technology has changed the way people buy and play games, and retail stores are hurting all over the United States. The company has swapped management, closed stores and let people go but the business continues to flounder.
But not its stock price. As covered in the movie Dumb Money, masses of people decided to wage a war against professional capitalists and kept pushing the stock higher. Ignoring all fundamental principles, the trading horde opted for another capitalist principle, that things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. Enough of them bound together to run the stock and push professional stock traders to capitulation.
Gamestop stock trading last five years showing dramatic spikes
People are protesting on college campuses and the streets to protect Hamas from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Masses have willfully opted to ignore basic morality in the face of heinous barbarism committed by the group which has promised to repeat its barbarity.
Like “Hello Kitty” who directs the masses to buy a meme stock, the Iranian tools of CAIR, Democratic Socialists of America, Students for Justice in Palestine and others, rally mobs to shut their blind moral eyes, and side with an antisemitic death cult.
They have turned the game on itself using its own rules. Capitalism both believes in fundamental values as well as market pricing, just as western society values liberalism as well as free speech and assembly. In the frenetic broadcast social media world, clicks and retweets are empowering the latter to overwhelm normalcy.
Passions are no longer tethered to truth and decency. And this is BEFORE artificial intelligence (AI) gets mainstreamed which will usher a future in which people will be unable to differentiate the real from the manufactured.
We are entering a very dangerous state for mankind, in which bots, AI and the masses actually have the power to tear down society without conventional weapons. Depravity coupled with technology will breed anarchy, particularly in societies where trust has been trashed, as many have been in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The current axis of evil – China-Russia-Iran – are using anarchists on these shores to launch an insidious revolution, and our society just scrolls through X in bewilderment, rather than take actions to protect our values and our country.
In a world where facts are extraneous, we are only left with a clash of emotions.
Will we pass judgment solely on which party seems the most sympathetic because they feel the most injured? Does that foretell a future of balms for the pain, rather than solutions for the problems?
We are carrying our emotions across the threshold to deflower our intelligence. That is a marriage that will end poorly for civilization.
Gamestop is a publicly-traded company with very poor prospects. Technology has changed the way people buy and play games, and retail stores are hurting all over the United States. The company has swapped management, closed stores and let people go but the business continues to flounder.
But not its stock price. As covered in the movie Dumb Money, masses of people decided to wage a war against professional capitalists and kept pushing the stock higher. Ignoring all fundamental principles, the trading horde opted for another capitalist principle, that things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. Enough of them bound together to run the stock and push professional stock traders to capitulation.
Gamestop stock trading last five years showing dramatic spikes
People are protesting on college campuses and the streets to protect Hamas from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Masses have willfully opted to ignore basic morality in the face of heinous barbarism committed by the group which has promised to repeat its barbarity.
Like “Hello Kitty” who directs the masses to buy a meme stock, the Iranian tools of CAIR, Democratic Socialists of America, Students for Justice in Palestine and others, rally mobs to shut their blind moral eyes, and side with an antisemitic death cult.
They have turned the game on itself using its own rules. Capitalism both believes in fundamental values as well as market pricing, just as western society values liberalism as well as free speech and assembly. In the frenetic broadcast social media world, clicks and retweets are empowering the latter to overwhelm normalcy.
Passions are no longer tethered to truth and decency. And this is BEFORE artificial intelligence (AI) gets mainstreamed which will usher a future in which people will be unable to differentiate the real from the manufactured.
We are entering a very dangerous state for mankind, in which bots, AI and the masses actually have the power to tear down society without conventional weapons. Depravity coupled with technology will breed anarchy, particularly in societies where trust has been trashed, as many have been in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The current axis of evil – China-Russia-Iran – are using anarchists on these shores to launch an insidious revolution, and our society just scrolls through X in bewilderment, rather than take actions to protect our values and our country.
In a world where facts are extraneous, we are only left with a clash of emotions.
Will we pass judgment solely on which party seems the most sympathetic because they feel the most injured? Does that foretell a future of balms for the pain, rather than solutions for the problems?
We are carrying our emotions across the threshold to deflower our intelligence. That is a marriage that will end poorly for civilization.
On September 15, 2023, the United States Treasury Department sanctioned 29 individuals and companies in Iran. In taking the action, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Brian Nelson said “As we approach one year since Mahsa Amini’s tragic and senseless death in the custody of Iran’s so-called ‘Morality Police,’ we recall that the movement of men and women across Iran, inclusive of different faiths and ethnic groups, was met with horrific violence, mass incarceration, and systemic internet disruption by the Iranian regime. The United States, alongside the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and our other international allies and partners, will continue to take collective action against those who suppress Iranians’ exercise of their human rights.”
On June 21, 2021, the United States seized 33 websites used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU) and three websites operated by Kata’ib Hizballah (KH). The Department of State designated KH a Foreign Terrorist Organization. According to Reuters, “the sites seized included Press TV, the Iranian government’s main English-language satellite television channel, and Al Alam, its Arabic-language equivalent. Both came back online using Iranian domain addresses Alalam.ir and Presstv.ir.”
There was no brouhaha about the US actions against the lead state sponsor of terror. American media accepted the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)’s position that “that components of the government of Iran, to include IRTVU and others like it, disguised as news organizations or media outlets, targeted the United States with disinformation campaigns and malign influence operations.”
But the US government and media reveal blatant hypocrisy when it comes to Israel’s actions against Qatar’s Al Jazeera, which Israel is closing after the Qatari-backed terrorist group Hamas savagely massacred 1,200 people in their homes.
The New York Times’ Serge Schmemann wrote an opinion piece on May 7, 2024 that started with “the Israeli government’s decision to kick Al Jazeera out of Israel says more about the government than the TV network.” This is the mantra of the Times: vilify the Israeli government as right-wing fanatics and don’t write about the antisemitic terrorism of Arab Muslims in the region, and their backers.
The piece would go on to belittle Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s worries about the security threat of Hamas by stating “the network was hostile to the messaging of Netanyahu’s right-wing government.” This is an insane inversion, turning the mouthpiece of a terrorist group which is waging a genocidal war against Israel, into a condemnation of Israel’s “right-wing government.”
New York Times opinion piece on May 7, 2024
Israel is engaged in an active war against a number of terrorist groups supported by Iran, Qatar and Turkey. In addition, roughly 25% of Israel’s population is Arab. It is fully understandable that the country would try to stop the “disinformation campaigns and malign influence operations” of terrorist groups to avoid a multifront war, including from supporters inside of Israel.
When people hold Israel to a wildly different double standard it is the mark of antisemitism. When they do it about a terrorist group in the midst of fighting a genocidal war against the Jewish State, it’s the sign of dangerous antisemite.
First One Through 