A Sept. 18th Guardian editorial on the targeted Hezbollah pager and walkie talkie explosions is seething with contempt for Israel, whose spy agency was behind what US intelligence agents have called the most effective and audacious counter-terror operation in recent history. “This is the most impressive kinetic operation I can recall in my career,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA officer who served in Middle East counterterrorism roles. “The scope“, he added “was staggering.”
Of the several thousand reported Hezbollah operatives injured, only a handful of civilians were reportedly harmed. That is, wrote John Spencer, Arsen Ostrovsky and Mark Goldfeder “an extraordinary feat in modern warfare and the textbook definition of a precision and proportionate attack.”.
The pager and walkie talkie attacks were a response to Hezbollah firing more than 8,500 rockets at Israel, murdering 47 people, mostly civilians – including 12 children killed while playing football in the July Majdal Shams massacre. In the meantime, roughly 80,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes in the north of the country as a result of these attacks – barrages of rockets fired into sovereign Israeli territory, despite Hezbollah having no territorial dispute with Jerusalem.
Finally, let’s remember that, according to multiple UN resolutions, Hezbollah’s presence in southern Lebanon is illegal, as their forces aren’t supposed to be north of the Litani River – about 30 km from Israel’s border.
So, how did the Guardian frame Israel’s counter-terror triumph against an Iranian proxy militia into a ‘war crime’? They effectively sided with the illegal, Iranian proxy militia, in an editorial titled “The Guardian view on Israel’s booby-trap war: illegal and unacceptable“:
a global treaty came into force which “prohibited in all circumstances to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects that are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material”. Has anyone told Israel and its jubilant supporters that, as Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group points out, it is a signatory to the protocol?
Has anyone told the purveyors of ant-Zionist vitriol at the Guardian about the caveat to that treaty, that, pursuant to Article 52 of the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention I, such acts are indeed permissible in circumstances where the objects in question are no longer used for civilian purposes?
So, given that the hand-held devices were distributed specifically to operatives of Hezbollah – which, lets remember, is proscribed in its entirely by the UK – and were being used for communication, planning and conducting terror operations, they ceased to be considered “civilian objects” and became legitimate military targets.
The Guardian then lies again, complaining that “the pager bombs were clearly intended to target individual civilians – diplomats and politicians – who were not directly participating in hostilities“, when, in fact, as we noted, the terror group is proscribed in its entirety, meaning, according to the UK, there’s no distinction between the group’s military and political wings.
Finally, true to the Guardian’s refusal to assign agency to the Islamist terror groups, the editorial blames Israel – and only Israel – for bringing the region (and the world!) to the brink of chaos. This means that we’re to believe that it wasn’t Hamas’s barbaric antisemitic massacre, or Hezbollah’s decision, the day after Oct. 7th, to align with Yahya Sinwar’s bloodthirsty pogromists, but, rather, Jerusalem’s year-long efforts to protect its citizens from these threats that ignited violence and chaos.
As this post is being published, the long awaited full-out war between Israel and Hezbollah has begun. As such, we can expect the Guardian’s coverage of this conflict to mirror their editors’ take on the pager explosions, which effectively mourned the humiliating blow to the terror group.
As Alistair Heath of the Telegraph wrote of the immediate rush to impute guilt to Israel for their brilliantly audacious booby-trapping of thousands of Hezbollah pagers, “robbed of its moral bearings, bereft of any sense of right and wrong, incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil.”
There’s arguably no Western media institution that more accurately reflects this moral rot than the Guardian.
Who are today’s Nazis and Fascists?
Perhaps those who want to bring down an open Rainbow democracy but support regimes which preach genocide, steal aid from their people, use them as human shields, hang gay men and murder ‘disobedient’ women? Including Guardian HQ … the BBC is worse still, being a public service broadcaster