Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action, four times is stupidity. The Jews are blessed with stupid enemies. Having watched the IDF systematically target gatherings of the top officials of (1) Hezbollah, (2) the IRGC, and (3) the Houthis, the political leadership of (4) the HAMAS terrorist organization still decided to meet in person rather than Zoom.
If you were wondering why Arabs never defeat Israelis in war, it is because contempt for the Jewish enemy is their perennial failing. They never see the disabling blow coming. Even more impressive in the annals of screwing around and finding out, HAMAS — the acronym for Harakat al-Muqāwama al-Islāmiyya, or the ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’ — had already rejected a White House ultimatum as well as an Israeli one when they decided to gather in one convenient location.
It is also very hard to sympathize with billionaires like Khaled Mashal, the now-deceased former second chairman on the HAMAS politburo. We use the old Soviet term because HAMAS is an artifact of Soviet-era KGB ‘active measures’ in the Middle East. As always with communists, there are some who make the most of the emergency system for the longest, and Mashal is one of the HAMAS leadership who made the most out of reselling stolen aid.
These men (they are all men) were ecstatic as they watched the sickening uploads from their death squads on 10/7. They turned on cameras and prayed to their god. Yesteday, they met their god in person, courtesy of the IDF. They deserve no pity and their deaths were deserved, for HAMAS is in fact a death cult.
In 2023, HAMAS leadership in Gaza calculated that Israelis would be too afraid of the world to destroy them. Today, Israelis have reestablished the understanding across the region that their mortal enemies are not safe anywhere, ever.
Qatar is officially Very Put Out but will do absolutely nothing, take no military action, since their military is called the United States Navy and Air Force. Altogether too many enemies of the Jewish state have met their demise recently because they believed global public opinion could not only be manipulated, but imbued with material power to stop Israeli action. Remember, they protested the arrest of Eichmann, too.
It does not take a genius to figure out how the Israelis pulled off this coup. Enemies of the Jewish state should really consider a ‘no phones’ policy for their in-person meetings, as in, anyone caught bringing a phone will be handcuffed to a chair and left to die alone in the airstrike. The leaders of Iran and Hezbollah have both distrusted smart phones with good reason, but it has not saved them. Clearly, Qatar’s cellular network is completely compromised by Mossad.
Name any communications technology and Israelis will make their enemies pay for using it: this is another lesson which their enemies seem too hard-headed to learn. This state of affairs never changes because the biggest and brightest terrorists tend to die, as they attract the most attention. In this way, Israel is always artificially selecting the most venal and stupid ones to continue the resistance to Israel’s existence.
Am I making too light of this moment? Should I be more respectful of genocidal terrorists who unleash captagon-fueled Einsatzgruppen rape-murder-kidnap squads on civilians? Absolutely not.
Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that “it is much safer to be feared than loved” because “love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.” In lieu of the world’s love, there is unfailing punishment for the mortal enemies of Israel.
We could all do with a bit more of sure punishments for those who transgress the moral boundaries of civilization. Unsure punishments, and worse yet laughable punishments for endless crimes, are the perennial products of a liberal impulse to avoid moral judgment and delay effective action. Eventually, systemic injustice results in demand for a reset. Israelis have been hitting ‘reset’ since 10/7 but their enemies don’t seem to have noticed.
‘Palestine’ has had its own aid agency, independent of the regular United Nations aid system, so that HAMAS can maintain systemic injustice in Gaza. Inevitably, Israel took action to disrupt the HAMAS monopoly on food aid that UNRWA had so carefully constructed.
Now the IDF will reset matters in Gaza, and no amount of fake news and propaganda will deter them from unfailing punishment for every last HAMAS fighter. The enemies of Israel always scoff and say this is impossible to achieve — right up to the moment that they find out, like Khaled Mashal has, that they were very, very wrong.
Iran Is Pretty Bad At Real Wars, Actually
The revolutionary regime of Iran is very good at retail terrorism and very bad at pitched battles. This has always been the case, and has only become more true over time. The clerics have never trusted the military with any political power, so they created the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a multi-service parallel military force that serves the political purposes of the regime, making its budget larger than that of the Islamic Republic of Iran Army (AJA, or Artesh), which exists to defend Iran.
Also, it's better to be feared than respected, as one Johnathan Willoughby has found out.