Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Jan 2025The Uzi was originally designed in the 1950s, and it was on the technological cutting edge at the time. The stamped receiver, telescoping bolt, and compact magazine-in-grip layout made it an inexpensive and effective weapon. Its sedate 600 round/minute rate of fire helped as well, making it easy to shoot effectively. Uziel Gal experimented with a compact version at that time, but dropped the idea when he proved unable to make a smaller version with the same low rate of fire as the standard pattern.
Fast forward to the late 1970s, and the designers at IMI revisited the idea of a compact Uzi. They were willing to accept the increased rate of fire of a shorter receiver and lighter bolt, and their first prototypes were ready in 1978. full export sales began in 1980. The gun was advertised as having a 900 rpm rate of fire, but the reality was much higher.
The final step of classic Uzi development was the Micro Uzi, introduced in 1986. This was actually developed form the semiautomatic, closed-bolt Uzi Pistol made for American commercial sales. That pistol was given a select-fire trigger group and a folding stock, and it became a micro-compact submachine gun for only the most tactical of operators. It was advertised as having a 1200 rpm rate of fire, but this was again underestimated to improve sales.
In reality, the standard Uzi does fire at about 600 rpm. The Mini (in closed-bolt form) ran at 1300+ in my testing at S&B, and the Micro was over 1400 rpm. Where the original Uzi is best kept in fully automatic mode and can easily fire single shots when desired, the Mini and Micro Uzis are definitely best suited to semiautomatic use. Firing them in fully automatic is a much more difficult proposition if one wants to maintain any level of accuracy and situational awareness.
Thanks to Sellier & Bellot for giving me access to this set of Uzis to film for you!
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May 3, 2025
Development of the Uzi Family: Standard, Mini, and Micro
May 2, 2025
Monkey Rockets, beavers with Parachutes, and the Fall of Empires – 1948 Newscast – W2W 26
TimeGhost History
Published 1 May 2025In 1948, the Cold War intensifies as Stalin blockades Berlin, triggering a dramatic US-led Airlift to save West Berlin. Meanwhile, the British Empire continues to crumble as Burma, Ceylon, and Palestine gain independence — with Israel’s declaration igniting immediate war. America launches the Marshall Plan, the Soviets tighten their grip in Eastern Europe, and televised anticommunist hearings captivate the US public. The year ends with humanity pushing new frontiers — from launching monkeys into space to relocating beavers by parachute — showing just how rapidly the world is changing.
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April 22, 2025
Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults
James Pew reviews Douglas Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (I was first made aware of the book by the sudden uptick in antisemitic posts on social media that directly attacked Murray and his work).
The opening words of On Democracies and Death Cults by Douglas Murray contains a disturbing fact about the situation Israel, and the entire Western world, were thrust into immediately following the barbaric terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023:
Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.
Indeed. Out of all the conflicts occurring all over the world, many of which are more devastating by orders of magnitude and in terms of the scale of humanitarian catastrophe than the IDF’s Gaza campaign, why would Westerners care so much about it? Why do Canadians and Americans take to the streets and occupy college campuses over it? These and many other vital questions are asked by Douglas Murray in On Democracies and Death Cults.
So why should this particular October 7th event, and the IDF’s subsequent military response, which is taking place halfway around the world, be the one that reveals “exactly where everyone is standing”? Murray knows the answer, as do his readers and most clear thinking people who do not harbour secret loathing’s for the Jewish people. The reason is clear and plain as day: the Jews are defending themselves and their homeland from a terroristic death cult bent on their destruction, but for some reason hoards of people from all political stripes from virtually all corners of the world, believe this to be a wholly unacceptable thing for the Jews to do.
The shame I felt for Canada, or more correctly, for things that had been allowed to take place in Canada following the October 7th massacre in Israel, was immediately apparent in the introduction when Murray wrote:
In Canada alone, after October 7, synagogues were firebombed and shot at, Jewish schools were shot at, Jewish shops were fire-bombed, and Jewish-owned bookshops were vandalized.
Future generations will need to contend with the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the worst crisis to strike the Jewish people since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism erupted throughout the West. An inexplicable “shapeshifting” hatred that “locks Jews in an unresolvable set of challenges.” Murray writes:
Jews were once hated because of their religion. Then sometime after the Enlightenment it became hard to hate people because of their religion. At that point the Jews were hated because of their race. Then, after the twentieth century it became unacceptable to hate people because of their race. So, in the twenty-first century, when civilized people cannot hate the Jews for their religion or their race, Jews can be hated for having a state–and for defending it.
Murray’s head is constantly in two places: 1) Israel, including the war zone in Gaza 2) The West. The question of why Israel seems always to be the object of relentless and obsessive international scrutiny, is top of Murrays mind. But as well, the infiltration of radical Islamic ideologies into the Western institutional edifice is not lost on him. Indeed, this knowledge leads him to such observations as the following:
While there were certainly plenty of non-Muslim politicians in the West who decided to attack Israel from the moment the conflict started, it should also be noted that elected Muslim politicians across the West seemed to have a special beef with the Israelis and supported the Palestinian side …
Canada has no shortage of the exact political personage Murray is referring to. The signs of Islamic infiltration and subversion into Canadian society are everywhere. The recent adoption by the Toronto District School Board of policies concerning Anti-Palestinian Racism, is but one example of the phenomenon.
Early in the book Murray mentions the Iron Dome – the Israeli missile defense system. One thing I never considered was the economics involved with the constant rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza. Whereas the cost of a rocket shot from Gaza is estimated at around $300 US, the cost of one of the defense missiles deployed to eliminate Hamas’ rockets is around $100,000 US, and sometimes two defense missiles are required to shoot down one $300 dollar terrorist rocket. The vast amount of economic resources eaten up by the asymmetrical terrorist warfare waged by Hamas is astounding, when one considers the years over which these rocket assaults have taken place.
April 15, 2025
How the UN Plan Tore Palestine Apart – W2W 20 – 1948 Q2
TimeGhost History
Published 13 Apr 2025In 1948, the British departure from Palestine plunges the region into chaos. Amid bombings, massacres, and forced displacements, a brutal civil war escalates into the Arab-Israeli conflict, reshaping the Middle East forever. As Israel declares independence, Arab armies invade, and atrocities on both sides deepen hatred and tragedy. Can either side emerge victorious, or has the cycle of violence become unstoppable?
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April 8, 2025
The Broken Promise of Free Palestine – W2W 19 – 1948 Q1
TimeGhost History
Published 6 Apr 2025By 1948, Britain’s conflicting promises in Palestine have created a powder keg ready to explode. Contradictory pledges made to Arabs and Zionists during WWI set the stage for rising tensions, violent uprisings, and ultimately civil war. As Britain prepares to withdraw and the UN votes for partition, violence escalates, and the hope for a peaceful, free Palestine shatters into chaos. How did the broken promises lead to such tragedy?
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December 14, 2024
Matt Gurney’s final thoughts from the Halifax International Security Forum
One of the things I regret about being totally broke is that I can’t pay for a full subscription to The Line, which is one of Canada’s best sources of (relatively) unbiased commentary on current events both in Canada and around the world. This is the third instalment of Matt Gurney’s report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum (earlier parts linked here and here):
This next one is going to be very brief, since it’s really just an observation. There was very little discussion of Israel. As I noted at the top, there was discussion of the situation in the Middle East. But it was mostly in the context of “The world is currently a mess”. Parts of the Forum involve breaking into smaller groups for more focused discussion on specific issues, and some of those might have focused on Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I can’t speak to what I didn’t see. But I was surprised by a relative lack of focus on the ongoing fighting around Israel in the main events.
A notable exception was the presence of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy on one of the on-record panels. An international law expert, she has spent the months since the October 7th attacks documenting the mass sexual violence that was such an awful feature of Hamas’s attack. Her comments were brief but powerful and can be seen here starting at around the nine-minute mark. I’d like to zoom in on one comment in particular. Dr. Elkayam-Levy told the audience how the invaders were able to capture the personal devices of many of their victims, and use those devices to broadcast the abuse and sometimes murder of these victims via the victims’ own social media apps. This was something that was discussed shortly after the October 7 attacks but not much after: by seizing the victims’ phones, the invaders were able to spread terror and traumatize the loved ones of the victims by showing their friends and family, via photos and videos and live streams, exactly what the victims were being made to suffer.
“I thought I had seen the worst,” the doctor told the assembled audience. “But really, if there is hell, this is what it looks like. Someone abusing your kin. Someone killing your loved ones in front of your eyes.”
Though it was only a small part of the official agenda, Dr. Elkayam-Levy’s comments left an outsized impression on me, and I suspect on many others.
He also discussed his own professional path which he regrets didn’t include a lot of traditional on-the-spot reporting on tragedies and interviewing survivors, as he feels he doesn’t have a good “game face” for those times when he now finds himself doing that kind of work:
I am 100 per cent on side with Ukraine in its war with Russia. I’m not blind to flaws in Ukraine today or in Ukraine’s history, but I have absolutely no doubt who’s the good guy and the bad guy in that ongoing war. I’ve had wonderful opportunities to speak with many Ukrainians since their country was invaded. I have heard their stories and tried to share them on my platforms. I’ve also had opportunities to meet and talk to many Ukrainians who are living now in my own hometown, mostly women with young children, who fled the fighting or once lived in parts of the country that are now occupied by Russia.
I feel so profoundly that these people have been wronged, and tremendously wronged. I believe so sincerely that they should have our full backing as they try and drive back the invaders and liberate their country. That their cause is not just in the West’s strategic interests, and I very much think that it is, but also that it is morally just.
But I have concluded that they’re screwed. We’ve lost interest, and Ukrainians are about to get the Kurd treatment, if I can be so crass. And I just didn’t have the heart to tell them that. I don’t even know how I’d begin to say that to them. I write and speak for a living. And words still failed me.
During a meal in Halifax, a woman who’d flown in to give a presentation on the work her organization does in Ukraine assisting displaced people told me a story of her own experience with the war. The original Russian invasion in 2014 hadn’t been anywhere near where she lived. She was somewhat shocked, she told me, when in 2022, her hometown came under attack. She described the first time she heard air raid sirens. The first time she heard a bomb blast. The first time she could hear the gunfire of advancing ground troops. She told me about the first person from her small community to die, a paramedic who was on her way to collect wounded when their ambulance was hit. And then she told me how, months later, she realized she couldn’t remember any of those things anymore, except for the first time, because they’d happened so much. Constant sirens. Constant bombings. Constant gunfire. The deaths of more people she personally knew than she could even remember.
And as she told me this story, I found myself near tears. I was able to cover it up, I think. I wish I had better game face, but I have some. But my tears weren’t even of sympathy. I wasn’t overwhelmed by her sad story, though it was awfully goddamned sad. No, the tears I felt were tears of shame. I knew that at the end of the conference, I’d get to go home. Toronto is a bit rougher than it was when I was growing up, but it ain’t a war zone.
This woman doesn’t get to go home, assuming her home is even still standing. She knew it, I think. I knew it. I think we both knew that the other knew. But we talked around it.
History is going to judge us harshly for our failure to do more, faster, to help Ukrainians defend themselves.
And alas, we’ll deserve it.
November 7, 2024
Forgotten War Ep4 – Rise of the Chindits
HardThrasher
Published 4 Nov 2024Please consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
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October 22, 2024
QotD: Antisemitism
The right and the left take turns deciding who’s going to be anti-semitic this century. For some time now the hard left in the West has led the charge against the Jews — or, as the sleight-of-hand term has it, the Zionists. The adolescent spirits of the left love nothing more than a revolution, a story of a scrappy underdog rising up against a colonizing power, and the Palestinians, with their romantically-masked fighters and thrilling weapon-brandishing, fit the bill. Plus, there’s something so deliciously naughty and transgressive about calling Jews the new Nazis — if it feels that good, it must be right.
Doesn’t matter that one side is a liberal democracy that grants rights to women and non-Jews, and the other side has thugs and assassins for rulers and sends its kids to summer camps where they learn the joys of good ol’ fashioned Jew-killin’; doesn’t matter at all. According to the script of the hard left, Israel was created when some Europeans (hisssss) invaded the sovereign nation of Palestine, even though we all know the Jewish homeland is somewhere outside of Passaic. Then for no reason Israel invaded the West Bank and Gaza — which for some reason had not been set up as New Palestine by the Egyptians and the Jordanians, but never mind — and made everyone stand in line and get frisked. Those who joined the line in ’67 are just getting through now. Evil Zionists.
James Lileks, “The most important story in the world last Sunday”, Screedblog, 2005-08-11.
October 7, 2024
A grim anniversary
In the National Post, Barbara Kay notes the anniversary of the Hamas attacks along the Gaza-Israeli border that killed many Israeli civilians and led to the still-ongoing captivity for hundreds more:
One year on, Jews in the West have had time to process the primary shock of Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel and the secondary shock of hateful blowback against Israel and Jews worldwide. We learned in a span of hours that where lethal antisemitism is concerned, “never again” was for us a mere objective, not a guarantee against those consumed by a mission of “again and again and again”.
But should we have been so surprised? Gaza was riddled with tunnels, their sole purpose to prepare for a war of extermination against Jews. The West’s intellectual “tunnels” have been operating in plain sight for many years. Under the aegis of “Israel Apartheid Week” and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, vicious anti-Zionism has been a campus fixture since 2001, when the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa erupted into a “festival of hate” against Jews. After decades of aggressive Israel-bashing, Palestinians have been elevated throughout western educational systems to the summit of intersectional victimhood. Those indoctrinated in this hierarchy over the last 25 years consider it a duty and a virtue to demonize Zionism as an original historical sin. October 7 popped the cork on that long-seething volcano.
Throughout the past year, we’ve seen hostage posters vandalized, Jewish schoolchildren bullied, Jewish-owned businesses attacked, Jewish neighbourhoods tormented, Jewish institutions burned and shot at. Downtowns are routinely plagued by foul-mouthed protesters shrieking mantras that call for Israel’s elimination. University campuses have tolerated long-term encampments, Judenrein except for Jews who earn their laissez-passer with a denunciation of Israel.
It’s getting worse. On Saturday in Toronto, a demonstration featured Hezbollah flags, banners extolling violence against Israel and portraits of the (recently eliminated) Hezbollah leader and arch-terrorist Hassan Nasrallah. Last Sunday in Montreal, a band of black-garbed protesters attacked Concordia University and smashed several downtown store windows. During a foot chase, one even threw Molotov cocktails in the direction of police, an ominous escalation.
More ominous in my opinion: Post-October 7, we saw the emergence at rallies and on western social media of the image of a Jewish star being dumped into a trash can accompanied by the words “Keep the world clean” — for years a meme favoured by Hamas, inspired by the Nazis.
The Nazis used the image and words in their propaganda to normalize the idea that Jews, like vermin, were a hygiene threat requiring drastic action to preserve the nation’s health. That such messages are tolerated in the public forum points to a growing acceptance of outright eradicationist antisemitism as a “respectable” opinion to hold, even among supposedly enlightened people in fields such as mental health, as evidenced by anti-Zionist blacklists targeting Jewish members of the profession.
October 3, 2024
Middle East situation – “There are really two international delusions we are seeing in play”
CDR Salamander on the situation in the Middle East as we come up on the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians on the border between Israel and Gaza:
“Israeli flag, Tel Aviv, Star of David” by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
Less than a week since the invasion of Israel from Gaza and the resulting pogrom that witnessed the largest one day murder, rape, kidnapping and tortures of Jews since World War Two — it is clear that Israel has decided that it was finally time to reset and repair the damage from decades of bad international theory and delusion.
There are really two international delusions we are seeing in play, one Israel has more control over, one has yet to be fully revealed to be the folly it is.
You can see the threads heading back decades earlier, but the first delusion hit its peak during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, the withdrawal from the Southern Lebanon security zone in 2000, and finished its summit with Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
The delusion was that The Smartest People in the Room™ in DC, New York, Brussels, and Tel Aviv could, if they talked enough, wished enough, and said nice things to each other enough, would find a way to get the various Palestinian. Hope, wishes, and a mistaken trust in international organizations convinced Israel to give peace a chance.
Peace had a chance, and it culminated on October 7th, 2023.
Now, it appears, Israel will take the world as it is, not as it and others wished it to be. The key part of “this world” that some schools of international security affairs for decades have refused to recognize is the common, evil thread connecting them all: The Islamic Republic of Iran.
Gaza
Hamas was always a proxy for Iran. It could not have been able to be the threat it was without two things: 1) Iran; 2) UN. There can be no returning to the world of October 6th, 2023.
Whatever status Gaza winds up having in the future, it will not be like the past. While there remains much hard work to be done in Gaza, the hardest military part is done. It will be pacified thoroughly, and then the really hard part — what will happen to the population and territory of Gaza — will have to be worked out.
Egypt wants nothing to do with it. The Arab nations have already let it be known they don’t want that radicalized population, and Israel cannot let another Hamas like governance take over that strip of land that points in to Israel like a dagger.
It appears that Israel is following a variation of my COA-A I posted four days after last year’s attacks. The bitter fruit of a half-century of bad theory will have to be fixed, somehow.
Lebanon
From its birth as a Shia militia boosted by Iran, Hezbollah has, even more than Hamas, been a proxy for Iran. Only vaguely connected to the Palestinian cause, it has simply become an advanced military force for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
For a year, well over 60,000 Israeli citizens have been internally displaced from their homes in Northern Israel due to unending rocket attack from Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. As they rightfully focused on the war in Gaza, (as President Lincoln advised, “One war at a time“), Israel took the blows with minimal response until the last few weeks.
The formerly Christian led government of Lebanon cannot police their own nation, and have not been able to for decades, and the UN is more of a problem than a solution, Israel will have to take steps to secure her own safety.
Like the Gaza situation, this will create problems down the road because the hostile population is not going anywhere. That is an issue for later. For now, the rockets must stop.
September 28, 2024
Lebanon is no longer a nation … it’s a parasitized husk operated by Iran’s proxies
In UnHerd, Tom McTague explains why there can be no “settlement” of the South Lebanon problem, because Lebanon ceased functioning as an independent state and is now largely controlled by Hezbollah, which means it’s indirectly controlled by Iran:
[…] A similar assessment was made about Lebanon, a country without a functioning state or economy and at the mercy of Iran’s colonial army, Hezbollah. This, also, was a situation that was thought to be containable — even as Iran exploited the anarchic chaos of Iraq and Syria to supply its proxy with enough weapons to devastate Israel.
The central conceit of the Abraham Accords was that, irrespective of Hamas, Hezbollah and the occupation of the West Bank, once the Israel-Saudi axis was formed, Iran could be pushed back and contained without direct American involvement. But, then, the depth of Hamas’s murderous brutality on 7 October shattered that assumption, leaving not only a traumatised and vulnerable Israel, but also a traumatised and vulnerable Western order forced to confront the stark realities of the Middle East.
Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel.
By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.
With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.
Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map — even from history itself. The pretence that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered.
September 26, 2024
Why Three Arab Nations Lost the Six-Day War Against Israel
Real Time History
Published Jun 5, 2024In just six days in 1967 Israel managed to decisively defeat Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six Day War. In the process they expand the territory they control with the Golan Heights, Sinai, the West Bank, and Gaza.
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September 22, 2024
Canada’s latest moral preening on the international stage includes a partial arms embargo against … the USA?
In the National Post, Conrad Black points out that the Canadian government’s tedious and never-ending virtue signalling has reached a new and barely believable low:
It is the usual pious and cowardly humbug that causes Ottawa to announce it is suspending the sales of some non-lethal military equipment to Israel because it has the effrontery to opine that the Israeli Defense forces are insufficiently protective of the lives of civilian Palestinians in Gaza. But it is breathtaking that Canada should include in this practically irrelevant step an embargo on some equipment to the United States that it suspects the Americans might pass on to Israel. This initiative is a trifecta of fatuous error. First, it is clear from thoroughly available evidence that Israel has achieved an unprecedentedly low ratio of civilian to authentic military casualties for modern urban counter-guerrilla warfare. This is especially difficult as the enemy in this case, Hamas, proudly states that civilian casualties are useful to its propaganda campaign (which has brainwashed our foreign policy-makers), and which habitually embeds its terrorist cadres in and near schools, hospitals, and places of worship to incite as much collateral damage on its own population as possible.
Second, it departs completely from any real concept of the nature of war. The invasion of Israel on October 7 and the slaughter of more than a thousand Israeli, mostly civilians, was intended and received as an act of war. Wars are not fought by dropping pamphlets or posturing with trivial gestures. As General Douglas MacArthur famously said during the Korean War, “In war there is no substitute for victory”. This is particularly the case in the current war in Gaza as Hamas has made it clear that it will never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. As long as that condition prevails, there can be no peace and Israel’s pledge to exterminate Hamas as a terrorist force enables it accurately to be described in the Wilsonian phrase: “a war to end war”. Canada’s government is engaged in a contemptible assertion of moral relativism between the heroic and democratic state of the long wronged Jewish people and a ragtag of vicious terrorists happy to be the cannon fodder of the principal terrorism-promoting state in the world — the primitive racist totalitarian theocracy of Iran.
Finally in the trifecta, in the bankruptcy of their imagination, our foreign policy makers have taken up the trite evasion of the outgoing Biden administration, that “Israel has a right to defend itself”, but we reserve the right to coach it on how to do that and this effectively limits self-defence to the expulsion of invaders but muffled and insulated retaliation against the invaders after they have been evicted from Israel. This is a formula for perpetual conflict and is a moral and military under-reaction to the enormity of Hamas’ provocation. What our government imagines it is accomplishing with this pallid, torpid, and ludicrous gesture surely escapes the imagination of all interested parties.
It must slightly bemuse the United States government that it is boycotted by Canada, which has benefited from an American guarantee of our security since President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking at Queen’s University in Kingston in 1938, said that the United States would not “stand idly by” if Canada were invaded by any power from another continent.
September 21, 2024
“This might be the greatest asymmetrical attack in human history”
Terrorist organizations in the Middle East always have to be aware of the risk of coming to the attention of Israel accidentally, and they’ve suffered losses whenever their operations have been prematurely exposed. The attack on Hezbollah’s communications infrastructure is, as Phil A. McBride says in The Line, “something genuinely new in warfare”:
The attack on Hezbollah’s communications through exploding pagers, radios, and other electronic devices triggered a cascade of instant memes.
Detonating the pagers and other devices would have been a relatively easy thing to do (to the extent that any of this was easy!), since it’s obvious that Israel had already penetrated the pager network, and Hezbollah’s communications generally, before the devices were even deployed. Once Israel was confident that they’d put all the devices into the right hands, they simply sent a message — remember, these devices are all intended to receive telecommunications — that somehow triggered the explosions we saw. I don’t know if the explosives did all the damage, or if the batteries were somehow overloaded as well. What is clear is that the explosions were enough to kill, injure and maim people who were directly holding the devices, but not much more. Videos posted online show people suddenly dropping to the ground in agony after their device explodes in their hands, pockets or backpacks, but people in their immediate vicinity are unharmed.
Again, none of this is easy, but if one is looking to remotely detonate a bomb, it helps when the bomb it intended to literally receive incoming communications.
[…]
That covers the pagers and two-way radios, but what about the other various items that exploded? While almost everything electronic you can buy these days has internet/wireless capability, Hezbollah went through a lot of trouble to be as disconnected from the internet as possible. I can only assume they wouldn’t have connected a device meant to read the fingerprints of terrorists trying to enter a safe house to the internet, where a Mossad hack is a constant threat. This means that any other device that exploded not only had explosive charges installed, but also a radio capable of receiving a remote detonation command. The most efficient approach would have been to tune those radios to the same frequencies used by Hezbollah’s two-way radios to minimize the infrastructure needed to pull off what was already an insanely complex operation, but we will need more information to even begin to understand that part of Israel’s plan.
And let’s talk about the plan. The level of sophistication for such an operation cannot be understated. Everything that we’ve seen over the last few days indicates a complete and total breakdown of Hezbollah’s internal security. Israel managed to intercept and infiltrate both their primary and backup communications networks before they were even deployed, as well as a swath of other electronic equipment, and turn them into bombs.
It has been said that communication is the most important component of any military system, but I don’t think anyone had ever thought of actually weaponizing the opposition’s communications infrastructure itself before now. This is something genuinely new in warfare.
September 4, 2024
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy indulges himself with a Trudeau-esque bit of geopolitical posturing
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill outlines the British government’s odd choice of timing to announce suspension of (some) arms shipments to Israel:
Bereft of vision, the modern politician is obsessed with “optics”. Which makes foreign secretary David Lammy’s announcement this week that the UK will be suspending some arms exports to Israel all the more surreal. The optics of withholding weapons from the Jewish State the day after we discovered that its enemy is so ruthless it will happily murder young Jews in cold blood are atrocious. Did not one functionary in the Foreign Office think to raise his or her hand and say: “Sir, should we at least wait until the bodies of those six Israeli hostages are cold before we shame and punish the nation they came from?”
This goes way beyond optics, of course. It is more than a failure of spin. It is a failure – a colossal, unforgivable one – of morality. As the bodies of the six slain Jews found in one of Hamas’s hellish lairs in Rafah were being transported back to a grief-stricken Israel, our government took action not against the Islamist extremists who carried out this unutterable atrocity, but against the nation that suffered it. Mere hours after the discovery of an act of fascistic savagery, our government handed a propaganda victory to the fascists by dragging Israel’s name through the mud. What were they thinking? Shameful doesn’t cover it.
Mr Lammy has said around 10 per cent of arms sales to Israel will be suspended. Thirty out of 350 arms-exports licences will be cancelled, primarily affecting parts for fighter jets, helicopters and drones. The reason for this smug, haughty smackdown of the Jewish State? Because there’s a “clear risk”, said Lammy, that such equipment will be used to “commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law”. Big talk from a politician who noisily supported the West’s imperial bombardment of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the widescale torture and rape of prisoners.
Many are damning Lammy’s partial embargo as gesture politics. “What is the point?”, headlines wonder. Denying Israel a few parts for planes won’t make much difference, some moan. For the frothing Israelophobes of the iffy left, nothing less than a complete arms embargo will do. They want not one gun to go to crazy Israel. If only there was a word to describe people who agitate morning, noon and night for the disarming of a Jewish nation that recently suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust.
The obsession with the partial nature of Lammy’s reprimanding of Israel misses the point. What the Foreign Office has just done is huge – and profoundly troubling. Sure, it won’t make much of a dent in Israel’s ability to fight Hamas, but it will cast aspersions on Israel’s fight against Hamas. It won’t militarily weaken Israel’s war on the pogromists that slaughtered more than a thousand of its people on 7 October, but it might morally weaken that war with its sly implication that there’s a criminal element to this crusade against Hamas’s army of anti-Semites. The partial arms embargo is indicative of something far more unsettling: a solidarity embargo as Britain slowly but surely turns its back on the Jewish nation.
