Back on May 1, I linked to this Michael Totten post from Israel, titled Everything Could Explode at Any Moment”;
Last year I drove down from Beirut into Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon along the border with Israel. Aside from Hezbollah’s other miniature state-within-a-state in the suburbs south of Beirut, the border region is the craziest place in the country.
The Lebanese government doesn’t control it and cannot police it. The army is not allowed to go down there. Soldiers I’ve talked to refer to the southern-most checkpoint before the Hezbollah-occupied zone as “the border.” Psychotic road-side propaganda shows severed heads, explosions from suicide-bombs, and murderous tyrants from Iran and Syria.
Lisa Goldman and I decided to drive up there and take a look from the Israeli side.
“I should warn you,” I said in the car. “Something is wrong on the border. Something bad is going to happen.”
“Why do you say that?” she said.
I told her what I knew, what had recently happened when I tried to visit the border again from the Lebanese side just two weeks before.
[…]
“I say this to my guys every morning: Everything could explode at any moment. Just after I said it this morning a bus load of pensioners showed up on a field trip. An old woman brought us some food. It’s crazy. They shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here.”
“What’s happening here is very unusual,” Zvika, the Israeli Defense Forces Spokesman, said. But he wouldn’t tell me what, exactly, was so unusual. Shortly after I left the country, a story broke in the Daily Telegraph that explained it.
Iran has moved into South Lebanon. Intelligence agents are helping Hezbollah construct watch towers fitted with one-way bullet-proof windows right next to Israeli army positions.
Here’s what one officer said:
This is now Iran’s front line with Israel. The Iranians are using Hizbollah to spy on us so that they can collect information for future attacks. And there is very little we can do about it.
If you didn’t read it then, do so now. Complete with lots of original photos.
If all out war erupts at the Lebanese border, try to remember just who it is that Israel is fighting. It’s not Lebanon.
More
Bill Roggio has more on the Iranian angle.
The sophistication of this attack [in which 8 Israeli soldiers were killed and 2 captured] indicates Imad Fayez Mugniyah, Hezbollah’s chief of military operations was directly involved. Mugniyah has a long history of successful military and terrorist operations across the globe. Mugniyah has a history of conducting similar snatch and grab operations against the Israelis. He was responsible for capturing three Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, and the abduction of an Israeli colonel in Kuwait in 2000.
Mugniyah began his career in terrorism in the 1970s with Force 17, the personal bodyguard detachment for Yassar Arafat, and later joined Hezbollah. His more infamous terror attacks include the April 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63; the October 1983 simultaneous truck bombings on the U.S. Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Marines and 58 French soldiers; the hijacking of TWA 847; the kidnappings and murders of U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic personnel in Beirut; the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1992, killing 29 people; the bombing of an Israeli cultural center in 1994, killing 86 people. He is suspected of direct involvement in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. servicemen.
Mugniyah has extensive links with the Iranian intelligence services, and has been directly linked to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and recently deceased al-Qaeda in Iraq commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Mugniyah is on FBI’s list of 22 most wanted terrorists, with a $5 million dollar reward for information leading to his capture. U.S. Special Forces aborted a raid to capture Mugniyah in the Persian Gulf in 1996. He was believed to have visited Syria in January of 2006, attending a meeting with Iranian President Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Assad.
Drudge is collecting MSM items on world reaction, while you can count on Instapundit and Pajamas Media for other developments and commentary around the blogosphere.
Stingray has thoughts on the potential implications for Hezbollah plans to transport the two abducted Israeli soldiers to Iran.
ET – the day Israel was declared an independent state its Arab neighbors attacked on all fronts. Israel earned its right just surviving that and with every subsequent unprovoked Arab war to be a state. There have always been Jews living in Israel. Not all Jews left in the Diaspora. Their claims to that land have always been valid by their numbers too. Let it go. It has no bearing on the righteousness of Israel’s position now.
Just like the IRA and Ulster, too damn bad, the demographics shifted with time and history. You have choices. Terrorism is the craven one.
The Fourth Way is to crush these monsters like bugs once and for all. Grab all of the hostile territory that you can. Occupy it and do search and destroy missions until you’ve killed every cockroach that would do you harm. Otherwise, the Islamofascists will reconstitute themselves. They always do.
We’ve always made Israel fight with one hand tied behind their back. Arabs never win conventional wars which is in Israel’s favor if that’s what Iran is thinking.
The reason Arabs lose: wwww.meforum.org/article/441
Bless the Israelis. Every dead Islamofascist is one we don’t have to face.
Nemo2;
Revnant Dream said: “Perhaps this is the point we get serious with Iran & Syria”.
I think it would be obvious I meant the Anglo Alliance. Besides do you think Harper is juicing up the Military for a display? This is a world war buddy. When I use we, I mean where all charged with the responsablity to end this barbarian wave.
Never count us out. We just came back from the brink of the socialist pit, the liberals where damning us too. It takes time to build up.
Revnant Dream …..I hope you’re right and that ‘we’ does include ‘us’…..but, when I read the feedback posts at the Globe & Mail, (for example), I have serious doubts that Canada will remain a part of ‘we’ for long………the Trudeaupian heritage has permeated the Canadian psyche for too long, I fear.
From a recent Hugh Hewitt-Mark Steyn conversation:
HH: Now when President Ahmadinejead of Iran comes out and says if you strike against Syria, you’re hitting against the Islamic world, and a fierce response will call…the mask is off, really. It hadn’t been on very tightly to begin with, but it’s really off now. It is one war. Do you think anyone will quarrel with this?
MS: I think it is one war. You know, I think we forget how much of the present depravity derives from the Palestinian situation. Going back to 1971, the Palestinians assassinated this guy in an Egyptian hotel. They shoot him dead in the lobby, and as he falls to the parquet, the guys who killed him rushed forward and start drinking his blood. You know, a lot of the death cults started in this…with this particular situation, and it is metastasized, and I think it is one war. And that’s the difficulty that Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair and people like that have, that they can’t…they’re on the right side…you can’t be on the right side against Islamism everywhere but Gaza and the West Bank.
HH: But they never wanted to believe, and I sense that in the Hitchens interview yesterday. He does not want to believe it is Islamism, because if it is, then the die is cast. It’s more about oh, the poor Palestinians and the two state solution. But the two state solution, Israel would gladly accept, it’s the Islamists don’t want it.
MS: No, they don’t, and I think it’s interesting when one looks at what has happened in Gaza and the West Bank over the last couple of years. The West Bank, by the standards of these things, is comparatively civilized. Gaza, which has been left to the Palestinians, as you say, the mask is off. You suddenly realize they’ve got no interest in nation building, no interest in state building. There is no Palestinian nationalist movement. The salient fact about Gaza is that the average age in Gaza, the median age is 15.6 years. You’re dealing with a population of unemployed teenage boys, raised in a death cult, and encouraged to think that Jew killing is the highest fulfillment of life.
HH: You touched on something very important. There is a Palestinian nationalist movement, but it’s primarily in the United States and other places, not in Palestine. I’ve had a number of law students who are Palestinians, and their parents are quite successful in the United States. And they want a state. But I think they’re watching their dream dissolve because of Islamism.
====
ET shares the same problem as Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair.
This is the end of a real insight piece by a well versed Michael Ledeen. It helps to have this in your back pocket.
-ttp://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDE4MDA3NDUyYjA0ZGY1MzQ4NjM5NjM1MWY4NDVkZGM=
As do millions of Syrians and Iranians. And you know what? Millions of Arabs all over the Middle East do too. Give them a chance to fight for their freedom, as we did with the Georgians. The longer we dither, the more likely it becomes that we will sadly and unnecessarily find ourselves in a military confrontation of some sort, with all the terrible consequences that entails.
Faster, please. Your options are narrowing. You cannot escape the mullahs. You must either defeat them or submit to their terrible vision. There is no other way.
— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
=================== TG
well well. i see alot of discussion on israel and all of them by non-israelis.
this is the sad fact of the so called academic circles that we israelis have so much contempt for.
we want peace and want to live with our palestinian brothers who were here before we came. we are ashkeniazis and sephardic. no jews were really here except for some ultra -orthodx in jerusalem who actually were really pissed off with the new jews who really “plopped” there from russia, germany and the rest of europe, also usa.
so now we had this real shit of a mix, ultra-orthodox, secular, and orthodox and the bastard new york settlers who really screwed up the scene for israel./
now there are some north american jews who think that they own israel and are more israeli than us.
all i have to say is that leave us alone go and drive in your suvs and leave us alone.
we dont want your money and your radical beliefs.
we want to live and make peace with our neighbors.
we have to do it at any cost otherwise we will all have to wind up this experiment of plopping israelis. we even made modern hebrew. imagine what we will do to hang on here and get an identity.
we dont hate muslims, if we were muslims we would be just like them. if someone took my house then i too would become a suicide bomber.
who knows but please ashkhe-nazis leave us alone. you have brought only conflict and death.
well well. i see alot of discussion on israel and all of them by non-israelis.
this is the sad fact of the so called academic circles that we israelis have so much contempt for.
we want peace and want to live with our palestinian brothers who were here before we came. we are ashkeniazis and sephardic. no jews were really here except for some ultra -orthodx in jerusalem who actually were really pissed off with the new jews who really “plopped” there from russia, germany and the rest of europe, also usa.
so now we had this real shit of a mix, ultra-orthodox, secular, and orthodox and the bastard new york settlers who really screwed up the scene for israel./
now there are some north american jews who think that they own israel and are more israeli than us.
all i have to say is that leave us alone go and drive in your suvs and leave us alone.
we dont want your money and your radical beliefs.
we want to live and make peace with our neighbors.
we have to do it at any cost otherwise we will all have to wind up this experiment of plopping israelis. we even made modern hebrew. imagine what we will do to hang on here and get an identity.
we dont hate muslims, if we were muslims we would be just like them. if someone took my house then i too would become a suicide bomber.
who knows but please ashkhe-nazis leave us alone. you have brought only conflict and death.