How can Israeli intel be so brilliant and yet so stupid at once?

How did they carry out the most successful and consequential covert operation in living memory but be unable to recognize the obvious signs leading up to Oct 7 or make the right calls re. Hezbollah? (1/6) To understand why Israeli intel has had such epic wins on the tactical level but the worst failures possible on the strategic level, recall that the people doing all the clever practical stuff are in no way related to the to the upper echelons that interface with decision makers.

Parts of the old Israeli elite establishment, noting their marginalisation on the political level, have nevertheless maintained their grip on some of the reins of power within the IDF, and particularly the intel community. (2/6)

Imagine being Irish and accusing others of being "settler colonialists"?

But this explains why Ireland, with only 2,000 Jews, has nevertheless become a primary exporter of Jew-hate. If your brightest 50% escape every generation, for 10 generations, you are left with Ireland. There are 10 times more Irish people (people with predominantly Irish heritage) in North America than in Ireland.

There are more Irish people in Sydney than in Dublin.

They displaced the natives. They are settlers.

If the reports that Assad's forces have retreated from Hama, handing it the rebels, are true, they will be retreating to mount a last stand at Homs.

If the rebels capture the Homs area, it is all over for Assad. His Alawite coastal heartland and all the ports (circled in pink) will be cut off from the capital Damascus.

Iran would lose access to all but two border crossings into Lebanon (mountain passes that Israel can, and routinely does, control via airstrikes.

The Kurds are also pushing into Deir Az Zor (circled in yellow), and if they succeed, Iran will lose its primary supply route to Hezbollah (they will be forced to run the gauntlet across the Syrian desert, within easy reach of US bases).

The best case for Assad is that his poorly paid troops can hold Homs, allowing him to keep a rump state (the blue circled area). If he can't, expect huge bloodletting as the hated Alawites reap the whirlwind of their 50 years of oppression of all the other groups.

The future of Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Assad depend on what happens in Homs.

For Israel the safest result is probably that Assad holds the blue circled area in his hugely weakened state, while the Kurds take enough strongpoints in the desert to cut the Iran-Lebanon routes, or to funnel them such they become easy pickings and unsustainable. As for Iran, there is really no best case scenario for them. They have lost most of their ability to sustain or resupply their militias in Syria and Lebanon en masse, even if things stay as they are.

An hour after I posted this—predicting that calls for "Intifada" will inevitably lead to bloodshed in the West that will be blamed, as always, somehow, on Jews—the execrable Owen Jones got the ball rolling in advance.

Using an image of the Tavistock Square attack (where an Israeli woman and a Jewish woman, a family friend of mine, were among the 13 dead), this Big Lie blood-libel to ensure that when the Jihadis come, everyone knows who is really to blame...

His real message is "Jews, Western people: Stop supporting Israel or you'll deserve what the terrorist have planned."

Why does this "Root Cause Game" always end at "Jew"? The Jihadi/far-left playbook:

1. Spread propaganda about how evil Jews are.
2. People attack Jews.
3. Wait for Jews to fight back.
4. Paint Jews as aggressors.
5. Back to step 1.

Rinse and repeat. The smart ones keep their hands clean, but are just as critical to the plan.

Why would Israel sign a ceasefire with Lebanon when it has reduced Hezbollah from a mighty army to a disjointed rabble? Why not "finish the job"? The reason is simple: Israel’s primary goal—neutralizing Hezbollah as a strategic threat and thereby leaving Iran exposed—has been achieved to its satisfaction. The extra benefit is not worth the marginal cost—to Israel, but not to Lebanon.

Most Israelis oppose the decision and would prefer that Israel finish the job. The Lebanese—many of whom, including a significant number of Shia, now want Hezbollah gone—seem even more disappointed.

Hezbollah posed four major threats to Israel. Let’s break them down and examine if and how they’ve been neutralized. (1/6) 1. The Most Serious Threat: Border Breach and Mass Infiltration

Hezbollah had the capability to secretly amass up to 15,000 fighters near the border, ready to breach it in a surprise attack akin to the events of October 7. Such an operation, while suicidal for most attackers, would have inflicted massive damage on Israel. Tens of thousands of civilians could have been killed, and military bases overrun.

This threat has been completely eliminated. Hezbollah’s infrastructure in the first-line border villages, as well as its main forward bases in Khiam and Bint Jbeil, has been captured and systematically destroyed. These installations, which took 25 years to build, have been rendered unusable. Under total surveillance, Hezbollah has no chance of rebuilding them, making an asymmetric invasion impossible. (2/6)

Why can't the left podcast?

Tldr—it's because the left has been hijacked by a stultifying orthodoxy that forces its adherents to say things they don't believe, and nobody wants to listen to the obviously disingenuous. And insincerity kills charisma.

It's not for want of of billionaires, as billionaire-employed Taylor Lorenz argues, and the Republicans certainly didn't "build Joe Rogan" as she implies. (1/5) The left can't do long form because their ideology is an orthodoxy. Orthodoxies don't function via discussion and debate—the lifeblood of podcasting—it works via rules and creeds witch-hunts and heresies. There is nothing to talk about, just people to praise and others to pillory. (2/5)

Why, I wondered, was every blood-hungry antisemite and Hamas fan on this site suddenly citing a junior educator at a third-rate London college, claiming to be a "scholar of pogroms," Brendan McGeever?

Turns out it’s because the Pears family generously showers him with money to write books nobody reads about the "sociology of antisemitism." How strange, then, that he has become an overnight hero to antisemites! Why?

Unlike his newly found claque of jew-haters, I actually read his long, windy thread so you don’t have to.

TL;DR: What happened in Amsterdam wasn’t a pogrom, wasn’t antisemitic, and saying that it was is actually rrrrr-racist! (1/8) This is the argument:

1. Certain academics have (arbitrarily) defined the word "pogrom" in Marxist terms, such that the victim must be a racial minority "structurally exploited" by an oppressor racial/religious group. (You see, it’s settled: sociologists agree, that’s what the word means.)

2. The victims were Israeli Jews, not good—I mean, "vanilla" Jews! (In reality, it was explicitly a "Jew hunt," and people from dozens of nations were attacked as "suspected Jews.") (2/8)

Will the 1,000s of American troops and CIA agents stationed in Qatar just stand idle as arch-terrorists with the blood of hundreds of Americans on their hands drive past the their embassy and step into their private jets and fly off into the sunset?

Qatar isn't expelling the Hamas leadership because the Biden administration asked them to, but because they correctly suspect that the incoming Trump administration will demand their arrest and extradition.

They must be arrested, extradited, tried and hopefully executed. Anything less is a humiliation for the USA. A reminded that Qatar is a fake country, with a tiny actual population, served by an army of foreign workers.

Even their police force and parts of their paltry military is staffed by foreigners.

This is why they hold their noses and invite the Kuffar USA (that they fund Al Jazeera to propagandize against) onto their little appendage to the Arabian Peninsula, since otherwise they would soon be overrun by the Saudi rivals.

Qatar needs the USA far more than the other way round. The USA could pack up its toys in weeks and Qatar would be gone within months.

When Trump publicly told Israel to attack Iran's nuclear sites a few weeks back, he set up the next 10 weeks as peak danger time for the Middle East if he won, and he has won, so here we are.

1. Iran has lost Hamas and Hezbollah, proxies it used to deter Israel. (1/5) 2. Iran has lost control of its airspace along with much of its air defence network.

3. Iran is still reeling from finding out how deeply their elites are penetrated by spies. They are likely very busy chasing their own tails.

4. They are losing their influence agents and fellow travellers who have held positions of power in the USA since 2008, and ensured that the US is hamstrung and appeasement-focused in everything relating to Iran. (2/5)

Why is Israel destroying so many buildings in these border villages? Random vengeance?

The truth is accidentally revealed by anti-Israel researcher Evan Hill: The blank patch (i.e., almost no buildings are damaged) between Ayta al-Shab and Yaroun is Rmaich. (1/4) Despite the negligence of the Lebanese government and UNIFIL, the citizens of this Christian village fought all attempts to turn the bucolic mountain township into a terror base to destroy Israel. They bravely defied Hezbollah, unlike their neighbors. (2/4)

Even as the main story in the Middle East has been the Turkish revenge carpet bombing of Kurds in Syria and Iraq, Sky News' Turkey based "Special Correspondent" Alex Crawford has only been writing about Gaza on X.

In fact, amazingly for a truth-seeking journalist who actually lives in Turkey where 20-25% of the people are from the heavily oppressed Kurdish minority, it's now more than 5 years since she used the word "Kurd" in any over her 1,000s of X post.

Surely she is terribly moved by the plight of the Kurds in the country she calls home, at least as much as she is by the Hamas "fighters" and Hezbollah "activists" she seems to so love?

Imagine a foreign correspondent who lived in Israel, who never managed to find the opportunity to use the word "Palestinian" or "Arab" over 5 years.

Wouldn't that seem odd?

Iran barely failed to assassinate Netanyahu this morning, only because he wasn't where he usually is on a Saturday morning at dawn, in bed at his weekend beach house. If I were a senior IRGC member I know what I would be doing right now: Getting dressed up in my finest burka, and heading across the mountains to Pakistan, because this is what is called a casus belli.

This is the north facade of Netanyahu's Caesarea house, hit by an Iranian drone. Of the five large windows on the upper floor facing the pool, only one has had a steel and blast proof glass contraption added. Why might that be...

This leaked and now widely shared photo is clearly taken from inside Bibi's garden, by somebody with security clearance, which is almost as bad a failure as the fact that this drone got through, despite being tracked by an Apache, and without the local sirens going off. This is his response to the assassination attempt, without addressing it directly, in a rare Shabbat broadcast:

With Sinwar dead, 31 of the initial 54 "playing card" leaders are confirmed dead (58%), others are undoubtedly dead too, but unconfirmed by Israel.

Assuming that the Hamas rank and file are dying at the same rate (in truth, they are certainly dying more), and taking the median estimate for Hamas' initial strength at 35,000, we can predict that c. 21,000 Hamas men are dead. At the at least 3,000 captured alive, and a conservative 5,000 severely injured, and we can see that Hamas are down to just a few thousand fighters.

The IDF has achieved this while losing 350 of their own, a kill ratio of 60 to 1, while keeping the combatant-civilian casualty ratio at a record low in modern warfare. Despite the unprecedented civilian setting and the weaponzing of the laws of war agaisnt them.

This is the real reason Hamas are done. Sinwar is just a trophy. The only "household name" figures that Hamas has left are:

1. Khaled Mashal (in Qatar)
2. Abu Obeida (just a spokesman, a Hamas Daniel Hagari, not a real leader)
3. Mohamed Sinwar
4. Mousa Abu Marzook (in Qatar)
5. Husam Badran (in Qatar)
6. Osama Hamdan (in Lebanon)
7. Zaher Jabarin (in Turkey)
8. Ghazi Hamas (in Lebanon?)

To not offend some of the 1.5% of Michiganders who are Muslim, Harris picked a dud VP, Tim Walz, instead of Josh Shapiro—who would have sealed PA for her, but alas, is a Jew.

If she loses Michigan or PA by 1-2%—and with it the election—she will richly deserve her defeat. As this poll shows, it didn't even help her. It was a bad play. As was obvious it would be. Stupid people are advising her.

The NYT reveals why Hamas attacked when they did and how they successfully tricked the IDF into complacency.

The 2023 weekly protests in Israel tricked Hamas into thinking that Israel was on the verge of civil war. It wasn't. The protests were part of the normal democratic process and looked much more dramatic and well supported than they were thanks to friendly press narratives. But Hamas didn't know that.

Hamas tricked Israel, but Israel accidentally tricked Hamas.

The net result of this dual information mismatch was Ocotber 7, and then the decimation of Hamas and now their Hezbollah allies.

Hamas and Hezbollah are both explicitly genocidal groups who had spent 20 years amassing suicide armies on Israel's borders, waiting to attack. Israeli society's inadvertent deception of Hamas, alongside the IDF's laughable credulity to Hamas' lies, accidentally saved Israel from a much worse joint attack that would one day have come.

Ocotber 7 was Israel's darkest day, but in 50 years, it might be seen as the day Israel was saved.
This is from just 4 days before the calamity. Everyone in Israel knew that the pilots were bluffing and would obviously show up to serve in any war. But Hamas didn't know that.

Other nations get to mourn their dead in peace. But Jews mustn't cry: Jewish tears are "weapons of war," explains the Guardian, memorials to Jewish dead are just rallying points for "limitless violence."

Jews don't count—and they don't get to count their dead either.
A new low. Just imagine the artist designing this sick parody of a memorial to the victims of October 7, with the star-less flag ribbon and the faceless victims. @Freedland stopped writing for the Jewish Chronicle after 25 years over something far more trivial, and wrote a catty letter to the editor, @JakeWSimons . I am sure any day now he will hand in his notice at the Guardian.

This thread from a month ago aged well, and faster than I imagined. The end game is here.

Hamas' Al Aksa flood didn’t flood Israel. Instead, it has been swept away by Israel's rising tide, dooming its Hezbollah allies and quenching the Ring of Fire that Iran spent 30 years building around Israel, crippling its own economy in the process.

Iran was playing chess, but Hamas didn’t understand the game and didn’t realize it was just a pawn. (1/14) I wrote that thread a month ago because I realized almost nobody had any idea what the real game was.

People needed to know that Hamas and Hezbollah did not exist to "liberate Palestine." They were nowhere near powerful enough to do that. Their purpose was to protect the otherwise defenseless Iranian regime and its nuclear program from Israeli attack. (2/14)

I almost feel bad for Hezbollah. They’ve spent the 18 years since the Second Lebanon War preparing for this day.

They dug bunkers and tunnels, turned bedrooms into missile silos, and mosques into fortifications. (1/8) They concealed firing positions under bushes across Lebanon's hills and in the Bekaa Valley. They carefully distributed their weapons.

But in those 18 years, Israel has been working too, and the technological advances in that time have vastly increased Israel's edge. (2/8)

Hamas Qatar & Iran meticulously executed a hybrid warfare strategy—the goal being to sacrifice its own people just to shower Israel with bad press.

Israel's dismal, disjointed reply is best encapsulated by the firing of its 2 most talented spox for petty personal reasons. (1/4) Sinwar's goal wasn't military, they are not stupid.

They knew they couldn't conquer Israel's 10 million people with 3,000 men.

Their plan was to draw Israel into a war, and then use their carefully built PR operation to isolate Israel, and fracture it internally. (2/4)

In March, after analysing satelite maps and speaking to friends who had been in Gaza, I predicted the IDF plan, which has finally come to fruition today. Israeli tanks are now busy taking control of the port of Khan Younis (red dot) having vacated and cleared the third corridor at Gaza's narrowest point at Kisufim.

Alongside the ever widening Rafah corridor that hermetically cuts Hamas off from resupply, and the now 6km wide Netzarim corridor with its 5 fortified bases that separates Gaza City from the rest of the Strip, Gaza is now cut into three. The humanitarian zone is now also cut in two by the new corridor.

Expect this new corridor to be fortified with bases. I would not be surprised if the IDF decided to form two additional corridors (yellow lines) to separate Beit Hanoun from Gaza City and to separate Rafah from Khan Younis.

The 1km buffer zone along the border looks to also be almost entirely cleared.

There are also a number of other military roads that have had large areas around the cleared of obstacles meaning that the IDF can sit back in their bases but be at any point in Strip with 5 minutes and via unpredictable routes. The point is to make the Gaza Strip strategically controllable by a minimal IDF force.

The only urban areas that the IDF have yet to enter in force (though they are already starting) are the towns in the central portion, Deir al Balah and Nuseirat. Only there can the Hamas infrastructure still be anything like its pre-war level.

It is almost certain that most of the remaining Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, are hiding out there, as are most of the most remaining hostages. They are now surrounded on four sides, with no hope of resupply, totally enemy surveillance as if they were in a fish tank.

The IDF has played this really well. They played the slow game, perhaps against their will and under US pressure, but managed to reduce Hamas from a dug in mighty army able to fire 1,000 rockets at hour to a insurgent rabble who can only fire a rocket on special occasions.

Hamas are contained and almost totally defeated. Israel did this at a cost of 330 heroes while eliminating 17,000 enemies, taking 5,000 POWs, and taking many 1,000s more out of the fight via injury. In the meantime, the Hamas T-gram groups I follow are ignoring this harbinger of their defeat and instead are laughing about a guy who had to run out of his rocket struck house in a towel in the Golan this morning.

Whatever helps them cope.

I read the New York Times hit-job on Bari Weiss, so you don't have to.

She's a heretic. A witch. Did you know she is a Jew? Her friends are Jews. She is a witch. Actually, she does Jewish stuff. She loves money. Oh, she is rich... and a Jew. Heretic. Burn. The. Witch... JEW. Some selections. The rare gentile to get a mention is as you would expect going to quoted with a snide remark.

Honestly, it's quite balsy on the NYT to print such a catty article about someone that was bullied out of her job at their own paper...