Every morning, I read a bunch of news reports, helped by a couple of news aggregators as Android apps. Global and local news, that is. The quality of the news reports is abysmal these days; I remember how, some 20 years ago, I could have a fabulous view of everything that happened all around the globe, thanks to the local correspondents of Radio France Internationale and the BBC World Service. I was able to get valuable insights regarding countries from Southeast Asia to Latin America, without ignoring Africa. Nowadays, the mainstream media has a severe form of ADHD, and in the worst possible way: it can only focus on a couple of stories at a time, and it fails to come with relevant follow-ups. And yet, I am a consumer of news—not an avid one, but I still try to get informed. It doesn’t help much—if anything, it can trigger a mental depression—but I just can’t help myself.

Being informed is important to me. Jules Verne wrote many novels about exotic and less exotic places without having visited more than a few countries, most likely only England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, and the United States. From his easy chair, he let his imagination flow, while being as well-informed as he could. He gathered information from books, maps, and accounts from explorers and travelers. There was no Internet back then, and even less radio broadcasters, but he strove to be informed—and he succeeded!

Two news of all have triggered anger in me a couple of hours ago. Maybe it’s just a form of sadness, but a bit of anger too. In this post, only one of them—the second one in a future post.

MOSSAD über alles

The simultaneous explosion of hundreds of pagers (beepers) across Lebanon that led to the death of at least 12 people, including 2 children, and injuring nearly 3,000, was an obvious MOSSAD operation. I didn’t need to read opinions about who was behind it.

Today, I’ve only learned that the Gold Apollo AR-924 pager batch affected by this “supply chain attack” was not manufactured in Taiwan. The Hungarian company BAC Consulting Kft has used the Gold Apollo name under license, and the Taiwanese company was in no way involved in the design and manufacturing of this device. (Kft stands for korlátolt felelősségű társaság, and it means PLC or Ltd. Atrocious language; it’s more difficult than Finnish and Icelandic.)

Good job, MOSSAD!

As I was writing this, a second operation took place: Hezbollah walkie-talkies exploded in Lebanon! Hand-held radios used by Hezbollah detonated late on Wednesday afternoon across the country’s south and in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing at least 3 people, just one day after the wave of exploding pagers! CNN: “The devices that detonated in a fresh wave of explosions in Lebanon on Wednesday were walkie-talkies, a security source told CNN. Preliminary information suggested that there were between 15 and 20 explosions in southern suburbs of Beirut, and a further 15 to 20 blasts in southern Lebanon, the source said.” Al Jazeera: Smartphones, intercoms, radios, and solar panels have exploded throughout various regions of Lebanon. Lebanon’s health ministry: at least 9 dead and more than 300 wounded. UPDATE on the walkie-talkie issue: Icom IC-V82 was produced in Japan by Wakayama Icom Inc. between 2004 and 2014, and has been since then discontinued. A more recent count: at least 20 dead and over 450 injured.

Wow, MOSSAD must be on steroids!

I won’t link to any informative article, as there are only too many, and the situation is still somewhat fluid. I opted for an opinion column in WaPo: The ominous implications of the pager attack against Hezbollah. If you’re not using Bypass Paywalls, you’ll might need to access this archived version, but you won’t be able to read any of the 2.1k+ comments.

The above article still offers all the relevant information, but I selected it for the following assertion: “This sharp escalation and risk of a wider war comes less than two months before the presidential election — and it might detonate any chance of a Gaza cease-fire deal and the release of Israeli hostages.”

My feelings exactly. The increasing number of comments to that column are more or less as expected: some praise Israel and wish Hezbollah a warm place in Hell, while others insist that Israel is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and the author of the column shouldn’t consider this MOSSAD operation legitimate. Why not? Because, despite the pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives, they exploded while their bearers were in random places, including markets and supermarkets, therefore the collateral victims, fortunately most hurt, not killed, are random and totally innocent. Here’s a selected comment:

Well, it’d be decent if Israel let independent international journalist into Gaza to disprove these “accusations”, but they don’t because they are actively ethnically cleansing Palestinians. They have the sophistication to target individual Hezbollah members via pagers but can’t avoid indiscriminately bombing civilians in Gaza? Please. Also, just because a group has historically been the victims of atrocities (Jews during the Holocaust) doesn’t give them a free pass in the future to then commit atrocities against other groups of people without scrutiny nor consequences. The Palestinians did not cause the Holocaust, so why did they pay for the atrocities Germany conducted against the Jews by having their lands forcibly stolen? Why didn’t Germany give up their own land in reparations??

Now, let me state the following:

  • Lebanon does have a Hezbollah problem, but it’s not governed by Hezbollah, despite some claims to the contrary. Israel likes to pretend that Hezbollah and its allies (including the Amal Movement and the Free Patriotic Movement) won a majority in the parliament in the 2018 general elections. However, Hezbollah itself secured only 13 seats in an 128 seats Lebanese Parliament, so only 10%. In the current government, it has two ministers: one for the Ministry of Agriculture and one for the Ministry of State for Parliamentary Affairs. So no, Lebanon is not Hezbollah; South Lebanon is another story, and the lack of a real governmental control in the south is obvious.
  • If we’re to talk about questionable members of a government, why don’t we examine the composition of Israeli’s one? Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security, has been previously convicted in a court of law of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist group. Wikipedia: “Before 2020, Ben-Gvir was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.” But Israel’s High Court supports Ben-Gvir. Then, Aryeh Deri, who served as the Vice Prime Minister, Minister of Health, and Minister of the Interior and Periphery between December 2022 and January 2023, was convicted of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Current ministers oposing a Palestinian statehood and supporting the expansion of illegal settlements in West Jordan include: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (an illegal settler in the occupied West Bank himself!); National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir; Minister of Justice and Deputy Prime Minister Yariv Levin; Minister of Housing & Construction Yitzhak Goldknopf (head of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party); Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Avi Dichter (“Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”); Minister of Immigration and Absorption, Ofir Sofer; Minister of Heritage Amihai “Why don’t we nuke Gaza?” Eliyahu; Minister of Settlements and National Missions Orit Strook.
  • The emphasized rhetorical question is perfectly valid: They have the sophistication to target individual Hezbollah members via pagers but can’t avoid indiscriminately bombing civilians in Gaza?
  • Another question: Why now?

Ladies and gentlemen, let me present you the very first conspiracy theory I’ve produced in a long while, and the only one posted to this blog. It just occurred to me as having a high likelihood.

  1. It’s known that members of the Female Combat Intelligence Collection Corps in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have reported unusual activity near the Gaza fence and raised alarms prior to the October 7, 2023, attack, but they have been ignored by higher authorities in the Israeli government and military.
  2. It’s known that units from the IDF were extremely late to arrive in the areas attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and when they arrived, IDF’s helicopters and armored vehicles killed indeterminately, both attackers and Israeli victims, thus artificially raising the number of dead Israelis. Since October 13, 2023, I wrote 14 posts supplemented by dozens of comments on the ongoing conflict (massacre, rather) in Gaza.
  3. It’s known that Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu has been facing an ongoing corruption trial since 2020, being accused of fraud, breach of trust, bribery, and media manipulation in several cases (Case 1000, Case 2000, and Case 4000). However, due to the current state of emergency in Israel, particularly following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the ongoing conflict in Gaza, the legal process has been suspended indefinitely.
  4. It’s known that Bibi made all he could do in order to make the Oslo Accords impossible to implement, because he never wanted a 2-state solution to exist, and he never agreed that Palestinians have the right to statehood.
  5. It is known that, since October, 7, Israel ramped up its military assaults on the occupied West Bank, and the number of Palestinian children killed by Israel has more than doubled since then: “Between 7 October and 14 August, 115 children were shot dead in the territory, nearly triple the amount in the preceding 10 months, which stood at 39 killed. Additionally, at least 1,400 children have been wounded in the same time period.”
  6. It’s known that Bibi aims to dismantle and destroy the Axis of Resistance, including the Hezbollah, Hamas, Syrian groups, and Islamic Iran.

I suppose you’re also aware of the conspiracy theory around Pearl Harbor, be it false or not. It says that the US, more specifically FDR (President Franklin D. Roosevelt), was aware of the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, but allowed it to happen because it needed a reason to persuade the Congress to declare war on Japan and Nazi Germany. Even if it wasn’t what actually happened (we’ll never know for sure), I can see a pattern here.

Suppose Bibi wanted a reason to completely destroy Gaza and make it inhabitable, under the pretext of annihilating Hamas. And suppose he wouldn’t care about the price paid, as he usually doesn’t care about human lives. Bibi was Prime Minister during the peaceful 2018–2019 Gaza border protests, in which IDF snipers killed 223 Palestinians and mutilated thousands by shooting them in the knees. If he’s willing to kill 41,000 Palestinians, to destroy beyond repair 45% of the houses in Gaza and to leave 1.1M Gazans without a home, and if he’s not willing to do anything to liberate 100 hostages, the price of 1,200 Israelis is not too high a price. After all, in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the toll was 2,400 Americans! Even the July 27 rocket attack on the northern Druze town of Majdal Shams that killed 12 children and teenagers, attributed to Hezbollah, is questioned by some, as no independent review was possible. One has to just trust the IDF, but this attack served as the ideal pretext for a stronger involvement of Israel in Lebanon. So my theory is this: Bibi wanted October 7 to happen as a motivation for this War of the Worlds started by Israel! It could have been prevented, but this is exactly what Bibi didn’t want to do! As a collateral advantage, his trial will keep being suspended.

Maybe I’m wrong, but the above theory seems possible to me.

By all imaginable definitions and regardless of the justification, Israel has committed two acts of terror in Lebanon these days. This will have consequences. And I expect an unprecedented, massive conflict in the Middle East, like never before. Iran + Russia = ❤️

An update regarding the first operation, the explosion of pagers, as reported by the BBC:

In an interview with the BBC, an ophthalmologist at Mount Lebanon University Hospital in Beirut said the past 24 hours there had been “a nightmare”.

“Unfortunately, we were not able to save a lot of eyes,” Dr Elias Warrak said, adding that more than 60 to 70% of the patients ended up with at least one eye removed.

“Some of the patients, we had to remove both eyes. It kills me. In my past 25 years in practice, I’ve never removed as many eyes as I did yesterday.”

Very nice. Israel is going to be loved more and more in the region!

As a side note, while we’re rightfully blaming the atrocious regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, look what medieval titles you can find in the Washington Post:

At least, America never bombed anyone. Oh, wait…