Twin Blasts At Soleimani Grave Kill Dozens On Assassination Anniversary
Four years ago today, a very strange thing happened: Donald Trump killed Qassem Soleimani.
That turn of events, perhaps more than any other development to that point, was a testament to just how bizarre our reality had become by 2020.
Trump killing Soleimani was like Roseanne Barr assassinating Xi Jinping. No version of history should include such a thing. It's as if the algorithms running our reality simulation misfired.
But it happened. Trump, a silver spoon socialite, ended one of the most
One of the surprises of the latest round of the Israel-Hamas conflict has been the reluctance of Iran, through Hezbollah, to open a northern front against Israel. Maybe this was the Islamists’ heartless way of saying (to Iran), “Wake up. We’re at war here”?
MFN, I believe the reluctance has to do with the fact that Israel has been so forceful in their response to Hamas. As I have suggested previously, the claims of “genocide” fail to imagine the battlefield logistics necessary to entirely kill Hamas, which importantly in turn may keep 100,000 Hezbollah fighters and their missiles (not to mention the IRGC) at bay.
Yeah, they’ve forcefully killed more than 15,000 women and children so far, half the population of Gaza is starving and one in four Gazans is at risk of famine. And Hamas isn’t “entirely killed.” You can’t “kill” an ideology. But you can kill women and children, and you can also suggest, as Ben-Gvir and Smotrich did over the last week, that Palestinians in Gaza should be kicked out permanently and relocated to Europe.
I’ve documented Hamas’s atrocities in grisly detail in these pages. Over and over and over again, in fact. Which is to say I’m the very last person who’s somehow in denial about what it is that Israel’s fighting for and fighting to avenge.
However, I will not countenance any effort to minimize the plight of Gazan innocents or even the appearance thereof. There are 15,000 and counting women and children dead there, and God only knows how many buried under the concrete.
This is what it is: A mini-genocide. No scare quotes are necessary.
It’s interesting that military and explosives experts also seem to not understand “the logistics.”
Has it occurred to you, AP, that maybe — just maybe — the IDF wants to kill these people? The women and the children too, I mean? Did you read The New York Times‘s account of what Hamas did to Israeli women on October 7? If so, don’t you think it’s at least possible that what you’re seeing in Gaza is the Israeli military saying, effectively, “Well, we can’t do that to you, as much as some of us would like to, so instead, we’ll just make up for what we can’t do by killing 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 of you the ‘regular’ way, with bombs, for every one of us you killed the crazy way.”?
Read that New York Times piece I’m referring to, then think how you’d feel if that was your wife, or your daughter, or your sister, and then tell me you wouldn’t drop a 2,000-pound bomb on a neighborhood full of women and kids if it meant killing two or three of the men who helped plan 18 hours of serial rape in your community.
I bet you’d drop that bomb. And even if you wouldn’t, I can assure you that some people with their fingers on those triggers at the IDF would.
And guess what? That’s still genocide (in this context) regardless of what prompted it. Maybe in other contexts it wouldn’t be genocide (i.e., if we weren’t talking about a conflict that’s inherently religious/ethnic) but you still can’t drop 2,000-pound bombs on women and children, regardless of what “their” men did to your women and children.
Well, you can. And Israel is. And they’re hardly the first military to do it, just like Hamas isn’t the first group to maraud through a town, rape the women and murder everybody in it. You know who else did that? The US military. In uniform. In Mail Lai. On March 16, 1968.
But if you drop those bombs, you shouldn’t be surprised when people call it what it is (in this case, it’s a mini-genocide given the unique circumstances, in another case it might be mass murder), just like Hamas shouldn’t be surprised when people say, “Hey, you’re murderous rapists.”
This is a terrible world, AP. Just ask the Old Testament God. He flooded the damn place because it was so terrible.
Actually I think about this probably every day. And I do not disagree with a single word you wrote here. I’d even posit the emotions are actually worse than you are suggesting, because there is tremendous resentment towards centuries of antisemitism boiling to the surface as well.
I think we are making some progress here though, because I am realizing that your definition of genocide (no scare quotes) would apply to pretty much any field of combat, from Gaza, to Ukraine, to Syria to Sudan to Vietnam (where roughly a million North Vietnamese civilians died) and so on. I guess I just wish you would differentiate between actions that occur in the fog of war in response to something as horrific as October 7th, versus say gas chambers or death marches or killing fields.
P.S. Ben-Givir and Smotrich (and for that matter Netenyahu as well) and all their disciples are terrible people and have been terrible for Israel and the world. We agree on this point as well.
The problem with the “differentiate” talking point is that if we say, “Well, only the Reich is capable of genocide,” then we risk increasing the odds of future genocides. What happened in Nazi Germany is an abomination, not an aberration. If we treat it as the latter, we’re running a very high risk of repeating it, or a higher risk than we otherwise might. This isn’t a new argument. In a lot of ways, it’s just common sense. The very last thing you want to do after a man-made catastrophe (which is to say a catastrophe that’s possible again as long as man is still around) is say, “Whoa. That was God awful. Good thing it was a one-off and can never happen again!” Or “Only this specific group of people are vulnerable, so as long as we protect them or arm them to the teeth so that they can protect themselves, we’ll never have another ‘real’ genocide.” Read this: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust
A good red-blooded conspiracy devotee might suggest that Israel would be brilliant to stage the attack when it was so obvious that they had little or nothing to gain from it.
I’d have to say that the obvious is right.
Update: as of 12:30 or so, CNN is reporting that ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attacks at the Soleimani anniversary. Makes sense. Makes even more sense if one believes, as some do, that Iran or one of its proxies tipped Israel off to the “safe” house location of Hamas bigwig Saleh al-Arouri. In the short to intermediate term, there are two “winners” in the region if Hamas is degraded as a political and military force — and one of them is Iran.
Thankful for these posts and information. I wasn’t alive for the post-Pearl Harbor reaction in this country, but was struck by two particular things following the other significant modern attack on our country on 9/11. First, that the rest of the world took notice and mourned with us — something we rarely do for other countries, or at least not nearly as extensively (we can’t even find most of them on an unlabeled map). But also the carte blanche blood lust that ensued where all of Islam and Muslims were suspect (even if they were Sikhs), and we could be collectively conned into conflating al Qaeda with Iraq/Saddam Hussein by some fictional yellowcake that was about as convincing as a second grade diorama. I wonder how we might react if one of the agreed-upon bad actors of the world decided to take out the closest thing we’ve had to a global-class terrorist, otherwise masquerading as failed casino operator and potential future president/dictator. Not sure I would shed a tear.