Israel's Mossad spy agency planted a small amount (3 gm) of explosives inside 5,000 pagers made by Gold Apollo (a Taiwanese company). "The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code." 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm's brand, "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking,
> Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm's brand, "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"
He also said it was strange he got paid from "Middle East". That statement of his also indicates this was not a long standing "licensing" agreement. Someone likely called up from "Europe" and asked for the license for that specific device.
Conclusion: the company in Europe is a paper fiction. The devices were made in "Israel" and the only time they may have been in Europe was to get them from Middle East to so a "European" company can ship them back.
This also means Hezbollah has an asset in its upper ranks. We can assume this since they announced before "We're gonna use pagers from now on folks" and thus prior to this Shin Bet had no reason to run a cutout in "Europe" making pagers. The entire production chain was then a fiction setup likely recently, certainly post "headsup everyone, pagers" announcement by the targeted organization.
So the chain of events is clear:
- "Did all you hear we are going to use pagers?"
- Shin Bet sets up the phony production Taiwan -> EU.
I think from now on future OEMs will be very careful indicating whether a product was in fact made by them, under their supervision, or was license made by some third party.
You'd think that. Here in America, the NSA has been intercepting and bugging servers for decades, and manufacturers have been suspiciously quiet about the whole affair.
Suffice to say, when enough pressure can be exerted by a government agency, OEMs are happy to keep their mouth shut.
How they looked and what they did was presented in some of the Snowden files.
I have doubts those servers and other devices with implants made it into the wild since they were specifically targeted for high value target customers of those companies.
I wouldn't wish to be in the PR damage control team of Gold Apollo right now.
This was a direct attack to their survival as company. Will they sue Israeli government for turning their product into a bomb used to mutilate and kill people? Seems not probable.
Will they sue the Hungarian company making the bombs? That would be a more realistic target. Now Hezbollah has an excuse to attack Hungary interests in the EU and the conflict could escalate. That company should be crushed and closed for good by the Hungarian law system IMO. Either you are a military grade company or you aren't.
If Gold Apollo wants to keep selling pagers, better they start making all the carcasses on their products transparent from now on. With a big photo in the boxes showing how the correct product must look.
I assume that you, as a company, need a special permit to manufacture lethal weapons or military products on EU. Either you have it, or you don't. And if you don't have and still do it, I understand that you are breaking a dozen of EU laws.
The EU now needs to do something about it, and do it fast. Or to pretend that nothing happened, surrender to Israel, create a dangerous legal precedent "for the cause" and send a clear message that EU manufacture laws are a joke: "All those security filters painfully raised around EU products worth zero and can be easily jumped over". This is a really bad message for all the EU makers.
A franchise of your brand also signed a contract to make your product. I assume that changing the functionality or specifications of your registered product is strictly forbidden in that contract. I bet that this move violated some laws on Taiwan also.
If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo I would be fuming and furious at this moment.
Israel not only pushed them into the middle of a war that is not their war, without their consent or knowledge; also destroyed the brand image and painted a target in the backs of each employee and reseller of Gold Apollo.
At this moment, nothing suggests that the Taiwan based company were part of this. They should apologize, clear things, and detach themselves from this PR mess as soon as possible.
I understand that from the Mossad point of view this can be a big success, but from the point of view of the companies that try to sell their legit products, this is an direct attack.
> Israel not only pushed them into the middle of a war that is not their war, without their consent or knowledge;
Weren’t they already selling pagers to Hezbollah? It seems like they were already in the war as a supplier of goods to a terrorist organization.
I wonder if this is why Israel made this move because the manufacturer was already breaking international sanction by supplying Hezbollah so they have little recourse.
If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo, I’d be investigating why my franchisee was selling stuff to Hezbollah in the first place.
But it’s beepers and only 5,000. How expensive is this at the end of the day? It’s probably the last time a company lends then brand name for a small amount.
> Weren’t [Gold Apollo] already selling pagers to Hezbollah?
Selling pagers to Lebanon citizens is legal if I'm not wrong.
Not necessarily. At this moment, all suggests that somebody (Ehem, Mossad) was impersonating a reseller of the brand [1]. How do they knew that the buyers were from Hezbollah?. Did the buyers wear a t-shirt?. What if somebody was buying it to resell it later and bank some profit?. This stuff could ended being sold to innocent people, or distributed by all the schools of Lebanon.
[1] New facts can change this picture and I may be wrong about this.
> If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo, I’d be investigating why my franchisee was selling stuff to Hezbollah in the first place.
Agree. Definitely, the maker should make a move about that, just to be sure. And to be very transparent about that investigation.
> Selling pagers to Lebanon citizens is legal if I'm not wrong.
This is true. But only the thousands of Hezbollah pagers blew up, right? There are a lot of details needed to see if they knowingly supplied Hezbollah or just sold a big batch to a random customer. I assumed, perhaps falsely, that a 5000 pager order for Lebanon is pretty specific and does anyone really use pagers any more? My thinking was that this is a specific tech used by Hezbollah. Although it is a consumer tech, maybe pagers are super popular in Lebanon. But 3000 people were injured so I thought that the vast majority of these pagers were used exclusively by Hezbollah.
My point is their stuff was already in a war. Israel making them explode doesn’t seem to change that.
> only the thousands of Hezbollah pagers blew up, right?
Hopefully! Just out of curiosity I had a look for that brand of pager on eBay, but didn't see any. I'd hate to think that there were a few rogue units out there that had potential to cause harm!
> Weren’t they already selling pagers to Hezbollah?
I don't have info about those specific models, but this is pagers and not rockets. If someone makes an order for 5000 units I can't image you'd have an expectation to do a background check with references.
It's basically like ordering 5000 units of Raspberry Pi, would you consider that a military export?
For the US, at least, I am forced to confirm that those 5000 raspberry pis aren’t going to a terrorist organization. Isn’t the EU the same way? So it’s not that it’s a military export, but that it’s a sanctioned organization (Iran and Hezbollah).
How are you realistically able to do this though? It's not like they can't order batches to some neutral-country intermediary and then ship them from there.
Only the military wing of Hezbollah is considered a terrorist group by the EU, so a Hungarian company could legally sell them equipment provided it was to the political or social arms of the organization (how they determine this with an obviously fluid org like that I'll never know).
This stunt is great for Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions folks though. Here in the US, many states require fealty to Israel in the form of promising you won’t boycott them if you want to do business with that state’s government. Now there’s an easy out: no one is boycotting Israel, they’re just avoiding the liability of Mossad intercepting and tampering with a shipment.
Would that even hold up in court? Would be amazing at counteracting these unconstitutional laws. The biggest problem is that these laws are much easier to get passed then to get repealed. Because each repeal requires a long winded lawsuit that can sometime only get the law slightly altered.
It would not hold up in court because the requirement to not boycott Israel is stronger for businesses than it is for individuals who want to contract with the state government.
There is a federal Office of Anti boycott Compliance that any employee of any company can tip off and have the company punished if it's believed they did not give a fair shake to an Israeli supplier or bidder of any kind.
Well, pagers are not military products. And second, except for ordnance, you don't need any license to manufacture any product.
For products that can have dual-use capabilities, you need an export license that is given per customer (at least in the EU) where some due diligence is performed. If the company is a reseller in Lebanon and there are no export bans for that country, they can be sold/bought without an issue.
The fact that somewhere in transit they were modified, the manufacturer or seller cannot be held liable for it.
Doesn't matter. Hezbollah are subject to sanctions by the EU as a designated terrorist organization. Presumably, that applies to all companies operating within the EU.
Sanctions violations are very much a "do not pass go" style crime, and this looks like it was an entire batch that was delivered directly to Hezbollah.
I don't mean to be "that guy", but "military grade" means nothing nowadays. It can mean anything from "made to exactly standards" to "made by the lowest bidder, and likely to fail the minute it's used".
Just normal pagers with 20g of high explosive inserted in to them. They found a way of remotely getting the battery to overheat with would make the thing go boom.
> If Gold Apollo wants to keep selling pagers, better they start making all the carcasses on their products transparent from now on. With a big photo in the boxes showing how the correct product must look.
I don't think that would make a difference at all, explosives could be disguised in any electronic components, being transparent wouldn't help very much. The Taiwanese company's brand is now irreparably tarnished, I think that is the cost of lending the brand name to an untrustworthy partner.
I doubt the company exists anymore or that there's anyone left in hungary who can be held responsible. Here's what i imagine took place:
step one: mossad sets up some sham manufacturing facility in Hungary or buys an existing one.
Step 2: reach out to gold apollo and make a deal to produce their pagers under license. Money no object they probably offered them very good terms. Gold apollo is so pleased by the money being offered they fail to investigate the company properly.
Step 3: mossad agents start production introducing lethal batteries into the design,
produce several thousand units then
vanish leaving apollo executives bewildered but they have the money already so they don't ask too many questions.
Step 4: sell all the pagers
at a great price to some hezbolla arms dealer, go home, buy some popcorn and turn on the tv.
In short everyone involved have probably disappeared months ago.
Also a really clever part is that they could have turned a profit on the sale meaning the operation was at least partly subsidised by hezbolla themselves.
There are lots of companies with questionable practices in Hungary. One scam I am aware of is companies that are registered in the names of homeless people whose sole function is to churn out receipts that other companies buy at fractions of their face value in order to run “clean” expenses through their books and effectively launder money.
Would not surprise me if this turned out to be something like that.
Its not just Hungary. There's a famous high street in London with a series of sweet shops (about 2 dozen) that are a very obvious front for a money laundering scheme. Allegedly the taliban or some other afghan crime ring).
I don't know why the authorities are ignoring them but it's probably such a big can of worms that everyones afraid to open it.
In all seriousness though, those “sweet shops” and “Thai massage parlours” and the like are clearly fronts for money laundering. I doubt they’re being ignored, but as you say, there’s probably some reason no one’s dealt with them yet.
Am intermediary can be sued just for damaging products through insufficient, they can certainly be sued for adding defects on purpose. Especially lethal defects.
But can the manufacturer sue? Isn’t the normal way that the customer sues, because their stuff was damaged? Can the manufacturer sue me if I buy their stuff, modify it to be deadly, and sell it again?
(I don’t mean “can the sue me” but “do they have any chance of winning” of course)
> But can the manufacturer sue? do they have any chance of winning?
For Gold Apollo the dilemma here is either to sue the Israel Government (and try to survive the experience as company), or to take the piss and be sued for the families of the people mutilated by "their" product. They are in a difficult position.
It depends on how deep are their pockets and what they think will do less damage to the brand. Also if it has Taiwanese government support or not (unlikely as they probably depend on Israel technology for defense); and if Taiwan companies team with them or not. If the "made in Taiwan" sector want to keep selling radios and pagers to the rest of the planet they need to assure that this can't happen again.
I assume that the consequences for Israel will be indirect, limited and approved by USA, or none.
Update: Gold Apollo is a small company with about 30 employees. The CEO said that this was humiliating, the products were made by a distributor in Hungary and that they were ruined for that. Small chances that they could sue anybody.
If you pretend it's legit, I'd say you're breaking trademark law, even if it isn't explosive. The same way you can't put old laptops in Macbook cases and open an online shop.
In this case there would also be a contract with specific terms for the reseller/manufacturer that certainly includes language such as "purposefully produce devices that would damage the brand".
Of course I think the customers have a more serious case to bring on (particularly ones that weren't terrorists). As well as war crime considerations.
As it can be expected the situation is extremely murky. Hungarian press is abuzz with this, I will translate a few hard facts and leave speculation to others. I will also use English sources as appropriate. Hungarian sources are below the list, you can run them through automated translation to fact check me.
* There's a small consulting company called BAC after the initials of the founder Bársony-Arcidiacono Cristiana. One of their services is https://archive.fo/kwTKA "We develop international technology cooperation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products. This cooperation entails scaling up a business from Asia to new markets e.g. developing countries". Their home page https://archive.fo/dXtMx lists these: Strategic Advisor for major International Organizations including Financial companies (Venture Capitals, IAEA, UNESCO, CNRS, EC, etc.).
Business Developer and Savvy Analyst for Innovative/ Solutions in diverse fields (Sustainable Development (SDGs), Water, Energy, Resilience-Mitigation-Adaptation, Capacity Building, Complex Emergencies, Digitalization (AI, Blockchain, ICT) within Humanistic Economy.
* The official place of business is just a business "placeholder". The woman who answered the doorbell for journalists said no one ever from BAC is there, maybe once a month a mail comes which she receives.
* This house is also the registered address for a number of companies. Two companies have Russian owners. One of them is an oil wholesaler.
* BAC revenue in 2023 was 210 million forints and 13 million profit. What's remarkable is how person-related expenses (payroll etc) was a mere 0.5 million forints for the entire year. Hungarian monthly minimum wage was a bit over 0.25M HUF. One million HUF is about 2820 USD.
In conclusion, if I needed to speculate based on the LinkedIn page and the archived consulting page, what gives me pause: if this woman indeed exists she is one of the most talented people in all of Hungary. Seven languages, degrees in diverse fields and a PhD in physics. At the same time, I have indeed found a PhD from 2006 and her grants and scholarships from even earlier are probably not hard to verify either. I do not know what to think.
To me the content archived consulting page looks very much like something a large language model would generate. Impressive, but doesn't make any sense considering the size of this company. Probably good enough to fool Hezbollah anyway.
She purportedly got a PhD in London, UK. Now I do not speak English that well but to me this sentence "This cooperation entails scaling up a business from Asia to new markets e.g. developing countries" does not look correct. Is it...?
It's grammatically correct, but it's very awkward. Most people would say "We partner with technology companies to introduce their products to new markets in developing countries".
As it's written, it only mentions "a business" (singular) when it likely means multiple businesses. It also uses the word cooperation, which has different connotations than a partnership. Typically, business will say that they "cooperate" with governments, standards bodies, or trade restrictions. For friendly and mutually profitable agreements, they'll use the word "partner" to indicate that both parties benefit.
> This was a direct attack to their survival as company. Will they sue Israeli government for turning their product into a bomb used to mutilate and kill people? Seems not probable.
Would Toyota or any other car manufacturer sue Arabs et al. for turning their pickups into rolling suicide bombs?
Toyota will definitely sue to death somebody --selling-- thousands of new Toyotas modified in mass to kill their drivers. If not, they would be sued massively instead, so is not something that they could just let pass.
If the owner wants later to trow their Toyota over a cliff is a different problem and not Toyota's business.
You are right in tha aspect that terrorism doesn't care about excuses (at least externally, it needs to justify its actions to its "follower base" though).
I have an intuition that the grandparent tried to express someting like:
Now Hezbollah has a motivation to attack Hungarian interest in the EU.
Which I'd simplify as something more concerning for me, as a Hungarian: Now Hazbollah has motivation to attack Hungarians.
> As of October 2020, Hezbollah or its military wing are considered terrorist organizations by at least 26 countries, as well as by the European Union and since 2017 by most member states of the Arab League, with the exception of Iraq and Lebanon, where Hezbollah is the most powerful political party.[374]
> The countries that have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization include: the Gulf Cooperation Council,[375] and their members Saudi Arabia,[376] Bahrain,[377] United Arab Emirates,[376] as well as Argentina,[378] Canada,[379] Colombia,[380] Estonia,[381] Germany,[382] Honduras,[383] Israel,[384] Kosovo,[385] Lithuania,[386] Malaysia,[387] Paraguay,[388] Serbia,[381] Slovenia,[389] United Kingdom,[390] United States,[391] and Guatemala.[392]
The EU doesn’t consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization either — only its military wing. Much like people who considered the Provisional IRA to be terrorists but not Sinn Féin.
It's a shame that Hezbollah do not wear uniforms, a war crime[0]; because then it would be clear that these are military officers, and thus terrorists by that definition.
Or is your statement that the people targeted were not military? Or... what's your point with this comment?
I didn't have any point other than pointing out that your claims were incorrect.
Separately, I do think it's funny when people try to justify Israel's actions by reference to international laws or norms, as if Israel cares. They would still have done this even if they were the only country in the world that considered Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
Just like they're (practically) the only country in the world that considers the Golan Heights or East Jerusalem to be legitimately part of their territory, their occupation of the West Bank to be legal, their permanent air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip to be legal, and so on. They don't appear to care about international norms at all.
It's harder to hold them to account when their combatants aren't held to similar standards.
It's a very solid defense to say "well, if we're being attacked by a non-military force that breaks the rules, then what choice do we have".
If they were being attacked by a military force that followed the Geneva conventions it would be easier to drum up anti-Israel support internationally for an intervention.
So, sorry to say it; but it's a fair criticism to say that one side is even more flagrant of the rules: why should Israel even bother trying to abide them?
I wasn't asking you to condemn it, I was using it as an example of my claim that Israel doesn't care about international law or norms, even in cases where you can't possibly use "but our enemy violates them too" as a justification.
It doesn't matter if they care or not truthfully, because international relations are supposed to hold them to account.
Thats why we sanction Russia and Iran.
Israel needs to be friendly with the west because it is surrounded by hostile nations. But those nations are making things harder for the rest of the world to intervene.
Pretty easy though, when Israel is clearly being held to a standard that their combatants aren't.
I'll tell you now: I'm becoming more radicalised the more I see the absolute state of discourse here; it's not only polarised: it's completely asymmetric.
It seems that it's not even possible for people to consider that the Islamic side has a part to play in what is happening, and to condemn both parties for the actions that they take, understanding that it's not equivalent in all areas.
> Pretty easy though, when Israel is clearly being held to a standard that their combatants aren't.
If you look at it binary then both sides committed atrocities, war crimes, and generally acts of terror. If you look at the magnitude though one stands out.
> the Islamic side has a part to play in what is happening
Attempts to defend either are weak, nether is defensible really. But defending the side that took it orders of magnitude further with explanations like well the other side "had a part" are absolutely gross and reminiscent of explanations for certain atrocities a certain European country committed 80 years ago because "they" knew what they did to deserve it right? "They" also had a part to play.
I agree with this sentiment, actually; it's not binary, there's no "both sides", we have to take each atrocity in the context in which it's presented and dispassionately dole out justice. Ideally based on an even field of understanding about what the rules are and without taking personal preferences into account.
But I think we disagree on a core tenet: that magnitude is a precursor to understanding who belligerents are.
If that was the case then during all history, the winning side would always have to be the bad guy, no matter who initiated hostilities or how warfare was conducted.
> Israel is clearly being held to a standard that their combatants aren't.
This statement doesn't make a lot of sense. Israel is an ally we supply with munitions and the other side is acknowledged to be a terrorist militia and therefore we support their destruction. Of course we expect Israel to adhere to a much higher standard than Hezbollah, right?
I think (hope) you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who believes Hezbollah members shouldn't be held accountable for violations of the law of armed conflict. It's just that nobody believes the problem of Hezbollah is going to be solved in a court or with diplomacy at this stage.
> the Islamic side
If you feel the need to worry about the religious angle you really ought to differentiate between Sunni and Shia when talking about Lebanon in particular, given the unique characteristics of their demography and politics. Although I don't know where you're going with that.
Good reminder about avoiding low quality posting but also we aren't supposed to compare hn posts to reddit. I've done that too, and been reminded not to.
Its called war. Traditionally militaries have always despised spies but the results speak for themselves. No standard operation could ever have been so discriminatory or so effectively minimised the risk of collateral damage. Nor could they have disabled so many enemy soldiers so cheaply and most importantly of all, without putting a single troop at risk.
So nasty but effective. I think Israel should at least get some credit for minimising the risk of innocent bystanders getting injured. They could have made a bigger bomb.
That doesn't invalidate any of my points. A 10:1 ratio of militant to civilian deaths would be impossible to acheive using any conventional method. Unless you are arguing the acceptable number of civilian deaths in war is zero i'm not sure of the point you are trying to make.
Hezbollah and Hamas need the inherent anti Israel bias of Europe. It's the only international group with money and influence that sides with them. If they attack anything in Israel then it is a massive Israeli win.
Europe only care for geopolitical games in the Mediterranean and petroleum. The Gaza conflict has shown that oil is on its way out as a top level geopolitical influence.
Lol military grade. This is a guerilla fighting group getting leftover oil money from Iran. They were using pagers.
Israel has been fighting for 100 years with its hands tied. With the unofficial and largely official sunni/saudi Israel alliance, only Iran cares about the freedom fighters of Gaza and Lebanon, and you can put a ten year clock on that funding once EVs start taking real chunks of transport
Thanks. I am usually not super pedantic but I've noticed some people using "mt" for meters recently. I immediately fall into confusion when the wrong symbols are used. Then go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out if it is a cultural or regional thing.
People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember. I want to ask—are people not taught this in school? I had multiple introductions and revisions of the SI units and SI prefixes in secondary school, pre-university, and university, and every time, a wrong prefix or a wrong symbol was penalised by half a mark per question. I had classmates who mixed them up regularly and lost something like seven marks each time. They learnt very quickly not to, as those seven marks could make one or two grades' difference.
As someone who champions sole use of the SI units, this annoys me to no end.
I've seen things like 'kgs', 'gm', 'gms', 'mtr', 'mt', 'K' instead of 'k' (note capitals) for 'kilo-', mixing 'm' and 'M' (which are supposed to mean 'milli-' and 'mega-' respectively), usage of 'u' instead of 'μ' for 'micro-' (the one exception I will concede is 'mc' in the medical field, because people apparently confused 'μ' and 'm' which results in a 1000× over/underdose), and don't bother with the degree symbol (Alt+numpad 0176 on Windows, Option-Shift-8 on macOS) for °C, or use °K for kelvins (there is no degree, as it is an absolute scale and not relative to anything else, unlike the Celsius/centigrade and Fahrenheit scales), and so many other typographical errors.
I love this, thanks so much for writing it! I'm writing a blog post on metrication and this will be a super-useful resource for the sort of pedantry I intend to engage in.
Then see my point about the UK/metric/Imperial. ;-)
Incidentally, in that link there's a very common example of bad usage namely the volt/voltage. 120V is shown as bad usage and 120 V good. One sees the former usage on machines, appliances, in printed material etc. so often that it's almost a de facto standard.
I'm inconsistent in my use too, one time I'll include the space at other times not.
I agree about standardization, but I think this framing comes off as lacking empathy. Plenty of folks either
- Avoided the topic in school or put all their effort into other subjects
- Didn’t learn this in school—there are a wide variety of education systems across all the decades and distances that folks on this site may have grown up in
- Learned this in school, but a lifetime ago, and haven’t had a reason to revisit it. At a certain distance, your life experience and work experience massively overshadow what you learned in school.
Forgive the inference, but based on your recall of specific grading policies I would guess that your time in school is still near to you, or at least very important. It’s not that way for everyone.
(I am of course doggedly accurate with my unit abbreviations.)
"People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember."
In the US that is, not in metric counties that use SI by default.
For those in the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) there are multiple metric systems. The other notable system that's still in use is the cgs (centimetre–gram–second) system.
'cgs units' are still used in some areas notably physics as they can make calculations easier, there they're called Gaussian-cgs units.
Incidentally, often, as here, 'cgs' is in lowercase to reflect the case of the units' abbreviations. That said, the uppercase abbreviation is also often used. For instance, as I typed this my browser kept correcting the lowercase to 'CGS'.
> In the US that is, not in metric counties that use the SI system by default.
India which metricated in the late 1950s is still a big (ab)user of poor SI symbolism. A lot of the 'cms', 'gms', 'cc', 'kgs', etc come from Indian writers and Indian publications (case in point: the article in this thread).
> The other notable system that's still in use is the cgs (centimetre–gram–second) system.
> 'cgs units' are still used in some areas notably physics as they can make calculations easier, there they're called Gaussian-cgs units.
I'm not sure they're used all that much—I was under the impression most CGS units fell out of favour as MKS and eventually SI took over. I was an RA at my physics department for a while and we used SI as much as we could. Some specialisations use a certain form of natural units (like geometrised units in general relativity), but by and large SI dominated.
Right, there are offenders everywhere but the chief offender is the US by far (many don't have a clue about SI let alone metric, ask an American what 20°C is in Fahrenheit and they've no idea).
The UK is also troublesome in that whilst supposedly a metric country Imperial is still commonplace. For example, there's widespread use of antiquated units like the 'stone' (14 pounds)†, even BBC medical programs still regularly use the term.
Re Gaussian/cgs, in physics it's still widely used especially in field theory/Maxwell, SR (Special Relatively), etc. because in charge calculations and such involving permeability, permittivity, speed of light certain terms can be restated as 1 instead of their actual SI values.
Personally, I understand why this is done but from my perspective it's confusing if not misleading for reasons well outside this discussion (but who am I to argue with those more learned than me?). This Wiki provides justification of sorts (see Unit of charge): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_units.
† In Australia where I am, only people of my generation who've been around for decades would even know what a 'stone' was. Anyone born after say the mid 1970s would likely think you're talking about a rock. Trouble is, we see BBC/UK programs here. Fact is the UK is oblivious to the problem or it'd first correct its exports.
Why would your average American need to know what 20°C is in Fahrenheit? Very few people use Celsius here. All our appliances use Fahrenheit, weather reports use Fahrenheit, our recipes use Fahrenheit, and for science and physics we use Kelvin.
Honorable mention for "cc", which stands for "cubic centimeter" which is exactly equal to 1 ml. I can't find any logic to explain why cc is used in some contexts and ml in others.
The problem is old habits die hard and to be (or appear) to be consistent then an official designation can be unwieldy, as here.
I simply cannot remember when I last saw cm³ but cc and ml are everywhere including on commercial chemical reagent bottles etc.
The same nomenclature problem is all over chemistry too, the preferred IUPAC name for say isopropyl alcohol is propan-2-ol, and the preferred name for acetone is propan-2-one (systematic 2-Propanone). I can't say I've ever heard anyone ask me to pass them the bottle of propan-2-one, it's just not done (not in my world anyway).
If there's a choice between an awkward or simpler term then the simpler one wins out every time.
You know, as this is a tech forum, I'll reply via a tech business, re: branding angle.
Yes Gold Apollo, they were yours. That's because you licensed your name, and your name is your business.
(EG your mark(name) of trade)
I've seen this in everything from hotels to frying pans. License that name! We made 1% more this quarter. Yeehaw!
Holiday in has corporate owned hotels, franchised hotels, and of course licensed hotels. Franchised ones have more control from corporate, licensed far less. And it shows.
Same as t-fal, which in Canada is just the cheapest junk you can get, with Canadian Tire owning and manufacturing under the name:
More concisely, why should anyone who, due to these explosions, does not trust devices branded as Gold Apollo care about a distinction between a product using a licensed trademark vs a product that has been contracted out for production of products using the brand name they own?
Or to really drive the point home, the only reason we give companies exclusive control over certain names (trademarks) is so that they can build a reputation. If companies are going to just license out the names to whoever gives them money anyway then we might as well get rid of trademarks entirely and let anybody produce crap knock off products without having to pay a trademark owner.
I suspect from a company perspective, it is all just different degree of relying on a supply chain. Any company that outsource production that goes directly to customers are relying on reputation and contracts, and the assumption that they can apologize to customers and change supplier when/if something goes wrong. I seem to hear that a common practice is to do random sampling in order to do quality control, but in terms of supply chain attacks it wouldn't do much good if the attacker is a state actor with the ability to create non-tampered version.
I think thats already happening in major ways due to online shopping where reviews mean more than brand for some imported goods. Brand names for consumer goods on my Amazon search results are often completely made up and often temporary.
It's difficult enough to secure the supply chain towards the OEM as it is. It's nigh impossible for a vendor/OEM to secure the supply chain towards retail and distribution, not relative to nation-state attackers of great sophistication and with huge budgets. This sort of thing could happen with any smartphone, any feature phone, laptops, etc. Though it was a lot easier to mount this attack given an order for thousands of units from one company.
A man in the middle redirecting to a fake web page could be enough to create an opportunity. I assume that in some countries hacking the internet could be still possible.
Or a terrorist could sell phones on the street for months, use them as sleeping devices, and wait until a big holiday or the super-bowl to spread chaos massively with minimum risk for him/her. So now we everybody need a way to be able to scan our devices and detect that risk ASAP. The Mossad still don't understand the mess that had created for every westerner by opening this door.
Ironically this appears to be because another company wanted to protect its trademark.
> In the United States, Tefal is marketed as T-fal. This is to comply with DuPont's objection that the name "Tefal" was too close to DuPont's trademark "Teflon". The T-fal brand is also used in Canada and Japan.
It's unreasonable to expect a small companies to have rogue nation states in their threat model. Apple, Microsoft, ... yeah but not a smaller business.
CTC bought Paderno, a Prince Edward Island perennial, to juice out more brand value after they’re done sucking T-Fal dry.
It's worse than that.
Panerno, a high quality manufacturer of stainless steel cookware, using North American steel, was indeed bought by Canadian Tire.
Immediately after purchase, the factory was sold to a Chinese firm, who wanted to import crappy Chinese steel, but still label cookware "Made in Canada".
It is their ingress into the North American market.
And as Paderno's plant is gone, it means that Paderno of Canadian Tire is now made with Chinese steel, not North American steel, and built to lowest quality standards.
But of course it still says "Made in Canada".
Canadian Tire has boasted in earning reports that more than 60% of its profits now come from its own brands. Often like this, quality brands bought and turned into junk.
This is one pf the reasons why many jurisdictions in Canada have warranty laws that say the retailer is liable too.
Just one quibble: Made in China doesn't automatically mean junk. Case in point: The iPhone. When it comes to Chinese manufacturing, they cater to all price points in the marketplace.
Apple's size and scope, along with direct control of production to force a high quality product helps.
Including knowledge transfer, tooling assistance, trade secrets at the start.
But the truth is, even if you can find a rare product such as this, which is really Chinese assembly with US know how, direct control, and methods, 99.999% if the stuff you buy when Made ib China will be... junk.
The exception to the rule is not relevant. Made in China means "junk".
It's not just Apple. You can buy a forged spanner (and other tools) from China that can beat the pants off of any domestically made version. It's all about what the distributor/brand will pay for.
This is just wrong. You can buy junk in China and you can buy very quality products in China. They launch rovers to the literal Moon. They produce 7nm chips. This is not junk, this is state of art.
That's your own personal experience. I don't buy junk and if I would repeat that experiment, it's very likely that I'd pick up, e.g. Fluke multimeter or some old iPhone I'm keeping around.
My example has nothing to do with what you personally buy, and instead with "what is Made in China" in a local market. I am referring to both reality, and perception.
If you have millions upon millions of products, and only a tiny, tiny, tiny number are of OK quality, then it's entirely fair to say "Made in China" is junk. That's how it works. Exceptions to the rule are simply that, and not relevant.
If a company makes fridges, and 1 model out of 100 are OK, the other 99 crap that breaks in 2 to 3 years, everyone would say "That company makes junk!". Referencing "But they made one good fridge once!" is not something anyone need care about, and is the exception to the rule.
Yet with Made in China, we're talking about a million junky, sub-par products, compared to 1 that may be acceptable. And even then, quality control is still an issue.
Made in China is junk, an entirely fair, reasonable, logical statement, predicated upon the reality of the situation for most people.
Manufacturing in the PRC defaults to “cheap-as-possible” mode if the specs aren’t explicitly laid out. Think stinky black plastic and sharp metal edges.
Most of the time, the default is compatible with what the free-market MBA crowd wants.
My guess that entire company was just a Mossad front.
* They seem to have little or no actual presence at their Hungarian address
* CEO has a profile that seems to have very little to do with the manufacturing of telecom devices
* Gold owner says their payments were strange and came through the middle east.
* Orban is very pro Israel
A front yes. A front for who though? Was it a front for Hezbollah that got infiltrated or a front setup by Israel fit for purpose.
I have no sympathy for Hezbollah but empathy a plenty - I've been on that side of a security breech and step one involves tearing things apart; things that are the problem and invariably unless you've got ice water in your veins you'll tear apart things that are not the problem as well.
> "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"
That's whitewashing. If they license the brand, they should control every aspect of manufacturing. Otherwise they are irresponsible. If I was their client, I wouldn't trust them any longer and return all pagers.
I am curious about the technical details - where were the explosives packed, how were they connected and triggered? Did any pager survive and didn't blow up?
Unfortunately I’ve been trying to tell this to friends and family for
almost a decade in regards to clothing and home goods.
People are stuck in the 80s and 90s that a logo defines how something was made, which isn’t true at all these days. Calvin Klein is a great example where most of their income comes from licensing, not selling their own clothes. They might review designs but have no say on if the resulting garment can be sold with their logo. As long as they get get the licensing fee. Unfortunately I know people who will spend more on their items than the same garment made by the same manufacturer but with a different license on jt
Working at an electronics retailer a few years ago, this was well-known (though news to me, when I started). They hid the fact that the company no longer manufactured their products, and/or that multiple companies were selling similar or even the same product (produced in the same factory, even).
It is trouble, though, since the entire point of a "brand" is to signal provenance in manufacturing, quality, etc. It's supposed to be a way to know something about the product (if nothing else, who to hold accountable when something goes wrong). If it doesn't, what's the point?
These declarations sound so stupid to me. What's the point of having your brand on a product, if you're going to claim you have nothing to do with it? What is the point of the concept of a brand even?
To make money, like with all the merchandising that happens with a popular movie. Any number of things are licensed with the owner of the IP having very limited involvement in it, like turning down certain types of licenses as bad for the brand but not getting into the weeds of manufacturing. It's not like if there was some branded Disney cell phone that Disney is going to inspect all the board-level components. I can't speak about this pager company other than to think they're glad for any business they could get, so would license the brand.
There must be some other ostensible purpose for a brand than "to make money". People who would buy the hypothetical Disney phone would have other reasons than "to give Disney money". Nobody has that as a goal when buying stuff.
People form subconscious connections to a brand. You are more likely to buy a Disney phone for your kid if it gives you a warm feeling because you remember how much fun it was to watch Lion King with your kid. That might not be the deciding factor, but if it's functionally identical to the other other phones it might make the difference.
Yeah, but I don't think the subconscious factor is strong in the case of some pagers sold to Hezbollah. Disney was an example someone chose, and it ceases to be a useful example here.
The goal of the brand owners is to make money, for the customer the value should be a certain reputation of quality. But as long as customers don’t notice or punish it, it’s advantageous to sell out your brand to make more money (from the perspective of the brand owner)
And isn't it strange when a company publicly declares that you can't have any expectations based on their brand? Seems like they're drawing customers' attention to the thing, instead of hoping they don't notice.
Possibly the pagers had to have a popular brand to "work as designed", and this brand was up for sale, but declares it won't admit this to the real customers.
To prepare for lawsuits from families of the injured in what appears to be a supply chain attack maybe without the knowledge of their licensee in Budapest (BAC Consulting), and likely without their (Gold Apollo) knowledge. Deny and distance.
I feel like it’s reasonable to expect a brand to be aware if some organization, even Mossad, placed explosives in 5000 of their items.
It means this company is incompetent and should not be trusted. It’s one thing to have malware injected into software (pretty bad) and another to have physical explosives put into your product.
So if someone steals a box of iphones, adds a few grams of explosives inside each phone, and then resells them or gives them away, then Apple is at fault?
If you buy the boxes from an Apple store, or from an approved distributor, Apple is at fault. What's the meaning of "approved"?
If you buy them from the back of a truck, then no, Apple has no fault of course.
But there's a declaration saying "we had nothing to do with the pagers even though they have our brand". That's different from saying "they were booby-trapped after they left our hands". Not even the company itself is claiming the defense you're using.
The problem is that the company which did the rigging seems to have had an official license. If apple gave away licenses to build things branded apple and they contained explosives, I would blame apple, too.
But the best that they can realistically do, once they've found out about the shenanigans, is to cancel the licensing deal with the Hungarian manufacturer. Which they probably will. Maybe sue them in a Hungarian court, if there's anybody left to sue.
Every brand in the world is now expected to have the ability to detect and thwart intelligence operations run by Mossad? Like, a yoghurt company needs to have a counter intelligence division?
I think they should have some control over their manufacturing. It’s not so much that the yogurt company has a counter intelligence division, it’s that the yogurt company didn’t detect someone putting poison into a few hundred truckloads.
I expect brands to have quality control procedures in place.
Selling your own parts to be restamped as another brand is common though. Selling your brand to be stamped on someone else's parts is basically only useful to do this exact thing though.
Why would you say that? Many everyday products are produced under license or franchise with the brand having minimal involvement in the entire process. Even if apollo had done qc in the factory it would be easy to trick them.
Manufacturers for certain categories of products are homogenized, often regionally, whereas the brands maybe many.
Plus, clandestine supply chain attacks fall into 2 categories:
- A. With manufacturer/reseller complicity. (Not many manufacturers choose this because it would harm their business.)
- B. Without manufacturer/reseller complicity, but with logistics interception for sw/hw implants or complete substitution. (This is the method NSA TAO used to load implants into Cisco gear.)
If such a supply chain attack was in progress on a larger scale against the US, do we have mechanisms in place to detect it? Would shipments of these same devices pass through US customs?
This attack is quite indiscriminate. There are already videos circulating of random people being collateral damage.
Israel is losing the support of people more and more, and all that due to the crusade of Netanyahu to stay in power and to not be imprisoned for his former crimes.
Despicable. So much human suffering and for what ?
Easy. When it is you or your allies committing an act, it is war and collateral damage. When it is someone else, it is terrorism.
It is often a difficult topic to discuss because both sides tend to be in the wrong. It ends up being asymmetrical warfare. The stronger side accuses the weaker of hiding behind civilians while the weaker side accuses the stronger of human rights violations.
As sad as this case is, I find it pretty interesting since it is clearly an extrajudicial act of violence carried out in a foreign land. The west will likely celebrate this, but I personally find this much worse than the Indian assassination that took place in Canada "recently" and didn't have significant collateral damage, yet the west was up in arms about.
Is the target the relevant piece or is it actual impact? If you have a single military target who is known to use X brand phone, is it war to kill 5,000 people to get this one target? Is it not instilling terror on the people who use those devices?
It is this rationalization that enables powers to bomb civilians and ethnic groups under the guise of targeting military targets who stand no chance if they segregate themselves from the populace due to the power dynamics. And then the cycle only continues as each side adds fuel to the fire.
The actually impact of every war since (a very long time) are that more civilians are killed and harmed than military personal. Looking at the statistics produced by the US military on the iraq war, civilian deaths was 3x of enemy combatants. UN has estimated that globally, modern wars has an 10:1 ration of civilian deaths to military combatants.
Looking at it from that perspective there is no line between war and terrorism. All wars are terrorism.
> targeting military targets who stand no chance if they segregate themselves from the populace due to the power dynamics
This is flawed rational. If you can't find any parking lot you keep driving, it doesn't allow you to double park and block someone else's car. If you are too weak to maintain your posture at war you shouldn't fight it on the backs of civilians. Your inability to execute your wishes legitimately doesn't provide you with any right to act illegitimately and inflict the cost and pain on others.
> If you can't find any parking lot you keep driving, it doesn't allow you to double park and block someone else's car. If you are too weak to maintain your posture at war you should't fight it on the backs of civilians.
That cuts both ways. Just like hamas should not hide amongst civilians, if Israel is too weak to go into Gaza to arrest hamas, it has no excuse to act illegitimately and bomb civilians.
It's terrible, heart breaking. But that's the outcome of very slow army attacks, with evacuations, humanitarian aid and efforts to minimize civilians casualties, not maximizing it.
The army could have burn down the entire strip from the air and leave no person or stone there, in five minutes. That's what I meant by burning down the entire strip. If Hamas had the power to do the same to Israel they would gladly do so, as is evident from the way they use their power and resources.
Saying that it's 'cutting both ways' is evil statement. One side gladly ignores the lives and suffering of it's own people, while the other pay with the lives of soldiers in an effort to minimize the death toll of the same people.
Try a different approach than engaging in war/apartheid. The practice of the IDF "mowing the grass" by harming civilians has been long established and commented on. Certain Israeli politicians also empowered Hamas, in order to divide and discredit the Palestinians, so that they would not be in a suitable position to negotiate an end to the conflict. Practices like that do not produce peace. I suggest Israel do its best to look at its role in this conflict (and not just Hamas's) and then act in good faith to bring about peace, so that there are no more terrorist attacks like Oct. 7.
Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive—not even the most pacifist country would do that.
And let's not pretend that no diplomatic solutions have been proposed, all of which were rejected. They will only accept it if they own every inch of the land and Israel is obliterated (their own word).
> Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive
The actions that led up to Oct. 7 long predate it. The seeds of this have been sown every year that the IDF "mowed the grass" and every time they tried to disrupt the PLO from negotiating a peace. Remember, an Israeli prime minister was assassinated for seeking and negotiating peace- not by the Palestinians but by a radical Israeli, whose politics are aligned with the current prime minister. This current prime minister has used his long time in office to disrupt and prevent any peace from occurring.
The disappointing logic there is the idea that historical conflict of any kind, anywhere on Earth, could possibly "seed" an atrocity like Oct 7. The sheer ferocity, scale and cruelty of 3,000 terrorists storming across the border to gleefully slaughter and capture civilians young and old, is somehow reduced to "oh well, they had it coming"... "oh well, the seeds were sown"?
In my view, that is a very dark and troubling position. I will never in my lifetime form the view that Oct 7 was anything other than crossing all lines. It was end-game stuff. Standing alone in measures of evil, it therefore needs dealing with on those terms. Civilised humanity should be uniting against that senseless barbarism including renewed focus on the deeper causes and future remedies for fanatical violent groups.
This may be why many of are divided: Those who believe Oct7 crossed all lines; and those who believe Oct7 was horrific but within "resistance" seed-sowing territory. We all want peace, but it amazes me the latter has any traction at all.
> The disappointing logic there is the idea that historical conflict of any kind, anywhere on Earth, could possibly "seed" an atrocity like Oct 7
If you don't recognize causes, then you will be baffled by effects. It has been clear to observers of the Middle East that the status quo that Netanyahu has created was violent and untenable. It gave the appearance of peace only because most people remained ignorant of the underlying brutality of the situation. If you think Oct. 7 was frightening, what do you think about the generations of children that have been killed and maimed by IDF soldiers and settlers? The terrorist invasion of Oct. 7 was terrible and unacceptable, but that does not make what Israel did before or after ok. The fact that you cannot recognize that Israel has also crossed all lines, means that you are incapable of being a part of the solution.
Israel has done many terrible things, no more than any other country who has engaged in war, nothing like crossing all lines, but pain was inflicted on innocent people, for sure. So what? October 7th isn't an inevitable or just counteraction. Jews have been mascaraed repeatedly for hundreds of years, including by Palestinians and other Arabs. Can you give an example where Jews retaliated by mass raping, butchering and burning alive their oppressors?
What you referring to are war crimes. Sadly this is part of most/all wars. Not justifying or trying to reduce the evilness of the actions, but this is something very different from October 7th or any other pogrom.
One are relatively small scale horrible events within an active full scale war, the other are sadistic attacks aimed at civilians, by crowd that is made of at least half civilians, outside of active war. One is a massacre, the other is a prolonged violence torture and mass raping.
I don't think Israelis are saints, and Israel could and should have acted better in many cases, both for moral reasons and for its own good. I believe a two states solution is the only just and sustainable option, and Israel's share in avoiding it is a terrible mistake. But October 7th wasn't action of people who see the two states solution as a desired state or a viable compromise.
> Not justifying or trying to reduce the evilness of the actions, but this is something very different from October 7th or any other pogrom.
Trying to treat the terrorist attack on Oct. 7 as unprecedented and unique is not only deeply ignorant but incredibly dangerous. It allows you to suspend all normal considerations of decency, which we have seen in the words of Israelis leaders (calling all Palestinians "human animals" and terrorists) and the actions of the IDF (war crimes, murdering civilians, throwing people off buildings, torturing, etc).
Please stop with your apologies for genocide and war crimes. Even Israeli scholars and Holocaust survivors recognize that what Israel is doing now is deeply wrong. Stop
I wish that October 7th was unprecedented. It is not the first pogrom Jews suffered. I'm not aware of a case in the history where Jews behaved like that. If it did occur,it is unexcusable, just like October 7th.
Let's put it in clear terms. I'm an Israeli, humanist and supports a two states solution.
You, on the other side, are terror justifying and, I guess, antisemite.
That was not a conflict within a state. No one expected the US military to attack ISIS members within the US- that is clearly a police and judicial matter (and was thankfully treated as such).
Sorry but the failure of the state to contain the terrorist organization within it does not mean Israel should be expected to sit there and be attacked. Any country, when its citizens are attacked, have a right and a duty to respond.
Or maybe you are confused and think some how Israel has security control within Lebanon? Which is clearly not true.
That was a Marine barracks that was part of a "military peacekeeping operation". Granted, 128 non-military Americans were injured, but all of the dead people were military. The U.S. politicians labelled it terrorism.
>On November 5, 2009, a mass shooting took place at Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos), near Killeen, Texas.[1] Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others.[2][3] It was the deadliest mass shooting on an American military base and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since the September 11 attacks until it was surpassed by the San Bernardino attack in 2015.[4]
Overall I agree. However, the difficulty that I see is when someone attacks a, sometimes nominally, military target in a situation or method where it will unreasonably injure or kill civilians. Or even when the military target is mostly an excuse to target civilians.
I think it can also get less clear when the target is an enemy's infrastructure, industry, or political infrastructure.
If an army unreasonably kills or injure civilians it will most probably be considered a war crime. Committing war crime is not necessarily better than being a terrorist, but it's different.
This military response was the opposite of indiscriminate. It was proportionate and targeted. It focussed as best as anyone ever could on the precise set of people who (hiding among their own civilians) have been launching hundreds of inaccurate rockets to kill Israeli civilians - for months.
It isn't the "best ever" as there was no guarantee the pagers were worn only by combatants. As of now, of the 9 dead, 1/3rd are definitely not: 2 children & 1 woman.
> set of people who (hiding among their own civilians)
These people should always wear military uniform and live in a separate neighborhood even when they're not on duty? What do you propose?
> have been launching hundreds of inaccurate rockets
>These people should always wear military uniform and live in a separate neighborhood
That is on the table, yes. Otherwise, while they mingle with civilians, it's clear that the civilians are in danger. If I'm one of them, and I'm intent on persuing this action, moving to military quarters is going to come to mind.
Imagine one of those pagers, hip height, at a shop queue or bus stop. Or you're on a bike in traffic next to one of them.
Everything about this sucks. It absolutely is indiscriminate. It's different than droning a guy at his house and accepting his wife as collateral damange. This is 3,000+ maiming explosive devices scattered all about with no way of mitigating the collateral damange.
I definitely agree that it's a problem that fighters are dispersed among the civilian population. However, requiring them to wear uniforms and live on a base seems like it would make it impossible for a smaller force or an insurgency to stand up to a more powerful enemy that is able to wipe out any obvious military target at will.
What's the alternative that doesn't give powerful nations more or less absolute power to push around weaker nations or people?
I don't think anyone, especially civilians, love the idea of militants hiding among the population. I don't know why they must in order to stand up to a more powerful adversary. Regardless, this isn't some kind of rule. It's more of a consideration for that individual, like "should I be hanging out at home with my family while I'm engaged in a dirty war with an adversary that is willing to strike my family to get me?"
1. It's really rather common for active duty military to segregate themselves in combat zones. One of the reasons is that there is mutual benefit in reducing the exposure of civilians.
2. There is no alternative to a powerful entity getting its way. We have the word power simply to describe that capability. It's not an annointed status.
Guerrilla warfare has been a reliable way for a less powerful entity to resist a more powerful one. However, it often requires the less powerful entity to hide within the general population; which results in the problem that we are seeing here.
That could very well be. However, you aren't really engaging with the point I'm making. If weaker powers aren't supposed to do guerrilla warfare, then what are they supposed to do? Just letting other groups roll over them isn't a viable option.
Likewise, if you target enemy personnel knowing that civilians are going to be the primary victims, you might be committing war crimes, even when it works.
"By the same token, it's totally fine for Hezbollah to raze Tel Aviv, because the IDF is based there, thus using civilians as human shields. And almost all Israelis become soldiers at age 18."
I agree, both sides act with extreme disregard for the other side. Blaming Israel ignores that Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran are constantly provoking them, blaming Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran ignores that Israel is constantly provoking them. Going back and forth with "theyre terrorists" only leads to more terrorism.
I'm not advocating for anything. I'm just saying that it's unrealistic to expect people to just roll over for an enemy with greater conventional warfare capability.
Hiding among the civilian population is bad, but so is a situation where powerful states can oppress others without any check.
Personally, I'm not sure what a better alternative is. Which is why I asked my question.
Do we know approximately how many terrorists were killed and how many civilians were killed? Do we know what steps Israel took—if any—to prevent the target pagers from falling into civilian hands?
I'd say the pager bombing was as /surgical/ as one could possibly be.
A very sophisticated and targeted attack, putting tiny amounts of explosives in devices used by terrorist-linked individuals (ONLY Hezbollah were using the pagers because of their paranoia about Israeli monitoring of cellphones).
An example of an /indiscriminate/ attack is Hezbollah's firing of unguided rockets into Israel's civilian areas. In July, for example, a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children playing football in the Golan Heights. THAT is indiscriminate killing.
Dropping kilotons of aviation bombs on a populated city is indiscriminate. This is nothing in comparison to that. Frankly I would even call this surgical.
There is no question that an enemy setting off thousands of small bombs in American supermarkets and homes, maiming unknown numbers of bystanders and killing children, would be designated an act of mass terrorism.
Anyone who claimed such mass terrorism is acceptable because it is not as bad as obliterating cities would be condemned as an apologist for terrorism.
They didn't indiscriminately set off thousands of bombs in supermarkets and homes. That's not at all an accurate description of what happened. That would be terrorism.
They gave a terrorist organization the ability to give its most important operatives a bomb to wear. And then they detonated that bomb. That's not terrorism. It's about as targeted of an attack as you can imagine. Blowing up terrorists is objectively a good thing.
They detonated the bombs in supermarkets and homes. It is 100% an accurate description of what happened.
If an enemy targeted members of American political parties that have sponsored terrorism and brutal dictatorships, detonating thousands of bombs in supermarkets and homes maiming nearby civilians and killing children, would you also call this “objectively a good thing?”
The bombs didn't even have enough force to kill 99.6% of people who had them attached physically to their waists. Semantically, that's a pretty big difference.
Not always. There was IRA, there was RAF, there was ETA. It's just in Middle East this problem is much bigger today, to the point where terrorist organisations can have whole countries under their control.
For powers that be, every rebellion is terrorism. This isn't new. Today, in matters concerning ME, even college kids are labelled terrorists without much thought: https://x.com/gobloid3/status/1836437489831055659
> these are both terror tactics, you're setting up a false dichotomy
Eh, there is utility to this attack beyond terror. Israel just simultaneously took out Hezbollah’s communications and definitively outed its senior members. Also, strategic bombing à la WWII wasn’t psychological—it was intended to wipe out the civilian population that worked in the war factories.
States engage in what you call terror tactics all the time, for legitimate military and illegitimate reasons. The clusterfuck with the Middle East is the sheer number of non-state actors. In Gaza, that’s complicated. But in Lebanon, it’s not—-the Lebanese state is widely recognised. Hezbollah is not a state, but it’s also not purely a political party.
> Eh, there is utility to this attack beyond terror
As there was in bombing civilian cities, which housed factory workers making war machines. You have put up another false dichotomy. Terror attacks do not need to be devoid of all non-terror utility to be considered terror attacks.
If, during America's war in Afghanistan, the Taliban had blown up pagers carried by American officers going about their lives in America it would be called terrorism. The nearby civilians injured in the blasts would be a key focus, not swept under the rug.
> If, during America's war in Afghanistan, the Taliban had blown up pagers carried by American officers going about their lives in America it would be called terrorism. The nearby civilians injured in the blasts would be a key focus, not swept under the rug.
Because they’re a non-state actor. (Hezbollah doesn’t follow and isn’t bound by the Geneva Conventions, either.) Even if it only hit American military personnel, we’d call it terrorism.
You’re labelling usual acts of war as terrorism. That punts us from the uncomfortable discussion of the human cost of war to the much more palatable one of semantics. This is war. War resembles terrorism because they’re both violent and brutal and largely indiscriminate. If this is terrorism, then we’re essentially saying any warfare is terrorism. If that is the case, then states have a legitimate right to terrorism. Not sure that’s where we want to end up.
> If this is terrorism, then we’re essentially saying any warfare is terrorism.
terrorism is primarily violence targeted at civilians, while legitimate acts of war targets military personnel (but could have civilians as collateral).
In this particular case, the pagers are targeted at non-civilian personnel, but has some civilian casualties.
Hezbollah rocket attacks, on the other hand, seems to be targeting civilians first, and military personels second (if they are accurate enough for such).
> terrorism is primarily violence targeted at civilians, while legitimate acts of war targets military personnel
States targeting civilians are a war crime. Not terrorism. The hijacking of Flight 77 was still terrorism despite targeting the Pentagon.
> the pagers are targeted at non-civilian personnel, but has some civilian casualties
That is war. That is collateral damage. Marking every military action with civilian casualties terrorism simply normalises terrorism as a legitimate war tactic.
I want to note that you are not wrong. There are many definitions of terrorism [1]. I’m just pushing back on this usage because it looks like the first step to normalising terrorism as something every power that has ever gone to war has done.
The Taliban was/is not a "non-state actor", they are and were the government of Afghanistan. And whether or not they were that has no bearing on whether or not a tactic is terrorism.
What do you mean? You fire out the "detonate" command on the frequency used by Hezbollah - only pagers connected to that network blow.
It's statistically probable you'll overwhelmingly damage terrorists. Sadly collateral damage is inevitable in war, and this is far more precise than even a laser guided bomb.
You're shopping for groceries. someone is standing next to you. Their pager explodes and you are severely injured. You never had anything to do with this war.
Still think it's surgical? By that definition 9/11 was surgical as well, after all they only targeted two towers and just a few people who happened to be there got hurt.
The US could just drop nukes on any country they have a trade dispute with. They don't, because that is insane and disproportionate and they have the capability to do better than that.
What Israel did here is something you would expect from a terrorist organization.
In comparison to bombing to smithereens the entire block, and having hundreds/thousands of people die under the rubble, some of them over the course of days - yes.
Do you know that 100 is more than 1? Some people get confused by simple arithmetic.
Exactly this. It's interesting how I haven't been able to find any single media portraying this as a possible act of terror while they have been quite critical of conduct in Gaza. I hope this changes as there really needs to be a reckoning with the idea of bombs randomly triggered anywhere, maybe hospitals, schools, theaters.
It's downvoted because it's the definition of proportional.
3g of explosives personally handed to the most senior leadership of your enemy and with enough explosive force that 98% of people who had them attached to their person survived is the very definition of restrained and targeted. Certainly not "indiscriminate".
Stuffing explosives into civilian appliances is the definition of indiscriminate.
If doing this isn't already banned by the Geneva Conventions, it is only because it wasn't practical to do. But then again, very little that has happened in this region during the last 80 years has been following any international law.
hardly, pagers might be accessible by the population, but hand delivered pagers distributed by a terror organisation are not exactly the same.
Panasonic Toughbooks are technically available to the civilian population, but booby trapping a shipment of them that would be delivered to the US military would be a pretty sophisticated military strike. Hardly indiscriminite even if people took them home.
Are you seriously suggesting that you would give away a pager, handed to you by your operator so that he can send you messages, a one-way legacy communication device selected as as an alternative for standard common cellphone specifically to avoid the risk of you being tracked by an enemy?
Not a bot. Just not wishing to connect my x years old user with anything related to politics. This is my only other account and that is within the site guidelines.
I'm an Israeli. So some of my views are aligned with Israel's official views. I would estimate the percentage of the alignment of my views with the current government at a single digit number. I have a negative, visceral reaction to Bibi, and can't stand hearing him even if I want to. I think Israel under the current government is doing almost every mistake possible, and takes the wrong decisions again and again, most probably due to Bibi's criminal issues and corrupted character.
Not all organizations work as the US military. Or even as a US company.
I know nothing about Hezbollah, but there's a widespread opinion on HN that any equipment you get from "work" can absolutely only be used by yourself in said work environment. That's really not the case in all cultures, everywhere.
At my previous job, management clearly told us that we could use computers & printers for any personal activity, including paid side jobs, as long as we didn't compete with the company and didn't go completely overboard with the printers (personal judgement).
Not every organization is hostile to its employees/members.
I'm guessing Hezbollah is not comparable to the US military in many respects, and assumptions that hold true for the US military may not hold true for any other military or paramilitary group.
That said, I don't have particularly strong opinions about this attack, and I certainly do not support Hezbollah in any way. But this "it works like this here, therefore it works like this everywhere" mentality is a hindrance to understanding the situation - any situation.
If you're giving your personal communication devices away, given that it's used to summon you personally...
... honestly?
I have no words, that's fucking stupid.
It's not like it's a toy, or it can play games, or that it can be used reach out to a parent/guardian if a child is lost.
It's a pager, a receive only communication tool. An outmoded one by far, and given to you by your terrorist organisation to intentionally evade Israeli detection.
If you're giving it to your children, not only are you basically being negligent in your duties, you're also giving away something that has less utility than the device you used to use and likely have on standby.
Perhaps. Still, in any pool of 3000 people it's fairly reasonable to assume that one or two (or ~2950) are "fucking stupid". Because people, as a rule, are.
If I'd let my prejudice run loose, I'd even argue that militant religious groups have an above average quota of "fucking stupid" people, so odds are indeed fairly good that some of these devices would make it into the hands of someone other than the original owner.
Some would argue that "being related to someone who is fucking stupid" is not a capital offence.
Alright, let's take this in the context in which it's been given to us then.
-> Your task is to, with as much accuracy as possible and with the minimum loss of civilian lives as possible, target a hostile force that lives within the population and does not identify themselves. They live outside of your borders.
-> If even a single non-combatant is lost, you are a monster.
-> In the mean time, every month that passes, hundreds of rockets rain down indiscriminate destruction upon your country, an action that has cost the lives of 12 children already.
Why are you asking me? I'm not even arguing that the attack was wrong.
I just challenged your - IMO incorrect - suggestion that it's reasonable to assume that no devices would spread to anyone other than the original owner.
If there's such a thing as acceptable collateral damage, the attack may still be reasonable. I'm even leaning towards the opinion that it is.
It's possible to consider the downsides of something without being opposed to it.
> It's downvoted because it's the definition of proportional.
Two wrongs don't make a right... are we really at that level of brain activity on HN of all places ? this is schoolyard level
You can have proportional terrorism, proportional war crimes, proportional crimes against humanity. Proportionality doesn't tell you much, it certainly doesn't tell you anything about it being indiscriminate or not
Also feel free to read the actual texts defining these things, detonating explosives in supermarkets is indiscriminate by nature, there is just no way around it if you're in good faith : https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12
Both sides are clearly operating out of the boundaries we defined for conventional wars, is it really that hard to accept ? They're not even trying to hide it really... such a strange allergic reaction to these basic facts
Proportionality is at the center of defining a war crime.
"The principle of proportionality (Article 51(5) (b) API) states that even if there is a clear military target it is not possible to attack it if the expected harm to civilians, or civilian property, is excessive in relation to the expected military advantage."
So, the case that Israel has to make here is that the expected millitary advantage from the operation exceeds the collateral damage. The fact that civilians died doesn't automatically make it a war crime from an international law point of view.
Appeal to not be emotional is even harder to take seriously when Hezbollah rockets killed 12 children and Israel has killed 10,000 children this year alone.
You’ve put me in a bad position, because by telling you you’re wrong you will interpret it as if its reasonable.
First, we’re talking about Lebanon and its population, lets not muddy the waters further by suggesting that Hamas and Gaza are part of that conflict right now. But if we did, as far as I can make out, for the entire duration of the war since 10/7 there has been a total of 7,500 children identified as being killed. Sadly that number is not backed up by any independent source and unfortunately Hamas has been known to inflate these numbers.
Nonetheless, it is a tragedy.
An entirely unrelated tragedy to the 12:1 child murder ratio of Hezbollah vs IDF this year, and under entirely different circumstances.
I would prefer more interventions in Gaza to mirror this one in its precision and lack of civilian casualties.
I’m certain that you would prefer no intervention happen at all, which is where we will have to fundamentally disagree and part ways.
> as far as I can make out ... there has been a total of 7,500 children killed
I said 10,000 for this year, which is lower than the amount coming from Gaza. You low balled it much further. Hamas might be accused for inflating numbers, but Israeli apologists are actively deflating that number. Regardless, the numbers are staggering.
> I'm certain that you would prefer no intervention ...
Firstly, you don't know me but have immediately filled in who you believe I am based on your expectations. You should reflect on that (and how much you are creating your own world), because those prejudices are exactly what motivate the hate that drives these conflicts.
I would like to see intervention in Gaza. Number one, would be to stop the indiscriminate bombing of children. Number two, would be to provide relief to all of the people who have lost their homes and livelihood, who have been maimed and are starving. Number three, would be to resolve the displacement of the Palestinians in a just manner. Number four, would be judicial proceedings against anyone (Palestinian or Israeli) who committed war crimes.
Israel cannot be bombing civilians. It is a war crime. Gaza is not a sovereign state, but a displaced people living in Israel. If Israel is too weak to go in and arrest criminals who commit heinous crimes, then it needs to contend with the problem and take a different approach to how it deals with the Palestinian people.
I can find literally no source for 10.000+ outside of the UN "estimating" it, the nearest I could find was 7.500 and that's not verified (and old). I'm not trying to downplay anything and I resent the implicaiton.
I'm perfectly content holding Israel to account for their numerous crimes, but that becomes extremely difficult to do when you have literal terrorists doing everything they can to make things as bloody and cantankerous as humanly possible to cast shadows at Israel.
Bombing civilians is not technically a war crime in of itself, people like to use the word war crime without actually fucking reading what are war crimes, such as not identifying yourself as military, hiding in the population, using medical buildings as cover and so forth.
Israeli's settling the west-bank and blockading aid under the guise of "the more material they have, the more they will use against us" is condemdable; but when 5,000 rockets suddenly launch from Gaza and a ground force invasion kills over a thousand people -- people reasonably start to think that Israel has a point, and all my criticisms against Israel suddenly start to look very impotent.
Where I get annoyed is that people have decided that terrorists are good, actually, despite clearly throwing gay people off of roofs and engaging in what are actual war crimes.
> I can find literally no source for 10.000+ outside of the UN "estimating" it, the nearest I could find was 7.500 and that's not verified (and old). I'm not trying to downplay anything and I resent the implication.
You resent the implication, but you also did not appear to do any research to support your view.
> Bombing civilians is not technically a war crime in of itself, people like to use the word war crime without actually fucking reading what are war crimes, such as not identifying yourself as military, hiding in the population, using medical buildings as cover and so forth.
> Israeli's settling the west-bank and blockading aid under the guise of "the more material they have, the more they will use against us" is condemdable
The settlement of the West Bank is in direct violation of international law (article 49 of the Geneva Convention) and is a war crime in itself.
> Where I get annoyed is that people have decided that terrorists are good, actually, despite clearly throwing gay people off of roofs and engaging in what are actual war crimes.
I don't know who thinks "terrorists are good". To me, that sounds like a strawman to avoid the realization that what Israel is doing is deeply wrong.
Even Israeli scholars on genocide like Omer Bartov (a former IDF officer) state "it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions."
Israel is engaged in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. That is painful to acknowledge, but in some ways is not surprising. The victim becoming the victimizer is a human story older than the Bible. The Jewish refugees from WWII underwent terrible horrors and were deeply traumatized. It is not surprising that many of them became radicalized and deeply angry. We have seen the same thing happening to the Palestinians, as well as any other people that is traumatized.
You're almost there buddy... people criticising israel here are also criticising hezbollah for war crimes... you don't have to pick a side and close your eyes on their actions
Three grams of explosives in each device used by a hostile military organization.
I don't think it could possibly be more targeted. Literally just devices issued by Hezbollah themselves to their own members.
Maybe it wasn't perfect. That seems to be the bar you are setting.
But much closer to perfect than I would have imagined possible. And closer to perfect than I think most people would have imagined. Maybe that is aggravating to people ideologically set against literally anything they might do.
But far superior, and less disruptive to innocent people to tactics used elsewere by Israel. Far far more more targeted and less disruptive to innocent people than the tactics used by Hezbollah themselves.
Am I misinformed, or was 3,000? They are the most senior 3,000? When you send out 3,000 explosive into the general population, how do you mitigate the collateral damage? I truly don't know the answers here. I'm under the impression that they all detonated simultaneously, so I'm keen to infer that there was very little thought given to civilians unlucky enough to be in the vicinity.
Man. Blasting off fingers and genitals is really something...
All the information I have seen indicates that they were handed to Hezbollah and distributed by Hezbollah for the intent purpose of avoiding Israeli intelligence services.
With your analogy it would be like emptying the mag in the general direction of the car of the target, praying the target actually is in the car and praying there is no one else anywhere close to him.
Please help me understand then, because from what I can understand about the facts here:
1) It was delivered into the pockets of Senior Leadership of Hezbollah, with an incentive for those pagers not to be distributed elsewhere.
2) The explosive yield was very small, of an estimated 3000 pagers; 12 fatalities were recorded, making the death rate about 0.4%. One of which was a child, a relative of a Hezbollah leader. (this is an unjustifiable tragedy, but the only recorded civilian fatality).
3) There has never been, in the history of all warfare, such a surgically precise attack with such a low casualty rate of the civilian population - considering the attack happened at a singular time where it was not possible to get all of the members away from the civilian population at all.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning, it's not indiscriminate if it's very targeted and very localised.
It's like something in a James Bond movie, or a cheesy riff on the genre like Kingsman.
You might not want to acknowledge it, but this is definitely a new era of warfare, and one that hopefully has benefits for everyone - reducing the reliance on global supply chains that harm the environment because labour is cheaper elsewhere. (it's a very thin silver lining, let me have it).
Don't be silly, 11 criminals dead and one bystander is well within limits of even a civilian police force, military ones are considered much more broad.
NATO sets the acceptable loss threshold at 4:1; for every 4 combatants killed, 1 civilian is considered acceptable.
Yes, this is callous, and cold, and awful, but emotion has no place here, we're talking about people on both sides who feel like they are fighting for their right to exist. This is quite literally war, and there will be casualties.
Truth be told, while I'm not giddy and children dying, I'm glad we're talking about so few civilian casualties despite causing so much damage to Hezbollah operatives and operations.
Don't be silly, 11 criminals dead and one bystander
You aren't even getting the military-civilian ratio for the first wave right. According to the Lebanese Health Ministry we have at least 6 civilians killed (including 4 healthcare workers and 2 children), so that's at most a 1:1 ratio, far less than the 4:1 rate that you cite as "acceptable". And this doesn't even touch on the vastly larger number of wounded (2,750 just for the first wave).
By all indications these devices were intended to maim even more so to kill -- and to do so a great scale. From Wikipedia:
At least 12 people were killed after the first wave of attacks,[73][1][74] and more than 2,750 were wounded.[6][7] Civilians were also killed,[11][14][15] including four healthcare workers[75] and two children.[76] It is not clear if only Hezbollah members were carrying the pagers.[20] Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said the vast majority of those being treated in emergency rooms were in civilian clothing and their Hezbollah affiliation was unclear.[77] He added the casualties included elderly people as well as young children.
Interesting, it seems there's a conflict between what the Lebanese Health Ministry said, and what Hezbollah said (as of yesterday) -- and you're choosing to go with Hezbollah's numbers.
It does seem that the reports are still coming in, and are in the process of being evaluated and fact-checked. I chose to go by WP because in most cases at least attempts to reconcile between different sources, though it's far from 100 percent accurate about anything.
Hopefully we'll have better numbers within the coming week or so.
> To sum up, sabotage against the enemy is a lawful operation provided the legal rules for the choice of targets and the methods and means employed are respected.
Do you think they meant: booby trapping is _illegal_ unless it's to harm military personnel ? lol
"Rule 80. The use of booby-traps which are in any way attached to or associated with objects or persons entitled to special protection under international humanitarian law or with objects that are likely to attract civilians is prohibited."
Examples of protected objects are childrens toys or medical supplies bearing the insignia of the red cross; but if you want further reading: See, the military manuals of Belgium (ibid., § 32), France (ibid., § 39) and Germany (ibid., § 43) - hard to read without translations though.
Examples of protected persons include, of course, doctors who wear the red-cross insignia. However it's also a war-crime to wear this insignia and act in the interests of any power exclusively, or operate as a combatant. - so, owning military equipment that is given out by the high command of a terror organisation would immediately disqualify you, and if you survived the blast you would be facing a tribunal.
However, Booby-traps which are used in a way not prohibited by the current rule are still subject to the general rules on the conduct of hostilities, in particular the principle of distinction (see Rules 1 and 7- linked below) and the principle of proportionality (see Rule 14). In addition, the rule that all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects (see Rule 15) must also be respected.
But proportionality is in play if you do not fall below the NATO recommended 4:1 combatant:civilian ratio. Which it seems Israel didn't.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm's brand, "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"
Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking,
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/3-grams-of-explosives-per-pa...