Israel’s pager attacks did not change the world. They merely alerted the world to the possibility of everyday devices being compromised. What is true today was still true yesterday, it just wasn’t top of mind: we have to be very careful with what we allow our adversaries to sell to us.
Did 9/11 not change the world because the idea had been made in fiction beforehand?
The pager attack did change the world in two ways: the obvious one is where your point is most accurate (people becoming aware of how fragile supply chain are - just think snout what a terrorist could do with Amazon’s comingled inventory and returns!), but the other thing it did is start to legitimize this. If it’s only the Unabomber doing something, it’s clearly indefensible but as states use it other people will start to justify it on those grounds.
Hezbollah is hardly a sympathetic target but I’d be shocked if someone in the region doesn’t try to attack Israelis this way saying it’s not a war crime for the same reasons.
> the other thing it did is start to legitimize this. If it’s only the Unabomber doing something, it’s clearly indefensible but as states use it other people will start to justify it on those grounds.
This is the most worrying part: Do we really need to normalize the idea of governments sending little bombs out into the civilian population and detonating them, hoping that they actually hit their targets? This is not how legitimate warfighting is done.
That’s what I’ve been fearing, too. It’s like dressing up as medical workers or using chemical weapons: no matter the legitimacy of the current target, it’s virtually certain that someone else will cite that as a justification for why they’re doing something similar. This seems especially dicey in the generative AI era where it’d be increasingly cheap for some government to “prove” that the people they just bombed were Hezbollah-level threats.
Legitimate warfighting is where sensible pacifist civilians have a sufficient notice and a chance to leave the intended warzone with their belongings before the war starts. It is also where military, industrial, and infrastructural targets are the only targets, where reasonable efforts are made to avoid targeting civilians. Legitimate warfighting brings freedom in the end, whereas illegitimate warfighting takes it away.
What percentage of wars are fought with the intention to bring freedom in the end? A lot of wars are just the result of imperialism. I think that definition is somewhat artificial.
If a bomb went off next to me in Safeway, I'd consider the people who did that to be my enemy for life. This was an attack on civilians, civilian infrastructure and the general population of the world who now has to worry about being murdered by their devices.
I would definitely be radicalized and take up arms. Hell, I'm not even there and it's radicalizing me! I know a lot of people who are making significant life changes in the US based on what Israel and its supporters are doing.
I think it's a myth that you can "demoralize" people by killing their friends and family and terrorizing the public. That doesn't work and never has.
Israel has been trying this strategy since the inception of Zionism and not only has it not worked, it's created a massive amount of armed resistance. Sure enough, massive waves of rocket attacks have been coming from Lebanon since Israel's terrorist pager attack.
It sounds like you're around Zionists, no one I've spoken to has anything but deep resentment toward Israel and that spans many different demographics.
Yea, I mean sure it's better than firing a missile at an apartment building full of families because there are a few terrorists hiding in it. But that's a pretty low bar. We are also just taking their word for it that it was a carefully chosen shipment (this time) and that it went out specifically to actual Bad Guys™ (this time). With only "Trust Us, Bro" as assurance. It's a bad precedent to normalize.
Strictly speaking, yes, I’ll concede that this changed the world if you are part of a military group and your foe is Israel or another highly advanced adversary. But no, I don’t think that this changes the world in the way that the article implies.
9/11 changed the world because it started two major wars in the Middle East, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It set the stage for world politics for the next few decades.
The reality of this attack is that it really won’t affect people’s lives in any meaningful way. Maybe a few people will be wary of using beepers for the next few months but I don’t see many people thinking of giving up their smartphones over this. Or perhaps I’m wrong and this foreshadows many similar supply chain bomb attacks in the future… I don’t know, but neither does Bruce Schneier and it’s too early to say definitively what the effect of this will be.
It changed the world because now "regular" people are looking to divest of Israeli tech as fast as possible. They turned consumer devices into bombs and made everyone in the world less safe. It will be seen as the biggest strategic misstep in Israeli economic history. Quite a dumb move given that their economy is already on the ropes.
It used to be a possibility. Now is a reality, and done not by a minor unorganized player (like a small group of people breaking things) but by a major power. Even if they stop doing it right now, and not escalate it to i.e. phones, it has set up a dangerous precedent.
It seems like a stretch to argue that a world in which thousands of people are simultaneously injured or killed by an electronic device they had no reason to fear is not meaningfully changed by said event.
The world is in a continuous state of change, and the fact that these pager attacks are now in the public consciousness introduces a whole series of potential pathways of thought and action that wouldn’t have been explored if not for this event. This is in addition to gaining clarity about the world as it already was immediately prior to the attack, i.e. yes we were vulnerable, and an entity was in the process of actively exploiting that vulnerability. Now we're aware, and that awareness has/will initiate a new cascade of change.
ETA: I'm very curious to understand how/why people disagree with this.
Hezbollah bought a specialty item (pagers) and many countries/companies are legally prohibited from doing business with Hezbollah. My sense is that these two facts were all but necessary for Israel to carry out this operation. So "changed the world" is hyperbole.
Yeah, and almost every civilian under a certain age in Israel is technically part of the army, most likely has army training, and can be called back into active duty so they are a fair game and whatever is done to them is necessary and fine according to your logic, right?
Why the distinction? I mean they can be called into the army, have army training, and are basically just not actively fighting at that moment. They are also already assigned to units, already have their equipment in storage, etc. Just like the Hezbollah members that got targeted in civilian areas.
Also your last sentence is pretty ironic considering who didn't follow the usual rules here. I guess it's other people's fault if Israel plants explosives in thousands of devices and triggers them with absolutely no way of knowing if they were aboard an airplane or in a hospital.
Where does the Hague convention say that targeting off duty enemy fighters with explosives in civilian areas is fine? Or more precisely, what part of the Hague convention makes it fine for Israel to do that, but not for Hezbollah? Unless you are saying that every hezbollah militant with a pager is an active armed armed fighter which is completely ludicrous, considering where the explosions happened.
Basically the only way to make your argument work is by applying a double standard where everyone that could quickly become an active Hezbollah fighter is fair game, but everyone that could quickly be activated in the IDF (and has the training, assigned unit and everything else planned for for said activation) is not fine. You could hand waive about international law,but it doesn't make it more true. (Israel prefers to just call everyone around them terrorists to avoid openly breaking international law anyways)
See, now that's better. At least you are back to using the standard IDF talking points. I hope you realize that labeling an organization as terrorist is inherently an intra-national thing. For the Hezbollah, the IDF is the terrorist organization (And they have killed more civilians in a few months than the hezb ever did). So again, glad that you agree with the Hezbollah's point of view and their apologia for targeting civilians. (Hence why international law applies even when one side labels the other terrorist. Hezbollah usually fights in uniform, which means that the "non uniformed combatant" exception in war crimes does not even apply)
And the funny thing is that putting explosives in thousands of devices with 0 ways to track or make sure that they don't end up in say, an airplane, is the very definition of terrorism. It's something that even the Hezbollah hasn't done!
> Why the distinction? I mean they can be called into the army, have army training, and are basically just not actively fighting at that moment
Well, it seems like most people still make a moral difference between someone who "could" one day server in the army or a militant group (for example - a 10 year old child or a 30 year old guy who never took combat training) and someone who is actively fighting. Israel did not hit random Lebanese citizens, it hit almost entirely Hezbollah operatives.
Saying that all Israelis are part of the army is bullshit. Most Israelis, even today, don't do reserve duty for various reasons and quite a few never did army service.
If Hezbollah finds a way to hit only (or almost only) Israeli soldiers I would be very sad but wouldn't call it an act of terror.
Israel did not hit random Lebanese citizens, it hit almost entirely Hezbollah operatives.
Every large-scale airstrike in an urban area hits random civilians, and so far the Lebanese Health Ministry has indicated that out of 558 killed so far, at least 148 (50 children, 94 women, and 4 medics) were very likely not to have been militants.
Of course these are just the initial stages of reporting, and everything is to be taken with a grain of salt. But in this background, the idea that the strikes have hit "almost entirely" militants is highly dubious.
No, it's not a "could"
Israeli citizens are for the most part trained soldiers in what amounts to a less active reserve. It's more of a "will" than "could". In the same way that a Hezbollah militant with a pager isn't always an actual fighter on the frontline, but could be at any time.
As I said earlier, I know that not every single Israeli has been conscripted or part of the army. And I didn't say the actual official reserves. But are you saying that most Israeli citizens in a certain age bracket can't be called into active duty very quickly, and have the training to do so, and the IDF having the planning (down to unit assignments) and equipment to do just that in case of emergencies?
Because that's similar to how Hezbollah operates. Most of their militants are not actively fighting or even "reserves", but could be called into active service when required.
That's pretty ironic, considering the mental gymnastics you have been doing to justify spreading thousands of explosive devices while calling the other side terrorists.
So I guess the militants who died and were executed during the Warsaw uprising also deserved it, as they were part of a non nation state armed group and thus could be shot and executed even when unarmed. That's somehow okay according to your interpretation of international laws lol.
Did the fighters in Warsaw, if you can even call them fighters since they were a bunch of starving people with a few improvised weapons perhaps, open a war against Germany? I must have missed that.
IDF/military buildings are near civilian areas, considering that IDF is buying bombs to kill civilians (definition of terrorism), do you think it is okay to bomb civilian buildings located near IDF buildings?
He... Did not say that. He said they are targeting civilians, and basic math on casualty numbers ("hamas" numbers being the same as in use by both US and IDF military intelligence) can at least tell you they're doing very little to avoid it.
You might want to check the combatant to civilian casualties ratio for other conflicts including western led post WW2 ones.
Iraq and Afghanistan had worse figures, by many reports even the drone part of GWOT was worse.
And those were generally fought in more permissive environments.
For the most part the single largest casualty cohort in any conflict are civilians achieving a 1:1 to 1:2 ratio depending on which figures you go by while tragic is actually quite impressive for a lack of a better word.
When we design data structures do we not say that the sum of all things are intended tradeoffs? It doesn’t make sense to say that you intended to buy milk but you didn’t intend to spend money. Nothing in life works like that.
No, I didn't, I only asked a question by replacing words Hezbollah with IDF, pager with building. When pagers got blown up, there were civilians near by
One must embrace the sum of the decision. You don't choose to drive your car without expending energy. You choose both. You don't blow up thousands of bombs in streets and marketplaces and only choose to kill the people you want — you choose it all.
Recently we had what may have been a targeted hit in crowded public space in Alabama. When those individuals are caught, I hope it is understood that you don't choose to open fire in a crowd and only choose to shoot one person. You choose it all.
In such a world how do we make a decision? By judging that the price is right. Why did innocent people die when thousands of bombs blew up in public spaces? Because the price was right. That should be the center of discussion, not whether we'd like to blow up thousands of bombs in public places without paying the price.
There are tons of videos, none of them show drones chasing children. Some show injured children which unfortunately is unavoidable. Some are children injured by hamas themselves to manufacture a narrative.
If you really wanted the truth, you would have already found it yourself by now and I don't need to give you a source to prove it. This is only one example out of >14.000 dead children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBkNDNj05XA
And remember, no one will admit in official documents that they have deliberately targeted civilians, not even countries officially recognized as executing a genocide. Not a single one will have any official document saying: target innocent civilians. You can derive it from their actions
It was a multi-year operation to get to the place where they could sell the targets the mined devices. Google hasn't got that kind of time horizon.
Who is your enemy and why do they want to hurt you? Is anyone really concerned that mass market consumer devices have command detonated explosives in them already? I mean, other than the iphones?
> Who is your enemy and why do they want to hurt you
It seems like the perfect occasion to quote Mickens' immortal words:
> Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is
not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@
virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to
use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos
of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.
If they are that competent then it implies they let October 7th and September 11th happen. My know-nothing take is that given the funds, lack of morals, and government support they can pull off some actions that benefit them, but let’s not act like it is more than it is.
Don’t forget that governments are big organizations. The Israeli government “knew” in the sense that they were earned by the Saudi and Egyptian governments, and the Israeli intelligence community had Hamas’ plans at least a year before the attacks and widely circulated them, and had specific warnings months and days before the attacks:
One take on this is that Netanyahu allowed them to happen because he needs to stay in power to delay his personal risk of going to jail, which would be compatible with his subsequent actions to prolong the war, but it’s also quite plausible that this simply reflects widespread arrogance: many reports say the intelligence alerts were ignored because senior officials didn’t believe that Hamas was capable of a sophisticated attack. Their tactical excellence would have fed into this, because they generally do outclass their opponents considerably.
I'm a big Netanyahu critic, as are many in Israel nowadays. And I think he'd do pretty much anything to stay in power, which is at least some part of the reason the war is still ongoing, if not the main reason.
But the idea that he actually knew about this and let it happen, is IMO very, very unlikely. I mean, just from that same pragmatic perspective in which he'd do anything to remain in power - he lost massive amounts of support because of October 7th. He's been able to claw some of that support back, but he's still polling far below where he was before October 7th, and it is very unlikely he will remain in office past the next elections.
But the idea that he actually knew about this and let it happen, is IMO very, very unlikely.
Another take is somewhat between yours and that of the parent:
It's not that Bibi "knew" that an all-out massacre was coming on the scale that it actually did. Rather, that he chose to discount the signals he was receiving (that something "big" was in the works), and to downgrade the actual risk to his people. Thinking "Okay, so they might try something, but then we'll just hit back with some heaver-than-usual rounds of lawn mowing. Which will get the message across, and be lots of fun besides."
So in that sense he did "know", in that he could have known if he wanted but his ideology and his blind belief in his insane long-term strategy vis-a-vis Hamas prevented him from seeing what should have been staring him in the face.
Very much like with Bush II and the warnings he got about 9/11 -- but in Bibi's case, apparently the indications were much more specific.
Regardless of what Bibi knew or didn't know, the army was totally gone. Bibi is not the chief commander of the army, there is the commander of the South, the chief of staff (ramatkal), the head of intelligence - all were missing in action. Israel's entire understanding of border defense was completely lacking - and we now know that the same issue has been going on in the North. Had Hezbollah wanted to they probably could have created an even bigger October 7th - that's why Israel is now insisting on creating some kind of security zone clean of Hezbollah fighters for a few kilometers in South Lebanon.
The stark truth is that no one in the public really knows, yet, because there still hasn't really been any outside investigation of what happened. Netanyahu is pushing hard against such an investigation, btw.
The little we do know doesn't seem to point to him being a single point of failure - it does seem like there were many warnings, but for various reasons being uncovered now, it looks like several people in the establishment discounted these.
I do too think it's more stupidity than malice, but this is a very rare case of a conspiracy theory that could easily convince me. One, the civilians hit by the 7th october are bedouins, leftists still living in their anarchist commune, and partying teens/YA who wouldn't vote for him anyway. Two, intelligence agencies all knew, they had the plan (according to haaretz), and it is well-known that Egypt send a lot of advance warning (the week when it happened).
The fact that most of the IDF was busy finding ways to "liberate" land in the left bank while it happened to me is a reason why i mostly think it is due to stupidity. It's very plausible, and that's what IDF primary purpose was until last october. By removing people from their houses in the west bank, they allow settlers to take that land (as it is unused), and that's how Israel grow. It was like that that they took my father's (christian) orphanage and school: pretexted the building was too old and needed reparation, put the Sisters and the kids out, destroyed the orphanage, settled the place. Easy. They probably thought the warnings were given to prevent them to build new settlements fast enough, and choose to ignore them.
> It was like that that they took my father's (christian) orphanage and school: pretexted the building was too old and needed reparation, put the Sisters and the kids out, destroyed the orphanage, settled the place. Easy. They probably thought the warnings were given to prevent them to build new settlements fast enough, and choose to ignore them.
> the civilians hit by the 7th october are bedouins, leftists still living in their anarchist commune, and partying teens/YA who wouldn't vote for him anyway.
That's a pretty crazy claim. There were very few Bedouins killed (and how the heck would Bibi know who Hamas was going to kill btw? Hamas could have tried driving straight to Ashkelon or could have focused only on Sderot).
Nova party was not a left wing event, right wingers are just as likely to go to raves - I would say the rave was pretty much an ordinary representation of Israeli secular society.
Other than that tons of cops got killed, tons of right / center leaning people in the towns near Gaza and so on. And yes quite a few left wingers.
His party polls very low among the youth (that do not vote a lot anyway), i'm not saying that people who go to raves are left or right-wing, i'm just making a claim about their youthfullness. I don't even believe that anyway, i think it's more stupidity than malice, i just wanted to say i understand the people who believe that.
I don't think this is a Netanyahu issue anyway, i think that most israeli leaders, whatever their political leaning would probably have made the same mistakes. Not at least acknowledging "discourse on colonialism" from Cesaire when you have settlers yourselves is to me a grave mistake of the Israeli society. I'm not saying you must agree with most of it, i don't, or that it apply 1 for 1, it doesn't, but acknowledgement this text exist and trying to draw parallels and do a self-criticism is a very good way to limit the impact of colonialism on your own population and (especially in this case) leadership.
It’s too conspiratorial for my tastes, too, but I think you have to at least evaluate it given how much advanced notice they had. It certainly wouldn’t be unprecedented for someone to think they could spin things in a more favorable direction than turned out to be the case.
That said, if I had to bet my money is on simple arrogance. When you’re that consistently outclassing your opponent it’s easy to assume that’s always true as opposed to to _mostly_ true. We had similar problems with 9/11 where FBI offices were playing internal political games because they just weren’t serious enough about major domestic attacks.
Don't confuse ruthlessness for competence. Israel does a lot of things because it knows it can get away with them. Israel is also known for spreading blatant disinformation. Occam's Razor suggests they were unprepared for the Oct 7 attack because they simply didn't see it coming even if they knew Hamas was up to something.
When having terrorist organisations shoot bottle rockets at you or have their members blow themselves up is a common occurrence and your tolerance of collateral damage in your military counter-attacks is so high that you've continuously killed an order of magnitude more people in your counter-attacks every year while maintaining a much higher ratio of civilians casualties per military target, you don't actually need good intel because your mode of response defaults to "just kill 10x as many of them as they killed of us".
Israel's official X account tweeted that they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists. So it is apparently incredibly easy to become the enemy of Israel without breaking any laws or hurting anyone. That should concern everyone.
That's because Likud has been unable to build a coalition with anyone but far right splinters. So there are now people in power that want the same kind of religious nationalist state as the furthest right depths of the GOP (or maybe not to deep, considering Project 2025).
This is not likely to last through the next election, looking at polls.
Are these U.S students? The prominent figure in the video has his face entirely covered and it is known that many non students went to these events.
I can't tell from that video whether these people supported terrorism or not, it's not quite clear. I would say that calling for 'freeing Palestine from the river to the sea' doesn't leave much room for non violence.
The quoted tweet mentions "videos", and is actually a thread of multiple posts. You have to be signed in to see them, or use a nitter proxy[1]. If you look at those videos, it's clear that they're not calling the protesters "terrorists" for merely protesting, they're calling them "terrorists" for engaging in behavior such as intimidating jewish students or praising the October 7th attacks. It's slightly misleading to round that off to "protesting Israel's actions in Gaza".
It's slightly misleading to round that off to "protesting Israel's actions in Gaza".
It's very misleading to round it off that way, and that's exactly why Israel crafted that retweet the way it did.
Even though the underlying tweet tells a different story, by truncating and framing the material in that way -- by juxtaposing the insipid "(a)-(b)-(c)" argument with a video of a perfectly nondescript protest scene -- it's very clear that the intent to convey a simple, visceral, 3-second emotional impression: "protesting Israel's actions in gaza == support for terrorists == terrorism".
>Even though the underlying tweet tells a different story, by truncating and framing the material the way they did
It seems like a stretch to argue they're "truncating" the material, when twitter doesn't provide a way to link threads besides quoting the first tweet.
>it's very clear that what they're trying to do is to convey a simple 3-second emotional impression: "protesting Israel's actions in gaza == support for terrorists == terrorism".
I certainly didn't get that impression when reading the tweet. I agree the video was nondescript, which was why I went out of my way to use a nitter instance to see whether there were more to that tweet. The standards around "well if you read between the lines..." accusations are seemingly so low that in any given argument you could use them on both sides. For instance, you could plausibly argue that by linking to a thread where the worst pro-palestinian protesters were called "terorrists", and describing that as "[israel] consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists", it gives the "emotional impression" that you can't denounce any aspect of pro-palestinian protesters without being accused of thinking the entire movement are terrorists.
Right -- if they dig into the context (which of takes infinitely more time, and then they have to be logged into Elon's hate machine to even see it) then they'll find the more "nuanced" information below it (for what in the hasbara world counts as "nuanced" anyway), which is at least somewhat less brainwash-y and does try to make some kind of point.
But the whole intent of the retweet's framing (its truncating) of the underlying tweet is to bypass all of that, and just get straight to the cortisol-spiking emotional imagery.
>But the whole intent of the retweet's framing (its truncating) of the underlying tweet is to bypass all of that, and just get straight to the cortisol-spiking emotional imagery.
Again, not being able to quote an entire thread is a platform limitation, so to claim that it was intentional is a stretch. I agree that the tweet would be better if it contained a footnote of "btw we're not saying all pro-palestinian protests are terrorists, just the ones in the video", but given that twitter isn't exactly known for nuanced takes, claiming that the lack of such footnote implies it was intentionally truncated is an isolated demand for rigor. Moreover, if you're against truncating and "cortisol-spiking emotional imagery", of @Israel's quote tweet, you should be against the same behavior of the OP, which rounded off the entire thread to be "they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists".
I don't see the OP's framing as dishonest -- on the contrary, I see it as basically correct.
It's not the the Israel tweet was intending to literally say "protests == terrorists". The whole point is that was innuendo. It didn't have to be literally correct -- only to convey an insinuation and/or an emotional message.
And it seems pretty clear that emotional message was very much intentional in this case. It's also perfectly congruent with the number one insinuation / emotional message the hasbara folks have been repeating incessantly for decades (and in recent years, not merely as an insinuation but literally -- even so far as to have it successively encoded as legislation in multiple countries): "All protest/critique/doubt of Israeli policy or narratives == anti-semitism".
And perhaps we can leave it at that? I mean you can respond of course, but I'm not sure I have much more energy for this. I guess it's pretty clear that I'm pretty fed up with that country's official (and unofficial) propaganda machine, and all the mindless crap it's been spewing for decades and decades. And so I'm kind of tired of looking for reasons to give it the benefit of the doubt.
If you have a different take, then that's fine for you of course.
>I don't see the OP's framing as dishonest -- on the contrary, I see it as basically correct.
"basically" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. At best the claim was directionally correct in the sense that Israel hates pro-palestinian protesters, but that's neither a secret nor controversial. The specific claim of "they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists" is only true if you believe the highly subjective read-between-the-lines-and-consider-the-context interpretation.
>not merely as an insinuation but literally): "all protest/critique/doubt of Israeli policy == anti-semitism".
literally?
Source?
Moreover, you don't see the irony here? You're accusing the israelis of pushing a message of "all protest/critique/doubt of Israeli policy == anti-semitism", but here you are, rounding off a tweet thread where the worst pro-palestinian protesters were called terrorists as "they consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists"? I'm sure you find the latter to be more justified, but surely you can see the issue when someone who's vaguely skeptical of the pro-palestinian view is reading your comments?
Ok, you caught me violating my own rule with regard to "literally".
It's not literally "all". But there does seem to be strong, steady insinuation in their propaganda that much protest/critique/doubt of the State of Israel's actions/shenanigans is, ipso facto anti-semitic.
There's no source needed for this. It's been omnipresent in the environment of discourse (at least since the dawn of the ADL/Dershowitz era).
Though I do think it's quite fair cite both the Nakba Law within Israel itself, and the anti-BDS legislation adopted in certain countries as attempts to (at least partially) codify this omnipresent insinuation into law. More specifically the idea seems to be brand this visceral association (between strong critique and anti-semitism) as highly intrinsic -- to such a degree that can be called "close to literal" -- in people's minds.
It's both bizarre, and all too mundane and predictable somehow, the extent to which they've been able to keep pushing the envelope on (and reaping dividends from) this effort.
The OP is correct, since although the official Israel account is quote tweeting Shai Davidai, the most shameless zionist hasbarist on twitter, Israel's tweet is still self contained and is clearly trying to demonize and vilify the protestors as terrorists based on their "ideology" i.e. fighting back against your colonizer and oppressor is "terrorism" because any opposition to the racist colonial enterprise that is Israel has to be demonized and delegitimized by Zionists while they themselves engage in blatant terrorism. Israel's propaganda is so awful and lazy that it has become predictable. They will always hyperfocus on fringe cases, even manufacture such cases if they don't exist, in order to delegitimize the whole protest.
And anyone who actually followed the protests carefully has witnessed that Zionists were the aggressors trying to intimidate anyone who opposes Israel's actions in Gaza in any shape or form. Furthermore, the "they were intimidating jewish students" narrative has become so laughable at this point because zionists perceive any opposition to Israel as "intimidating" and so they are abusing the jewish identity as a shield to protect the israeli apartheid entity from criticism. People are sick and tired of this game because they have seen zionists playing these sick and twisted mind games for decades.
I never claimed that those videos are representative of all anti-israel protests, or that either accounts aren't engaging in bad faith argumentation, but at the end of the day, the linked tweet does not substantiate the object level question of "[israel] consider US students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza to be terrorists". The examples might be cherry picked, but it's a stretch to claim that a thread calling the worst protesters "terrorists" actually means they think all anti-israel protesters are "terrorists". Cherry picking is bad, but two wrongs don't make a right.
It's not a stretch by any means - you are bending over backwards to sanitize the most obvious propaganda to vilify and demonize protesting students at columbia by hyperfocusing on the fringe and leveraging that to delegitimize the whole. It's a pattern of propaganda in which Israel engages in regularly, one of their favorite strategies in fact. Both Israel's official account and Shai applied their smears indiscriminately, so there is no reason why I would need to interpret either tweet charitably since they are both primarily engaged in propaganda.
Your rhetoric is so laughable it's insane, you clearly enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing but you will not succeed in this case. Both tweets indiscriminately smeared protestors as "terrorists" and Israel's official account just said "they[the protestors] are terrorists" merely based on "their ideology" but you want me to be so charitable towards a propaganda account that even engaged in propaganda against Palestinians that is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda!? (e.g. caricatures of Palestinians as cockroaches and rats)
>"well they don't say that explicitly, but if you take the other stuff they're doing into context then it's pretty clear think that and are engaging in propaganda"
this is a laughable straw-man. I'm saying, as it's tweeted, that they smeared the protestors indiscriminately as terrorists based on their ideology of supporting resistance to colonization, but you are bending over backwards to sanitize the tweet by arguing semantics like a Nazi who hides behind dog-whistles and ambivalent language to retain a small degree of plausible deniability. anyone who is not hell-bent on arguing for the sake of arguing knows exactly that the purpose of that rhetoric is the blanket vilification of all protestors like they have done consistently for the past year. it's documented how zionists have persistently tried to smear protestors as "antisemitic", "terrorists" or any other evil known to man. Such dishonest strategies are the bread and butter of zionist propaganda. I will no longer entertain your bad faith argumentation.
>You accuse them of "indiscriminately smeared protestors", but so far as I can tell, neither @Isarel tweet nor the @ShaiDavidai thread said that all protesters were terrorists
LOL so according to your logic, although they both systematically vilified ALL protestors for months but haven't explicitly used the word "all" that is enough plausible deniability tho the smear is indiscriminate? So then we can also go through Nazi propaganda and every time it fails to include the word "all" we can assume that the Nazis didn't mean the peaceful jews, just some specific jews!? You simply want to argue for the sake of it, any sane person sees it for what it is - an attempt to vilify ALL protestors, like they have done consistently for decades.
Zionists systematically vilified ALL protestors and pro-israel media explicitly described peaceful marches as "hate marches". You're playing devil's advocate but you are doing a terrible job at it and I don't even need to take into account the history of both accounts to prove my point because it's so obvious to anybody who isn't hell-bent on denying the obvious.
>Source for they "systematically vilified ALL protestors"?
smearing peaceful marches as "hate marches", the tweet itself which explicitly states that the ideology of protestors i.e. supporting resistance against occupation makes them "terrorists", smearing protestors as "antisemites", this one is an all time classic, any resistance to the racist colonial project will lead zionists to smear you as an "antisemite" any chance they get
>Is this going to be the same thing as the original tweet, where they don't actually say all protesters are bad
So you would accept it when people would say that jews are pro-genocide and land theft but when accused of antisemitism you would say "no thats actually not antisemitism since he clearly didnt say ALL jews" - Ofc you wouldn't, that's where you would flip-flop on your logic and pretend like you never made the opposing argument. You engage in weaselly dishonest quarreling and you know it.
>In the case of the nazis, we know that's not the case because of what they did afterwards, but that doesn't give you license to extrapolate in every case. You can't extrapolate "I hate billionaires who don't pay their fair share of taxes" to "I hate all billionaires".
Ah ok, so in case of Nazis we can extrapolate because of their actions, but in case of these Zionists who systematically and persistently engaged in vilification of all protestors and justified genocide for almost a year we somehow can't, lol. The dishonesty is so glaring.
>Don't you think it's a bit irresponsible to paint the other side as a monolith?
Israeli propaganda couldn't even function without painting the other side as a monolith, their propaganda is that crude and dishonest. I mean it's funny how you once again turn the issue on its head where the propagandist vilifying peaceful protests as "hate marches" is somehow the victim. You are not a serious person and you've already wasted my time with incoherent denial hell-bent on denying the obvious.
The word "terrorist" is very overloaded in Israeli politics. To anyone right of Likud (or even Likud itself) it can even include opposition leaders and arab citizens.
Israel would 100% "blow up Columbia students" if they happens to be in the wrong side of the border at the wrong time. That's exactly the problem, Israel murdering wholesale students so other students are standing up tonight them while people like you ignore and defer.
Are there many instances of American citizens (students or non students) being killed by Israel? I would say no. I know of a few and they are very famous because its quite rare to happen.
I'd even guess there are more American Israelis that got killed by Palestinians.
- Mar 16 2003: Rachel Corrie
- May 11 2022: Shireen Abu Akleh killed, very in a likely targeted attack
- Sep 6 2024: Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, also likely targeted
And 2 American teenagers recently killed by settlers (who act as an extension of the Israeli government):
- Jan 19 2024 - Tawfic Hafeth Abdel Jabbar, 17 - [0]
- Feb 10 2024 - Mohammad Khdour, 17 - [1]
Meanwhile we have some 31 American citizens killed by Hamas since Oct 7 - [2]
The numbers are quite different. However it is deeply significant that Israel is supposed to be one of America's top allies (and the US is definitely Israel's "bestie" by far), yet its government has obfuscated and/or outright lied about a 5 incidents above. And except for Corrie, all 4 were shot in the head.
Yes, of course Israel has killed American citizens as well, can you not use Google?
You likely know who Rachel Corrie, an American student and peace activist is, but are forgetting on purpose. She was killed on March 16, 2003, in the Gaza Strip while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Corrie was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer while attempting to block its path.
Israel doesn't care, they will murder anyone standing in the way of all the free land land god gave them 3000 years ago.
I'm curious about why you're bringing Google into this. Is there some reason you think they'd totally be running a loosely targeted mass assassination program, except that they just can't plan ahead far enough?
That is such an out of the left field thing to lead with that I thought the article must have brought up this possibility somehow. But that doesn't seem to be the case either.
I guess I'd just then have asked the same question about Oracle. Why would you expect them to be compromising supply chains to kill people, except for their supposed limited planning horizon? It seems like an equally odd point to make of any company.
We don't actually live in a cyberpunkish dystopia of sovereign corporations. While it's reasonable to expect large companies to have their own intelligence operations - they are huge targets, after all - I find it hard to believe that any of them would run any kind of spook field operation in general, and definitely not anything this offensive.
others have made the point; we're not in a different world than we were a few months ago. the perception of the world we are, and have been in; may have changed for some.
i don't have a specific reason to name a particular company as more likely than any other to be ready to deploy direct violence in pursuit of shareholder value. I speak with cynical observation that if a capability exists, someone will find a use for it.
I don't know how difficult it would be to detect these in customs, but I'm thinking more of an organization posing as a fly by night Amazon/Aliexpress/Temu seller who wants to cause some chaos in a country.
What’s really needed is some way you can easily tell that a device has been tampered with, but which is also extremely difficult to bypass. And also where even if the OEM was in on the scheme, you could still tell. Like how a hash is used to tell if someone made changes to a piece of software.
For consumer products this is a nonstarter because companies will almost never fully divulge info about all the parts of a device required for this.
For defence product where almost everything is fully specified by the customer, it might be possible. If you know all the components in a device, and you can prove they are all genuine, then you can prove the whole device is genuine.
Engraved hashes on every part comes to mind, but that would be ungainly to validate and fairly easy to bypass by simply copying codes from one device to another.
This doesn’t work because the hashes are controlled by the same party party you don’t trust. If you want this, you need to pay for trusted third-parties to audit the factory and random samples - otherwise it’s basically like all of the blockchain startups trying to reinvent supply chains only to learn that a chain of hashes showing package A was delivered to warehouse B don’t help if you don’t actually know what was in the box, who picked it up, or what happened to it in transit. I guarantee that the Mossad would have had valid hashes on every battery.
This isn’t even very effective for software: people have been working on commit signing, reproducible builds, etc. for ages but it’s just a cascade of trust problems where striking the balance between workable and effective can be extremely challenging. Something like xz or SolarWinds would have had valid signatures on everything, and you still wouldn’t know the real identity of the person responsible for the duplicitous code.
You’re not going to easily detect supply chain tampering of code, but you might be able to detect the covert inclusion of explosives in your devices with imaging (X Ray and CT) and random sampling tear downs.
> requiring iPhones to be made entirely in the United States.
> attacking an international supply chain to compromise equipment
But "International" has nothing to do with it. If Lebanon had been a powerhouse of pager manufacturing, a fake reseller could have been created just the same and the pagers re-manufactured just the same. Single iPhones or cases of routers can be delayed in local transit for a touch up (through a small bribe, appeal to patriotism, theft or whatever). And remote exploits are common enough. Seems we need much more effort put into verifiability and such, in hardware and software. Secure enclaves was an idea in the right direction: there is a lot of chip budget available and some can be put into purely security features. Patch and firmware checksums. Encrypted memory path same thing.
What's on the way? Retail scanner imaging and reference photos posted by the manufacturers?
Removable batteries would always be welcome, but they won't fix the issue because the explosive material can still exist in the device, and it can still be triggered using the battery.
This isn't entirely hypothetical. There was for example a US-German joint venture of the respectivel intelligence agencies that produced compromised encryption/security software. The primary market were of course hostile foreign countries but the US saw no problems also selling to its allies which the German agents balked at (because after all if they openly do this that means there's no reason to believe they wouldn't also do this to Germany).
Granted, infiltrating a supply chain to boobytrap devices to prep them for a coordinated act of state terrorism is a different beast from merely compromising encryption and communication but a certain level of paranoia seems warranted.
Arguably if your client is IDF your devices are more likely to exclusively end up in the hands of military personnel whereas if your client is "Hezbollah" (whatever legal entity acted on their behalf in this case) an attack would be (and has been) far more likely to injure, maim or kill civilians and non-militants, not just because of the higher likelihood of harming bystanders and family members.
Would a supply chain attack like this against Toyota be justified because of the large market share in after-market "technicals" used by terrorist and insurgent groups?
Yeah, and since most civilians in Israel are part or were part of the IDF, then the comment you're replying to is right. And according to the same logic you're using, said Israelis are totally fair game for an enemy state or organization to target and kill. If killing suspected Hezbollah fighters outside of the battlefield in civilian areas is totally fine, because they could fight Israel, then most Israeli civilians are too according to that twisted logic.
I'm sure you'd have said the same if a few thousand explosive devices went off all over Israel, and Hezbollah said that it was just them targeting IDF troops.
There is a difference between using infiltration to gain intel and engage in surveillance (although this still caused moral outrage when Snowden leaked details about US intelligence services infiltrating foreign companies in allied countries) and using supply chain attacks to turn electronic devices into remote detonated bombs at scale to carry out a terrorist attack. What's next? Car bombs?
If "almost everyone" is "Russia, Ukraine during an invasion, allegedly the Mossad, maybe the CIA and otherwise mostly terrorist groups and insurrectionists" then sure:
Most countries don't actually have their intelligence services routinely carry out assassinations and when they do the point of having the intelligence service do it rather than the military is usually to keep a low profile.
If you find yourself engaging in carpet bombing, carrying out large-scale terrorist attacks, destroying vital civilian infrastructure, de facto maintaining an open air prison (or if you want a more ironic term, "ghetto"), and creating a track record of "double-tapping" to kill first responders, deliberately killing clearly marked unaffiliated aid workers and journalists, deliberately and directly firing at unarmed civilians with live ammunition to "disperse" them, killing your own citizens held as hostages by bombing their captors, deny any possibility of a ceasefire or peace deal that is not an unconditional surrender, and protecting citizens who engage in illegal occupations, expulsions and vandalism in a way that effectively results in an ethnic cleansing in direct violations of UN resolutions and then call every critic "Hamas", "IS" or "Iran" while simultaneously stating that your military campaign will not stop before "Hamas" is eliminated permanently...
... then maybe, just maybe, you've become as much of a monster as the ones you claim to be fighting.
The ends don't justify the means. The means define what ends you can achieve. If your ends are "living in relative peace and safety" (and for the sake of realism we take that to mean equivalent to a country in Western Europe as neither of those things can be guaranteed nor permanent) and your means involve deliberately killing 10x as many people as your enemies while also killing more women and children and not stopping before the enemy is guaranteed to never pose a threat again, then your ends are only achievable if you completely exterminate not only every single militant sided against you but also all of their friends and family who might be motivated by your actions to take revenge. Or more likely, you'll end up outnumbered, outgunned and at the mercy of those who had to endure unspeakable suffering because of you.
I think you're mixing a bunch of different issues, israel is doing some very bad stuff (occupation and how it handled/handling Gaza) but that doesn't mean that forces like Iran and Hezbollah and other religious lunatics shouldn't be dealt with (this is true for inside israel as well)
If you look at the situation in Lebanon, you have a religious para military organization pointing thousands of rockets towards israel with the aim of "liberating" the land and turning the entire region into a shia islamic empire - military power is almost certainly part of the equation of how to deal with it (along with diplomatic resolutions with other players)
And I really fail to see how taking out thousands of hezbollah members with virtually minimal civilians casualties is not a good thing - my main concern and criticism is that israel is not pushing aggressively on the diplomatic front as well to take advantage of that outcome.
Now it'll probably become standard operational practice for every organization that fears such attack to separate part of its new acquisitions of everyday items and sell them in Israeli second-hand market first, before internal use, as a deterrent.
This is concerning - what if Israel wants to take out one bad guy on a plane or something and views the bystanders as "collateral damage"? They blew these up in multiple countries, there is no rule of law here. This op has US state department/intelligence agencies written all over it (like the Nord stream pipeline). I suspect folks at the TSA, FAA, FTC, all over concerns over this behavior.
But it didn't happen, right? So maybe, just maybe, the people who did this super elaborate plan had the mental capacity to consider that option and took precautions to ensure that it won't happen?
There really aren't precautions necessary, mobile devices shouldn't have any signal when a plane above a few thousand feet.
Even without precautions, the odds that one of the pagers was in a plane over Lebanon within a couple minutes of being on the ground does seem very low. Not zero for sure, but you may be able to mitigate that simply by watching the handful of flights that may be over Lebanon at any one time.
So because it cant detect a kid then might as well blow up a plane?
Acceptable collateral damage is about proportionality and trying to reduce casualties to a minimum, it doesn't mean zero (and don't get me wrong, every one is tragic)
Damn, this reads like something Hezbollah would say. I mean the rockets they launch will probably kill IDF troops, whether active or not as most Israelis are part of the IDF reserves and can be called at any point to fight. Sure there are kids around them but hey, odds are it will still also kill some enemy fighters so that's fine!
International law dictates that reserves soldiers that are not in active duty are considered civilians - hence targeting them is a war crime.
And yes, there's something called collateral damage, which depends on the situation is considered legal, so yes, if you actually target a military target and happen to also hit civilians that reside in that target it is not a war crime. But it is a war crime if you just generally lob rockets in a direction hoping to hit something.
That's great, that confirms that Israel went against international law (again). Since a lot of the Hezbollah fighters were not in active duty, and were in civilian areas (Beirut isn't a war front).
You are confused - the Hezbollah fighters are on Hezbollah payroll hence they are "active" and part of the organization. The non-active reservists are not on IDF payroll since they haven't been re-called for duty, so the are considered fully civilian.
Do you have a source on that? Most Hezbollah militants usually also live normal civilian lives unless engaged in a conflict. Especially those in say, beirut. I mean, maybe Mossad has magically been able to target only Hezbollah fighters on active pay roll and on active duty with the pagers.
You don't have a pager given to you by an organization if you aren't working for that organization (as opposed to IDF reservists who don't carry any pagers, other than you know, civilians phones).
We also know for a fact that the top Hezbollah commander had such a pager (since it was reported he was in the hospital for treatment), which is pretty strong evidence they didn't exactly hand them out to random people on the street.
Now, can we know for sure without actually knowing what IDF knew? probably not, but it seems extremely likely based on what we do know that the pagers weren't carried by off duty low level grunts (again, top commander had it, iranian ambassador had one or was in close proximity, 90 or so Iranians had one and were flown back to Iran for treatment), but I guess those were just random iranian tourists that happened to be at the wrong place and the wrong time? right?
Didn't they just kill about 30 thousand innocent women and children in Palestine exactly for this reason- because they happened to be near some bad guy (at least that is the excuse given)?
"Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 (LN 114) was a regularly scheduled civilian flight from Tripoli to Cairo, through Benghazi, that was shot down in 1973 by Israeli fighter jets after it entered by mistake, due to a system malfunction, the airspace of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula – then under Israeli occupation – resulting in the death of 108 civilians"
"The Israeli Cabinet discussed the incident three times in secret meetings. The minutes, declassified in 2023, show that the main decisions were to deny all responsibility and to refuse to hold an official inquiry"
But then, I think the only real difference between a civilian flight and a residential building is that in the first one there's people of many nationalities, while the bodies buried under the collapsed ruins of the building are all Palestinians, so we don't care much about them.
You left out the part: "it was shot down by the Israeli fighter pilots after they did not receive a response to their demands for the aircraft to land"
You left out the part where the pilot of LN 114 apparently didn't realize that the approaching planes were Israeli (he thought they were Egyptian), and that he realized his navigational mistake and had already executed a U-turn before the Phantoms arrived (setting the plane on course for Cairo).
Also, it's not the IAF pilots "didn't receive a response" to their signals. One of their pilots signaled twice (first with hand gestures, then again by dipping the wings of one of the jets). They did receive a response to first signal at least, but may have been confused by it, or have interpreted as an attempt to flee. It's also entirely possible the pilot of LN 114 was understandably confused and in a very tense mindstate and wasn't sure how to respond.
From WP:
It continued flying eastwards into the Sinai at a speed of 325 miles per hour (282 kn; 523 km/h), until the crew realised they had had problems with their instruments and were off their path; at this moment, the French pilot performed a U-turn, in order to leave the Sinai and go back towards Cairo.[6] The Israeli pilots interpreted it as an attempt to flee and, according to them, then tried to make visual contact with the airliner's crew and to communicate with them by signaling with their hands. Still according to the Israelis, the 727's French pilot responded with a hand gesture indicating refusal, signaling his intention to continue back on his way out of Sinai. The fighters claim to have replied by dipping their wings, what was once again ignored by the civilian airliner crew. Then, the Israeli fighters attacked the civilian plane.
Minus The airliner that's exactly what Israel is doing and has been doing for the better part of 40 years. What did you think was going on? The West is moving into a region, destabilizing it, murdering all of the natives, and taking the land, there's definitely going to be some collateral damage.
"We can’t imagine Washington passing a law requiring iPhones to be made entirely in the United States. Labor costs are too high, and our country doesn’t have the domestic capacity to make these things. Our supply chains are deeply, inexorably international, and changing that would require bringing global economies back to the 1980s..."
Yeah, and that's what is happening. Globalization has waxed and waned several times over the last few centuries. It is a matter of government policy, not in any sense "inexorable". It is currently waning, and will continue to do so for several decades, probably, for this reason and many others.
> Globalization has waxed and waned several times over the last few centuries.
This is a new one to me, you got me genuinely curious. When was there a meaningful push for globalization prior to WWII, ignoring empires trying to colonize the world?
Well I don't know that one should ignore colonialism, but there was also very much a more open free trade system prior to WW1, than there was fifty years later.
What would the practical implications of this actually be?
My first thought is that NATO countries would stop selling arms or partnering militarily with Israel. Though I'm not sure if that is set in stone, the US has a habit of arming and working with groups, especially in the middle east, that either are designated as terrorist groups or act as one and are only missing the official designation.
Well... Maybe you get down-voted because you write anti-semetic stuff like "In my eyes, this incident raises the question about every Israeli software developer and hardware developer I work with."...
That’s not anti-Semitic - it would have been if they’d said “Jewish” since “Israeli” is a question of citizenship rather than religion. If you have foreign nationals in your supply chain, it is reasonable to question how you’d know if they were subverted - for example, change “Israeli” to “Russian” or “Chinese” and ask whether you’d say there’s a legitimate possibility that their government might be coercing them. (And, of course, anyone outside of the U.S. is totally justified asking the same questions about our tech industry.)
