An Image Taken From a Video Posted on Social Media Showing an Explosion and a Man Falling to the Floor at a Vegetable Market in Beirut this past Tuesday, September 17, 2024. Photo: AFP/Getty Images.
By Caitlin Johnstone – Sep 18, 2024
Israel just turned thousands of Lebanese people into involuntary suicide bombers in the name of fighting terrorism.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Israel just turned thousands of Lebanese people into involuntary suicide bombers in the name of fighting terrorism.
At least nine people have been killed and thousands injured in an attack in Lebanon which reportedly involved pagers packed with explosives being remotely detonated around the country, often in civilian areas. An eight year-old girl is reportedly among the dead.
According to The New York Times, unnamed officials from the US and elsewhere are saying that Israel planted the explosive materials in the pagers before they reached Lebanon after Hezbollah ordered them from a Taiwanese manufacturer.
The US is denying any foreknowledge of the attack, but that’s what they always do. We’re always asked to believe that the US never knew anything about attacks conducted by nations like Israel and Ukraine until they read about it in the news, and that their massive intelligence cartel and sprawling surveillance networks never pick up any information and exist for no reason.
This was a terror attack by any possible definition. If Hezbollah had detonated a bunch of devices held by Israeli forces in public spaces without knowing who was near them when they went off, every paper in the western world would have called it a terror attack. But because it was Israelis targeting Hezbollah (a political party which is part of the Lebanese government and has many civilian members), it’s only being called “explosions.”
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“Hezbollah blames Israel after deadly pager explosions in Lebanon,” reads the headline from the BBC.
“Thousands injured in Lebanon as pagers used by Hezbollah explode,” says The Washington Post.
“Exploding pagers belonging to Hezbollah kill at least 8 and injure more than 2,700 in Lebanon,” says NBC News.
No condemnations from western officials. No thoughts and prayers for the victims. No pledges to bring the terrorists to justice. Just the news media going oh wow, some pagers exploded.
Got that, kids? It’s only terrorism when the Official Bad Guys do it. When the Official Good Guys do it, it’s just giving those Bad Guys a sorely needed exploding.
The unprecedented nature and scale of this attack has raised a lot of concerns from a lot of directions. We all use electronic devices in our daily lives, and weaponizing them at mass scale is naturally going to scare people.
“If it were iPhones that were leaving the factory with explosives inside, the media would be a hell of a lot faster to cotton on to what a horrific precedent has been set today. Nothing can justify this. It’s a crime. A crime. And everyone in the world is less safe for it,” tweeted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism,” Snowden also said.
What strikes me watching all this is how gratuitously creepy it is. Israel is so creepy. Everyone already sees them as rapey genocidal baby killers, and then they have to go and commit this weird terror attack in the creepiest way possible and freak everyone out, to no clear and meaningful strategic gain. They’re so creepy they can’t stop themselves from always choosing the creepiest course of action.
Israel is gross.
Caitlin Johnstone
Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet. Utopia prepper.
