What America Can Learn from Israel but Won’t
“Yalla ya Nasrallah… ” By Roger L Simon
My friend Lee Smith has an excellent article on Tablet, “Killing Nasrallah,” with the subtitle “Israel shows America how to win wars” that inspired me to write this piece.
As I’m sure Lee would agree, regarding actually teaching or showing America how to win wars, given the current administration, the most reasonable conclusion is “Good luck with that.”
President Biden did acknowledge that getting rid of Hassan Nasrallah might have been a good thing because the Hezbollah General Secretary was responsible for killing hundreds of US citizens in the past, but hastened to add, faster than a New York minute, that now is the time for… you’ll never guess… a ceasefire.
That’s a ceasefire in the North and in the South. Lebanon and Gaza.
That would mean of course the survival of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the myriad jihadist thugs across Iraq and, most of all, the mullahs of Iran who were most likely quaking in their boots after Israel’s action. Ayatollah Khamenei has reportedly fled to a secure hideout.
It also ignores the excitement of people inside those countries—specifically Lebanon, Syria and Iran itself—who were, according to videos that were all over X on Friday night, dancing in the streets, rejoicing that a horrid dictator who had been oppressing them was dead. Hezbollah is hated through much of the Arab world as are the mullahs in their own country that has always been on the brink of an internal civil war since the 1979 revolution that brought them to power.
Unfortunately, disregarding or downplaying the opposition to jihadist dictators is par for the course for the Obama-Biden-Harris regime from the days when Barack Obama ignored the chants of the thousands of freedom demonstrators on the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities when they cried out to him, “Obama, Obama, are you with us or are you with them?”
Them, as it turned out, was the choice… meaning Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
Since then, except for the Trump years, American foreign policy has leaned toward appeasing the mullahs and away from the Iranian people, not to mention the equally benighted people of Lebanon and Syria under other dictators, Nasrallah and the Assads, Hafez and son Bashar. (Bashar and his wife Asma were even the subjects of a puff piece in Vogue, as if they were a fun couple in the Hamptons.)
America hasn’t always been the way we are now. We used to win wars against evil.
We once had a president named Harry S. Truman who went so far as to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make absolutely certain the Japanese emperor got the message and also to minimize deaths from a bloody invasion of the island nation.
Our country also made no bones about destroying German cities like Dresden with countless civilian deaths in order to finish off the Nazis.
In both cased we succeeded and Japan and Germany have been democratic countries for three-quarters of a century.
But Israel is not allowed to do the same. They must have ceasefires. They must not be allowed to finish the job against totalitarians the way the US once did.
Why is that? I hope it’s not because they are a Jewish nation.
Whatever the motive, our current administration is at best a fair weather friend and the weather is getting progressively less fair.
The Democratic Party, and its current presidential nominee, make a habit of walking out on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in the case of that nominee, for a sorority reunion, of all things.
They extended that habit on Sep 27 when Netanyahu addressed the United Nations, our representative to that supposedly august organization not even attending his speech.
Ironically, it was a brilliant and hard hitting talk, as was the address by the extraordinary Javier Milei, President of Argentina, one of the few allies of Israel in their fight against Islamofascism and the man I would nominate as the intellectual leader of the free world today. (Watch his speech, if you haven’t.)
Also ironically, during Netanyahu’s speech, actions were moving apace that he was well aware of but were unbeknownst to our reactionary government (I abjure the terms “liberal” and “progressive” as tired propaganda), to decimate the leadership of Hezbollah.
According to the Jerusalem Post, quoting Brig.-Gen Amichai Levine, “The operation was long-planned and reflects extraordinary collaboration with military intelligence and the Air Force.”
It certainly seemed long-planned, as did the pagers sabotage of a couple of weeks before.
Neither would have been allowed to happen if they had been run by that same reactionary, appeasing US government. (As I write this, a “statement” on behalf of Kamala Harris has been released on the assassination saying essentially the same as Biden.)
It all reminds me, as it has some other writers, of the Godfather movies with Netanyahu, in the role of Micheal Corleone, making his speech knowing that on the other side of the world the necessary work of justice is being done. (Yes, I know it’s a strained comparison, but the feeling is oddly similar.)
Netanyahu himself has been a beleaguered figure since Oct 7, blamed, fairly to a great degree, for the oversights that caused that disaster. I gather from Israeli reports that that nation’s longest-running prime minister is now in the process of redeeming himself, his popularity again on the upswing. Perhaps he can use his newfound power to fight for all of us and carry forth, even if our own country doesn’t, on the final words of his UN speech: “Enough is enough.”
SOME COMIC RELIEF
Another friend of mine, A J. Rice, has written a new book. A. J. is a public relations guy who represents authors and then writes books that sell more than theirs. (To make them jealous? Doesn’t sound like a good business strategy to me.) Anyway, as it happens, he’s very funny and his latest —The White Privilege Album—proves it. I’ve been reading it before bed to distract me from the troubles of the day with some jokes, only it doesn’t because every so often he gets serious and I’m back to my usual insomniac self. Still: recommended!
ALSO
Apropos, my subtitle “Yalla ya Nasrallah…”, this is where it comes from. You can click and sing along, if you like.
First published in American Refugees