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Netanyahu Details Hizballah’s War Crimes

At the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, the Israeli prime minister drew attention to Hizballah’s use of human shields, pointing out three locations where the Iran-backed terrorist group has constructed factories for the production of precision-guided missiles: two beneath multistory apartment buildings and one in an urban residential neighborhood in close proximity to gas installations. Such behavior not only exhibits reckless disregard for human life, but also violates international law. It is also a useful tactic, as Orde Kittrie explains:

U.S., Israeli, and other armed forces have repeatedly been confronted with human shields use by terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, and Islamic State. Terrorists hide behind human shields (a) to cause Western armed forces to self-impose restraints that render them less effective, and (b) to delegitimize lawful military operations, erode the Western will to fight, and to spur anger at the West by generating civilian casualties for that the terrorists can blame Western militaries. Terrorists engage in the actual war crime of using human shields so that they can falsely accuse U.S., Israeli, and other Western armed forces of engaging in war crimes.

Hizbllah’s use of human shields has been remarkably effective in achieving these objectives. It also puts civilians in danger of explosives accidents, such as those that recently decimated the port of Beirut and detonated a Hizballah arms depot in the Lebanese village of Ain Qana.

Yet Western countries have not yet responded by penalizing, prosecuting, or otherwise holding Hizballah, other terrorist groups, and their leaders and material supporters accountable for using human shields.

Read more at FDD

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Hizballah, Lebanon

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic