Stochastic terrorism and pagers

by liberal japonicus

I recently read this substack piece by Jay Kuo, Donald Trump is a stochastic terrorist, which baffled me a bit, because it seemed to me that terrorism, by it's very definition, is stochastic. A group or person commits an act or acts that are aimed at instilling fear in a larger group because it would be impossible to commit those acts against everyone. But it seems that Kuo's idea of terrorism is the targeting of an individual or a smaller group, and when some randomness is added to the process, it becomes stochastic. I'm thinking about that while reading about pagers (and now, walkie-talkies) in Lebanon. Here's the Guardian's explainer.

There's a lot to wonder about. Israel has not admitted responsibility, but it is difficult to imagine another group being able to undertake this. It also makes one wonder about the timeline. How much earlier was the supply chain entered and what other consumer goods could be sabotaged in a similar way?

Unfortunately, I am headed out the door and will only be on my phone for the next few days, but I'm curious what everyone else makes of this.

Comments

[grumbles]

I personally don't like the "stochastic terrorist" term for multiple reasons. It describes mass-media incitement. Radio Rwanda stuff tuned for local MAGA sensibilities and Trump's personality defects. Folks should leave the poor, misused mathematics jargon in piece. (Also, it doesn't sound smart, it is just confusing people about both math and what Trump's doing.)

The pager attack is certainly novel, and viscerally horrifying. Makes you give your cell phone the side-eye. But if the reports are accurate, it sounds like the pager attack was somewhat targeted. Assuming the reports are true, it was a mass-purchase by Hezbollah, part of replacing their (compromised) cell phone-based communications network. Hezbollah has civilian functions, too, and I don't think it is clear that these pagers all went to military folks. And there were bystanders, including kids.

But it wasn't the bomb-equivalent of the Tylenol poisonings. And I think it is worth comparing with the much less novel but far more indiscriminate and devastating ongoing bombing of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.

I don't understand the strategy, though. If they'd launched a conventional attack right after doing this, it would make sense. Maybe Hezbollah was figuring it out, and it was a use-it-or-lose-it decision? Or maybe Bibi and/or his allies are trying to commit the country to a protracted war.

[Liberal japonicus]

I’m still looking for reportage. When it was first reported, it gave the impression that it was targeted, but later, the number of injuries really undercut that. There also needs to be more information on the supply chain, when were the pagers made and was the company an Israeli front. The reportage emphasizes that Hezbollah bought the pagers, but as I understand it, Hezbollah acts as a default government/business because of a number of factors limiting the official Lebanese government. Also, these pagers might have been resold or a proportion sold to the public.

[nous]

If you are looking for the reference that launched the concept of stochastic terrorism into public discourse, it's:

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/10/934890/-

Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.

This is what occurs when Bin Laden releases a video that stirs random extremists halfway around the globe to commit a bombing or shooting.

This is also the term for what Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity, and others do. And this is what led directly and predictably to a number of cases of ideologically-motivated murder similar to the Tucson shootings.

Update: the mechanism spelled out.

(This update is to resolve some ambiguity.)

The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist, they are the "missile" set in motion by the stochastic terrorist. The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media as their means of setting those "missiles" in motion.

Here's the mechanism spelled out concisely:

The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media to broadcast memes that incite unstable people to commit violent acts.

One or more unstable people responds to the incitement by becoming a lone wolf and committing a violent act. While their action may have been statistically predictable (e.g. "given the provocation, someone will probably do such-and-such"), the specific person and the specific act are not predictable (yet).

The stochastic terrorist then has plausible deniability: "Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I'm not responsible for what people in my audience do."

The lone wolf who was the "missile" gets captured and sentenced to life in prison, while the stochastic terrorist keeps his prime time slot and goes on to incite more lone wolves.

...and it goes on from there.

I would not characterize what I assume is Israel's recent attacks using pagers and radios as stochastic terrorism. It's just ordinary terrorism, in that the exploding devices are not meant to do meaningful damage to the individuals the devices are linked to (thought I am sure that this is a much wished for outcome), but rather to disrupt communications and sow terror in the targets' social groups.

The real weapon of the terrorist is not the bomb or the gun, but rather the media. An assassin is not necessarily a terrorist because not all such killings are spectacular. An assassination that is meant to look like an accident or natural causes is not terrorism. Terrorism is the weaponization of spectacle.

[GftNC]

I found nous's final two paragraphs particularly useful about terrorism, and especially the final sentence. Thank you, nous, for such a succinct, clear, and if you will forgive the use of such a word in this context, elegant definition.

(I mean elegant in the sense that I believe certain mathematicians refer to an "elegant proof", which is to say, if I understand them correctly, brief and complete with no unnecessary and distracting sidesteps.)

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Sounds like Hezbollah is going to have to team up with iFixit.com to take apart all of their electronic devices.

This is not how I expected the 21st Century to go.

[Rob J.]

Hopefully your phone doesn't explode.

Airport security is about to suck even more.

[Michael Cain]

As this story has grown more detailed, I have to admit that I'm surprised Iran hasn't been cranking out simple but reasonably secure communications widgets for their proxies in other countries.

[CharlesWT]

There's speculation that Hezbollah got the pagers from Iran.

[liberal japonicus]

Thanks to nous for doing the research. I can't do a deep dive on stochastic, but it seems to me that it is just being used as a way to covertly tag behavior by people in power as terroristic, thus missing the definition.

When I was in uni, we discussed Les Justes (The Just Assassins) by Camus and talked about terrorism. However, this was in the early 80's, so we didn't really have the concepts and mental picture to go very deeply. Our examples were the IRA and Basque separatists, and terrorism was generally small cells of people attacking targets that represented nation-states. The idea of terrorizing the populace did come up, especially when we talk about Camus

https://eng-archive.aawsat.com/nicholas-blincoe2/lifestyle-culture/jennacamus-and-the-algerian-revolution

Soon after accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Albert Camus was confronted by a young Algerian at a press conference and challenged to speak in favor of the ongoing revolution. (Camus was born in Algiers and his family still lived there.) Camus replied: “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” In the account, published in Le Monde and translated around the world, his reply was shortened to become: “Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother.” Camus’s original words questioned the idea that terrorism and justice can ever go hand-in-hand. However, the version he is remembered for is more chauvinistic: forget justice, because only the tribe matters.

A lot of ink has been spilled about Camus' stance, and because Camus holds a special place for me, I feel a lot of the grief he received was misplaced. And by a twist, In this Ezra Klein podcast with Zadie Smith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id_k43ZU8t4&list=PLdMrbgYfVl-szepgVpArP0obwYgbKdfvx

had her recommend the _The Rebel's Clinic
The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon_ by Adam Shatz, which may give me more perspective.

But to return to the modifier stochastic, rather than define terrorism in terms of power relations (as I think tends to be the case), it seems that the whole idea of terrorism depends on randomness, initially the randomness of the place and time of the attack, so Thatcher in Brighton is targeted but missed, but now, with the randomness of the targets. The reportage initially emphasized the Hezbollah members killed, with later reports bringing up the astonishing number of other casualties. I'm not able to read a lot, but I think that the targeting of Hezbollah rather than Hamas and the amount of time it must have taken for Israel to enter the supply chain at multiple points suggests that this was not a reaction to Oct 7th, but a much longer term plan.

Terrorism doesn't come in stochastic and non-stochastic varieties: randomness is baked into it.

[nous]

I think I see where you are coming from in how you are thinking about randomness, but I think that "uncertainty" is probably a better term. In your Thatcher incident, there was a high degree of uncertainty around timing, but who was attacking, and who was being attacked, were both absolutely known. In this most recent case, we assume that the receivers of those pagers and radios were known, but there was no way of knowing if the intended targets would be in possession of them at the time the trigger was activated. And in the case of the anti-terrorist security forces, terrorists try hard to make their attack timing and targets unpredictable, in order to make counter-terrorism expensive and difficult.

I'm resisting your use of "random" here because so much of terrorism is meticulously planned, it's just planned with an indifference towards collateral, with secondary goals that can be achieved even if the target is not destroyed or the attack is thwarted.

In the case of this particular term, "stochastic terrorism," and the way that it has been used in public discourse, the randomness is not of the sort of unpredictability that is described above. The "stochastic" part has to do with a lack of any structural chain of command or operational guidance on the part of the person stirring up grievance and inciting action. The person is identifying a target and making an aspirational statement wishing violence to befall the target, and maybe even promising recognition and help avoiding the consequences of extra-legal action. It's "stochastic" because the speaker does not know who will heed the call or how they will choose to fulfill it.

I think that "stochastic terrorism" always existed in our pre-War-On-Terror world under the rubric of "incitement." I think this newer term is picking up on the language of the GWOT and showing how hate and a grievance narrative can cascade like the Tide Pod Challenge in a modern media landscape.

Come to DC. It will be wild. We will stop this. How that all comes together, though, is left to the underpants gnomes to determine.

The randomness in stochastic terrorism is entirely designed to provide deniability and escape culpability. It's just an aspiration expressed in proximity to a group of people that have been stirred into outrage, knowing that many in your audience have shown a desire to act upon these violent musings. But you never said who should do it, so no one can blame you if a mentally unstable person took things the wrong way.

Thomas Becket was killed by stochastic terrorism.

[wj]

I cwould say that random comes into it (and produces more widespread terroe) when the targets actually are random. That is, there is no way to tell which shopping mall or school, or whatever will get hit. Who gets hit is a matter of who chanced to be where, and where the terrorist chanced to attack.

[nous]

I cwould say that random comes into it (and produces more widespread terroe) when the targets actually are random.

But it's not random, it's just unknown and unpredictable, and thus unpreventable, from the perspective of the intended target/audience. The terrorists know what will be attacked and when, and they select those targets for specific reasons to fit specific political or ideological goals.

Which is why these guys began using the term "stochastic terrorism" to describe people who set out to provoke attacks with the intent of terrorizing a population, but rely on self-elected, rogue-element actors to fill in the details and make the choices for themselves.

The not-knowing insulates them from accountability.

But someone always knows. It's not like anyone builds a drone with a random guidance and timing system, and sets it loose to hit gods know what, gods know when. That could cause fear, but it wouldn't be effective for terrorism.

[Liberal japonicus]

Good points nous. While I can see that, my thinking about randomness is that it allows us to extend the idea of terrorism to things like driving while black or being or someone being stalked, so they never know when they are safe. In my thinking of defining terrorism, that fits the template, with a key being the target never knows when it will happen.

A similar scenario is when Israeli forces in Lebanon
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/what-kind-booby-traps-has-israel-used-lebanon

These reports are not solid, and it is the targeting of children that is focussed on, the weaponization of everyday products seems the fit the pattern.

[wj]

Granted, it isn't truly random. But then, no "random acts of violence" are truly random either.

However, from the perspective of the potential victims, it is random -- that is, something that it is impossible to predict from the information available to them.

For an analigy, consider: the appearance of a new comet in the sky is, for us, random. In fact, it's a totally deterministic playing out of celestial mechanics on chunks of ice in orbit in the Kupier Belt. We just don't have the information necessary to predict it.

[nous]

I get it. I'm not disagreeing. I'm just noting that the "stochastic" part of the accepted use of "stochastic terrorism" isn't referring to the type of randomness, or appearance of randomness, that y'all are exploring here. For the sake of this conversation here we can stretch the concept to use the term against the grain, but using the term in this way in general conversation would lead to confusion and wrong-foot many people familiar with the now-accepted usage.

That is all.

[hairshirthedonist]

Consider "stochastic terrorism" a term of art. Someone created that phrase to apply to something that hadn't been identified as a distinct concept. Sure, you can apply it in a literal way that is different from the meaning intended by whoever created it, but that's kind of the point - that interpretation will be different from what the term was intended to mean.

I think the main point is that the stochastic terrorist does not give specific direction to any specific person or people. No time, no place, no names. But there's a high probability that someone, somewhere, at some time will act on the words of the stochastic terrorist.

And the people who act on the words of the stochastic terrorist are not, themselves, stochastic terrorists. They are rogue terrorists or lone wolves or whatever you might call them - just not "stochastic terrorists."

Even tRump's BS about Haitians in Springfield, OH, has become stochastic terrorism. I don't even know that he intended it to be, but at least the possibility should have occurred to him if he cared about the consequences of what he said.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

wj; regarding comets and orbital mechanics.
I think you are neglecting the fact that even Newtonian gravity, for more than two objects, tends to give chaotic (technical term!) results.

Plus, the various gas jetting from a comet nucleus that affects its orbit isn't even in the "predictable, if we knew the initial conditions" category.

[nous]

Meanwhile, though, on the central point of what (we all assume) Israel is doing with those communication equipment attacks, I think the analysis is provocative (in a good, critical sense) because Israel occupies such an ambiguous position in how people usually think and talk about terrorism. We think of terrorism as being a thing that out-groups and the marginalized do to undermine the power of a more powerful enemy. It's a way that a fanatical group can oppose a hegemonic power using the violation of norms as a power multiplier to counterbalance the asymmetry of the two groups' political power.

In most of the world's reckoning, the Palestinians are the side with less power, and it doesn't take a lot of work to think through their use of terrorism. It fits neatly inside our box of how to think about the violence. We don't approve of Hamas's/Hezbollah's tactics and moral calculus, but we don't see many tactical alternatives for them to oppose Israel's occupation or their slow annexation of Palestinian territory.

And in terms of the larger political situation in the Middle East, it's not hard to see Israel as an endangered, marginalized state surrounded by governments and populations that are hostile to them. They map as underdogs in this way, and that opens up a space for them to be more proactive in their approach to national defense without it striking people as being excessive. Their paranoia is, in a measure, justified.

And we can see the Israeli Settlers in the Palestinian Territories as terrorists because we do not see them as an extension of Israeli policy, but a defiance of it.

All relatively neat boxes.

But the way that the Israeli Government has pursued this military offensive against the Palestinians...it seems clear to me that they conceive of themselves, and are trying to portray themselves, as the underdogs, and treating O7 as an existential threat to the nation, which opens up in their minds a space for violence that violates the norms in order to balance the asymmetry.

That's the part that much of the world is not buying. And, not buying it, it sets these sorts of actions, committed with absolute indifference to the civilian populations, not just in occupied territory, but in a separate, sovereign nation, as state sponsored terrorism, and blurs the moral line between them and the "rogue states" that have historically opposed them.

Which is how we end up here, trying to work through a muddle of contradictions, with Israel refusing to be put into any of the usual boxes we use to sort good guys from bad.

Yes, terror, but is it the sort of ethno-religious, fundamentalist terror that we recognize in the region? Or is it something like the KKK's reign of terror, or France in Algeria, where the terror is part of a sort of settler colonial occupier's mindset, seeking to pacify an unruly population? All of these positions seem true in some limited sense, but none of them seem stable or sustainable. There are too many contradictions.

We know it's wrong, but we don't know how to sort the contradictions to start making it right.

[GftNC]

it seems clear to me that they conceive of themselves, and are trying to portray themselves, as the underdogs, and treating O7 as an existential threat to the nation, which opens up in their minds a space for violence that violates the norms in order to balance the asymmetry.

And here's where it gets difficult to know who "they" are. Netanyahu will portray himself as underdog and brave leader of beleaguered little country fighting for its life, and most if not all of it is in the intererests of keeping himself out of jail. And the extreme religious (and even nonreligious) rightwing in Israel (and the US) don't give a fuck for the lives of Ayrabs (leave out that e.g. Iranians aren't) and think whatever Israel does is just dandy. And a considerable proportion of the population of Israel (though smaller than it used to be), while hating Netanyahu and being essentially liberal and wanting Palestinian statehood, is still traumatised by 10/7 and feeling properly vulnerable en masse for the first time, and understandably hating Hamas and Hezbollah, so easy to manipulate. I don't know what the percentages are, and I'm scared to call people I'm close to and find out - I spoke to immaculately lefty liberal friends for weeks after 10/7, and was shocked at their bewilderment and ambivalence.

It is a clusterfuck.

[nous]

Agree, GftNC.

My sense is that whoever has greenlit these attacks is operating under the logic that after 10/7 no Israeli jew is feeling safe, so it is only right that none of their neighbors who house foes of Israel should feel any safety.

And the word I keep coming back to in this, rather than "terrorism," is bloodfeud. I think terrorism is a much more calculated and tactical thing - immoral, but rational (at least at the organizational level) - feud is not rational.

But, as you say, it's hard to tell who among those in power are given over to the actual grievance of the feud, and who is exploiting the grievance in order to further some other goal (like postponing a legal/political reckoning that can be put off by a state of emergency).

[liberal japonicus]

My sense is that whoever has greenlit these attacks is operating under the logic that after 10/7 no Israeli jew is feeling safe, so it is only right that none of their neighbors who house foes of Israel should feel any safety.

On my way back home, so I'm still not able to read and follow things up, but what strikes me is that it seems that the pager/walkie-talkie operation would require more time than from 10/7. I realize that it has been almost a year, but even that is not really sufficient for an 'operation' (I put that in quotes, because I think we should call it terrorism, Israel is saying 'if you have anything to do with Hezbollah, you should be afraid')

I did listen to this Ezra Klein/David Remnick podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iKEd9raMyk

which I think synchs with calling this a bloodfeud. This synchs with the weaponization of both tax receipts and water that is mentioned.

This is also where citation gets a bit strange. I think that I listened to a much longer podcast where Remnick suggested that a large portion of Israel views all these groups as cutouts for Iran and so feels justified in taking the war to them, which would match up with Israeli planning pager explosions a lot earlier.

I also have a certain hesitance from drawing conclusions from the podcast. Both Klein and Remnick are Jewish, and making it like listening in on two people having a family discussion and drawing conclusions about the state of everyone in the family.

That is to say, what GftNC says, a clusterfuck.

[nous]

Here's a link to the Bell¿ngcat story that the Guardian appears to use as its source for a lot of the details for their explainer.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2024/09/20/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-exploding-pagers/

If the sources cited by the Guardian are correct that the devices were brought into Lebanon in the spring, then Hezbollah did not have them in their possession until after 10/7. The front company could have been a longer term operation, and the bomb plot was certainly an idea that predates 10/7, but the actual timeline for setting things in motion seems like it must have been post-10/7 opportunism.

Who knows, if Israel set up the front and was using it to build relations with the people doing communications in Hezbollah, then they may have had all manner of plans for things they could do with communications devices besides just blowing them up. This seems like it burns a longer-term op.

Speculation on my part, but interesing, and I don't think too much of a stretch from the realm of the possible given what has been reported.

[wj]

This seems like it burns a longer-term op.

Somehow not surprising that Bibi is engaging in super short term thinking. In his position, I doubt he imagines he can do otherwise. (At least, not and stay out of jail.). No matter the negative impact on his country.

[Donald]

The flip side of being a democracy is that when a country has a long pattern of large scale human rights violations, you conclude one of two things— either democracy is not all it is cracked up to be, or the majority of people support the brutality. In Israel’s case I think it is more the latter. It is a very long blood feud and plenty of people in that part of the world are more than willing to dehumanize people on the other side. For that matter, plenty of Americans are just as bad. The Lebanon attacks are notable only in being a new form of terrorism, but Israel was carrying out false flag terrorist attacks in Lebanon back in the 70’s and early 80’s. As I said here some months back, the NYT reported this a few years ago but buried the lead so most people reading the story saw an account of two planned attacks that were called off and missed the paragraph mentioning that many attacks went forward.

Here is BTselem reporting on the token investigations into Israeli shooting of Gazan protestors in 2018-2019. They shoot civilians and they don’t care. Of course one could say the same about many governments but the myth is that Western societies are different. Oct 7 was just a catalyst for a much higher level of violence and it is a damning indictment of Hamas that they had to know that their own mass murders were going to trigger this. They knew exactly who they were dealing with and they thought it was worth it.

https://www.btselem.org/publications/202112_unwilling_and_unable

It is infuriating listening to Biden spokespeople robotically reciting how they are asking their Israeli partners for more information and asking for thorough transparent investigations into the latest atrocity. It is a joke and they know it is a joke. It is like asking Russia to investigate its own civilian killings. I don’t think that is much of an exaggeration.

I also think Western politicians are prone to exaggerate the virtues of democracy and one sees this in the fainting fits they had when the ICC prosecutor asked for warrants against both Hamas and Israeli leaders. Such lese majesty.

[Donald]

Morality aside, I assume Bibi wants an all out war and hopes to drag the US into it. That would probably affect the election in Trump’s favor, which Bibi presumably wants. I’m guessing, but it seems reasonable.

Though also, again setting morality aside, the problem with Trump is that he is unpredictable. I think Cheney and some other neocons endorsed Harris not for any very good reason but simply because while they might want a militarist in office, they don’t want a completely unstable idiot who might do anything. So Bibi might regret his actions, if I am guessing his motives correctly.

[Liberal japonicus]

I’m frustrated that I can’t find the full Klein/Remnick discussion, part of it was how Remnick felt Israelis were inclined towards Trump, though without relistening, I can’t remeber the qualifications Remnick may have made.

[GftNC]

I also think Western politicians are prone to exaggerate the virtues of democracy

I'm quite sure I don't have to quote Churchill on this, among the ObWi commentariat! And on the whole, I agree with what he said (although contrary views from sensible people would be interesting).

I think "blood feud" definitely gets at some of it where the Israelis and Palestinians are concerned. I also think nous's speculation under the Bellingcat link @10.27 is pretty convincing, and I was mulling something very similar to that as well.

how Remnick felt Israelis were inclined towards Trump

I'm starting to feel like Janie feels about "we". It seems to me that you can no longer speak about how "Israelis" feel about Trump, any more than you can now speak about how "Americans" feel about most things, the countries' populations are too drastically polarised about almost everything. I think it makes more sense to speak about their governments, though even they (in the case of Israel and Benny Ganz for example) can also be somewhat split.

[Donald]

I don’t have links handy, but I have seen polls where most Israeli Jews ( as opposed to the Palestinian citizens) think the level of violence in Gaza is either about right or not violent enough. The split is more about what sort of society Israel will become for its citizens— secular or religious.

As for Churchill’s quote, there is no better alternative of course, but people often talk as though the fact that a country is a democracy somehow means it can’t be capable of barbaric actions, which is silly. But the various Western official reactions to the ICC prosecutor are based on that silliness. It means that in practice, Western governments are barely any better than dictatorships when holding themselves to account regarding war crimes. They are much better at upholding civil rights for their own citizens. Though of course there are people like Trump who wish to break that pattern.

[wj]

I wonder how polls in Israel compare, for accuracy, to polls here.

[GftNC]

people often talk as though the fact that a country is a democracy somehow means it can’t be capable of barbaric actions, which is silly

Not only silly, Donald. Also, ridiculous, and ahistorical nonsense. But regarding Israeli public opinion, although I was specifically talking more about lj's half-remembered possibility that "Israelis were inclined towards Trump", I also (like wj) wonder how accurate the polls in Israel are these days.

However, it's a clusterfuck however you look at it.

[Donald]

I don’t think polls in either country are all that inaccurate. If you have to predict a close election, then a poll probably won’t be accurate enough. But if you just want to know if the vast majority of a population dehumanizes the other side, I would trust the polls.

I might look for links later. Laundry duty calls,

[liberal japonicus]

It seems to me that you can no longer speak about how "Israelis" feel about Trump, any more than you can now speak about how "Americans" feel about most things

On one hand, I think that is true, on the other hand, that sets up a analysis paralysis where you can't advocate anything because you never know where the players are. Which may be the point.

Fortunately, I found the Klein/Remick interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPvcyiYpzu8

It's an hour plus, so I don't expect folks to listen to the whole thing, but the discussion about Israeli views towards Trump is at 1:05

I also think that the discussion was before the pager attack, and I wonder how that would have changed the discussion.

[Donald]

Poll. You have to scroll down a bit to get the breakdown between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs ( as this article calls them.). 74 percent of the latter think Israel has gone too far in Gaza, but only 4 percent of the Israeli Jews.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/05/30/israeli-views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/

Elsewhere, what I have read is that many are angry at Netanyahu for not getting a ceasefire to rescue the hostages, but this is not about humanitarian feelings towards Palestinians.

[GftNC]

On one hand, I think that is true, on the other hand, that sets up a analysis paralysis where you can't advocate anything because you never know where the players are. Which may be the point.

Well, it's certainly not my point in saying that, lj. Analysis paralysis: definitely to be avoided, just like other forms of paralysis!

[Donald]

Rashid Khalidi on the history of Palestinian nationalism. He also says some harsh things about current US leaders.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147/articles/the-neck-and-the-sword

[CharlesWT]

Adding insult to injury.

"Interviewed in the report, Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and Yedioth Ahronoth, says the whole scheme was dreamed up by a brilliant female intelligence operative, aged less than 30, somewhere in the Middle East.

[I don't see how this is possiable.]
In a lengthy report quoting Israeli and foreign sources, the TV channel says those behind the attack were determined to ensure that only the person carrying the pager would be hurt by the blast.

“Each pager had its own arrangements. That’s how it was possible to control who was hit and who wasn’t,” it quotes an unnamed foreign security source saying."
Report: Hezbollah pagers were detonated individually; attackers knew who and where the target was

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Do you *really* know what's in your cellphone/laptop battery, and that every step of the supply chain is "safe"?

Pagers and walkie-talkies are a lot simpler to take apart and check (and swap out batteries!) Apple users beware.

[GftNC]

Donald, v interesting poll, thank you. I wonder whether, and how much, the percentages have changed since then?

And, talking of percentages, I have just read that in an Economist article, they say that immigrants are 14% of the US population, and responsible for 36% of innovation. Haven't read the piece, so I don't know how each is defined (I suppose only innovation would have to be), but very interesting and a good riposte to the craziness.

[nous]

In a lengthy report quoting Israeli and foreign sources, the TV channel says those behind the attack were determined to ensure that only the person carrying the pager would be hurt by the blast.

“Each pager had its own arrangements. That’s how it was possible to control who was hit and who wasn’t,” it quotes an unnamed foreign security source saying."

I don't for a second believe this. Even if we were to assume that each device had its own individual triggering code, Israel would not have had control over how those devices were distributed to Hezbollah operatives, and yet they want us to believe not only this but also that they would know who had the devices when the trigger was sent, and that the people doing the triggering were taking care for the wellbeing of those in the surrounding area.

Not buying it. We've all seen the CCTV footage.

Assuming that is a lie, I also doubt the origin story, which smells like a psyop to me. And I think that the idea that each device was individually triggered was probably put out there hoping that Hezbollah would continue to distrust their communication devices and not assume that this was a one-shot on Israel's part.

I mean, these are all things that I would write if I were trying to build a psyop for the aftermath of a strike that violates international law. Get those talking points out there and let your allies keep hammering them to counter the outrage.

[GftNC]

And by the way, talking of Israel (or at any rate Jews, and as we know, Trump thinks the two are one and the same), we haven't mentioned his contention that if he loses it will be the Jews' fault. There's so much else going on, that this (like so much else he does) just gets drowned in the endless river of shit pouring out of his mouth. But it shouldn't of course, just as the threats against the pet-eating Haitians shouldn't:

https://wapo.st/3XHEl2G

[CharlesWT]

"TEL AVIV — In the initial sales pitch to Hezbollah two years ago, the new line of Apollo pagers seemed precisely suited to the needs of a militia group with a sprawling network of fighters and a hard-earned reputation for paranoia.

The AR924 pager was slightly bulky but rugged, built to survive battlefield conditions. It boasted a waterproof Taiwanese design and an oversized battery that could operate for months without charging. Best of all, there was no risk that the pagers could ever be tracked by Israel’s intelligence services. Hezbollah’s leaders were so impressed they bought 5,000 of them and began handing them out to mid-level fighters and support personnel in February."
Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah: New details emerge of Israel’s elaborate plan to sabotage Hezbollah communications devices to kill or maim thousands of its operatives.