On Tuesday, September 17, Lebanon experienced one of the most widespread terrorist attacks in history. All at once, pagers across the south of the country indicated they had received a message and then exploded. As of Tuesday night it was said fourteen people were killed, including an eight-year old girl. Almost 3,000 were wounded, a testament to the indiscriminate nature of the attacks. As the people who possessed the pagers were primarily associated with Hezbollah, responsibility was quickly attributed to Israel, both by Hezbollah and by Israel’s ghoulish supporters, who are excited by wanton violence. The New York Times quickly confirmed Israel’s responsibility, something which no one has seriously tried to deny. This may be a glorious day for Israel’s partisans, but this use of personal electronics for massive and decentralized violence should horrify reasonable people.
According to the Times’ “government officials,” Israel put plastic explosives into a large batch of pagers that Hezbollah ordered from a Taiwanese company—which has now said it only licensed the products to be manufactured by a different corporation in Budapest. They were then detonated remotely apparently after a message caused the users to look at them, though the method by which Israel accessed the network to send the messages remains unknown. Regardless, if Israel did this, it has reached a comic book level of villainy. In essence, Israel turned an unknown number of humans into involuntary suicide bombers. Further, while it is established that Hezbollah stopped using cell phones to avoid Israeli spying, this is particularly nefarious because pagers are widely used by hospital staff and Israel had no idea who would ultimately receive the pagers once they entered Lebanon.
The New York Post reports that Hezbollah ordered over 3,000 pagers, presumably all of which were modified by Israel. The Post called this a “highly coordinated” attack, though it seems to have only been coordinated in the same sense as an emergency alert. It’s true that it used a high level of technical expertise, both to safely put in the explosives and then make them so the battery heating would trigger the explosion, as well as to get into the network and send the messages which lead to the battery over heating. However, the actual attack does not appear to be coordinated whatsoever, as Israel did not know, or care, who had the pagers or what they were doing. Hezbollah is a legal political party in Lebanon which provides a broad array of social services and is a sort of quasi-government in the country’s south. Possessing or being near a pager originally purchased by Hezbollah is no indication that an individual is a valid military target.
None of this stopped all of the worst people in the world from praising the attack for being “well targeted.” Just for one example, the awful David French, tweeted, “From a law of war standpoint, Israel’s pager bombs represent one of the most precisely targeted strikes in the history of warfare. I can’t think of a single widespread strike on an armed force that’s embedded in a civilian population that’s been more precise. It’s remarkable.” I may have not gone to law school like David French, but I am pretty sure that sabotaging personal communication devices so they cause deadly explosions in civilian areas is not some great innovation in following international law. I am also confident that many people have done better than causing 3,000 injuries to get fourteen deaths. One could go on all day highlighting Zionist partisans reveling in their favorite country’s penchant for creative violence, but readers will be familiar with how these people behave.
Of course, all of these same people must deny that what Israel has done constitutes a terrorist attack. I acknowledge, like so many politicized terms, people use “terrorism” to mean “violence I dislike” and it is often used in such a loose and sloppy way that it feels meaningless, with people sometimes going as far as to call unruly protests or normal intimidation “terrorism.” However, regardless, even liking the perpetrator and disliking the target does not stop this from being an obvious terrorist attack, no matter how much Israel’s partisans may admire it.
I try to use a consistent internal definition of terrorism in my own writing, which is “the use of public violence by non-state or covert state actors, especially against civilian targets, for the purpose creating fear to generate political or social change.” Even so, it can require a degree of judgment and discretion to properly apply the term. For example, what Israel has done to Gaza, though criminal and intended to terrify, is not terrorism, because violence committed under the flag of an internationally recognized sovereign state is just being a government. Ukraine shooting a long range missile into Russia is just war, whereas blowing up the Nord Stream Pipeline is terrorism. In some instances this is complicated; Hamas is a quasi-state actor but does rule Gaza and has for over a decade, so it is not clear if they should be considered a government. Regardless, even without a specialized definition, the layman’s understanding of terrorism obviously includes any situation where you hide bombs in items and later detonate them in public places. This is such a clear example of terrorism that even if Israel formally acknowledged responsibility for the attack, it would be hard to argue that should preclude it from being called terrorism.
While this attack appears to have been intended to terrify Hezbollah and the Lebanese, it should scare all of us for several reasons. The most obvious is that this is a new method of mass murder in a society where we all carry electronic devices. It also demonstrates that, even if explosives were added to the pagers in this instance, the government could remotely destroy our phones by making the battery overheat, and could potentially do this to anyone they didn’t like at any time. The possibilities are endless, such as using the camera to wait until a phone is in a position where an overheated or exploded battery could be made to start a house fire.
The risk that this escalates conflict in the Middle East is another reason for fear. However, what should scare us the most is the violence and craven hypocrisy of our own ruling class who are so brainwashed into the belief that they are the “good guys,” they cannot recognize that causing hundreds of explosions which injure thousands of people is a terrorist attack, simply because it was done by their favorite country. Nothing good will come from this innovation in political violence, nor from the new frontier in shamelessness opened up by admiring it.
