The 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks came earlier this month, and I published an article reviewing those historic events and analyzing the important evidence always ignored by our mainstream media.
This time I sought to place that story within the context of the rapidly-approaching first anniversary of the 10/7 Hamas raid, which had launched a new round of very bloody conflict involving Israel, the Palestinians, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and other major players in the region.
- American Pravda: October 7th and September 11th
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 9, 2024 • 11,200 Words
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The September 11th attacks once loomed very large in American public life, prompting as they did a long series of our Middle Eastern wars that killed or displaced many millions of Muslims. But now after more than two decades they seem to have become little more than a fading memory and my article attracted less readership than I had hoped. Meanwhile, a large fraction of the lightly-moderated discussion was dominated by fanatic conspiracy-cranks, who claimed that no jetliners had ever struck the WTC towers or that the buildings had been destroyed by nuclear explosions or even that almost no New Yorkers had actually died that day, with thousands of imaginary victims having merely been invented by our dishonest media. These seem like exactly the sort of crackpots who tend to monopolize an issue once more sensible people have gradually lost interest and gone elsewhere.
Those 2001 events were certainly the largest and most dramatic terrorist attacks in the entire history of the world, perhaps even comparable in their magnitude to all previous terrorist attacks combined. But it is only natural that their memory and relevance would gradually fade away over the course of nearly a quarter-century, much as had previously happened with the great battles of the First World War or our country’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam.
However, just a few days later on September 17th, the world’s headlines were filled with a dramatic new story of a somewhat related type. Thousands of simple pagers all across Lebanon beeped their notice of an incoming message and then suddenly exploded a few seconds later, with many walkie-talkies and solar panels similarly detonating the following day. Although the death-toll was nothing like that on 9/11—only about three dozen were killed including a couple of children—some 2,800 individuals were injured, with many hundreds of them being blinded and Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon losing an eye in the attack.
Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group that is one of Lebanon’s largest political parties, had purchased those pagers earlier this year as a replacement for less secure cellphones and distributed them to its membership, so that nearly all the victims seemed to have some connection with that organization. Given the ongoing military conflict with Israel, that latter country was universally assumed to be responsible for the attack. Although no official credit was claimed, a dozen of Israel’s knowledgeable defense and intelligence officials boasted of this very successful Mossad operation and provided all its details to the New York Times, which published several major stories based upon that information. Pro-Israel pundits and activists loudly crowed at their major victory against Hezbollah, whose membership had suffered such grievous losses.
I discussed all of these developments in an article last week, which attracted considerable readership and debate.
- Mossad’s Exploding Pager Attacks and 9/11
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 23, 2024 • 5,600 Words
In that piece, I noted that this sudden wave of thousands of simultaneous explosions across Lebanon, often striking civilians, was seen as Lebanon’s own 9/11, and it terrorized the entire population, which suddenly grew very fearful of all their electronic devices. Indeed, according to longstanding international law, this attack constituted an absolutely flagrant example of illegal terrorism, as was discussed by the experts interviewed by NPR and the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. Despite the lawyerly protestations of pro-Israel apologists, the international statutes seemed completely unequivocal.
A global treaty, which has been signed by more than 100 countries including Israel, bans “the use booby traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects that are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material”.
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I further pointed out that if thousands of such electronic devices in Israel or America had been similarly booby-trapped by Hezbollah or any other hostile organization and then exploded in exactly that same way, no one in the West would regard this as anything but the most blatant case of massive international terrorism.
A huge wave of simultaneous explosions had taken place in a country not at war, resulting in thousands of injured or severely maimed victims, some of them civilians. Therefore, I argued that aside from the 9/11 Attacks, this might easily constitute the second worst example of international terrorism in world history, or at least that nothing else as large and serious came to my mind. But the facts were actually much more extreme than I realized when I wrote that piece.
I first learned that Hezbollah had shifted its military communications network to pagers in the many media stories describing the background to the successful Mossad operation, all of which were presumably based upon Israeli sources.
However, this information was apparently mistaken. Alastair Crooke had served as a senior MI6 officer and British diplomat, and his decades of experience in Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East gave him exceptionally strong expertise on these sorts of matters. The same day that I published my article, he was interviewed on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube channel, and he completely contradicted those media claims that I’d so readily accepted.
According to Crooke, Hezbollah’s military communications network has for many years relied upon optical fiber cables or personal messengers, so almost none of those exploding pagers would have been used by its fighters. Since Hezbollah functions as the local government in most of southern Lebanon, those devices had instead been distributed to the organization’s far more numerous civilian members, such as civil administrators, first responders, and hospital personnel, who probably constituted the overwhelming majority of the victims. This rendered the terroristic nature of the attack far more obvious and blatant, greatly strengthening the case that it might be considered the world’s worst terrorist incident other than 9/11.
Furthermore, many have also pointed out the terrible precedent set by the use of those exploding pagers given that the technology of booby-trapping simple electronic devices is so easily available to other countries and non-state actors. The soft, vulnerable societies of America and most of the West may come to deeply rue the day when this deadly line was first crossed, endangering so many of us in the future. It is quite shocking that this huge terrorist attack was carried out by an American ally whose activities have been totally supported by our own government rather than by some notorious outlaw group sanctioned by the entire world, such as Al Qaeda, the alleged perpetrator of the 9/11 Attacks.
One of the extremely few examples of strong public criticism came in a CBS Sunday Morning interview of former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who emphasized the terrible dangers that our Western societies might now face.
Our mainstream media almost invariably describes Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, thereby seeming to legitimize all methods of attack against its members and affiliates. As an example of this narrative, Israel has justified its recent assassinations of some of the senior figures by describing those strikes as payback for Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of our own Beirut Marine barracks, which took the lives of more than 200 American servicemen. Given that the latter claim has been so frequently repeated, I’d come to accept its reality.
However, Col. Jacques Baud is a highly-regarded former Swiss military officer with extensive experience in the Middle East. When I watched his long and persuasive interview last week, I realized that I may have once again been deceived by the dishonest pro-Israel propagandists who dominate our media.
According to Baud, Hezbollah was only founded in 1985, so it didn’t even exist at the time of that Marine bombing attack and no one had ever associated its activists with that deadly operation until long afterward, when Israeli propagandists could take advantage of the fading memories of the chronology. Indeed, Casper Weinberger, who had been our defense secretary at the time, stated in a 2001 interview that no one was ever sure who had actually been responsible for killing our Marines in Lebanon. Baud also emphasized that Hezbollah’s military wing was only first designated as a terrorist group by the Europeans in 2013 after it was blamed for a 2012 bombing against Israelis in Bulgaria; but he claimed that attack had actually been the result of a dispute between rival Israeli crime syndicates, and Bulgaria later admitted that there was no evidence that Hezbollah had been involved.
With thousands of Lebanese civilians wounded or mained by Israel’s booby-trapped devices, Hezbollah publicly vowed to retaliate for that massive terrorist attack, and Israel then used that threat as an excuse to unleash one of the most intense aerial bombardments in modern history, destroying urban centers all across southern Lebanon and producing the deadliest one-day death-toll in decades, with a large majority of the casualties probably being civilians. This led to widespread fears that Israel planned to totally destroy that neighboring country, transforming it into another Gaza. Indeed, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, longtime chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, suggested in an interview that since Lebanon was an effective economic competitor to Israel, its destruction might represent a major goal of this operation.
A few days later, Israeli warplanes extended their operations by bombarding an area of south Beirut with some 80 bombs, many of them huge bunker-busters, in a successful attempt to kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. This attack on Lebanon’s capital totally destroyed an entire city block containing numerous large residential towers, producing images of utter devastation that Max Blumenthal noted closely resembled the ruins of the World Trade Center towers after 9/11. As far as I know, in recent decades no country other than Israel has ever employed or even contemplated the use of such extremely heavy ordnance against a densely-populated urban center, and I assume that the civilian death-toll will prove to have been enormous.
Although massive aerial bombardment of undefended cities in neighboring countries is not usually considered terrorism, it certainly constitutes an enormous war-crime, and killing such large numbers of civilians obviously serves to terrorize the entire surviving population. No other developed country in today’s world seems to demonstrate Israel’s total disregard for civilian human life, leveling an entire city block with bunker-buster bombs in hopes of assassinating a single enemy target.
