Don’t Fear the Beeper

by

I have to admit that I am snickering still over the Mossad’s targeted beeper offensive against Hezbollah … who ought now to go by the nic of “Hezball-less” – snickering in those intervals between genuflecting in respectful admiration to a national intelligence organization who can actually undertake an operation of such … intelligence. And sneaky, original creativity. And command of technological aspects. And a complicated operation conducted by a sub-rosa organization over a long period of time, without a single desk jockey blabbing to a fool like Seymour Hersh. And pulling the detonating cord at a time calculated to inflict the most damage on an enemy chain of command.

From the liver to the knee, indeed.

A commenter at Bayou Renaissance Man’s post about Operation Grim Beeper huffed and puffed indignantly – War crime! Horrible! Unprecedented! What about the Children! and calling the rest of us all kinds of unflattering names as we are markedly unsympathetic to the plight of the Hezball-less command echelon and those few innocent unfortunates caught in the immediate vicinity. The commenter went by the nic of Anonymous for the purpose of that comment thread, and likely for good reasons – cowardly reasons, but there you go. So brave to stand up thus anonymously on a conservative blog-thread! So … whatever. Sabotaging pagers, cellphones and walkie-talkies specifically ordered for the use of and put into the hands of a terror org’s operatives is a heck of a lot more targeted and focused than say … dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Germany and Japan in WWII, firing rockets at random into Northern Israel or sending hijacked airliners into a couple of tall office buildings in New York.

Frankly, I applaud the specificity of Operation Grim Beeper – it delivered in a very satisfactory way to people who had richly deserved such retribution and had deserved it for decades. I have not forgotten the Hezbollah truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, or the hideous torture and murder of kidnapped Americans in Lebanon at around the same time. The Israelis took out the trash in a way that it seemed that our own administrations since then were unable and then unwilling to do. Thanks, Mossad; you might not get anything but backbiting and quiet sabotage from the Biden administration and our State Department generally, but you have my personal gratitude as a military veteran.

Besides defanging Hezbollah/Hezball-less, in decapitating their chain of command by killing or incapacitating everyone sufficiently high-ranking enough to be issued a pager, Grim Beeper has some other interesting side effects; first, in lumbering the organization for immediate and ongoing medical care of their wounded. The dead burden an organization to a certain degree, but care of the wounded and permanently crippled ties up considerably more in resources. And secondly – having essential bits of male anatomy atomized by an exploding beeper – that’s just cruelly comic. Heartless – but funny. Becoming a laughingstock across the Middle East just has to sting. I’ve also seen speculation that Hezbollah/Hezball-less might also have lost whatever remains of toleration for their activities within Lebanon itself, although there may not be enough normal folk left there to return Beirut to being the Paris of the eastern Med again. As for notable Hamas-Hezbollah fan Rashida Talib getting all indignant and bent out of shape over a cartoon … well, she IS a fan of both … and pointing it out humorously by referencing an exploding pager on her desk is something we still can do. Honestly, you’d think that someone elected to a seat in our national legislature would have developed a thicker skin.

Your thoughts and insights?

26 thoughts on “Don’t Fear the Beeper”

  1. From an operational perspective I’m still in awe of these operations.

    There are so many ways for something this complicated to go wrong: the front organization for the beeper sales might have been subverted or the Hez might have gone somewhere else or the explosives might not have worked/aged out or the explosives might have been discovered or the batteries replaced….

    Rinse and repeat with the walkie talkies. What an amazing op

    I would add one thing going forward in addition to Hez being “lumbered.” The Iranians and Hez have to be in major freakout mode right now.

    The Iranians have been hit multiple times in Iran and in their most secure areas from the mass theft of the Iranian atomic archives, the motorcyclist born assassins of various officials and scientists, to the exploding bed…. now exploding beepers?

    I think our prospective Sh’ite Imperial Overlords are wondering what other feats of magic Mossad is going to spring on them…. and how badly riddled their organizational structured are with enemies and informers

    Good times

  2. I know that this is not possible, but the idea of the beeper having a shaped charge designed by a mohel leaving the Hezbollite circumcised is amusing. Would he then be regarded as being Jewish by his fellow terrorists? ;-)

    Subotai Bahadur

  6. Recent news is that the US is trying for a 21 day ceasefire. Netanyahu dismisses Hezbollah cease-fire push, confounding White House

    Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday dismissed a U.S.-backed push for a 21-day cease-fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon and vowed that fighting would continue, even as Biden administration officials complained that Israel was fully informed of the truce proposal and indicated Netanyahu had agreed to it.

    At this stage I would believe Netanyahu before I would believe the Biden Administration.
    IIRC, Israel has told Hezbollah that if Hezbollah ceases its rocket attacks on Israel, Israel will stop its attacks on Hezbollah. I have read that every day since October 7, Hezbollah has fired rockets at Israel. Hezbollah replies that it will keep firing until there is a cease fire in Gaza.

    For most of this year, the administration has tried to negotiate a cease-fire calling for the withdrawal of Hezbollah to the Litani River, about 18 miles north of the Israeli border — as demanded years ago in a U.N. Security Council resolution

    Which indicates the efficacy of the Biden Administration’s “diplomacy.” There is no way that Hezbollah will consent to withdrawal to the Litani River. After all, Hezbollah has made it clear that its condition for stopping firing rockets at Israel is a ceasefire in Gaza.
    What makes this even more absurd is that as the USG designates Hezbollah a terrorist organization, it doesn’t negotiate directly w Hezbollah, but with the Lebanese government. If the Lebanese government agrees to something, the odds of Hezbollah agreeing to it, or the Lebanese government being able to force Hezbollah to adhere to an agreement, are small.

  8. Actually, from what I understand, this was supposed to be kept “sleeping” until used as the opening move of a ground invasion (when this could no longer be avoided). But a couple of Hizbalmaaz (Party of Goat) operatives tried to fix their broken pagers, found the payload, and started sounding the alarum — at which point Israel’s choice was “use it now or lose it”

  9. Facebook removed my post of a joke about Hezbollah trying beepers and getting killed. then walkie-talkies and getting killed, and then convening at a place Israel could trace them to and still getting killed.

    Facebook is sick and apparently pro-Hezbollah.

  10. Sherman’s quote [paraphrased] could very well apply to Hamas and Hezbollah:
    Israel’s goal was to “make [Hamas] howl.” “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and we must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” The hard war was here for [Gaza]. “We cannot change the hearts and minds of those [Palestinian terrorists], but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

    original, about Georgia and the South, here; https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/william-tecumseh-sherman-and-total-war#:~:text=%5Band%5D%20make%20them%20so%20sick,property%2C%20everything%20that%20to%20us

  11. Anonymous, with his invincible self-righteousness, pious blather and convenient Israeli friend (a “messianic Jew,” of course, so not evil), outed himself as simply the oldest species of Jew-hater still extant now that we have no Baal worshippers and ethnic Amalekites left. Thank G-d most Christians, whom he directly derided as heretics, can no longer relate to that mindset.

  12. Ron
    Facebook removed my post of a joke about Hezbollah …
    The current news about Zuckerberg being neutral in this election etc. is cover for the fact that Facebook is just as biased as ever.


  13. Mike
    September 26, 2024 at 6:48 pm

    The Iranians have been hit multiple times in Iran…

    I think our prospective Sh’ite Imperial Overlords are wondering what other feats of magic Mossad is going to spring on them…. and how badly riddled their organizational structured are with enemies and informers

    They seem to be on a bit of a spy-hunting binge right now. Which is one of the intended side-effects of these sorts of things. Make sure you hang a sign on somebody when you leave that says “This guy helped.” Especially if he didn’t.

  15. I wait, with the greatest anticipation, the full telling of the story of this operation. I think it must rank with the Raid on Entebbe as an example of great military intelligence and performance.

  18. NYT:Hassan Nasrallah, Who Led Hezbollah for Decades, Killed at 64

    Both Hezbollah and Israel announced his death on Saturday

    Here is an appropriate quote attributed to Mark Twain: I Did Not Attend the Funeral, But I Sent a Nice Letter Saying I Approved of It

    Americans and Israelis are not the only groups who approve of Nasrallah’s funeral. (from the above NYT article):

    In 2005, Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a huge suicide truck bomb in downtown Beirut. An international tribunal later indicted four members of Hezbollah, although ultimately only one was convicted in absentia. The killing was believed to have been organized by the Syrian government, which had been determined to thwart Mr. Hariri’s attempts to loosen the grip of Syria’s security forces on the country. Mr. Nasrallah warned Lebanese against cooperating with the tribunal.

    Far-out Friday becomes Sublime Saturday.

  21. Money quote:
    “especially given the low level of trust between US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”

    Will someone please explain why anyone should trust the “Biden” administration for the time of day, let alone the security of their country?

  22. What to me is even more amazing than the technical aspects – building their own explosive-laden pagers – is setting them up in the distribution network that the Hezballess buyers trusted. How did they do that? Or do they just outsource bids – and the lowest wins?

    You are too much with the puns, Sgt Mom ;-)

  23. By now, I imagine, the electronics of a pager consists of at most two IC’s and a few passive components. A little more than a weekend Arduino project but lots of people in Israel could do it with no trouble. The plastic case might be a little more trouble but there are lots of injection molders in Israel..

    The Hezys can’t just click the Buy It Now button, sanctions. So everything has to go through layers of cut outs, commonly known as smugglers and money launderers. Outside the lowest layers, I assume the motivation is a combination of cupidity and self preservation and somewhere, Mossad made someone an offer they couldn’t refuse. Right now there are a number of actors trying to gauge just how effective the Israeli decapitation has been, their life depends on Hez’s ability to settle a grudge and were I completely “innocent” I wouldn’t want to depend on their due diligence in investigating just who to thank in their idiosyncratic way.

    The hints in the media are that they thought they were buying from someone in Hungary. Where this information came from is probably equally sketchy. Yet someone else looking over their shoulder.

    War is ever a dark, dirty affair. Winning is better than losing but no one walks away with clean hands.

  24. Unsurprisingly, the Hezy’s have anew “leader”:
    https://nypost.com/2024/09/30/world-news/hezbollahs-acting-leader-naim-kassem-vows-to-fight-on-after-hassan-nasrallahs-death/

    Money Quote:
    “A founding member of Hezbollah who had been Nasrallah’s longtime deputy, Kassem will remain in his acting position until the group’s leadership elects a replacement. ”
    Unstated for some reason: “if he’s lucky”

    Nasrallah was supposed to be worth a measly $250 million, a pauper compared to the billions that the head Hamasniks are supposed to be worth. Wonder how much of it is courtesy of the U.S. Taxpayer?

  26. Subotai Bahadur:

    Moslems also practice circumcision. It’s not explicitly commanded in the Koran,
    but does appear in the Hadiths and Sunnah. All the major “schools of Islamic jurisprudence” agree that it is required.

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