Category: Foreigners

Are You Tired of All This #Winning Yet?

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The Gaza War began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fired more than 4,000 rockets at Israel, then sent 6,000 terrorists across the border, where they murdered nearly 1,200 innocent Israelis and kidnapped another 250. Joe Biden was president at the time, and respect for the United States was at an all-time low. For the next 17 months, while Democrats pandered to the pro-Hamas protesters, nothing was done to end the war. In January 2025, Donald Trump took office for his second term as president and now, less than nine months later, there is a peace deal with the remaining hostages returned to Israel.

Hamas has been defeated and thoroughly humiliated. At Instapundit, Ed Driscoll cites this pithy summary by Ed Morrissey:

“Trump won this war in June, when he made an unapologetic decision to intervene with military strikes in Iran. Those strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities completely shook up the order in the region, which had settled into an Iranian track toward dominance. Israel had already done most of the damage by wiping out Hezbollah’s upper echelons and their banking system, which led directly to the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the rise of a new Syrian regime that detests the mullahs in Iran. However, the strikes by Trump on Iran forced everyone to reconsider their assumptions and recalculate for a president who had no problem ordering military force to defend and protect American interests.”

Also from Ed at Instapundit, here’s an important point made by retired Col. Kurt Schlicter: “If you start a war, you need to be prepared to lose it.”

Gen. John Bell Hood (left), Gen. William T. Sherman (right)

Knowing me to be a native of Atlanta, perhaps some readers will be surprised to discover that I’m willing to admit that General Sherman was right about certain things. In September 1864, after the Yankees had captured Atlanta and Gen. John Bell Hood’s Confederates had retreated south of Lovejoy Station, Sherman wrote to Hood, explaining his plan to evacuate the civilian population of Atlanta (a plan detailed in Special Field Orders No. 67). Hood replied harshly, declaring to Sherman that “the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war.” Sherman replied vehemently and at some length, defending the necessity of the evacuation, and laying the blame for war on Southerners who, “in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war, dark and cruel war; who dared and badgered us to battle, insulted our flag, seized our arsenals and forts,” et cetera.

The point that Sherman sought to make was that those who choose war must accept the consequences of that choice. At the time the Confederates opened their bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, and for quite some time thereafter, neither North nor South expected the war to become what it did — a four-year ordeal that took the lives of more than half a million soldiers, to say nothing of the other destruction and hardship involved. My ancestors fought for the Confederacy, and I’ll brook no insults of their honor, yet an important lesson is to be learned from the Sherman-Hood correspondence, which the inhabitants of Gaza and their sympathizers ought to study. How many times have you seen the pro-Hamas crowd on X posting before-and-after pictures of Gaza and trying to blame Israel for the destruction? Well, boo hoo hoo.

Atlanta in 1864

To quote General Sherman: “Talk thus to the Marines, but not to me.”

Oh, they want to complain about the occupation, do they? They send us an invitation to their pity party, and pout when we don’t R.S.V.P.

They slaughter the innocent, then try to say they’re victims.

Can’t speak for anyone else, but I resent the insult implied by people who tell me such things as if I am fool enough to believe them. Of course, Southerners are very sensitive to insults, but I’ve learned to resist such provocations. History teaches some hard lessons. Anyway . . .

If Democrats had their way, Trump would now be in prison. Instead, he’s a hero, and I’m not yet tired of all this winning. Are you?



 

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How to Become a Good Communist

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JoAnne Deborah Byron, a/k/a JoAnne Chesimard, a/k/a Assata Shakur was a Communist, a murderer and a terrorist. She was still a fugitive from justice when she died Thursday in Havana, Cuba:

Cuban officials on Friday said that Joanne Chesimard, who was convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper, has died in Havana decades after breaking out of prison and escaping to the communist island.
Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Chesimard, who was born JoAnne Deborah Byron and was also known as Assata Olugbala Shakur, passed away after living there for years under asylum granted by the Cuban government.
“On September 25, 2025, American citizen Joanne Deborah Byron, ‘Assata Shakur,’ passed away in Havana, Cuba, due to health conditions and advanced age,” the ministry’s statement said.
In 1977, Chesimard was convicted of the murder of State Trooper Werner Foerster, who left behind a wife and 3-year-old son, during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973.
In 1977, she was found guilty of first-degree murder, armed robbery, and other crimes and was sentenced to life in prison. She escaped from prison in 1979 and lived underground before surfacing in Cuba in 1984.
The FBI and the New Jersey attorney general each offered a $1 million reward for her capture.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and New Jersey State Police Superintendent Colonel Patrick Callahan said they spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio about Chesimard’s reported passing.
“For years, we have worked with the State Department to bring Chesimard back to New Jersey, so she could face justice for the cold-blooded murder of an American hero,” both said in a joint statement. “Sadly, it appears she has passed without being held fully accountable for her heinous crimes.”
“We mourn Trooper Foerster’s loss every day, and we extend our deepest sympathies to his widow, Rosie, their son, Eric, and the entire New Jersey State Police family,” they added. “Unlike his killer, Trooper Foerster never had a chance to live out his days in peace. But we remain fully committed to honoring his memory and sacrifice. We will vigorously oppose any attempt to repatriate Chesimard’s remains to the United States.”
Chesimard, who regarded herself as a godmother and step-aunt to late rapper Tupac Shakur, was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List in 2013.
She was a member of the Black Liberation Army, which the FBI describes as “one of the most violent militant organizations of the 1970s.”

Given the extraordinary craziness of our own era, with political violence rampant and apparently increasing, many people have forgotten how crazy things were in the 1970s. Back when I was in middle school and high school, you had all kinds of wacky radicals running around. The nation had gone through a series of crises — the drama of the Civil Rights Era, the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War, etc. — and a lot of people couldn’t handle the stress and just lost their minds.

You had the Manson Gang murders in 1969, then the Weather Undeground bombers, the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the Symbionese Liberation Army, and let’s not forget the Peoples Temple and Jonestown. It was during that decade-long national nervous breakdown that JoAnn Chesimard assumed the moniker “Assata Shakur” and decided that the Black Panthers weren’t radical enough for her tastes.

The Black Liberation Army (BLA) emerged as an ultra-violent splinter of the Panthers, in association with other black radicals, spewing Marxist-Leninist jargon as a pretext for killing cops and committing robberies. “According to a Justice Department report on BLA activity, the Black Liberation Army was suspected of involvement in over 70 incidents of violence between 1970 and 1976. The Fraternal Order of Police blamed the BLA for the murders of 13 police officers.” Arguably the most infamous of their crimes was the 1981 Brinks robbery in Nyack, New York, where BLA members joined forces with Weather Underground radicals calling themselves the May 19th Communist Organization. In the Nyack robbery, this radical gang killed Brinks guard Peter Paige and police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown.

Police on scene after the Brinks robbery, 1981

By the time of the 1981 Brinks robbery, “Assata Shakur” had already been convicted of murder, escaped from prison and fled the country, apparently going first to Mexico before eventually ending up in Cuba. She was among dozens of American fugitives harbored by the Communist regime in Cuba. In June 2017, during President Trump’s first term, he called for Cuba to extradite her. Jordan Schactel wrote at that time:

Chesimard has become a folk hero among the fringe Left. Because of her background in far-left activism, some in movements like Black Lives Matter see her as a hero, and not the terrorist cop-killer that she really is.
The Black Liberation Army, which rose to prominence in the 1970s, was known for its ruthless methods. In one incident showcasing their carnage, three BLA militants killed two NYPD officers in the East Village. But that wasn’t the worst part. The assailants stood over the officers and continued to shoot into their bodies repeatedly.
By 1973, Shakur was the subject of a multi-state manhunt. The FBI labeled her the “revolutionary mother hen” of the cell that had carried out the murders of NYPD officers. Later that year, Shakur bolted New York City with fellow BLA members.
On her escape down the New Jersey turnpike, she was pulled over by state troopers. At that time, her accomplice, Zayd Shakur, was killed in a gunfire battle. A police officer was also killed in the incident, with help from Chesimard, who again sped away in her vehicle
But ultimately, she was captured sitting on the side of the highway after being wounded in the gun battle.
In 1977, Chesimard was charged with murder and convicted of firing the shots that killed New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster. She was also convicted of seven other felonies. She was sentenced to life in prison plus thirty years for her crimes.

Ruthless cop-killer, “folk hero.” We could extend this with a detailed examination of the cause-and-effect puzzle of left-wing craziness — do these radical movements just act as a magnet for psychopaths, or does radicalism turn otherwise ordinary people into dangerous lunatics? But let’s not belabor the point. At any rate, there’s only one kind of good Communist and it’s the kind that “Assata Shakur” has now become.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

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KiwiFarms Sues U.K. and It’s Awesome

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Regular readers here know that I’ve often praised the online forum Kiwi Farms as an invaluable source of information on “LOLcows,” which is their term for idiots who make fools of themselves online, as I explained in October 2023:

Some of us are old enough to remember when, 15 or 20 years ago, Silicon Valley had a libertarian tilt. Entities like Google were very much in favor of free speech and very much against censorship, but more recently, they’ve gone 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Probably the defining event of this shift — the moment when Big Tech’s pro-censorship regime made clear its intentions — was the episode known as “GamerGate,” beginning in August 2014 with the drama surrounding Zoe Quinn (a/k/a the Tattoo-Covered, Mentally Ill Ex-Stripper Whose Real Name Is Chelsea Van Valkenburg).
#GamerGate was my first encounter with Kiwi Farms, which proved to be useful for research on such personalities as Zoe Quinn, Nicholas Edwin “Sarah” Nyberg, and “Brianna Wu” (a/k/a John Walker Flynt) who were involved in the controversy as left-wing SJWs (“Social Justice Warriors”).
What united the SJWs was the rallying cry of “harassment” — #GamerGate was, according to them, about the misogynistic bullying of women in the videogame industry, and claims of victimhood were amplified to promote that narrative, even though the alleged victims of harassment were relatively obscure people who were, at best, marginal to the industry,

There seems to be an unwritten rule that left-wing activists should be entitled to say or do anything they like without criticism. To criticize such a left-winger is to “harass” them, and this alleged “harassment” then becomes a pretext for silencing criticism of the Left. Kiwi Farms says “to hell with that” and, even though most participants in the forum are not ostensibly political — and I doubt many consider themselves conservatives — they vehemently oppose this kind of censorship.

So the United Kingdom’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) wants to enforce their Online Safety Act’s age-verification requirements. KiwiFarms and 4chan hired lawyers to sue the U.K. over this, and one of the lawyers they hired is my friend Ron Coleman. The filing begins thus:

The Internet is a global system of communication between computer servers, located in data centers around the world. Despite the Internet’s global reach, it is more or less universally acknowledged that the Internet is, predominantly, an American innovation, built by American citizens, residents, and companies, and that the United States has the largest and most thriving technology sector of any G7 member state.
Foreign governments, particularly those in Europe, which have not managed to build technology sectors of their own have, for the past half-decade or more, sought to control the American Internet, and hobble American competitiveness, through a range of legislative and nonlegislative initiatives.
These foreign governments have threatened American and other non-European entrepreneurs with a wide range of coercive threats, including, fines, arrest, and imprisonment, for engaging in conduct which is perfectly lawful in the territories where their websites are based, including in the United States. . . .
The United Kingdom recently joined France in seeking to apply its domestic laws to the rest of the world, with the enactment of its censorship law, the Online Safety Act 2023
(“OSA”). Immediately after the OSA’s substantive provisions entered into force, this censorship law was used to target the free speech rights of American citizens. . . .
This lawsuit seeks to restrain Ofcom’s conduct and its continuing egregious violations of Americans’ civil rights, including, without limitation, to the right of freedom of speech.

AMERICA, BABY! The Kiwi Farmers are very pleased, expressing themselves in, uh . . . colorful language.



 

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After Alaska Summit Meeting, Putin Confirms Ukraine War Was Biden’s Fault

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We all knew this, of course, and Trump has been saying it for three years, but now we have it directly from Vladimir Putin:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that the war between Russia and Ukraine would never have begun if President Donald Trump were president in 2022 instead of then-President Joe Biden.
Putin’s comments came during his joint press conference with Trump in Alaska following their three-hour-long closed-door meeting with top advisers about the war in Ukraine.
“I’d like to remind you that in 2022, during the last contact with the previous administration, I tried to convince my previous American colleague the situation should not be brought to the point of no return when it would come to hostilities,” Putin, speaking in Russian, said according to a translator. “And I said it quite directly back then that it’s a big mistake.”
“Today, when President Trump saying [sic] that if he was the president back then, there will [sic] be no war, and I’m quite sure that it would indeed be so. I can confirm that,” he said, per the precise audio translation.
Trump has long said that the war would not have happened if he were president at the time. In fact, during a CNN town hall event in May 2023, Trump said as much and that Putin would agree with his statement.
“If I were president, this would have never happened, and even the Democrats admit that. Putin knew it would have never happened, and his pipeline would have never happened,” Trump said. “A lot of things would have never happened.”
“All those dead people, both Russian and Ukrainian… they wouldn’t be dead today, and all those cities that are blown up and disintegrated right to the ground, that wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
Putin contrasted his virtually non-existent relationship with the Biden administration with his “business-like and trustworthy” relationship with Trump and expressed optimism about a potential end to the conflict.
“I think that overall, me and President Trump have built a very good business-like and trustworthy contact, and have every reason to believe that moving down this path, we can come and the sooner the better to the end of the conflict in Ukraine,” he said.

Of course we can be sure that this will be construed by many Democrats — e.g., Adam Schiff — that Trump is Putin’s stooge, but such an interpretation is reading the situation bass-ackwards.

Let me explain something very basic about statesmanship: Plot a 4-point axis with the terms “friendly/unfriendly” and “strong/weak.” Now, if a foreign country is friendly and weak, you don’t need to worry about them as a potential adversary, but they’re also not going to be any help in a crisis. A country that is friendly and strong is a valuable ally. Now, a foreign country may be unfriendly — indeed, overtly hostile — but if they’re weak, who cares? Their hostility is impotent. Greatly to be feared, however, is the country that is both unfriendly and strong.

So, try to see this situation from Putin’s perspective. With Joe Biden as president, America was simultaneously weak and overtly hostile to Russia, and Biden’s “strategy” (if we can deem it as such) was to rely upon our so-called “European allies.” For years I’ve been saying that it’s ridiculous to refer to France, Germany, etc., as “allies,” because from a military point of view, they are utterly worthless. If push came to shove, how many combat-ready divisions could Our European Allies™ actually deploy, even in their own defense, much less at some troubled hotspot elsewhere in the world? So the idea of the Biden administration is that we would rely on Our European Allies™ to deter Russia while, at the same time, we would continually insult Russia and engage in various covert hostilities against the Putin regime. We saw the result.

In August 2021, the Biden administration enacted its disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Were these unrelated incidents? Of course not. Just ask yourself: How long does it take to plan, organize and mobilize for a major military action? About six months, I’d say. The minute Putin saw the Biden bungle in Afghanistan, that’s when he ordered his army to prepare for the Ukraine invasion. When it became apparent, in December 2021/January 2022, the Russia was building up its forces near Ukraine, what was the Biden administration’s response? Talk, talk, talk.

Putin spotted Biden for the gutless wonder he was –the typical bully-braggart, always threatening others, but afraid of a real fight — and Ukraine suffered as a consequence. Liberals with the Ukraine flag logo in their social media profiles can hate Trump all they want, but it won’t change the fact that Russia never would have invaded if it hadn’t been for Biden’s bumbling and weakness. Democrats will never admit this, but when did anyone ever expect Democrats to tell the truth?



 

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The Worst News Network on the Planet Has Covered Itself in Shame This Week

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For the past couple of days, I’ve been watching CNN (so you don’t have to) and — dear merciful God! — there are no words to describe how awful it is. On the other hand, the attempt to describe it gave me an excuse to beat that dead dog again with a 1,300-word opus:

Among the errors to which journalists are prone, none is so common as the delusion of instant expertise. Assign a reporter to do an article about theoretical physics, and by the time he files his story, he’ll be convinced he’s Stephen Hawking. You see this sort of phony expertise everywhere in the media nowadays, including sports, where every ESPN panelist offers his predictions with rock-solid confidence, and never acknowledges his mistake when the team he’d picked to win ends up on the wrong side of a lopsided blowout.
Trafficking in fake expertise is routine practice at CNN, where their dwindling audience is now expected to believe that such personalities as Kasie Hunt and Erin Burnett know more about the effectiveness of U.S. military weapons than does Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. It’s worth noting in this context that CNN invested heavily in the idea that Hegseth was not qualified to be in charge of the Pentagon, despite his experience as an officer in the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq.
Scarcely had the B-2 bombers returned from their bombing mission against Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility than CNN went to work to prove that the Air Force mission was a failure. . . .

Please read the rest of my latest American Spectator column. When I sent it to Dianna Deeley, she complained that I’d started the Paw Patrol theme song playing in her head. We’re on a roll!



 

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How Trump Ruined the Media’s Weekend

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Oh, sure, it was a bad Saturday for the Ayatollah, but try to imagine what it was like for the news media. Suppose you’re the lead national security reporter for the Washington Post or the New York Times. It’s a Saturday in June, so maybe you’re out at the beach for the weekend, having a nice seafood dinner with friends at some beachside bistro on the Maryland shore. You’re probably on your third glass of wine when, shortly before 8 p.m., your phone explodes with messages from your editors.

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT! THAT SON OF A BITCH!”

Which is how reporters talk, by the way, especially when they find out on a Saturday night that they’ve got barely an hour to write the lead for a front-page story in the Sunday paper, and the only information they’ve got is a Truth Social message from Donald Trump. Bwa-hahahahaha!

A lot of reporters had their weekends ruined this way. The front-page story in the Metro edition of the Washington Post carries three bylines (Dan Lamothe, Evan Hill and Warren Stroebel), and down at the end, it gives credit to two other writers, Natalie Allison and Alex Horton, as having “contributed to this report.” Meanwhile, of course, the news desk was scrambling to remake the layout of the front page, and clearing space for the “jump” on page A11, as everybody in the newsroom — skeleton staff on a Saturday night — was scrambling to deal with this story.

It didn’t end there, however. After rushing to get a story in the early Metro edition (the one delivered to the suburbs), then they immediately turned around to do an update for the late city edition. Shortly after Trump’s Truth Social message, the White House put out the word that there would be a 10 p.m. press conference.

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT! THAT SON OF A BITCH!”

Which is how reporters talk, when they find out they’re going to have to write up a second version of their front-page story — including quotes from the press conference — with just minutes to spare before the presses roll for the late edition. Great weekend at the beach, eh?

OK, so after filing your first version of the story, you might have 30 or 45 minutes before Trump’s press conference, time enough to write up a quote or two from your “intelligence community” sources. And then — as the final weekend-wrecking insult from the president you loathe with ever fiber of your being — at the end of his White House press conference, Trump announces that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Dan Caine will hold a Pentagon press conference at 8 a.m. Sunday.

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT! THAT SON OF A BITCH!”

Which is how reporters talk, when they realize that after a night spent scrambling to write a front-page story, they’re going to have to get up early Sunday and head down to the Pentagon for a press conference by that smug Fox News bastard Pete Hegseth. It’s absolutely . . . perfect.



 

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One Standard Deviation: How Israel Targeted Iran’s Top Air Force Leaders

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Say hello to Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh and, while you’re at it, go ahead and say good-bye because, as Clemenza said of Paulie, you won’t see him no more:

The commander of the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] air force, Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Iran overnight, the IDF announces.
According to the military, the top brass of the IRGC Aerospace Force was killed alongside him as they met in an underground command center to prepare to attack Israel.
The command center was struck by fighter jets, the IDF says. . . .
Among the senior officials killed were the commanders of the IRGC’s drone unit and air defense unit, the military says. . . .
“Hajizadeh publicly pledged allegiance to the idea of destroying Israel on multiple occasions in recent years and played a central role in formulating the plan to destroy Israel,” the army adds.

Did you know Jews are smart? I mean, on average, despite such utter dummies as Joy Behar. “Jews — specifically, Ashkenazi Jews of European origins — test higher than any other ethnic group. . . . [T]heir mean IQ was .97 standard deviation above the rest of the [U.S.] population” (The Bell Curve, p. 275). A “standard deviation” is about 15 IQ points, the difference between “bright normal” and genius.

Israel is a nation born in war, and which has been under attack regularly since its modern founding in 1948. Since the 1980s, Israel has had an influx of Ashkenazi migrants from the former Soviet Union, including many ultra-Orthodox Jews with large families. Thus you have a nation of approximately 7 million Jews, the entire population of whom are, on average, one standard deviation smarter than their Arab neighbors, and devoted to military activity as their only hope of survival.

The Israelis fight smart, you see:

As it became clear Israel was about to attack, the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ air force convened in a bunker to coordinate the response.
But Israel knew that emergency protocol, and the location of the bunker. They destroyed it, killing the overall commander and the heads of the drone and air defense forces. “The fact that there was nobody to give the order neutralized an immediate Iranian response,” an Israeli official said.
They were among the more than two dozen Iranian commanders targeted in a sprawling attack on Iran’s military command-and-control. The heads of the IRGC, the Iranian military and Iran’s emergency military headquarters were all eliminated in the opening salvo.
Another key target was Iran’s air defense systems and radars. Israeli intelligence mapped their locations, and most were hit by the Israeli Air Force in the opening strike. That gave the IDF virtually unchallenged freedom of operation in Iran’s skies.
Meanwhile on the ground, Israel’s Mossad spy agency was conducting a series of covert sabotage operations deep inside Iran to take out air defenses and ballistic missile launchers. . . .
n central Iran, Mossad commando units had positioned guided weapons systems in open areas near Iranian surface-to-air missile launchers.
In another area inside Iran, Mossad covertly deployed weapon systems and sophisticated technologies hidden in vehicles. When the Israeli attack began, these weapons were launched and destroyed Iranian air defense targets.

You see why I started out with a Godfather allusion. Like Michael Corleone eliminating the heads of rival Mafia gangs, Israel is settling all the family business in Iran. And they’re just so much smarter than the Iranians, it almost seems unfair. Can you imagine the kind of long-term surveillance and planning that went into this operation? Like, figuring out where the Iranian air force leaders would meet in an emergency, mapping out the location of that bunker, giving them some kind of signal of an impending attack, then watching them scurry to their bunker and — WHAM! — you took out the leadership at the outset of the campaign, so “that there was nobody to give the order” for the Iranian counter-attack. Meanwhile, you’ve got Mossad spies sneaking around all over Iran, ready to play their part in wrecking the enemy’s air defenses, so that the Israeli Air Force can fly in without danger of getting shot down.

One standard deviation — it’s a lethal advantage.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

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‘An Earth-Shattering Kaboom’: Israel Wipes Out Top Iranian Military Leaders UPDATE: ‘Decapitation Strike’ — List

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Wednesday I spoke to a colleague who said to me in a very matter-of-fact way that Iran was going to get hit soon. He isn’t some kind of security-clearance type, but he does have a few “sources close to the Trump administration,” as an Objective Journalist would say, and I don’t know how he knew it, but he was certainly correct. It has been pointed out that, on April 12, Trump said Iran had 60 days to reach an agreement on ending its nuclear weapons program, and today? Yeah — Day 61.

Anyway, this is YUGE:

Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) confirmed in the early hours of Friday morning local time that Israeli airstrikes on targets in the country eliminated Major General Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Other arms of Iran’s state news apparatus confirmed several other high-profile regime members, including two nuclear scientists, were killed in the strikes. While unverified reports suggested that Salami may be far from the only high-ranking Iranian regime official to have been targeted successfully in the operation, he is the only one whose death the Iranian government has confirmed at press time.
Salami has sustained a place as one of the most prominent and belligerent senior leaders in the Iranian Islamist regime, regularly threatening attacks on America and Israel. In what was perhaps his final public appearance on Thursday, Salami declared that his forces were “war-tested and experienced,” prepared for war against its enemies.
The IRGC is both a U.S.-designated terrorist organization and a formal wing of the Iranian Armed Forces. Among its chief operations is to sustain relations between the Iranian terror state and its jihadist proxies, such as the Houthis in Yemen and Lebanese Hezbollah, and with fellow rogue states such as Venezuela and Cuba.
IRNA confirmed Salami’s death in a brief message that offered no details on the occurrence. It confirmed that Salami died in Tehran and claimed him a victim of “assassination.” In a separate report, the state news outlet confirmed a barrage of airstrikes over the capital city by the Israeli Air Force.
Another Iranian state media outlet, PressTV, reported early Friday that the strikes had “martyred … several other senior IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists.
“Veteran nuclear scientists Mohammad-Mehdi Tehranchi and Fereydoon Abbasi have also been martyred in the attack,” PressTV reported . . .

The list of targets eliminated already is very long — nuclear sites and missile sites among them — and Israel’s attacks are continuing.

UPDATE: Known kills so far:

  • IRGC Chief-of-Staff Hossein Salami
  • IRGC General Gholamali Rashid
  • Chief of Staff Mohammad Bagheri
  • Ali Shamkhani, Senior Advisor to Khamenei

And these nuclear scientists:

  • Dr. Fereydoun Abbasi
  • Dr. Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi
  • Dr. Abdolhamid Minouchehr
  • Dr. Ahmad Reza Zolfajari

Various sites associated with Iran’s nuclear and missile programs were also hit and, as I say, the Israeli strikes are continuing — it’s almost 10 a.m. in Iran now — so we can expect this list to grow.

UPDATE II: Associated Press (1:44 a.m. ET):

Israel attacked Iran’s capital early Friday in strikes that targeted the country’s nuclear program and killed at least two top military officers, raising the potential for an all-out war between the two bitter Middle East adversaries. It appeared to be the most significant attack Iran has faced since its 1980s war with Iraq.
The strikes came amid simmering tensions over Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program and appeared certain to trigger a reprisal, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warning that “severe punishment” would be directed at Israel. Israel said Iran had launched drones in an initial response.
Multiple sites around the country were hit, including Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facility, where black smoke could be seen rising into the air.
The leader of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Hossein Salami, was confirmed dead, Iranian state television reported, a development that is a significant blow to Tehran’s governing theocracy and an immediate escalation of its long-simmering conflict with Israel.
The chief of staff of Iranian armed forces, Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, was also confirmed dead by Iranian state television. Other top military officials and scientists were believed to have been killed. . . .
Some 200 Israeli aircraft took part in the opertion, hitting about 100 targets, Israeli army chief spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin said, adding that the attacks were ongoing.
In the aftermath, Defrin said Iran had launched more than 100 drones toward Israel and that “all the defense systems are acting to intercept the threats.”



 

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