The Quad taking China as a target is destined not to go far: Global Times editorial

By Global Times

Published: Sep 23, 2024

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202409/1320174.shtml

The leaders of the US, Japan, India and Australia met for the Quad Leaders’ Summit in the US on Saturday, local time. Although the White House strongly denied that the Quad mechanism is merely a tool for the US to limit China in the "Indo-Pacific region," and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan claimed that "the Quad isn't really about any other country," soon after the beginning of Saturday's Quad leaders' meeting, a camera feed picked up US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announcing the first topic: China, as participants thought reporters were out of earshot. Everyone knows that the Quad summit is aimed at China, but the participants want to cover it up, demonstrating how the encirclement of China enjoys little support in the international arena.

The joint statement issued by the leaders of the four countries did not directly mention China. It expressed "serious concern" about the situation in the East and the South China Seas and condemned "coercive and intimidating maneuvers" in the South China Sea, but did not clearly name who took action. In addition, the four leaders announced plans to strengthen cooperation in maritime safety and security, enhance the interoperability of the maritime security organizations of the Quad countries, provide maritime monitoring technology to other Indo-Pacific nations, and launch joint coast guard patrols next year.

Although Western public opinion had previously heightened the rhetoric surrounding the meeting "to deal with aggressive China," we see that, apart from continuing to hype the "China threat" and "Indo-Pacific crisis" theories behind closed doors, the Quad summit is unable to come up with anything fresh and substantive. The so-called joint implementation of the coast guard mission has been in the works for a long time. As for the Quad's claim of contributing to the region's "freedom and openness," it is even more illusory and difficult to discern.

Many analysts believe that the more important agenda of the Quad summit is for the leaders of the four countries to come together and express their support for the continuation of the Quad mechanism in the future. With elections approaching in three of the four countries, this dialogue will be the last meeting of the current leaders. 

Washington certainly hopes to leave a political legacy at this time, and the other three countries also made some diplomatic remarks. However, many foreign media outlets, including Nikkei Asia, have pointed out that whether the four countries can continue to maintain close interaction under the relevant mechanisms in the future remains to be seen and "hype cannot obscure the Quad's existential crisis."

The Quad, as a flagship project of the "Indo-Pacific Strategy," has been "revived" under US leadership for three years now. Looking back over these three years, aside from a few meetings and statements, little concrete progress has been made in the six Quad working groups established to address "global challenges" and the Quad "seems adrift." This is not surprising at all. 

A small circle attempting to contain China on security issues and exclude it on economic matters in the region, while loudly proclaiming the goal of "building a free and open Indo-Pacific," is actually engaging in crude interference in regional affairs, which goes against the trend of the times and contradicts the wishes of regional countries.

The Quad's situation is also a microcosm of the closed and exclusive small circles that the US has pieced together around China. Western, especially American, public opinion attributes the slower-than-expected development of the Quad to India's "independence and autonomy," accusing New Delhi of leveraging its relationship with the US for its own benefit, which undermines the concept of a "strategic alliance." Among the four countries, which one - including the US itself - does not have its own national interests to consider when facing China? Which country can truly "decouple" from China or "exclude China"? China is the main trading partner for most countries in the region and is also a major contributor to regional peace and stability. Discussing security and development without China yields no substantial meaning beyond empty talk. Moreover, artificially creating tensions and inciting confrontation with China is bound to be unpopular.

Some analysts suggest that the Quad summit attempts to counter the so-called "China threat" without "irritating China." In fact, Washington's actions reveal that it must consider not only China but also the reactions of regional countries and the international community. Rather than trying to conceal its intentions, the US should return to a trend of peace and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific as soon as possible. The US has already committed to not seeking a new Cold War or opposing China through strengthened alliances. Whether its words align with its actions is being observed not only by China but by the entire international community.

Genocide’s A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel’s Waging Genocide, Not War

Ilana Mercer • September 20, 2024

https://www.unz.com/imercer/genocides-a-crime-not-a-war-crime-israels-waging-genocide-not-war/ 

Genocide is a crime, ‘the crime of all crimes.’ It stands alone; no mitigation or extenuation attaches to genocide

IF it is portrayed as a war crime; genocide—the methodical, malicious murder of the many—can be dismissed as incidental to battle; a mere case of, “Oops, bad things happen in war.” You hear the last phrase all the time from Israel’s supporters, as they gush their enthusiasm for the Jewish State’s crimes.

The genocide-as-a-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends imprimatur for criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime.

This is precisely the point of Israel and its co-belligerents: The purpose of framing Israel’s ongoing extermination of Palestinian society in Gaza as a byproduct of war—the same having commenced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—is to give the impression that industrial-scale mass murder is often incidental to war. Bad things happen in the butcher’s shop of war.

But genocide—legally and morally—is a stand-alone crime; it is not a crime attached to a set of mitigating or explanatory circumstances. Israel, gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate mass murder, is thus a criminal entity. Perhaps not a common criminal, but, nevertheless a criminal country, a threat to the comity of nations. It doesn’t take a Carl von Clausewitz, famed Prussian general and war theorist, to figure this out.

Disquieting though this is, a better source of metaphor for Israel than von Clausewitz is Truman Capote. He is the originator of the true-crime genre, in which a real event is treated with fictional techniques and turned into a literary work of art. That Capote’s In Cold Blood certainly is.

Israel, to commandeer and paraphrase Capote, is that “rarity, a natural killer—absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows.”

In the crime he anatomized, Capote encountered the “single-killer concept” and “the double-killer concept.” Israel comes under the nation-killer concept, given that the nation, with thumping majorities, backed the killing of Gaza.

In any event, because it is an indefensible crime for which there are no extenuating circumstances or traditional defenses—genocide is not a war crime.

The manifestly willful attempt to destroy a society and its people is a crime for which the death penalty—execution of those involved—has, historically, been meted. The exculpatory agents of Israel’s crimes against humanity are, alas, incapable of reasoning from fact, ethics and logic. Like programmed automatons, they therefore recite a counterfactual storyline, an ideological meme.

HASBARA AND A FLORET OF BABY FLESH

Israel’s odious excuse-making has come to be known as Hasbara.

In Hebrew, hasbara is the name of the verb to explain (lehasbir). It means explanation. Exculpatory constructs, assorted Hasbara, serve to coat Israel’s corporeal crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give these some imagined purity of purpose.

Think of Hasbara as providing cretins with bogus constructs with which to rape reality.

The facts of mass murder have been undercounted so far in a 649-page list of every Palestinian recorded killed in Israeli attack s. Two hundred and twenty-six pages of these, list the names of children 18 year and younger, including 14 pages of newborns and babies under a year old. Each name corresponds to a body, identified and interred. The last 11 pages list Palestinian elders, ages 77- to 101-years-old, all older than the country that killed them. (Via The Electronic Intifada.)

This carnage is being dismissed as a byproduct of war, executed within the matrix of Israeli “self-defense,” as Hasbara has it.

Hasbara to what end ? To propagandize international audiences into sympathizing with Israel and demonizing Arabs . (+972 Magazine.)

Hasbara to dress up tiny dismembered babies, courtesy of Israel’s American baby-busting bombs, as something other than a little torso, and a miniature groin, from which a floret of baby flesh protrudes, where once a chubby little leg kicked. Watch! The tot is watching.

Hasbara to frame the specter of baby flesh peeled away to expose gleaming white bone—little bodies and minds shattered for life should they live—as the doing of a third party. “I didn’t do it,” jokes Bart Simpson in that all-American parody, The Simpsons. Hamas made me do it. CNN’s Hasbara, which ascribes an almost-attractive raffishness to IDF criminals, has it that the Occupation made Israeli soldiers commit their crimes.

Hasbara to help leave refugees with no redoubt, and nothing to their name but a nylon dome above their heads. Gaza’s homeless must wait to parry whatever next thrust Israel will deliver in… “self-defense.”

In-the-heat-of-battle Hasbara greases the skids for a Jewish Taliban and his posse of soldiers, whooping it up, as they explode one more mosque among the hundreds they’ve already vaporized.

Hasbara explains away another IDF demon grimacing maniacally while reciting The Shmah, our “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” prayer. He then levels a mosque. “Have an explosive Sabath,” roar these particular IDF, before bursting into popular song, “The Nation of Israel Lives,” and sharing that they had just wired up a house of prayer in Khirbet Khizaa, Khan Younis, in the central Gaza Strip. Next I want to see their faces, scores of them, appear on our screens from the Hague. But will Hasbara tools like Matthew Miller, ensconced in the State Department, allow it? Rhetorical.

Israel’s Hasbara facilitates “Israel’s conceit of invincibility,” in Mouin Rabbani’s words. It has marred the West’s morality, but will never contaminate the natural law, and has yet to fundamentally change the common law.

Civilizing systems of ethics still stipulate that no one has the right to kill a single innocent human being, directly or indirectly, let alone hundreds of thousands of them—for by the time the Israeli serial killers are cajoled to stop the carnage, there could be, in my informed opinion, between 250 to 500,000, maybe more, Palestinian deaths by Israel.

Easily—that is if the Lancet, the medical journal of record, and the human rights community don’t lie. The scholar Norman Finkelstein, author of Gaza, An Inquest Into Martyrdom (2018)—an exegesis of fact and law—has strongly suggested that they, too, have been compromised.

MINARCHIST, ANARCHIST OR STATIST: GENOCIDE IS FORBIDDEN!

International law is not at odds with the natural law or the libertarian law on the matter of industrial-scale mass murder. For reasons obvious, there should certainly be no difference between how classical liberals or anarchists understand the non-aggression axion in this context. Minarchist or anarchist; genocide is verboten in libertarianism.

Craig Mokhiber, one of this country’s most principled specialists in “international human rights law, policy, and methodology,” explains:

‘International law does not allow a claim of self-defense to justify crimes against humanity and genocide. Nor does it magically overcome the international humanitarian law imperatives of precaution, distinction, and proportionality, or the protected status of hospitals and other vital civilian installations.

In addition, the presence of people associated with armed resistance groups (even if proven) does not automatically transform a civilian location or protected structure into a legitimate military target. If it did, the common presence of Israeli soldiers in Israeli hospitals would equally render those hospitals legitimate targets. Attacking hospitals is not an act of self-defense. It is an act of murder and, in systematic and large-scale cases, of the crime of extermination.

A claim of self-defense does not justify collective punishment, the siege of civilian populations, extrajudicial executions, torture, the blocking of humanitarian aid, the targeting of children, the murder of aid workers, medical personnel, journalists, and UN officials- all crimes perpetrated by Israel during the current phase of its genocide in Palestine. And all shamelessly followed by claims of self-defense by Israel’s defenders in the West.’ (Via Mondoweiss)

Having figured out, over this pixelated page, that genocide must be addressed as a crime, not a war crime, I humbly discover that I stand on the shoulders of “Raphael Lemkin.

Lemkin was … first …to put forward the theory that genocide is not a war crime and that the immorality of a crime such as genocide should not be confused with the amorality of war.” Genocide is “the gravest and greatest of crimes,” and thus dubbed “a crime against humanity,” wrote Lemkin, a Polish, Jewish human rights lawyer.

“‘The term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that,’ Lemkin explained in a 1945 article. ‘More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations’—cultural institutions, physical structures, the economy—’of the life of national groups.” (Via Mother Jones.)

Much like any good libertarian, Lemkin was a natural-rights thinker, whose reasoning about genocide—the intentional murder of the many—was derived from reasoning about the crime of homicide. Mass murder, essentially, is when “the natural right of the individual to exist” has been sundered many times over.

As to the offender: If the individual may not gratuitously and serially kill people; neither may the collective, the state, exterminate a class of people. It should make no difference as to whether the felon is a lone criminal or the “common force,” to use Frédéric Bastiat’s natural-rights nomenclature. In The Law, Bastiat writes this:

“Since … force by an individual cannot legitimately be… used against the person, freedom, or property of another individual, by the same argument, the common force cannot legitimately be used to destroy the person, freedom, or property of either individuals or classes.”

WHEN MONEY MEDIATES MURDER

If words matter, then boy! does money matter.

The Israel Lobby, AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is an almighty fifth column which ought to have long since come under corruption investigations and dismantled (ditto the ADL). At the very least, AIPAC, a blatant Israel operative, ought to have been forced to register as a foreign agent and scrutinized.

The first such endeavor was attempted by William Fulbright decades back. In 1963, by Wikipedia’s telling, Fulbright—academic, statesman and politician—had implicated AIPAC in laundering five million tax-deductible dollars “from philanthropic Americans,” by ostensibly sending the money to Israel “and then recycle[ing] it back to the U.S. for distribution to organizations seeking to influence public opinion in favor of Israel.”

On April 15, 1973, Fulbright told Face the Nation, a current affairs television program, that “Israel controls the U.S. Senate. … [and that we] should be more concerned about the United States interest rather than doing the bidding of Israel … The Senate is subservient to Israel, in my opinion much too much.”

That was the end of Fulbright’s campaign.

Fulbright’s reality, underscored in 1973, has reached its nadir in 2024. On July 23, American law-makers-cum-Israel-lap-dogs leap to their feet some 50 times, with cheers and deafening applause, to express adulation for mass murderer Bibi NetanYahoo, who is named as an offender by the International Criminal Court.

From Fulbright whose re-election bid AIPAC helped torpedo in 1973, to Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, two charismatic Americans with grassroots support, who’d refused to do Israel’s bidding, in 2024: AIPAC (track it) continues to buy influence, and to subvert Americans whenever they attempt to exert their popular will against that of the Israel donor-class.

Progressive representatives Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush of Missouri dared to voice disgust for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza. That was the end of the Bush/Bowman bids for office.

While we’re deconstructing Israel’s lexicon of crime, do please quit calling its “Operation Swords of Iron” in Gaza a war. It’s not.

GENOCIDE IS NOT WAR

Israel’s onslaught on Gaza—from my diligent daily tracking, the Israelis have comfortably settled into massacring between 30 to 100 individuals, each day—is not a war by any definition.

In Gaza, there are no armies arrayed one against the other. This is no war between equal, opposing warrior forces. There is no parity on the battle field, only, for the most, the bullyboy’s aerial blitzkrieg carried out against a trapped civilian population. In terms of matériel, not the quality or morality of its men, the Middle East’s most powerful army is also among the world’s top 20 military forces.

The IDF’s extermination campaign against a population of cornered civilians has indeed been disrupted by pockets of asymmetric guerilla warfare from non-state resistance fighters. Their exploits are available on the X platform of military analyst Jon Elmer.

Gleaned from my close observations over 11 months; the Gaza-based Hamas fighting brigades are no fat cats; they are skinny young Ghazzawi men, some in sandals, slinking among their ruined homes, darting in-and-out to defend what is left of their communities. These fighters are indubitably of the Palestinian people and for the people, as Palestinians see them.

And the way Palestinians see things is all important. The art of getting along, differences and all, is imperative in conflict resolution. Realpolitik demands not dominance, but that dueling perspectives be taken into consideration. Israel and America should not foist their reality on their opponents.

At any rate, let us try to avoid a dialogue of the deaf, and remember that words matter. They mediate action. Use them accurately: Genocide is the kind of crime that stands alone; no mitigation or extenuation attach to genocide. By extension, Israel is waging genocide, not war, and … Americans want it stopped.

For all their initial stated eagerness; most of our countrymen (61 percent now) want Israel’s genocide halted. Americans, moreover, want to stop arming Israel, as a June poll from CBS showed (via The Intercept). This includes 77 percent of Democrats and nearly 40 percent of Republicans.

Beholden to donor-class dominated politics, the regnant villains of the Stupid and the Evil Parties are, nevertheless, refusing to end the genocide in Gaza. Yet it must be stopped. Actively and urgently so, given that, in an attempt to bury the crime of all crimes; Israel has shifted the focus to its northern front, to Lebanon.

How to stop the genocide, in my next instalment.

Israeli killings of Palestinian children 'an extremely dark place in history', says UN

United Nations committee highlights serious Israeli violations of international human rights law through 'indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks' affecting Gaza children

By Sondos Asem

Published date: 19 September 2024

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-killings-children-gaza-historically-unprecedented-says-un-committee

A United Nations official on Thursday accused Israel of committing historically unprecedented violations against Palestinian children, including mass killings and arbitrary detentions. 

"The outrageous death of children is almost historically unique. This is an extremely dark place in history," Bragi Gudbrandsson, vice chair of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), told reporters.

"I don't think we have seen before a violation that is so massive as we’ve seen in Gaza. These are extremely grave violations that we do not often see."

The CRC, which monitors compliance of state parties to the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, on Thursday released its findings on six state parties to the treaty, including Israel, after a review during its latest session.

In its report, the committee said it was "greatly concerned about the high number of children in Gaza killed, maimed, injured, missing, displaced, orphaned and subjected to famine, malnutrition and disease" as a result of Israel's "indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks".

During UN hearings that preceded the report, Israel denied that its war on Gaza violated the treaty or international humanitarian law. 

In addition to calling out Israel for killing Palestinian children, the CRC also expressed its concern about the "continued abduction, arbitrary arrest, and prolonged detention of large numbers of Palestinian children by Israeli forces, mostly without charge, trial or access to legal representation or contact with family members".

It urged Israel to release all Palestinian children arbitrarily detained and halt the practice.

It also called on Israel to "abolish the institutionalised system of detention and the use of torture and ill-treatment against them at all stages of the judicial procedure".

Last week, the health ministry in Gaza published the names of 710 Palestinian newborn babies killed by Israeli forces during the ongoing war.

They are among more than 16,700 Palestinian children killed in Israeli attacks since last October, according to the Gaza-based government media office. 

According to a report in June from the International Committee of the Red Cross, more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza as a result of Israel's assault on the enclave, either lost, disappeared, detained, buried under rubble or in mass graves.

US Navy Chief Unveils Plan to Be Ready for War with China By 2027

The US is preparing for a direct fight with China despite the risk of it turning into a nuclear war

by Dave DeCamp

September 18, 2024

https://news.antiwar.com/2024/09/18/us-navy-chief-unveils-plan-to-be-ready-for-war-with-china-by-2027/

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the highest ranking officer in the US Navy, unveiled a plan on Wednesday to be ready for a war with China by 2027 as the US military is preparing for a direct fight with Beijing despite the risk of nuclear war.

The plan lays out goals to be reached by 2027, including making 80% of the naval force ready for combat deployments on short notice. Franchetti told The Associated Press she wants to increase combat readiness so “if the nation calls us, we can push the ‘go’ button, and we can surge our forces to be able to meet the call.”

Other goals include increasing recruitment, improving Navy infrastructure, removing delays in ship maintenance, and increasing the use of drones and other autonomous systems.

Franchetti said the US is taking lessons from Ukraine’s operations against Russia in the Black Sea and the US’s new war against the Houthis in Yemen. US Navy ships have battled the Houthis since January in what US commanders have called the largest US naval battle since World War II, but the campaign has failed to deter or stop Houthi attacks.

Franchetti said that she is focusing on getting ready for war with China by 2027 because that is “the year that that President Xi (Jinping) told his forces to be ready to invade Taiwan.” However, that idea is only based on claims from US intelligence officials.

While China has ambitious goals for its military, there’s no evidence of a direct order to be ready for an invasion of Taiwan by 2027. Earlier this year, Defense News reported that Xi raised the issue with President Biden when the two leaders met in San Francisco in November 2023.

Recounting the meeting, a US official said: “Xi basically said: ‘Look, I hear all these reports in the United States [of] how we’re planning for military action in 2027 or 2035. There are no such plans. No one has talked to me about this.'”

The Defense News report noted how the claims about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan have helped funnel money to a US military buildup in the Asia Pacific. The claim about a 2027 invasion was first made in 2021 by Retired Adm. Phil Davidson, the former head of US Indo-Pacific Command.

“The concern it generated earned a nickname: the ‘Davidson window,’ shorthand for the near-term threat of an attack on Taiwan,” Defense News reported. “And that changed how Congress spent money. The Pacific Deterrence Initiative doesn’t have its own budget, but in the last few years the US has spent more on its forces in the region.”

 

Israel's New Campaign of "Terrorism Warfare" Across Lebanon What we know about Israel's bloody attacks targeting consumer electronic devices in Lebanon Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous Sep 18

dropsitenews+jeremy-scahill@substack.com

For the second day in a row, electronic devices across Lebanon, including walkie talkies, exploded on Wednesday, killing 14 people and injuring over 450, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

The attack came one day after thousands of pagers across the country exploded at the same time, killing eleven people—including a 9-year-old child—and wounding nearly 3,000, including many civilians and government and hospital workers. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for the attacks.

“Everyone's scared to send text messages, to make calls, and they're afraid to open laptops. It's definitely led to some level of complete disorientation, fear, confusion, paranoia. It has huge psychological effects,” said Amal Saad, a leading expert on Hezbollah. “People have started to say, ‘Okay, this is going to be the new type of warfare. This is going to be how they're going to fight. It's going to be terrorism warfare. So this is the new normal now.’ People are preparing themselves for more of this.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a brief video statement on Wednesday after the second round of attacks. “I have said it before: We will return the citizens of the north to their homes in security, and that’s exactly what we are going to do.”

“We have many capabilities that we have not yet activated,” Israeli lieutenant general Herzi Halevi said, regarding Israel’s plans for military operations at the northern border with Lebanon. 

The second attack appeared timed to cause total panic among the civilian population and to undermine confidence in Hezbollah’s ability to control and contain Israel’s assault. On Wednesday, multiple explosions went off at a funeral for some of those killed on Tuesday, according to the AP whose reporters witnessed the attack. 

"I'm starting to realize,” Saad said, “the objective behind this was to terrorize and paralyze and demoralize.”

Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah is scheduled to give a public speech Thursday where he is expected to address how these attacks were conducted and to lay out the group's plans for a military response. “Hezbollah has to respond and will respond,” Saad said. Israel, she said, has at times denied or downplayed the effectiveness of Hezbollah’s attacks. To restore morale, "you need it to be indisputable that Hezbollah did this," she said. "If it's a different type of response that Israel can conceal and hide, I'm not sure how effective that's going to be."

At approximately 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, thousands of pagers across Lebanon sprang to life, beeping and vibrating. The message on the screen indicated an error. “The message was: Fault. Fault. And it continued to beep and heat up before the explosion of the pager,” said Ali Jezzini, a security analyst and journalist in Lebanon who has been speaking to hospital workers treating the wounded. 

Many victims, he said, lifted the devices to examine the pagers and as they did so, they exploded, causing injuries to their faces and hands. “It did give a code and it continued to ring and vibrate. So that's why they had to hold it in their hands to check what's happening. It was faulty, it was not responding, so that's why they kept it in front of their faces and the palms of their hands, because they're trying to figure out what's wrong with it. That's why most of the injuries are like that. It didn't explode right away.”

The widespread physical injuries are intended to have a larger psychological effect, according to Jezzini. "I would compare it to an operation made by the Americans in Vietnam where they actually planted faulty ammunition that made the guns explode for the Viet Cong on the NVA and during the Vietnam war,” said Jezzini, referring to an operation called Project Eldest Son.

“Psychologically, it does actually help to, you know, make the fighter lose confidence in his equipment. That's the aim." He compared it to a psyop, intended to "alter the perception of Hezbollah's leadership" and perhaps force it into a ceasefire.

Speaking to Israeli troops at the Ramat David Airbase on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made no mention of the explosions but he did declare “the start of a new phase in the war” saying, “the center of gravity is moving north. We are diverting forces, resources, and energy toward the north.”

The United Nations Security Council will meet on Friday over the attacks following a request by Algeria on behalf of Arab states.

Experts are still searching for the precise mechanism that triggered the explosions in the pagers yesterday. The most likely scenario, based on available evidence, is that the pagers were rigged with some form of explosive material or mechanism before being delivered to Lebanon. That would mean Israeli agents were able to access the devices at the point of manufacture or to interdict the supply chain. Officials in Lebanon have said they believe the pagers contained 10-20 grams of explosive material. The devices were then detonated through a message, code, or pulse pushed to the devices, which triggered whatever mechanism had been installed.

“I have to give credit to those that fabricated those pagers, very ingenious,” said Mike Vining, a legend in the world of U.S. covert operations, one of the first members of Delta Force and an expert on explosives. “When I was in the military at my old job we developed a lot of tricks. I am saddened about the fact that innocent people were injured. The goal is never to hurt the innocent.” 

Vining told Drop Site News that he had no inside knowledge of the operation in Lebanon, but offered some plausible theories on how the pagers were rigged and detonated. “Probably had some pure PETN explosives in the pagers,” he said, referring to pentaerythritol tetranitrate, a highly explosive substance. “I believe from what I see, first the lithium battery is shorted and explodes and that causes the PETN to detonate. What makes me think this is that the pager got hot and smoked first. A single signal must have been what triggered the reaction.” 

 “Sources today in Lebanon were saying that the [pagers] have passed the inspections on multiple airports, such as X-rays,” said Jezzini, making it difficult to place blame on one single agency for allowing the attack to happen.

Reporting by Al-Monitor and Axios has suggested that Israel decided to move forward with the attack out of concerns that Hezbollah was on the brink of discovering the rigged pagers, but this remains unconfirmed. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also echoed the point at a briefing at UN headquarters: “What has happened is particularly serious, not only because of the number of victims that it caused, but because of the indications that exist that this was triggered, I would say, in advance of a normal way to trigger these things, because there was a risk of this being discovered.”

Multiple news outlets have reported that Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant informed U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that Israel was going to carry out an operation in Lebanon, but offered no specifics. The U.S. has officially denied any involvement or foreknowledge of the plot. "We were not aware of this operation and we were not involved in it," said U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Tuesday. 

The model of the pagers matches that of a model manufactured by a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo. Images of damaged devices shared online after the blasts showed labeling matching the AR-924 model built by the company, along with the company name. 

The AR-924 was listed on the company’s website prior to its removal this week. In statements issued by the company after the attacks, Gold Apollo denied manufacturing the product and said the model in question is produced and sold by BAC Consulting KFT, a Hungarian company that had been authorized to use its branding. In public comments, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said that its records showed no direct exports to Lebanon by Gold Apollo.

The president of Gold Apollo, Hsu Ching-Kuang, told the press that a year after signing their partnership, BAC made the unusual request to design its own products but with Gold Apollo’s trademark. According to Hsu, payments to Gold Apollo from BAC reportedly came from a bank account registered to an unnamed country in the Middle East, causing occasional delays and freezes in payment, despite BAC being based in Hungary, an arrangement he called “strange.”

BAC is based in Budapest and was established in 2022, publicly available information shows. A company website, since taken offline, describes the role of BAC in developing, “international technology cooperation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products,” and “scaling up a business from Asia to new markets.” 

Business records listed for the company in Hungary show around $584,000 in revenue for the company in 2023 along with only $320 in fixed assets. Reporters from the Associated Press who visited the building listed as the headquarters of BAC in a residential neighborhood of Budapest found a building used as a site for headquarter addresses of multiple companies. 

The CEO of the company is listed as Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono. A LinkedIn page for Bársony-Arcidiacono indicates that, prior to her role at BAC she had previously worked for the European Commission, as well as a “strategic advisor” for consulting firms in various countries. (The EU Commission denied she was ever a staff member, but could not rule out the possibility she worked as a contractor.) After the attacks, Bársony-Arcidiacono was quoted in press reports confirming her company’s licensing arrangement with Gold Apollo, but stating, “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong.”

In a statement posted on Twitter on Wednesday, Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesperson for the government of Hungary, also called BAC “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site” in the country. “The referenced devices have never been in Hungary,”  he added.

Globally, many condemned Israel’s use of such a widespread tactic that, by design, would clearly harm and kill civilians. "It's not just fighters" being maimed, Saad said. "Hezbollah is such a huge grassroots organization, there are so many people who work [in its civil institutions]. My friend's cousin lost his eyes and his fingers yesterday because he's a nurse in Al Rassoul Al Azam Hospital. He's a part time nurse in that hospital, but he's a student. And there are many, many people who are connected to Hezbollah in this way just through part time work."

"Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon,” Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for information from the U.S. State Department as to whether any funding from the U.S. went into the attack. “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict,” she posted on Twitter. “Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any US assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology.”

“It's the only way to wage war for the Israelis, the dirty war,” said Jezzini. “They are aiming to change the whole perspective of the world on how to wage war and what is legitimate or not to survive. So instead of complying with international law, they are trying to change the whole concept of international law. That is real danger here.”

Who is surmising China launching an ‘Opium War’ against the US? Global Times editorial

By Global Times Published: Sep 18, 2024

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202409/1319937.shtml

Whenever China-US cooperation makes actual progress, there tends to be rhetoric in the US aimed at undermining the momentum, with the crackdown on fentanyl being the latest example. Recently, some individuals in the US have once again begun to blame China for the fentanyl issue, claiming that China is waging a "new Opium War" to "hollow out" the US from within. A report by the US Congress in April directly slandered "China as the ultimate geographic source of the fentanyl crisis." These voices make it clear who is undermining China-US cooperation in combating fentanyl.

The American politicians hyping up such claims appear to be suffering from persecutory delusion. They envision China as an omnipotent, mysterious force that controls Americans, leading them to involuntarily abuse fentanyl, which has resulted in a large number of personal and family tragedies. They have likely heard about the huge damage caused to China by the Opium War launched by the West, thus they are attempting to portray themselves as victims, invoking an old Chinese saying "give somebody a dose of his own medicine." In their eyes, the current fentanyl crisis in the US is an act of revenge by China. At the same time, these American politicians attempt to prove that China's "revenge" is unjustified because "the US did not participate in the Opium War" and "the harm caused by fentanyl to the US far exceeds the costs of China in the Opium War." 

These remarks, characterized by confusing logic and filled with historical fallacies, are viewed as ridiculous by Chinese society. Their only function is probably to reflect the guilty conscience of Western political elites regarding historical issues. China is a victim of the Opium War, and these politicians fail to understand and appreciate how deeply repulsed Chinese society, which experienced the Opium War, feels about drugs. In a certain sense, the Opium War is an important reason for the current antipathy and zero-tolerance attitude toward drugs in Chinese society. When it comes to counter-narcotics, China has the strongest determination, the most relentless policy and one of the best records in the world. In terms of drug control, it is not an exaggeration to say that the US should be a "student" that should humbly learn from China.

The fentanyl issue in the US is not manufactured by China, nor is the abuse of fentanyl a problem originating from China. The root of the problem lies in the fact that American society's demand for narcotic and psychotropic drugs cannot be met through legal, safe, and effective channels. The fentanyl crisis in the US began with the over-prescription of medications, particularly opioids. An article published by the American Addiction Centers in 2022 stated that even patients taking fentanyl as prescribed by doctors could become addicted, yet some doctors prescribe lethal doses of fentanyl to patients. A study on cancer treatment indicated that up to half of American patients should not have been prescribed fentanyl in the first place. This is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the failures of the US in managing the fentanyl issue. As Al Jazeera said, it is "a disaster of its own making."

In fact, illegal fentanyl entered the US market as early as the 1980s, and multiple illegal labs have been discovered within the country, but American politicians often avoid these historical facts. With only 5 percent of the world's population, Americans consume 80 percent of the world's opioids, something that any reasonable person can recognize as abnormal. 

The enormous demand for fentanyl substances in the US is the root cause of the crisis, and it is this excessively high domestic demand for these drugs that drives the development of the illegal fentanyl market. In addition, why is the same chemical, which is only a raw material for industrial and pharmaceutical production in many countries, turned into a source of problem in the US? These are issues that American politicians must face up to.

China's attitude toward supporting the US in combating the abuse of fentanyl is sincere, and its actions are pragmatic. We are willing to strengthen drug control cooperation with the US and actively participate in global drug governance. This reflects China's responsibility as a major power. The drug control mechanisms of China and the US have a history of over 30 years of professional cooperation within both bilateral and multilateral frameworks.

Following the meeting between the two heads of state in San Francisco last November, relevant departments from both sides have fully resumed drug control cooperation and made substantial progress. Starting September 1, China added three Fentanyl precursors, identified by the United Nations drug control mechanism, to its list of controlled precursor chemicals, imposing stricter oversight over their production. This marked a "valuable step forward" in China-US drug control cooperation. These achievements have not come easily, and the US should cherish them. 

If the US truly wants to address the fentanyl issue, it must first respect the cooperative efforts in drug control between China and the US, stop politicizing the fentanyl issue, abandon the irresponsible practice of applying pressure through public opinion, reduce its own internal conflicts regarding the fentanyl issue, and sincerely return to pragmatic cooperation. Seeking China's cooperation and support while simultaneously smearing and labeling it will only make the US fentanyl problem more difficult to resolve.