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By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine
The exploding pagers that reportedly wounded thousands of Hezbollah terrorists came within 3 days of the 40th anniversary of the Islamic terrorist group’s attack on an American embassy.
On September 20, 1984, a Hezbollah terrorist drove a Chevy station wagon fitted with diplomatic plates and Soviet rockets at the US embassy in Beirut and detonated it, wounding the US ambassador and killing two Americans, Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth V. Welch and Petty Officer First Class Michael Ray Wagner, while wounding five other Americans.
The Biden-Harris administration marked the 40th anniversary of the Hezbollah attack by dispatching Amos Hochstein, its envoy, to pressure Israel into turning over land to Hezbollah in exchange for some temporary quiet.
A previous Hochstein deal saw Israel turn over gas fields to Hezbollah only to see the terror group launch thousands of rockets at northern communities in Israel. 60,000 Israelis have been displaced by these attacks and cannot return home.
But the Biden-Harris administration decided that the best way to honor the hundreds of Americans killed by Hezbollah, including the 220 Marines in the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983, the brutal torture of Colonel William R. Higgins, who had his tongue pulled out and was castrated before being dumped in front of a mosque, and Navy diver Robert Stethem who was beaten to death on TWA Flight 847, was by demanding that Israel surrender to the terrorists.
But the Israelis have been settling not only their scores, but our scores for us.
In 2008, an Israeli car bomb took out Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s chief of staff, who had been among the monsters jumping up and landing on Stethem’s body.
“They were jumping in the air and landing full force on his body. He must have had all his ribs broken,” a stewardess on the hijacked plane described.
“I was sitting only 15 feet away. I couldn’t listen to it. I put my fingers in my ears. I will never forget. I could still hear. They put the mike up to his face so his screams could be heard by the outside world.”
Mughniyah had been attending an Iranian reception celebrating the Islamic takeover of the formerly free nation, only to find that his car’s tire had been loaded with explosives.
The reported joint Mossad-CIA operation was also the last hurrah before the Obama takeover and the beginning of a new D.C. policy of appeasing Iran while undermining the Jewish State.
Fuad Shukr, Mughniyah’s close ally and a top Hezbollah figure, had been responsible for the Marine Barracks bombing that killed 241 U.S. military personnel and wounded 128 others, as well as the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 where Stethem was brutally murdered by the terrorists.
Iran marked the 40th anniversary of the Marine Barracks bombing in October with over 170 attacks on American military personnel across the region. The Biden-Harris administration tried to talk tough, launched a few airstrikes and then backed down. Israel however did not.
After a Hezbollah attack on an Israeli soccer field killed 12 kids, Shukr, who still had a $5 million reward on his head from the State Department for the Marine Barracks bombing, was taken out by an Israeli airstrike.
The Israelis had infiltrated Hezbollah’s communications system and placed a call asking him to go up to the 7th floor of the building where he had been hiding out to escape detection.
He did and never left again.
After Shukr’s death, Hezbollah accelerated its shift away from high-tech communications and toward pagers. Cellphones were banned in favor of pagers.
The terror group began performing spot checks to see if its terrorists were carrying phones. “Today, if anyone is found with their phone on the front, he is kicked out of Hezbollah,” a Reuters story claimed.
“Abandon your phone, disable it, bury it, lock it in a metal box, for a week, two weeks, a month,” Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah had warned his terrorists. “Allah knows how long this situation will last.”
Replacing large numbers of phones with pagers however created its own security risk.
The wave of pager explosions that swept through Beirut near the 40th anniversary of Hezbollah’s attack on our embassy should have come from us, but it likely came from Israel.
The Israelis had targeted Hezbollah’s communications system to cripple the terror group’s operations, first infiltrating the hardwired fiber optic landlines set up for it by Iran, then its cellphones and now its pagers.
Each attack has forced Hezbollah to retreat from high speed communications methods and to move further toward a dependency on human couriers.
The couriers carrying code words for the day are hard to crack but slow down any response.
Forcing Hezbollah to use medieval means of communications will make it difficult for the terror group to operate across long ranges, to coordinate with its masters in Iran and with other members of the Islamic terror network including the Houthis in Yemen and the militias in Iraq.
The pager attack represents the single most devastating targeting of an Islamic terror group in history, taking out hundreds of its personnel and crippling its communications.
It’s also a long overdue payback for Hezbollah’s attack on the U.S. embassy some forty years ago.
On September 20, 1984, Hezbollah struck in a Christian area of West Beirut where the American embassy had relocated after the Iranian-backed terror group had bombed the previous embassy location, killing 17 Americans, and kidnapped, tortured and killed other Americans.
The embassy was under the protection of the Christian Phalangist militia members who would later be sold out by D.C. diplomats in pursuit of a deal with Islamic terrorists.
Together with the American military personnel and the British ambassador’s security, they tried to stop the car bomb before it hit the embassy.
Bullets hit the Islamic terrorist driving it, he fell over, the car bomb turned and blew up before it could hit the embassy and kill hundreds of people.
The blast still blew a massive crater and left rubble everywhere. The British ambassador, who was visiting, was buried under debris and had to be dug out. Two Americans were killed.
A torn part of the American flag from the embassy was brought home to Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth Welch‘s mother who was one of the dead. Welch had volunteered for duty in Vietnam where he earned a Bronze Star.
He had been friends with some of the American hostages taken in Iran and had tried to recover MIAs while on duty in China. His last medal was a Purple Heart.
Israel is not just fighting its war against Islamic terrorism, it’s fighting our war too.
On the 40th anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attack against the American embassy in Beirut, the pager attacks that devastated Hezbollah settled not only Israel’s score, but ours as well.
