Thomas Wictor

One of the more tedious aspects of social media is the pathological need that people have to “debate.” What they’re actually trying to do is force their own beliefs on others. The ethos of “Live and let live” doesn’t exist in social media. Social-media absolutists go crazy over faith. To them, faith is a childlike attempt to blind oneself to unpleasant truth. I can’t speak for anybody else, but all my own faith is based on knowledge.

During Operation Protective Edge, I had faith that the Israeli Defense Forces would soundly defeat Hamas. And they did, as I’ll show you in a moment. I knew that the IDF would prevail because I study the weapons and tactics of the Israeli armed forces and the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades—the terrorist wing of Hamas. When I read this, it made me laugh.

Hamas mimics Hezbollah tactics, and no one will have stability till blockade is lifted

[T]his time around, Hamas is using Hezbollah tactics. Those tunnels Israel keeps deploring? “Copying Hezbollah:”

Hamas’s tunnel network follows the successful use of tunnels by Hezbollah against an Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006…

None of this bodes well for the future. Again, as the world stands by witnessing the ongoing genocidal slaughter, the best advice for Israel is to end the blockade.

Forget the stupid hyperbole about “genocidal slaughter”; even if the Palestinian casualty figures were accurate, they’d represent 0.1 percent of the population. That’s one-tenth of 1 percent. During the Taiping Rebellion (December of 1850 to August of 1864), the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was formed in southern China, in opposition to the Qing Dynasty. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom ruled about 30 million people. After four years of total war, the Qing Dynasty along with French and British forces put down the rebellion at the cost of at least 20 million lives, most of them civilians. That’s genocidal slaughter.

What happened after the Second Lebanon War of 2006 is that Hezbollah declared itself the victor. In this era, all you have to do to make people believe something is to say it. Even reputable military scholars began yapping about how Israel lost the war. I could go over all the facts debunking the claim that Hezbollah won, but the easiest thing to do is to quote the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.

He’s so beloved in Lebanon that he never appears in public, except with armed human shields. Oh, and he wears neck to feet body armor and has a ballistic blanket, carried by the man to his right in the photo below.

If someone starts shooting, they’ll unfold the blanket and drape it over that fat body.

Here’s what Nasrallah said after he stopped bragging about how Hezbollah won the Second Lebanon War.

We did not think that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.

What about today? Is he eager to take on the armed forces that he so handily beat in 2006?

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has admitted his terrorist group is incapable of defeating Israel on its own, in the latest illustration of how the Shia Islamist group is being overstretched by growing commitments throughout the Middle East.

In an interview with Syrian state TV last Monday, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Nasrallah explains that despite boasts by himself and other Hezbollah leaders about the group’s capabilities, it is incapable of mounting a war against Israel independently.

“Are we supposed to lie to our people and ourselves, saying that we are capable of launching a war against Israel, wiping it off the map, and liberating Palestine? Hezbollah is incapable of doing this all by itself,” Nasrallah told his interviewer, after being asked why Hezbollah is not using its “sophisticated weapons” to “open a new front” against the Jewish state.

“We have never made such claims. We are realistic,” he continued.

“We are facing a real force,” he added, in an unusual nod to the formidable adversary Hezbollah faces in the IDF.

Nothing has actually changed since 2006, except that Hezbollah now has more rockets and missiles, some 130,000. Their training is still garbage, as it was before. Currently Hezbollah is being demolished in Syria. So many Nazi-saluting goons are coming home in flag-draped caskets that it’s now illegal to report on it.

Who’s defeating them? Clowns who put out videos of themselves storming empty buildings.

When there’s no return fire, and when people break cover to stand in the open and shoot their machine guns from the hip, it means that there’s no enemy present. From the voices, it sounds like some of those terrorists have terrible acid reflux.

Hezbollah is a threat, but so is a drunk, psychotic, homeless man with a rifle. There are different levels of threat.

I knew that Israel had completely trounced Hamas during Operation Protective Edge, so it was sometimes frustrating to hear Israelis whine about how the war had solved nothing. Well, Hamas agrees with me.

Hamas, at least, is under no illusions about who won and who lost. In fact, according to two separate reports last week, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas’s full name) recently admitted that it can’t afford another bout of “resistance” like that anytime soon.

The London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat quoted sources in Gaza as saying another war is inconceivable unless Hamas acquires anti-aircraft missiles. And while the sources neglected to say so, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon thanks to Egypt’s crackdown on arms smuggling from Sinai into Gaza…

[Senior officials] said Hamas didn’t intend to start another war unless it found a way to neutralize Israel’s aerial superiority. But they also cited the fact that the war ended up achieving nothing.

Throughout the fighting, Hamas promised its people that even though they were suffering, it would be worth it: The international community would rebuild their homes and grant massive development aid; Gaza’s borders with both Israel and Egypt would be opened wide; Gaza would get an airport and seaport. But in reality, none of this has happened.

International aid has largely failed to materialize, and as one recent poll shows, Gaza residents blame this mainly on Hamas. Reconstruction work has barely begun. The Egyptian border remains tightly sealed. No airport or seaport is on the horizon. Israel’s naval blockade remains in place…

Just how unpopular this has made the prospect of another war is evident from another finding of the poll mentioned above: Though a whopping 84 percent of Gazans support “armed struggle” against Israel in principle, an identical proportion – 83 percent – want Hamas to maintain a cease-fire with Israel in both Gaza and the West Bank.

The way you defeat your enemy is to kill him and destroy his weapons. I have faith that the IDF and the Arab League will soundly defeat Iran in the coming war. But my faith is based on facts. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt carried out a gigantic amphibious landing in Yemen that involved hundreds of armored vehicles. After the Emiratis broke out of Aden on August 4, the Saudis launched another armored assault from the north, crossing into Yemen at the Wadia border post.

In the map above, the green is controlled by the Houthis, the pink by the Arab League, and the gray by al-Qaeda. The black arrow is where the UAE armored assault began, while the white is the Saudi. Now the Houthis are fighting a two-front war. Like Sunni terrorists, they’ve been reduced to putting out fake videos.

Those are Yemeni—not Saudi—M60A3 Patton tanks. The Yemeni army was using them the way most Arab forces have: as pillboxes. Saudis and Emiratis deploy their tanks correctly, as fast-moving offensive weapons defended by mechanized infantry and special forces.

The video is pathetic. First they show a guy firing a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). You can clearly see the open breech (red arrow).

But the projectile that hits the tank is a Russian Konkurs antitank guided missile (ATGM), a whole different munition.

See how the fireball is on both sides of the tank?

That’s because the Houthi tank hunters struck the vehicle right under the turret overhang.

In other words, they hit the one place where an ATGM wouldn’t destroy a tank. Sure enough, the crew escapes.

The Houthi failed marksmanship continues; they aren’t able to bring down their running targets even with machine guns.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, trained for the ground invasion of Yemen a year beforehand. And the UAE is called “Little Sparta” by the US military. Emirati pilots are so skilled that they were permitted to engage in close-air support (CAS) in Afghanistan, despite not being a member of NATO.

I never hoped that Israel and the Arab League would neutralize Iran; I knew they would.