Never ask

vga@sopuli.xyz to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 283 points –
27

Never ask how Israel gets away with state terror.

We can call it state terror, but an attack of this scale is an outright attack by Israel on Lebanon, which is arguably worse. Terror attacks target indiscriminately, this was intended for combatants (yes, civilians died, that's why it's worse).

Think about pearl harbor vs 9/11. Pearl harbor was a state attack by Japan on the U.S. using horrific means against a naval base. 9/11 targeted the planes and buildings, regardless of who was in them

But killing Palestinians is killing future terrorists!

::: spoiler for cerial /s :::

Its not a secret that Iran has diplomatic relations with them is it? Same with hamas btw. How do you think they establish communications for holding ceasefire talks?

Or, y’know, that Iran (along with a couple others, like Syria) is a primary funder of Hezbollah. Could also be that

Hezbollah is the only thing stopping Israel from conquering Lebanon, if they need Iran's help to stop Israel from invading and ethnically cleansing their land like they're doing in Palestine, so be it.

Umm...just because the 2006 conflict was a stalemate, I wouldn't bet on Hezbollah stopping a full Isreali invasion, especially if they are committed to the genocidal tactics they are using in Gaza. Iran would continue to remain relatively unbloodied and let their poxies die.

Nah, see,, some people would like to return to the time when saying "terrorist" would get people foaming at the mouth and approve whatever the military wants.

I'm still trying to understand why Hezbollah people were like

Thank you for this pager, stranger, I'll use this without question for the next few months, and certainly not give it away or sell it or take it apart.

And why anyone thought that it'd go that way.

I'll need to read more about it, maybe this is explained, but it seems like such a long shot

You need some sort of chain of trust to do anything big in the world. Im sure their hierarchies are pretty flat to keep the risk of infiltration low, but still, if you have a trusted source that supplies your equipment, then that can and will get compromised.

But like... A communication device seems like THE most suspicious equipment you can get. I'm shocked nobody verified, and I'm shocked that they had the audacity to even attempt.

Wrt giving/selling the pagers, well, I'll have to read more to find out if that happened. It wouldn't surprise me but also I imagine it'd be hard to find out.

They might have been checked at some stage, but if you have enough intel, you can figure out at which stage to insert the vulnerability. But i have seen lots of fun ideas on how this could be done. The fact that its apparently alkaline batteries, makes it interesting tho. Unless it was fake batteries with something inside them.

You could also try to make it so that the people who check the devices, only get to see good ones.

That's a good point.

And from everything we see it really seems like the IDF really doesn't gaf about collateral damage either, so they probably didn't care that they'd give any of these away to other people.

Finding out people's salaries is a good thing. It's how you prevent your bosses from screwing everyone over. Of course that information might be sensitive so don't go around inquiring willy nilly, but it's definitely a topic that you can and should sometimes visit.

(I know this is a s*** post so it's all good but some people don't realize the value in discussing salaries, and they think it's something that has to be super secret when that only hurts you, the employee.)

Don’t ask his family at the funeral, anyway.

Like you could interrogate meat chunks.

For communication? Does Lebanon have a right to defend itself?

This is like asking why Biden has a phone line to the fascists in charge of Israel. Does that make Biden a legitimate target?

This is why I hate the way the media and people talk about these issues. Here you say Lebanon, but the title is talking about Hezbollah. But honestly I'm sure Israel looks at it as Hezboollah is just a part of Lebanon. Why isn't Israel allowed to defend itself from missiles being launched from Lebanon.

I mean it's a legitimate political group in Lebanon that's firing missiles at Israel. Why is that considered okay, what is Israel supposed to do?

Neither is ok of course. The thing is that Israel had an overwhelming military and economic advantage for decades. The strategy should have been to aid in democratization, education and prosperity of the occupied Palestinian territories and neighboring countries. Propaganda is an incredibly powerful tool and they could have used it to de-radicalize Palestinians and create a peaceful 1 or 2 state solution. They've had decades to do this. But they did the opposite.

Part of it is I believe the US geopolitical strategy. The USA does NOT like democracy in countries it wants to exploit. This isn't ideology it's just a result of playing imperialist games. Imagine countries with oil and resources were democratic and educated, they'd want to own and control their own resources instead of accepting all this despotism and corruption. See Saudi Arabia.

And of course, see Iran. They had a democratic society and when they wanted to "renegotiate" the oil deals in 1953 the UK and USA created a coup and put a dictator in charge (the shah) to continue to exploit cheap oil. You sometimes see this propaganda of how modern Iran was in the 1960 under the Shah, but there was also repression and torture in prisons. Iran's theocracy today has a guardian council that is I believe partially structure the way it is to prevent foreign influence or NGOs (the modern tool to create color revolutions). Of course Iran and other groups fight back, and one of their tools is Hezbollah.

Israel serves as a client state of the US to help control the middle east, and partially their strategy is to keep them unstable, to have the right amount of extremism and repression and poverty and suffering so they can be ruled through force alone.

Socialists call the USA fascist long before Trump because they do not see people in other countries as equal or "worthy" of democracy or prosperity. So from that viewpoint Israel's policy was fascist long before Netanyahu. At some point they killed of most of their Kibbuzihm which was their socialist base.

And all this is the reason why propaganda is presenting this as a pure "good vs evil" conflict instead of the brutal and cruel calculus of power or imperialism using very sophisticated strategies and tools.

What? Is this the 90s? A pager? Fake news should try harder.

My company uses them regularly as one of their alarm systems when they need to notify the maintenance technicians of something that's not working because they are reliable and work even if the phone lines are down.

Why should people stop using them if they work?

Also fire departments, hospitals and other medical services. They’re extremely reliable, last a very long time on a charge and don’t shatter when you accidentally drop it.

Cell phones are easily tracked. Pagers aren't.

How do you figure? A pager is just a way dumber phone, but it's still a client on a cellular network like any other.

They aren't though, pagers run in a separate frequency and their own towers with far greater range and penetration. Most aren't even bi directional they just receive so there is no way to track them.

Pagers have more in common with a transistor radio than a cell phone.

Yeah I realize that now after doing more research

The way I understand it, pagers are a one way device. When a message is sent to a pager it is broadcasted by the network for the pager to recieve, but there isn't any sort of confirmation sent back to the tower, so they can't really be tracked. That's why they were in use prior to cellphones. These pagers ran on a AAA battery from what I understand, which wouldn't last very long if it was having to constantly broadcast like a cellphone.

Did a little digging and it appears the Hezbollah pages were POCSAG/FLEX which does indeed appear to be one-way, so that's very possibly a reason why they were picked