This is Israel’s greatest victory since the Six-Day War

There is a satirical Israeli song from the Second Lebanon War, ‘Yalla Ya Nasrallah’, with the chorus: ‘Come on, oh Nasrallah/We will screw you, inshallah/we’ll send you back to Allah/with the rest of Hezbollah’. The lyrics are doggerel, but I mention it for two reasons. One, it’s an absolute banger of a tune and, two, all that it threatened has now been carried out. Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah for 32 years, was killed last night in an IDF strike on the Islamist terror group’s underground command centre beneath a Beirut suburb.

“Yalla ya Nasrallah,
We will f*ck you Inshallah,
We will return you to Allah,
With the entire Hezbollah” pic.twitter.com/bMa6VuQwXH

His death is the latest in a series of targeted killings on the leaders of Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy force armed and funded to strengthen Tehran’s grip on the region. These assassinations have included Ibrahim Aqil, commander of Hezbollah’s Radwan special forces unit, along with its chief of staff Hussein Ahmad Dahraj, chief of operations Hassan Yussef Abad Alssatar, head of training Abu Hussan Samir, and others. It has included Ibrahim Qubaisi, head of the rocket and missile division, and Muhammad Hussein Srour, chief of drones and aerial defences. To give a sense of the speed and efficiency of Israel’s operations, all of these targets were killed in the last seven days. Hezbollah has terrorised Israel for almost 40 years and now Israel has eliminated almost its entire chain of command in a week. This represents years, probably decades, of planning and intelligence gathering against one of the most heavily armed forces in the region. As daring and improbable Israeli military victories go, it is up there with the Six-Day War.

Nasrallah’s death brings to an end the reign of a brutal butcher responsible for the deaths of many more Arabs than Israelis. Under his command, Hezbollah not only sided with Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war but took part in the large-scale killing of opposition fighters and civilians, including in Aleppo, Qusair, and Daraya. There’s a reason Syrians took to the streets last night to celebrate. They won’t be the only ones. Nasrallah’s death will be welcomed by the Druze of Majdal Shams, a town in the Israeli Golan Heights, where 12 Arab children were blown up by a Hezbollah rocket while playing soccer in July. It was one of 9,300 rockets Hezbollah has fired at Israel since 8 October, when it decided to join in the Hamas offensive of the previous day. All across the Middle East, in countries where denouncing the Zionist entity is a national pastime, prime ministers and peasants will privately respond to the news of Nasrallah’s demise with the same sentiment: the bastard had it coming.

Not everyone will see it that way, of course. Naturally, Iran won’t be happy. For the past year, it has watched (read: directed) Hezbollah and its other front group Hamas to launch attacks on Israel, only for Israel to respond with overwhelming force and tactical nous, taking out top commanders left and right. The financial cost to Iran in lost investment and hardware must be eye-watering. That will factor into what comes next. If Iran does not respond dramatically — it needn’t be all that effective, it just has to look good on CNN — then it will be a much weakened force in the region. Yet if it does, it risks a spate of targeted assassinations against its own leadership or, if the situation is allowed to escalate, some kind of direct engagement with Israel. Whatever their more hawkish elements say, neither country wants that. Regardless of what Iran does, it will now have to factor in that Israel is a far stronger, much emboldened enemy.

This is a historic victory for the Jewish state and its scale can be measured in the outrage with which it is greeted and the parties expressing it. Israel will be decried at the United Nations and calumnied by the human rights industry. It will be accused of war crimes by law professors from some of the finest universities in the world and charged with dangerous escalation by journalists who consider Israel’s mere existence an escalation. There will be indignation at the US State Department, the British Foreign Office and the European Commission, all of which will now have to spin this latest setback for Iran as another reason to revive the deadly foolish nuclear deal. Rest assured that all the right people are unhappy right now.

Hassan Nasrallah has plagued the Israeli psyche for so long that his death will come as a relief as much as a sense of triumph. But a triumph it is, another reminder that however long it takes, whatever the cost in blood and treasure, Israel always gets its man in the end. Jerusalem has reasserted this message in the most spectacular way. Yalla ya Nasrallah.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/this-is-israels-greatest-victory-since-the-six-day-war/

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The rise of the expertocrats

‘You are in danger!’ This is how the rhetoric starts. ‘But there is no need to not worry, we will fix it!’

There is a sad irony in this message. The government pretends to offer therapeutic words by identifying a problem only it can fix.

The problem is one of Iatrogenesis.

Derived from the Greek iatros, it means harm brought forth by the healer.

The illness is actually a product of the help offered by the government. The pain comes from the source of the cure. The foundation of the grief is derived from those who declare the loudest, ‘We care the most!!!’

It can become wearying for citizens to identify how often this happens in the self-destroying West. Yet, even under these somewhat bleak conditions, hope can be seen.

The Iatrogenic process starts with some form of legislative or ideological creep.

Authors such as Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier have identified the pattern. The slide starts from a seemingly harmless point, usually a pattern of ill-ease of dysfunction within society. This pattern is then given a label.

Labelling is often akin to pouring accelerant on a fire, particularly if done by an expert.

Without this perceived professional help, the expert can quickly become redundant in society. The economics of their livelihood can be in doubt. An expert on gender studies needs confusion about gender or else, why would their advice be sought? What do some experts do? They embrace strategies that raise the value of their information. This is best achieved by creating an expectation that there will be alarming consequences if their advice is not sought or acted upon. And that help is not cheap. I call this system, ‘expertocracy’.

Expertocracy can be found lurking, lounging, and licentiously lingering in the halls of bureaucracy. Some may call this the ‘technocracy’, but I resist that label. Many experts are terrible at the technical aspects of their profession.

Being an expert is a matter of opinion based on influence. It is even possible to remain part of the expertocracy while making matters worse.

Why ‘licentiously lingering’?

There is an inherent sensuality about those in the expertocracy. They tend to be emotivists who promise to make people ‘feel better’.

The current plaything of the expertocracy is environmental alarmism.

When pressured on their Net Zero logic, the response from ministers is often shallow, incoherent, and avoidant. They cannot explain the continuation of the nuclear embargo other than insisting ‘trust us’. They avoid at all costs engaging with the salient dialogue of Bjorn Lomborg, Ian Plimer, and Steven Koonin.

Koonin summarises his technical findings:

‘In short, the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.’

His advice concludes, ‘A prudent step would be to pursue adaptation strategies more vigorously … so the best strategy is to promote economic development and strong institutions in developing countries in order to improve their ability to adapt.’

How can it be that our economic leaders do not understand that giving taxpayers back their own money in the form of ‘subsidies’ decreases the productive value of that money? Why not allow them to keep it?

‘Here sir, give them this money and they will thank you for saving them. There will be an inflation number that looks good…’

That this number is a facsimile of reality rarely matters to them.

Education and counselling are two other extremely important industries that are currently under the thumb of expertocrats. They preach the loudest about an existential crisis surrounding the mental health of our young.

When a young person is unhappy, they can be described as having increased anxiety disorder or experiencing a state of depression (an example of concept creep).

If these emotionally compromised people see their peers being more successful, they claim it is an example of racism or a lack of equality (two concepts primary to critical race theory). Expertocrats working in this field have decided that ‘helping’ means limiting those who can access training and addressing the language used to explain history and social roles.

Shrier often describes how these unreal approaches to the feelings of young people have led them to learn irresponsibility through moral avoidance in decision-making. In her words:

‘In the last generation, all traces of tough love and rule-bound parenting have been supplanted by a more empathetic style… The approach to bad behaviour is always therapeutic – meaning it is non-judgemental.’

Non-judgemental in this context means failing to hold young people responsible for their part in creating problems for others.

As a young teacher from a Sydney-based university told me, ‘You mean, I am allowed to implement consequences?’

The idea that this requires permission helps explain why our classes are failing in their duty to be places of learning and are instead turning into environments that placate the emotive fickleness of the young.

Non-judgementalism in counselling helps young people perpetuate a scenario where they avoid taking responsibility for their role in the pain they are experiencing. Perhaps they did not study hard enough, and that is why they failed a test. Maybe they made poor choices in friendship groups or activities. These sorts of things. Critical Race Theory reinforces the idea that their pain is created by oppression – either from an individual or the ‘structural oppression’ of society.

The wider this ideology spreads, the more dependent people become on experts and their expertocracy.

They seek answers from experts rather than looking at themselves.

Doug Stokes explained: ‘Virtue no longer consists of what you “do or don’t do”; it consists of having the correct opinions … in short, it is a power-play wrapped in a trauma shield; obey me and do as I tell you, or you will harm the vulnerable groups and I will seek to cast you out.’

Stokes posits that a response against the expertocracy is coming.

‘How long will ordinary people put up with being denigrated, told their country is beyond redemption, and accept forms of elite restructuring of the institutions they hold dear?’

Perhaps the battle over the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill will show us if the reaction against the expertocracy is coming … or not

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/the-rise-of-the-expertocrats/

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