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* Richard Kemp: Gaza: The Usual Suspects Condemn Israel
* Amir Taheri: Putin's Threshold of Pain


** Gaza: The Usual Suspects Condemn Israel ([link removed])
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by Richard Kemp • August 7, 2022 at 5:00 am
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* Commenting on the killing of Zawahiri, UN Secretary General's spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the UN was "committed to fighting against terrorism and strengthening international cooperation in countering that threat".
* Of course it was a different story when Israel acted against Jabari. UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Tor Wennesland was "deeply concerned" by "the targeted killing today of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader inside Gaza."
* Israel has not claimed its operation in Gaza — codenamed Breaking Dawn — is to deter. The government has made it clear that the strikes were to prevent an imminent threat to the Israeli population. It had hard intelligence that PIJ, led by Jabari, was planning attacks across the border from Gaza. Protecting its people from violent external attack is not only permitted under international law, it is the duty of every government. If deterrence of such attacks were possible, Israel would have taken action to deter.
* PIJ is an Iranian proxy, directed and funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). Its leader, Ziad Nakhaleh, has been in Tehran for the last few days, meeting with his IRGC paymasters and other government officials including the president, Ebrahim Raisi.
* As PIJ and its fellow jihadists have indiscriminately fired an estimated 400 missiles (at time of writing) at targets from Sderot to Tel Aviv since Operation Breaking Dawn began, the IDF has continued to launch precision strikes from the air and the ground to halt the attacks on Israeli citizens. Just as Israel's casus belli for attacking PIJ targets was lawful, it has taken the utmost care to ensure its continued strikes are also lawful, only attacking targets that are proportionate and necessary to the military objectives and giving warnings where civilian casualties could occur.
* We can expect non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as Human Rights Watch to pile on. Amnesty International, however, might be slightly more circumspect as they are at present gyrating from the widespread international reproach that greeted their just-published report condemning Ukraine's defensive actions in which they again showed the total incomprehension of war and the laws of war that they often demonstrate in their denunciations of Israel.
* Slavering for the last two days at the prospect of IDF-inflicted mass casualties, much of the media immediately and without any evidence eagerly pointed the finger at Israel over the tragic killing of seven people, including four children, in Jeblya camp in the Gaza Strip. They will undoubtedly try, but journalists and UN investigators will find it hard to refute the IDF's confirmation that they did not strike the location and have conclusive video and radar evidence that the deaths were caused by a misfired PIJ rocket, launched as so often from within the civilian population. This would certainly fit as approximately a quarter of all terrorist rockets fired so far during this campaign have landed inside Gaza, not in Israel.

As Palestinian Islamic Jihad and its fellow jihadists have indiscriminately fired an estimated 400 missiles (at time of writing) at targets from Sderot to Tel Aviv since Operation Breaking Dawn began, the IDF has continued to launch precision strikes from the air and the ground to halt the attacks on Israeli citizens. Pictured: Local residents and Hamas police officers assess the damage from a missile strike by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that hit the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, on August 7, 2022. (Photo by Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images)

A week ago US President Joe Biden ordered the elimination of Al Qaida boss Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul. A few days later Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid ordered the elimination of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) commander Tayseer al-Jabari in Gaza. These were two of a kind: mass killers whose sole purpose was to inflict pain, death and destruction on ordinary decent people to bring about their vision of Islamic conquest.

Commenting on the killing of Zawahiri, UN Secretary General's spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the UN was "committed to fighting against terrorism and strengthening international cooperation in countering that threat".

Of course it was a different story when Israel acted against Jabari. UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Tor Wennesland was "deeply concerned" by "the targeted killing today of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader inside Gaza."

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** Putin's Threshold of Pain ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • August 7, 2022 at 4:00 am
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* Worse still, [Putin] may already be plotting to open diversionary fronts to confuse his adversaries and stretch their resources. One such front is already taking shape as Serbia, under a pro-Putin team, prepares to invade Kosovo, which is likely to drag in Albania as well. Another front is also looming in Moldova, where Putin has been shipping vast amounts of arms to a pro-Moscow faction. Russia is also probing the possibility of mischief-making in former French Africa to threaten the supplies of rare metals needed by European industry. Don't be surprised if even Estonia, a member of NATO, is subjected to what is known as "proximity pressures."
* The fact that the war in Ukraine has been relegated to the inside pages and lower rungs in news bulletins in the West encourages Putin in his illusions about a victory he is unlikely to achieve.
* The effect of Putin's strategy is to cast Russia as an existential threat to the world order, something that would endanger other nations beyond NATO and the European Union. Putin is delusional if he thinks he could foment chaos and expect sympathy and support from China, India and Brazil among the nations he is trying to woo to his side.
* In his novel Dead Souls, Gogol notes that "We Russians tend to blame others for our miseries, not knowing that whatever wrong is done to us is done by ourselves." Putin would do well to listen to the master of Russian literature, even though he was an ethnic Ukrainian.

(Photo by Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)

In any international conflict that involves tough political and diplomatic measures and violence of one sort or another, a key question faces the adversaries on both sides: what is the other side's threshold of pain?

More than six months after Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, his adversaries would do well to ponder that question.

The threshold of pain is a point which when reached obliges the adversary to re-think its current strategy and seek relief. Some adversaries may try to push that threshold as far as possible even after hearing their bones being crushed. This was the case with Adolf Hitler, who was ready to see the whole of Germany turned into a pile of rubble but could not contemplate surrender.

Others, like what the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini did in August 1988, would "drink the poison chalice" to avoid the collapse of their regime.

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