Posts Tagged ‘Jordan’

Israel Grounds And Pounds, Iran Sprays And Prays

Tuesday, October 1st, 2024

After killing off its entire leadership, Israel seems determined to destroy what’s left of Hezbollah, launching a ground offensive into southern Lebanon.

The IDF has initiated a “limited” incursion into southern Lebanon targeting Hezbollah assets, according to the Israeli military.

“The IDF began limited, localized, and targeted ground raids based on precise intelligence against Hezbollah terrorist targets and infrastructure in southern Lebanon,” the IDF said in a statement.

“These targets are located in villages close to the border and pose an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel.”

According to the statement, this latest action is part of the northern offensive codenamed Operation Northern Arrows. Israel hopes to secure the return of approximately 60,000 internally displaced citizens forced to flee their homes in the north because of artillery exchanges over the past year.

The IDF claims to be carrying out “a methodical plan set out by the General Staff and the Northern Command, which soldiers have trained and prepared for in recent months.”

The Lebanese Army — separate from Hezbollah — pulled back from certain checkpoints near the border amid intense shelling, seemingly clearing a path for Israeli ground forces to enter.

Israel has spent the past week degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities and inflicting heavy damage on the terror group’s infrastructure, leadership, and communications network. This culminated in the assassination on Friday of Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, who commanded Iran’s fiercest regional proxy force.

I speculated that the rest of Lebanon may finally be tired of Hezbollah’s shit, and the Lebanese army pulling back to let Israel roll over whatever Hezbollah units are left is a pretty big sign that they are.

Video from the ground offensive seems limited, probably because IDF has much better InfoSec discipline than Hezbollah. But here’s a video of some action, with an IDF spokesman calling the ground campaign (again) “limited, targeted raids.” Also said that Hezbollah was preparing an “October 7 style” attack on Israel.

How has Iran acting to the continued gutting of its catspaw? They launched a bunch of missiles at Israel.

Fire could be seen over the night skies of Israel as missiles exploded overhead. The Israel Defense Forces said the explosions were either successful interceptions or missiles that evaded Israel’s air-defense system and hit open land. Israel, Iraq, and Jordan shut down their respective airspaces as a result; Israel’s airspace reopened a short while later.

Two U.S. Navy destroyers fired about a dozen interceptor missiles to help defend Israel, Pentagon press secretary Patrick Ryder told reporters. He noted those details may change as the situation develops.

Israel vowed to respond to the attack, which came less than 24 hours after the IDF initiated a limited incursion into southern Lebanon to target Iranian-backed Hezbollah assets.

“We are on heightened alert on defense and offensive, we will protect the citizens of Israel. This [missile] fire will have consequences,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said after the initial wave of ballistic missiles. “We have plans, and we will act in the time and place that we choose.”

Iran’s entire attack evidently resulted in no casualties so far, and no reports of military infrastructure damage, but one did managed to land on Amman, Jordan, and Jordan also managed to intercept some of the missiles.

Way to get the Arab world on your side, Iran.

On top of all this, word has leaked out that the head of the Iranian unit charged with countering Mossad was actually an Israeli agent.

The head of an Iranian secret service unit set up to target Mossad agents working in the Islamic Republic turned out to be an Israeli agent himself, according to former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Speaking to CNN Turk, Ahmadinejad claimed Monday that a further 20 agents in the Iranian intelligence team tasked with monitoring Israeli spying activities also turned against Tehran.

The alleged double agents provided Israel with sensitive information on the Iranian nuclear program, according to his comments in the interview, which were widely picked up by international media.

Ahmadinejad said the agents were behind some key Mossad successes in Iran, including the 2018 theft of nuclear program documents that were taken from Tehran to Israel and revealed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The trove is thought to have been a factor in convincing then-US president Donald Trump to pull out of the nuclear agreement between world powers and Iran.

I doubt that. Just about everyone outside of Obama foreign policy wonks and social justice warriors though the Iran deal was idiocy.

The head of the counterintelligence unit was revealed as a double agent in 2021 but he and all of the other alleged Mossad moles were able to flee the country and are now living in Israel, claimed Ahmadinejad, a firebrand populist known for his hardline anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric and for the violent crackdown that followed his disputed 2009 reelection. He was prevented from running again for president earlier this year.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh…

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, video | 7 Comments »

Iran’s Israel Strike Follow-Up: A Colossal Failure

Sunday, April 14th, 2024

In a follow-up on yesterday’s news of Iran attacking Israel directly, it looks like Israel and its allies intercepted more than 99% of incoming drones and missiles.

Israel and its coalition partners in the Middle East successfully defended against an unprecedented Iranian attack featuring hundreds of drones and missiles soaring into Israeli airspace.

The Israel Defense Forces said early Sunday morning Iran launched 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles, with over 99 percent of them getting intercepted. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari called the defense “a very significant strategic success” as only a small fraction of them reached Israel itself.

A seven-year-old girl suffered severe injuries from shrapnel that fell directly onto her home. She was rushed to the hospital and underwent emergency surgery for a head wound. An estimated 31 people in total were treated for stress and minor injuries.

The U.S., U.K, France, and Jordan came together with Israel to intercept the onslaught of Iranian drones, according to multiple reports. Explosions could be seen over Jerusalem and other parts of the Jewish state as Israel and its allies defended the Jewish state. Most notably, Israel intercepted Iranian missiles headed towards the temple mount, a holy site for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

Suchomimus is reporting that seven of the missiles that got through, all of which hit Nevatim Air Base.

  • “Not all of these were launched from Iran. Some of the drones came from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.”
  • “Around seven missiles [all hit near] Nevatim Air Base. The base is still operational, however. Here is an F-35 landing shortly after the attack, so I expect the damage is actually quite minimal.”
  • “Some Reports say they actually landed in open areas, missing the key infrastructure.”

    • The Times of Israel is reporting that airbase, which is home to Israel’s F-35s, appears to have been a primary target in the strike.

    While a list of sites Iran tried to hit has not been publicized by Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — which launched the drones and missiles — the main target of the attack appeared to be a sensitive airbase in southern Israel, home to the F-35 stealth fighter jet, the military’s most advanced aircraft.

    According to the Israel Defense Forces, Iran’s attack comprised 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles — 99% of which were intercepted by air defenses.

    All the drones and cruise missiles were downed outside of the country’s airspace by the Israeli Air Force and its allies, including the United States, United Kingdom, Jordan, France, and others — according to the IDF’s top spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.

    Though Israel and Jordan have been quietly working together since they signed a peace treaty in 1994, this is the first instance I can recall of Jordanian planes helping protect Israeli airspace.

    The drones had a flight time of multiple hours to reach Israel, and the cruise missiles similarly would have taken around more than an hour to reach their target, according to assessments by defense officials.

    The ballistic missiles, however, have a much shorter flight time — around 10 minutes — and are more challenging to intercept, and indeed some managed to evade Israel’s air defenses early Sunday.

    The IDF said that the long-range Arrow air defense system managed to knock down the “vast majority” of the 120 ballistic missiles. The Arrow 3 system is designed to take out ballistic missiles while they are still outside of the atmosphere.

    We’ve talked about Iron Dome, Israel’s short range air defense system, but less about David’s Sling (intermediate range) and Arrow (long range). David’s Sling is a joint venture between Rafael and Raytheon, while Arrow 3 is jointly developed between Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing.

    Unlike the drones and cruise missiles, the ballistic missiles were shot down over Israel, leading the IDF to activate warning sirens over fears of falling shrapnel. The sole injury in Israel due to the Iranian attack was a Bedouin girl who was struck and seriously wounded by falling shrapnel in the Negev desert.

    Snip.

    Most of the sirens warning against the falling shrapnel and ballistic missiles were activated in the central and eastern Negev region of southern Israel, specifically in the area surrounding Nevatim Airbase. Sirens also sounded in the Jerusalem area, the West Bank, and Golan Heights.

    A few of the ballistic missiles managed to bypass the Israeli defenses and strike the Nevatim base. According to the IDF, minor damage was caused to infrastructure at the airbase, but it was operating as usual on Sunday morning.

    We’ll have to wait for satellite imagery to confirm that, but I suspect it will.

    Why are Israeli air defense systems so much better at intercepting missiles and drones than Russia’s is? For one thing Israel’s systems are probably at least 30 years more advanced than Russia’s predominately ancient, predominately Soviet systems. For another, Russia is 779 times larger than Israel.

    Right now it appears that Iran’s attack against Israel has been an expensive, colossal failure.

    Update: Suchomimus has a new video up that shows minimal damage to the base.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, video | 24 Comments »

    Israel’s War Against Color TV

    Sunday, September 3rd, 2023

    Sometimes I stumble across something that just boggles my mind. Such as this video that explains that Israel, the most technologically advanced country in the Middle East, wasn’t just slow to adopt color television, but actively fought its adoption, going so far as to create a device that stripped out color.

  • Israel resisted instituting a TV broadcasting service in the first place, and first Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion was opposed to the idea.
  • But wealthy Israelis still bought TVs, which could pick up signals from Cyprus (which started TV broadcasting in 1956), Lebanon (1959), Egypt and Syria (1960), and Jordan (from 1968).
  • Despite Ben-Gurion’s opposition to TV, the Israeli government wanted to use TV for educational purposes, and was worried that the Arab-language TV broadcasts that could be found in cafes contained propaganda.
  • When Levi Eshkol took over as prime minister in 1963, he reversed the no TV policy. In 1965, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was formed, and in 1966 B&W Israeli TV was finally introduced by Israeli Educational Television (IET). (In America, the 1966-1967 season was when networks finished their transition to all-color programming.)
  • IBA launched its B&W broadcasting on May 2, 1968, Israeli independence Day, sharing a frequency with IBE, and only broadcasting three hours of programming (two hours in Hebrew and one in Arabic) three days a week.
  • France, the Soviet Union and Lebanon started broadcasting color in the SECAM format in 1967. Israel, like the UK and much of Europe, used PAL format.
  • Jordan and Egypt used PAL, and they started broadcasting in color in 1974. Jordan even broadcast a news program in Hebrew!
  • So Israel quickly greenlit color TV to combat the Arab color menace, right? Wrong. PM Golda Meir was opposed, describing color TV as “artificial and unnecessary.” Despite IBA investing in color equipment!
  • “Yitzhak Rabin and his government continued to double down on their anti-color stance. They attempted to crack down on the import market. Their fears even extending to a drop in value of the national currency, the Israeli Lira. However, the stance was firmly rooted in the belief that color television was a luxury expense reserved for the few rich and wealthy, leaving the vast majority behind black and white TV was seen as a sort of social equalizer.” No color for you, bubbe, because Social Justice!
  • “The Israeli government of the day felt it necessary to invent a new system to neutralize color television for good. The Mekhikon, or the color eraser or color killer, is an invention that is unique to Israel’s television history.”
  • The video doesn’t do a good job of explaining how it works, so here’s the Wikipedia explanation:

    When a receiver is tuned to a monochrome transmission, the displayed scene should have no color components. However, if there is a hardware failure in the color killer stage, false color patterns may be displayed even during monochrome transmission.

    In normal color reception, high frequency luminance is mistaken for color, causing relatively invisible false color patterns. The reason for this invisibility is due to a key feature of NTSC/PAL, chroma/luminance frequency interleaving, where these false patterns are in complementary colors for adjacent video frames, allowing the human eye to average out the false color patterns. If, during a monochrome transmission, a color killer failure allows the color processing to be activated when it shouldn’t, a chroma subcarrier in the color processing stages is regenerated with no reference, causing that subcarrier to have enough frequency error that the chroma/luminance interleaving feature of NTSC/PAL no longer works, allowing the aforementioned false color patterns, overlaying the otherwise monochrome picture, to be much more visible by the human eye….

    In a color TV waveform, a reference pulse, called the burst, is transmitted along the back porch portion of the video signal. If the transmitted signal is monochromatic, then the burst is not transmitted. The color killer is actually a muting circuit in the chroma section which supervises the burst and turns off the color processing if no burst is received (i.e. when the received signal is monochromatic.) The main purpose of the color burst in the first place is a reference for the receiver to regenerate the chroma subcarrier, which in turn is utilized to demodulate the color difference signals….

    The government ordered the Israel Broadcasting Authority to cease broadcasting in color. As it was impractical to remove the chrominance signal from programs previously recorded in color, this was accomplished by simply omitting the burst phase signal from the broadcast. The “damaged” signal triggered the “color killer” mechanism in color television sets which prevented the appearance of color pictures. This method was named Mehikon (Hebrew: מחיקון “eraser”).

  • Note that all this was only happening at Israeli broadcasting stations. It didn’t do jack squat about those Arab broadcasts they seemed so worried about.
  • Naturally, this stupidity brought about its own technological reaction: The Anti-Color Killer, “a device to go with your new set restoring the damaged burst phase signal and allowing you to watch color programs exactly as they were filmed.” But you had to fiddle to get the color right, and then fiddle again every 15 minutes or so.
  • “Store owners who sold the device reported that nearly everyone who bought a color set from them also purchased the anti-eraser.”
  • Despite all the effort to keep color out, the Israeli government permitted a few color broadcasts: The visit of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1977, and (I kid you not) The Eurovision Song Contest in 1979.
  • IBA finally started allowing color broadcasts to go out in 1981, and the Mekhikon was finally retired in 1982…just before the World Cup.
  • Israel finally went to full color on all broadcasts in 1983.

    • Bureaucratic stubbornness kept Israeli broadcasts in black and white long after the vast majority of the world’s countries had switched over. Haiti, Bulgaria, Yemen and Oman all got color broadcasts before Israelis.

    Bureaucratic inertia is quite a force…

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    Posted in Regulation, video | 3 Comments »

    Islamic State Shrinks Again

    Saturday, July 28th, 2018

    The ongoing destruction of what remains of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is more of a process than a series of discrete battles at this point. A story I’ve been watching develop the last few weeks has finally achieved fruition: The complete elimination of the large, thinly-populated Islamic State enclave in eastern Syria along the Iraqi border.

    This was the situation at the start of Operation Jazerra Storm:

    Here it was two weeks ago:

    A tweet featuring a map of the operation a few days ago:

    (And yes, those blue areas near the Syria-Iraq border on the Livemap are salt plains, not bodies of water.)

    Now the pocket has been completely cleared:

    The hard nut of the Hajin pocket has yet to be cracked, but that should be next on the SDF list, since the the Islamic State has been completely driven from the rest of Syria east of the Euphrates.

    More news of the war against the Islamic State:

  • The Syrian Democratic Forces held their first direct talks with Assad’s government.

    The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are holding talks with the government in Damascus for the first time on the future of huge swathes of northern Syria under their control.

    The Kurdish-majority SDF, founded with the help of the US to fight Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) in northeastern Syria, now controls almost a third of the country and is looking to negotiate a political deal to preserve its autonomy.

    “We are working towards a settlement for northern Syria,” said Riad Darar, the Arab co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council, the SDF’s political wing.

    “We hope that the discussions on the situation in the north will be positive,” Mr Darar said, adding that they were being held “without preconditions”.

    The SDF now controls 27 per cent of the country, accord to the UK-based monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, having seized Raqqa and much of the eastern province of Deir Ezzor from Isil militants with the help of US airpower.

    The Kurds have used the cover of the Syrian war to carve out a semi-autonomous enclave in the northeast of the country, which it calls “Rojava”.

    Rojava is also known as the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria.

  • This is a very interesting development: “Political wing of SDF to open offices in Latakia, Damascus, Hama, Homs.” The caveat here is that it comes from Al Masdar News, a notoriously pro-Assad outlet, and that I haven’t seen it anywhere else.
  • At the other end of Syria, Assad’s forces are methodically destroying the Islamic State pocket in the Yarmouk Basin (again the Al Masdar News caveat, but they have the most recent story on the fighting), hard against the Golan Heights and the Jordanian border.

    • The Yarmouk Basin pocket is one of three pockets of Islamic State control west of the Euphrates. There’s another large, sparsely populated pocket northeast of there, where the Islamic State is active enough to still commit atrocities, and the large, sparsely-populated pocket immediately to the west of Deir ez-Zor.

    Likewise in Iraq, there are only two pockets of Islamic State control left: A large, sparsely-populated area east of the Syrian border in northwest Iraq, and a tiny sliver of land between Tikrit and Al Fatah Air Base.

    That little sliver has been static for months, with no fighting indicated, so it may just be a map artifact, or an area no one has been able to verify if it’s liberated or not. Keep in mind that the Iraqi government declared that the Islamic State was defeated in Iraq back in December, but counterinsurgencies tend to take time. Espicially counterinsurgencies against Islamic terrorists. It took 14 years to end the original Moro insurgency in the Philippines, and some would argue that it was never entirely eradicated…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for March 23, 2018

    Friday, March 23rd, 2018

    After making noises about vetoing the liberal-provision-packed omnibus spending bill, President Donald Trump signed the bill anyway. This is certainly a bad and base-depressing move, but shouts that this has “doomed” Republicans in this year’s midterms are premature.

    Some links:

  • But the omnibus spending bill does provide $500 million to build a border wall. In Jordan.
  • “Saudi Arabia is seeking to purge its school curriculum of any influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and dismiss employees who sympathise with the banned group, the education minister said.” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is starting to look like an actual, real-life Muslim reformer.
  • Seems like a good idea:

  • Former Senator and Governor Zell Miller has died. Miller was a conservative Democrat who insisted his party had left him and endorsed George W. Bush in 2004.
  • Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos reigns in unions at Department of Education, including making them opt-in rather than semi-automatic. As far as I’m concerned, her tenure is already a success… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Ohio high school student suspended for not walking out of school. One most never challenge the latest and most sacred dogma of the overclass… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “How Facebook Went From ‘Ideal Way’ to Reach Voters to Being ‘Weaponized’ (Hint: a Republican won).”

  • Orlando Weekly attacks woman as a “white supremacist” for posting anti-Jihad messages to Twitter. Tiny problem: she’s black.
  • Margaret Atwood, “bad feminist.” “Canadian literature (‘CanLit,’ as it’s known within the treehouse) has become ‘a raging dumpster fire” of embittered identity politics and ideological tribalism.'” (Hat tip: Gregory Benford’s Facebook feed.)
  • The enduring appeal of Casablanca.
  • EU decide to make things difficult for antiquarian booksellers:

    Starting next year they may become subject to new import regulations that will significantly complicate the process of buying old books, prints and manuscripts from sources outside the EU. The purpose of the changes is to combat the looting and smuggling of antiquities and prevent the financing of terrorism through the illicit trade in cultural goods. While the need for the new regulations is presented almost entirely in relation to the war on terror, the sweeping new rules themselves will be applied comprehensively and include no provisions for exempting goods from areas which are free from armed conflict or terrorist activities.

    The new regulations apply to a broad range of cultural goods, but none will be impacted more adversely than books. The new procedures are as follows:

    If a book, engraving, print, document or publication of “special interest” that is more than 250 years old is presented for import in any EU member state the owner or “holder of the goods” will be required to submit a signed importer statement to customs authorities in the country of entry. The statement must include a declaration that the books have been originally exported legally from their source country. However, in cases where the export country (distinct from the source country) is a “Contracting Party to the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property” then the holder of the books must provide a declaration that they have been exported from that export country in accordance with its laws and regulations. Needless to say, while the proposal specifies books and documents of “special interest” it does not give any more explicit criteria for defining what this means and the notion of “special interest,” on its own, is sufficiently vague and subjective to include, in practice, virtually any book that someone might want to import.

  • “The Bike-Share Oversupply in China: Huge Piles of Abandoned and Broken Bicycles.” With pictures. And when they say huge, they really mean huge.

  • Since the Social Justice Warriors at Google are purging firearms instruction videos, Full30.com.
  • The Onion: “American People Admit Having Facebook Data Stolen Kind Of Worth It To Watch That Little Fucker Squirm.”

    • To end on an up note: Happy National Puppy Day!

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    Posted in Budget, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | 2 Comments »