Sep. 24, 2024: In Lebanon, the Status Quo Is a Win for Hezbollah
Why did DOJ publish Routh bounty letter?; Rashida Tlaib and Hezbollah; What's really going on in Springfield?
The Big Story
The IDF continued to pummel Lebanon on Tuesday, after striking more than 1,600 targets Monday (we reported “more than 300” in yesterday’s edition, but the situation is developing quickly). Among those killed, according to reports, is the head of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile division, Ibrahim Qubaisi, targeted in an Israeli strike on the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh. Hezbollah, meanwhile, responded by firing more than 300 rockets into Israel, though it has thus far avoided unleashing the full power of its arsenal or targeting Tel Aviv and central Israel, which are thought to be the Israeli “red lines” for further escalation (at least according to an anonymous brigadier general writing in Israel Hayom). In other words, the conflict, though bloody and dramatic, remains contained.
Israel has been remarkably successful at inflicting damage on Hezbollah’s leadership stratum; in addition to killing Qubaisi today, it last week eliminated the head of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Forces, in a strike that killed at least 14 other Hezbollah commanders, and incapacitated perhaps 3,000 of the group’s operatives with its Tom Clancy-style destruction of pagers and other communications equipment. It has also, according to Israeli media reports, delivered a “major hit” to the group’s massive rocket arsenal.
The question, however, is whether these tactical victories have added up to anything of strategic significance. Here, the picture is far more ambiguous. Writing today in Israel Hayom, Yoav Limor notes that Israel’s escalation over the past week has failed to achieve its primary strategic goal: that is, “de-linking the fronts,” or convincing Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters from Israel’s northern border and cease its rocket attacks into northern Israel without first achieving a cease-fire in Gaza. Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, Limor argues, has thus far shown himself willing to absorb the past week’s “painful yet tolerable tactical losses” in order to preserve the strategic victory of the status quo, aka the forced depopulation of northern Israel. Indeed, in his Friday speech, Nasrallah said that Hezbollah will continue to act in solidarity with Gaza. Writes Limor:
Despite being clearly on the defensive in recent days due to the blows it has suffered, Hezbollah remains in a strong position, and Israel must now decide how to proceed. This decision comes amid an ongoing campaign in Gaza (and intense activity in the West Bank), while Israel faces heavy international pressure—mainly from the U.S. and France—to avoid escalation in the north.
Limor adds that while the IDF has signaled that its preparations for a ground campaign are complete, the Israeli “political echelon” has thus far been opposed to putting “boots on the ground,” with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, in particular, acting as a conduit for U.S. opposition to such a move. Scattered reports suggest that dynamic may be changing: Israel Hayom reported last week, for instance, that rumors of Netanyahu’s intention to fire Gallant were in fact a ploy to bring the defense minister on board with the Lebanon operation. Who knows.
What we do know is that the strategic logic in the north is changing. As Yonah Jeremy Bob writes in a Tuesday article for The Jerusalem Post, Israel has at least three good reasons to move forward with a ground invasion now:
It is running out of other escalation cards to stop Hezbollah’s rocket fire.
The risk of going all out with a very weakened Hezbollah seems much lower now than it seemed a week ago.
Israel has given the United States 11 months for diplomacy with Hezbollah without achieving anything, so it might have more slack from Washington to go all in than it would have had last October or even six months ago.
The third point, of course, reflects a bit of a misunderstanding: Washington will oppose a ground invasion no matter what, because its policy priority is to protect Hezbollah as a gesture of goodwill to Iran—a gesture that it no doubt intends as a down payment on future “negotiations” with Iran’s new “reformist” president under the Harris-Walz administration.
With that asterisk on the third point, we’d add a fourth. Geopolitically speaking, the time for Israel to act is now. The current White House is on Hezbollah’s side in Lebanon, but it is also headless. Barack Obama may well be running U.S. foreign policy from his iPhone, but he can’t seize the bully pulpit to declare Israel an outlaw state—at least not without puncturing the illusion. The entire party apparatus is consumed with propping a hyperreal hologram called “Kamala Harris” as some sort of person with thoughts and ideas and values, which are whatever you’d like them to be. If Trump wins in November, the cavalry is coming. If Kamala wins, you’re screwed, and you can look forward to four—and maybe eight—long years of word salad about how the Harvard University Junior Hezbollah Ortsgruppe shows us “what human emotion should be” while Team Obama eats your lunch.
In other words, if you’re Israel, it’s a coin-flip at best as to whether the United States will be your friend or your frenemy in four months. Those are bad odds for gambling with your country’s future, so don’t leave it to chance.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Itxu Díaz on the troubling turn against meritocracy
The Rest
→The Department of Justice’s Monday publication of a letter from would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh offering a $150,000 bounty for someone to “finish the job” stands in stark contrast to the FBI’s stated policy opposing the release of “legacy tokens” from mass shooters, which it cited last year while attempting to block the publication of a journal written by transgender school shooter Audrey Hale, The Tennessee Star reports. While the cases are not directly parallel—the Routh case was an attempted political assassination, not a “mass shooting” per se, and it was foiled by law enforcement—the FBI is a branch of the DOJ, and its arguments against publishing the Hale journals, stated in a May 2023 memo, would appear to apply equally well to the Routh letter. That memo stated that the FBI “strongly discourages the public dissemination of any legacy tokens” because they will enhance a shooter’s notoriety and “contribute to future attacks”; fail to “provide a cogent or coherent rendering of the facts leading up to an attack”; and “facilitate false narratives” proffered by “self-professed ‘experts’” and “untrained…pontificators.” Neither the FBI nor the DOJ responded to the Star’s questions about whether the memo applied to the Routh case.
→Ryan, however, was not the only Routh to make the news in September: His son Oran, who told media after the assassination attempt that his father was a “great dude” and “not a violent person,” has been taken into federal custody for possessing “hundreds” of files of child pornography, according to a Tuesday report from ABC. The files were discovered on Oran’s smartphone during a search of his North Carolina residence on Saturday related to the federal investigation into his father.
→Image of the Day:
This cartoon by Henry Payne, which depicts Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) with an exploding Hezbollah pager, was originally published in The Detroit News, but it caused a minor stir last Thursday when it was republished in National Review, the home of inside-voice Nikki Haley voters who nonetheless must be burned in effigy as buck-toothed Klansmen every now and then to sustain the moral order of the universe.
A sampling of the levelheaded responses from our progressive friends, all on X:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY,): The way Islamophobia and anti-Arab hatred is so normalized and deeply accepted in our politics is horrifying. It rarely achieves the equal condemnation it deserves.
Abdullah H. Hammoud (mayor of Dearborn, MI): Absolutely disgusting, anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia have become normalized in our media. The National Review ran this dangerous cartoon of Rashida Tlaib. This garbage was created by Henry Payne with The Detroit News. At what point will people call this out?
Rashida Tlaib: Thank you, Mayor Hammoud, for speaking up. Our community is already in so much pain now. This racism will incite more hate + violence against our Arab & Muslim communities, and make everyone less safe. It’s disgraceful that the media continues to normalize this racism.
In this case, NR’s sin was joking about Tlaib’s tendency to repeat as fact every deranged blood libel to originate with literal Axis of Resistance propaganda organs, which was pounced upon as an example of the hateful, borderline genocidal Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism that allegedly suffuses American society—bigotry that no doubt helps explain why so many seemingly normal Americans fail to show sufficient outrage over the genocide of peaceful Gazan paragliding enthusiasts or the murder of kindly Uncle Imad in Lebanon, whose only crime was to store 10,000 pounds of fireworks in his basement of his apartment, probably to celebrate the Fourth of July.
→So please don’t joke about Tlaib sympathizing with Hezbollah. If you are Rashida Tlaib, however, feel free to retweet Hezbollah propaganda as soon as you’ve recovered from your fainting spell:
The account Tlaib reposted, @sahouraxo, belongs to a “woman” who used to call herself “Sarah Abdallah” (we put woman in quotes because there’s no evidence, other than than the @sahouraxo X account, that this person actually exists). “Sarah Abdallah,” it turns out, was the subject of a BBC investigation in 2018 into pro-Assad and pro-Russian social media influence operations. According to a report by the social media analytics firm Graphika, “Sarah Abdallah” was the single most influential English-language social media account in pushing conspiracies about Syria’s White Helmets, a U.S.-allied civil defense group that was a major target of Russian and Assadist propaganda. In a follow-on investigation published on Medium, journalist Brian Whitaker found that “Sarah Abdallah” had previously used two other social media handles, @jnoubiyeh and @muqawamist. As he explained:
In a Lebanese context, “Jnoubiyeh” indicates a woman from the south of the country, where Hizbullah fought a long struggle against Israeli occupation. “Muqawamist” is a hybrid Arabic-English word. The Arabic part—“muqawama”—means “resistance” and is used in Lebanon to refer to Hizbullah.
→Meanwhile, here’s one of Tlaib and Hammoud’s Dearborn constituents, Imam Usama Abdulghani of the Hadi Institute, declaring on Saturday that Israelis are “sick puppies” who need to be “put down”:
We’d note Abdulghani’s use of “our commanders” to refer to Hezbollah’s commanders, which reminds us that over the summer, German police banned the Islamic Center of Hamburg for supporting terrorism. Documents released by German federal authorities revealed that the head of the Islamic center had been in continuous contact via WhatsApp with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s office, discussing how to “shape the narrative” around events in the Middle East for Western audiences. The investigation also found that the center was providing direct financial support to Hezbollah.
→A lot was written about Springfield, Ohio, in recent weeks, much of it useless in retrospect. But Joe Simonson of The Washington Free Beacon actually visited the place, and talked to residents about more than alleged dog-eating or the wonders of immigration for the local economy. As one local told him of the nearly 20,000 Haitian migrants who have arrived in the town since 2021, “Look man, why would they be eating animals? They have vouchers, they’re displacing people here. That’s the problem.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
A Survivor’s Last Day, by Lee Yaron
Moshe Ridler survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel, where he built a career and raised a family. On Oct. 7, at age 92, he was murdered by terrorists at Kibbutz Holit.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Meritocracy and Its Critics
The attack on meritocracy in the name of equality represents a dangerous confusion of terms whose result is a massive waste of social resources and greater misery for everyone
By Itxu Díaz
My mother was born in a tiny, forgotten village in Galicia, in northwestern Spain. She spent her childhood in this almost completely cutoff place, helping to tend the cattle, harvesting the crops, and attending to other farm chores. In the middle of the last century, her village had none of the facilities most cities enjoy: showers, agricultural technology, teachers or doctors, and opportunities to prosper. No doubt the villagers were happy, but there was more to the world beyond that beautiful isolated valley. No one there received any education until my grandfather, a military man who came to the village from the big city of Seville, decided to set up a school there and teach everyone to read and write and to learn the basics of primary education. When my mother was born, the village had already begun to change forever. My grandfather’s initiative changed everything.
Thanks to this initiative, both my mother and her siblings, as well as many other children of that era, received an education and later prospered in the high schools of the surrounding towns, competing on equal terms with children from urban environments. My mother went on to become a professor of psychopedagogy at the University of La Coruña, where she worked all her life until she retired. Almost everyone who left that humble village with the hope of forging a future ended up occupying important jobs and making a great leap in their standard of living.
Meritocracy—and my grandfather’s audacity and generosity—changed his academic and economic level, his place of residence, his social environment, and his aspirations in life. Another thing happened, too: My mother met my father on that journey to the city, and thus made it possible for my siblings and me to be here now.
My mother’s case is one of millions of examples of how meritocracy works as a social elevator and contributes to improving the corpus of talent and skills of society as a whole. That is, it contributes to the common good. Obviously, there will be students who will reach the minimum and others who will not. The alternative is much worse. Equalizing people downward, lowering standards, and worrying excessively about avoiding student frustration is to treat youths as immature people, undermining their push to give the best of themselves. It impoverishes them and, in the long run, impoverishes society as a whole.
The term “meritocracy” is still young. It was coined just over half a century ago, when a generalized model of hereditary aristocracy of wealth and status began to be replaced by the notion of a social elevator of self-worth and effort. The term comes from merit, and this in turn comes from the Latin meritum, that is, “due reward.”
There are a thousand ways of understanding meritocracy, and then there is that of the brilliant S.J. Perelman: “From the time I was very young I was going to be a valedictorian. I thought the Sacred Heart School was inaugurated to teach me how to pronounce ‘valedictorian’ correctly, and my father had a man wait with a gun outside my school to keep any other scholars from depriving me of my valedictoriness.” Humor often contains everything, because depending on the degree of irony with which you digest it, this quote by Perelman could reflect both the defenders of meritocracy and its detractors.
From Harvard to Yale, the publications of the great universities of the West are now full of articles against what they call “the myth of meritocracy,” claiming that it propels the evil of inequality that it was meant to combat. This criticism predates 2024. Perhaps they are belatedly theorizing something that has long been a growing practice in all areas of life where merit has a say, or else excusing their embrace of the opposite.
The educational trends in recent decades have been marked by the hegemony of poststructuralist Marxism, which considers that the differentiation caused by the meritocratic education system to be a structure of inequality. Moreover, Foucault believed that “every system of education is a political form of maintaining or modifying the adequacy of discourses, with the knowledge and powers that they imply.” Foucault is a singular thinker: He almost always says interesting things, and he is almost always wrong.
The Jewish universe, where the culture of effort in learning and high performance is strongly rooted in tradition, has numerous examples of people who prospered and created great businesses starting from the humblest of origins. The State of Israel, which has made defending itself a way of life, takes advantage of the potential of meritocracy to optimize its intelligence and military defense resources. The Talpiot program, which emerged after the surprise attack of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, is a good example. The approach, the result of learning from that traumatic experience, is simple: You may not have the largest army, but nothing prevents you from achieving technological superiority with which you can defend yourself against all kinds of enemies, even simultaneously. Talpiot’s idea was to push recruits to the limits of their capabilities in order to find the smartest, most creative young people with the best leadership and teamwork skills. Young talents are followed from elementary school, and the germ that nurtures Talpiot candidates extends to programs such as Nachshon, or the IASA boarding school for high-ability students. The fruits are there for all to see. For example, Israel’s famous Iron Dome, which has saved so many lives, was developed from a prototype designed by one of Talpiot’s outstanding students.
Talpiot does not operate alone. It collaborates with the IDF’s fabled Unit 8200, including in developing technologies. These programs are based on a system of meritocracy taken to the extreme, but they offer an interesting lesson: When someone is facing a critical problem, their immediate impulse is not to put themselves in the hands of the most diverse and egalitarian group of professionals, representing the widest range of groups formally certified as “oppressed” or “formerly oppressed” (a qualification that somehow excludes Jews), but rather in the hands of the best.
The American dream, the great cultural root of the United States, is the meritocratic dream by definition. In the academic universe, meritocracy is built on the essential premise of equal opportunity. When this proposition fails, the whole tower crumbles, giving wings to those who detest the system to ridicule “the myth of meritocracy.” However, it is the accumulation of merit, meaning proven competence, that allows students from humble backgrounds to prosper if they make an effort. When it comes to examining them, their origins, social class or economy will not be what comes under scrutiny. Rather, it will be simply their acquired knowledge and skills. We all know of cases of people who have benefited from this way of dividing students, to use poststructuralist language.
In The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits of Yale Law School argues that meritocracy, rather than democratizing American society, has served to increase inequality. In his opinion, meritocracy worked at first, in the mid 20th century, and helped to replace the hereditary aristocracy, but later, meritocrats took advantage of their position to offer their children an increasingly elitist and sophisticated education, creating ever greater inequality.
He is not the only one who sees things this way. In general, in progressive circles, the antimeritocracy view has triumphed on the pretext that only the rich can afford higher education, and thus access the best positions. Other arguments point out that meritocracy promotes failure in the lives of the unselected, or that it leaves out of the system those who have nonnormative skills that are not easily assessed.
To consider that meritocracy will produce a winner and a loser is a somewhat risky reductionism. It is fair to say that meritocracy will place everyone in the place where he or she will be able to perform best and, consequently, where he or she will be able to contribute more to the common good. “We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others,” reflects lawyer Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, “some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of men. But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.”
***
The politicization of the dilemma of meritocracy is typical of our times, where everything must be bathed in ideology. Today meritocracy, like the value of effort or discipline, is identified with the right, and egalitarianism with the left. However, there is no ideological basis for anyone on the left to reject meritocracy, because in fact it served to replace aristocracy.
The main drawback of Markovits’ approach, or that of Michael Young—who coined the term meritocracy more than half a century ago—is that it stumbles on its own dogmatism: It does not seek solutions that contribute to improving society, but rather gets bogged down in its own prior ideological nostrums. Yet the truth is that meritocracy, in all spheres of life, demonstrably contributes to better global development by promoting effort, efficiency, and individual excellence.
However, Europe is moving in the opposite direction. It despises excellence, and more and more countries are joining the trend of not failing or keeping a student back a year, even if that means overlooking the fact that a young person lacks the most basic rudiments in certain subjects. The aim is to do justice by being unfair: The student who fails and the one who gets an “A” are to receive the same result for their labor. Needless to say, these initiatives discourage the efforts of the best students while rewarding failure.
In the workplace, the war on meritocracy is even more advanced. Many progressive European governments have decided to impose what they consider to be equality, both in the public and private spheres, especially in matters of gender. Thus, in Europe it is customary to make it compulsory by law to have a certain percentage of women and men in public office or even on the boards of directors of private companies. This is the opposite of meritocracy and can worsen the performance of these bodies. The same is arguably true of restrictions on how many hours employees are allowed to work, and when.
A few days ago a doctor friend of mine was telling me about the dilemma of his boss in a private hospital who has four applicants for two management positions—three boys and one girl—and he has to decide on appointing the best ones as soon as possible. Two of the male doctors are incredibly bright, hardworking and work their tails off every day, and the girl and the other boy are incredibly bad at their jobs and also have no interest in working hard. The law and the company’s parity rules force you to appoint a male and a female to these important positions in the hospital, so you will inevitably be unfair to one of the two brilliant workers who will certainly end up leaving to work at another hospital, and make the organization they previously worked for worse off.
Is this equality? Is the result better for the patients at the hospital? If we widen our field of vision a little, we will see that in reality this contributes, case by case, drop by drop, to the impoverishment of the whole nation.
In school, at work, and in life we must once again vindicate meritocracy, excellence, healthy competition, and great aspirations, by understanding that the logic of individual merit is the best way to fit together the pieces of the workforce of a nation that want to prosper. And we should never be content with assuming our own mediocrity. As the Italian author Susanna Tamaro masterfully wrote in Più fuoco, più vento: “There is no such thing as mediocrity, grayness. There is only our fear. Fear of growing, fear of opening up to emotions. Fear of discovering that there is no cage around us, but only freedom, air. And if we just raise our eyes a little, the infinite space of the sky.”
Israel should do whatever whenever however and wherever necessary to eradicate Islamic terror
https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Abe-Renia-Schwartz-Darkness/dp/1540779300