On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization

by Douglas Murray

In the aftermath of the pager and walkie-talkie explosions much of the senior leadership of Hezbollah met up in a building in Beirut. The Israeli Air Force then struck the building they were in, killing much of the leadership. Then, in perhaps the ultimate blow to the organization, the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who had rarely appeared in public since the 2006 Lebanon War, thought that Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to speak at the United Nations in New York in late September was an opportunity to meet with Hezbollah’s senior remaining leadership in Beirut. It appeared to have been a double bluff by the Israeli prime minister. He ordered an air strike on Nasrallah and the other Hezbollah leadership just before stepping onstage at the UN. By the end of the day it was confirmed that Nasrallah and most of the rest of the leadership of Hezbollah had been killed. The New York Times would go on to say in their obituary of the terrorist leader that he was “beloved,” “a towering figure,” and a “powerful orator.”78 America’s president acknowledged that the death of a terrorist who had been behind the killing of 241 American service members at the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, was a good thing.79 Emmanuel Macron’s thank-you for bringing the killers of fifty-eight French paratroopers to justice was to impose an arms embargo on Israel.80 Whatever his oratorical skills, Nasrallah and his group had waged war on the West for decades. They had fired rockets at Israel daily...