* * *
Unless you’re saying that the country behind a self-evaluated >80% civilian to combatant kill ratio in Gaza went through rigorous protocols to minimize harm in this attack?
Also, Israel has not "self-evaluated" a >80% civilian to combatant kill ratio. There was a Haaretz report that said the IDF was able to ID about 20% of those killed as militants against known databases, which is remarkably high compared to any other war. That doesn't mean the remaining 80% are civilians, it just means they weren't ID'd against a databse. So this includes anyone with a gun at a distance. Do you think Ukraine has a database of Russian soldiers and are able to ID 20% of the russian soldiers they kill against that database? Of course not. Israel's self evaluation of the ratio varies between 1.4:1 and 2:1 depending on the government official you quote.
Re: location - They exploded everywhere you can think of, while these targets were doing civilian activities near other civilians, and not in a combat setting.
Re: possession - Given the above, and Israel’s horrendous kill ratio, there was definitely no consideration for possession of these pagers at the time of the attack. For example, who is to say that some pagers weren’t in use by members of the political bureau, or unofficially resold to a hospital for use by oncall doctors?
location - they all exploded on the person of hezbolllah leaders or in their possession in a belligerent country during wartime
possession - Israel has a laudable and low civilian: militant kill ratio, possibly the best in the history of modern combat. The pagers were encrypted military devices with military messages, there was no known use by doctors or non Hezbollah operatives.
Right, that’s my cue to stop engaging :)
Zero? The whole nature of the attack shows consideration towards "minimizing civilian harm." Tricking an enemy agent into carrying a small explosive device on his person, then detonating it, will have far less civilian harm than the standard procedure of dropping a bomb on whatever building they happen to be in.
Your thinking appears unreasonably binary here, as shown by your use of phrases like "zero consideration" and "definitely no consideration," in reaction to Israel not meeting an unrealistically high standard for "minimizing civilian harm." Could Israel have done more to minimize civilian harm with that attack? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean they did nothing.
I bet you won't do this, because I think we can ultimately agree it wasn't possible for Israel to take all these men out of action simultaneously and minimize collateral damage much beyond what it did.
I think where we disagree is that you think Israel should not have taken these men out of action.
And I would wager that you would immediately condemn such a barbaric attack if the sides were reversed.
Instead of answering directly you make a comment about deflection, and insist an obvious falsehood (the attack injured thousands of Lebanese civilians) is all you care to believe. On this, we agree. It's all you care to believe, the evidence be damned!
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/02/archives/letterbombs-mail...
This 1972 article cites unsubstantiated claims from memoirs written decades after the fact — not verified evidence. There is no solid historical documentation that Israel, the Israeli government, or even Lehi sent functional bombs to U.S. leadership in 1947. The only sources are anecdotal, inconsistent, and disputed.
Crucially, there are no Secret Service or National Archives records of any assassination attempt on Truman by Zionist militants. A Freedom of Information Act request for such records produced nothing. Historians who have looked into the claim find no contemporaneous evidence and no confirmation in government archives.
In other words, this is not a "documented Israeli attack on the U.S." Instead, it’s a story that survives (in spite of evidence that it's false) in the minds and narratives of people like you want it to be true. That’s how conspiracy theories work: weak evidence, strong emotion.
This isn't even the most outrageous thing Lehi and Irgun did (trying to partner with Hitler against the British might take that) before the Israeli government disbanded them and merged most of them into the IDF when they no longer needed to terrorize the West.
What you’re doing instead is substituting facts for relevance. You went from a false claim (“Israel mailed bombs to Truman”) to a pile-on of unrelated historical violence, as if proving Jews committed any political violence somehow rescues your earlier claim for which there is zero evidence. It doesn’t.
On the facts: – Irgun carried out the King David Hotel bombing against a building housing British military command, intelligence, police, and civil administration. Civilian staff were killed. That qualifies as terrorism by modern definitions. I’m not defending it. – Lehi was a tiny, radical splinter group widely condemned at the time, including by mainstream Jewish leadership. – In 1941, Lehi produced one fringe document proposing that a future Jewish state and Germany shared a common enemy in Britain. The proposal was ignored. There was no alliance, no cooperation, no operational contact. Calling this “trying to partner with Hitler” is dishonest.
None of this provides evidence that Israel, any Zionist organization, or any Jewish group attempted to assassinate a U.S. president. The fact that some groups committed real crimes does not magically make the crimes you invented true.
Conflating Irgun with Lehi, anti-British insurgency with “terrorizing the West,” and an ignored memo with Nazi collaboration isn’t history, it's you polemicizing.
Regarding Lehi and Irgun, they were small because terrorist cells usually are. They operated with the permission of the government (evidence by the government ultimately demonstrating this when it dissolved them and incorporated many of them into itself), and involved people celebrated today in Israel for their terrorism, including future PMs of Israel. It is entirely accurate to say that the terrorist organizations Irgun and Lehi represent the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today in a pure and honest form. And I doubt many over there would disagree with you, as long as you're speaking Hebrew lol
On the Truman claim, you keep saying “adequate evidence” while producing none. The best you have is a biography by Truman’s daughter decades later that does not cite sources and newspaper blurbs repeating those claims. That is not “well documented.” That is the stuff of conspiracy theory.
Here is what you still have not provided: a contemporaneous Secret Service report, a White House mail log entry, an FBI memo, a case number, a preserved device, photographs, lab notes, arrests, indictments, or any archival file tying an actual bomb to Lehi. In fact, a FOIA request to the Secret Service for records of this alleged incident came back “no responsive documents,” and the Truman Library reports it has nothing and explicitly notes that Margaret Truman’s biographies rarely cite sources.
So no, you do not get to say “adequate evidence” and then hide behind moral outrage.
Your next move is equally sloppy. “They operated with the permission of the government.” In 1947 there was no Israeli government. When the state did exist, it disbanded Lehi, arrested members, and fought Irgun in the Altalena affair.
If you have a primary document tying a Truman mail bomb to Lehi, post it. If you do not, drop the Holocaust baiting and admit you are repeating an allegation you cannot substantiate.
And your finale, that Irgun and Lehi represent “the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today,” is just collectivist bigotry. “Terror cells are usually small,” you say, and then you claim two fringe militias somehow define millions of Israelis. That is not analysis. It is an ethnic smear.
I was talking about the Holodomor, obviously.
>You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling.
I still believe it, as the claim was from Margaret Truman Daniel, who had first hand knowledge of what happened to her parents. You clearly don't agree, despite Israel having done the same thing at the same time to other Western politicians. There's no "trolling" or violation of "HN rules" going on, other than perhaps the antisemitic conflation of Jewishness with Israel, particularly when it comes to who is blamed for the terrorism committed by the latter. It is a form of ethnoracial essentialism and bigotry that also impacts Muslims in the US and other ethnic and racial groups (such as the targeting of Chinese citizens in Indonesia as a form of blame for the country of China's actions).
And the sermon about “conflating Jewishness with Israel” is rich coming from the person who already declared that Irgun and Lehi represent “the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today.” You do not get to smear an entire people, then clutch pearls about conflation when the smear gets noticed.
Also, Margaret Truman Daniel is not “first-hand evidence” of a 1947 mail bomb plot. First-hand evidence would be a Secret Service or FBI file with a case number, a White House mailroom log, the device itself, lab reports, arrests, indictments, or any archival record from the time tying a specific package to a specific group. You have produced none. A biography written decades later, with no citations, is hearsay until it is anchored to contemporaneous documentation.
“No reason to think it was false” is not how history works. Post a primary document or retract the claim. Everything else here, including your sophomoric word games, is noise.
Doing the pushes up glasses "Ahem well ackshully it was Mandatory Palestine" shtick doesn't really give your terrorism apologia narrative any more legitimacy.
>First-hand evidence would be a Secret Service or FBI file with a case number, a White House mailroom log, the device itself, lab reports, arrests, indictments, or any archival record from the time tying a specific package to a specific group
Which would certainly be classified.
Frankly, this is all just a diversion. Classic Z tactic. I really don't care if someone believes that (the future) Israel's paramilitary terrorists, out of their extensive mailbombing campaign against Western politicians, did or didn't target one specific person. It's really tangential to my point that Israel is a terror state that was born of a campaign of death and atrocities against not only the original inhabitants of the land they stole, but also against Western victims whose only crime was not helping the genocidal Zionist project enthusiastically enough.
Your “pushes up glasses, Mandatory Palestine” sneer is also a self-own. You accused “Israel” of an act in 1947. Israel did not exist in 1947. Correcting the actor and the date is not “apologia.” It is basic competence. And I literally called the King David Hotel bombing terrorism and said I’m not defending it, so your “terrorism apologia narrative” is just you lying about what I wrote.
The “classified” excuse is especially weak because this has been FOIA’d. The Secret Service response that’s publicly posted comes back “no responsive records.” Agencies do not answer “we found nothing” when they are sitting on a neat classified case file that exists. They either locate records and exempt them, or they Glomar. “No records” is what it says on the tin.
Then you retreat into “Classic Z tactic,” which is just coded insinuation for “I can’t support my factual claim, so I’ll smear you as part of a tribe.” You do not get to throw that kind of ethnic shorthand around and then pretend you are the one worried about “conflation.”
Bottom line: you used an unverified rumor to call me a denialist. When challenged, you switched to “classified.” When cornered, you admitted you don’t care if it’s true. That tells everyone exactly what this was.
I don’t think this attack could have been more moral or justified than it was. It didn’t even kill on large numbers, instead it was just enough to neutralize Hezbollahs command and control structures.