Brendan O’Neill, the former editor and now chief political writer at “Spiked,” is a rare pro-Israel voice in the British media. He’s jubilant over the fall of Assad and the harm Assad’s collapse has done to Iran and its proxies, especially Hezbollah, in the “Axis of Resistance.” More on O’Neill’s views can be found here: “The suicide of the Israel haters,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, December 9, 2024:
They tried to destroy the Jewish State and ended up destroying themselves. The 7 October effect is extraordinary. Fourteen months after Hamas visited its racist savagery on the people of southern Israel, the so-called Axis of Resistance is in tatters. Hamas is gravely weakened as a result of the ruinous war it started. Hezbollah has been spectacularly humiliated, its leadership almost entirely wiped out by the IDF. And now the Assad regime has fallen. This ‘keystone’ of the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’ is no more. The Iranian regime hasn’t looked this rattled, this isolated, this existentially brittle, since the Iran-Iraq war that followed its Islamic Revolution in 1979. Has there ever been a greater self-inflicted blow in world affairs than 7 October?
The fall of Assad is first and foremost a good day for the people of Syria. People are right to raise questions about what comes next, about what the Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and their various allies might do now they’ve conquered Damascus. But the staggeringly swift fall of the Assad regime, a testament to its superficiality, should be welcomed by all who love liberty. Bashar al-Assad, like his father Hafez before him, was the cruellest of rulers. He viciously suppressed dissent, jailed his critics, massacred Kurds and invited Russia to help him slaughter tens of thousands of his own countrymen during the civil war. The Syrians dancing in the streets following his spineless fleeing are not doing so because they’ve read every policy statement of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and agree with it all. They’re doing so because they feel the sweet relief of deliverance from Assad’s boot on their throats. It’s their Berlin Wall moment and it should not be begrudged them.
Yet Assad’s fall also speaks to the suicidal dynamic of 7 October. Hamas’s pogrom set in motion a chain of events that proved catastrophic for the pogromists themselves and their apologists. Assad’s scalp is the greatest prize yet in this self-destruction of the Israelophobes. That his shallow government, all-powerful but unrooted, was so speedily put into the history books by the advancing rebels is down to two things. First, and most importantly, the distraction of Russia. Assad’s allies in Moscow are too busy killing Ukrainians to be able help him kill Syrians this time round. Without the brute force of Russian back-up, Assad’s hollow government collapsed overnight. That Syrian soldiers in city after city downed arms as the rebels arrived spoke to the regime’s pathological frailty in the absence of Russian muscle.
The second problem for the Assadists was the gutting of Hezbollah by the IDF in recent months. Hezbollah played a central role in propping up the Assad regime during the civil war. Where Russia slayed rebels from the air, Hezbollah did it on the ground. It both trained pro-Assad militias in the ‘art’ of urban warfare and took part in major clashes, including the Battle of al-Qusayr when Assad forces and Hezbollah militants won back the key supply route of al-Qusayr in western Syria. The Center for the National Interest in Washington, DC went so far as to say that Hezbollah was ‘winning the war in Syria’, using its ‘battlefield acumen’ to re-establish Assad’s rule. In 2024, though, Hezbollah could do precisely nothing to assist its allies in Damascus. Like Russia, it is distracted. In fact, it is virtually defeated.
Where once Hezbollah ‘deployed its well-trained fighters’ to aid Assad, says the BBC, that ‘did not happen this time’ because Hezbollah is ‘preoccupied with [its] own affairs’. That’s one way of putting it. Actually, Hezbollah is suffering one of the worst ignominies of its entire existence as a result of the fallout from the 7 October pogrom it supported. In the days after Hamas’s butchery in southern Israel, Hezbollah started raining missiles on northern Israel in an act of solidarity with the Jew-killers. It was a low-level war for months until Israel upped the ante in September this year. It launched its devastating ‘pagers attack’ and took out Hezbollah leaders one by one, including the secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah. Last month, Hezbollah agreed to the humiliating terms of a ceasefire deal with Israel that effectively forces it to vacate southern Lebanon and, worse, to submit to the authority of the Lebanese government.
The result in Gaza so far has been 44,000 dead, with 20,000 of them Hamas operatives, and about 11,000 of the remainder were non-combat related deaths, from diseases and accidents.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah has lost 4,000 men, with several thousand so severely wounded by the “exploding pagers” and “exploding walkie-talkies” that they will not be able to fight. In addition, the IDF has confiscated 155,000 weapons. It has reduced Hezbollah’s store of rockets to 20% of their prewar number. That is why Hezbollah was in no condition to help Assad fight the rebels in Syria, and it was that absence of that support that led to the swift downfall of the regime.
And that, in turn, led to Assad fleeing Syria and turning up in Moscow.
Iran has been humiliated. Its “Axis of resistance” has collapsed: Syria is no longer an ally, but, under new management, is now an enemy of the Islamic Republic. Hamas has been dismantled. Hezbollah has been largely destroyed as a fighting force. In Syria, the Israeli air force, without any opposition, has already carried out 310 strikes on military targets in the country. The Syrian navy has been sunk. The Syrian air force, and military airbases, have been bombed to smithereens.
Which means that instead of terrifying the Israelis, the late Yahya Sinwar set in motion a series of events that led from motorbikes and flatbed trucks careening into Israel, to the dismantlement of Hamas, and then of Hezbollah, and then to the collapse of the Syrian regime, followed by the IAF’s massive destruction of Syrian airplanes, airbases, missile depots, and naval vessels. And finally, this has led to the Islamic Republic of Iran, stripped of all of its former allies, humiliated and weakened, its leaders in Tehran not knowing where to put their feet and hands as they await another blow, this one to their nuclear program, from Israel or perhaps even, in the new administration, the United States.
SKA says
Such good news for a change! Let us pray that the people of Iran will take heart from all this and that they gain the courage and, more importantly, the guns needed to purge their nation of the scumbag ruling class of mullahs and their IRGC dogs!
somehistory says
Ezekiel 38-39
St Croix says
Somehistory, are you thinking what I’m thinking? An alliance of HTS, Turkey, and hordes of other Muslims, coming against the Holy Land, a great final cleansing by the Lord himself on these invaders, and then, the restoration of Israel the Jews have always longed for, living in peace?
Those who say the beast and the false prophet are Europe, Catholic church, etc., I think they are mistaken. I think it must be Islamic.
The Catholic Church doesn’t “deny the Father and the Son” but Islam does, it is the religion which as that as part of its basic statement of belief!
************************* BIBLE: i John 2:
18 Children, it is the last hour; and just as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. This is how we know it is the last hour….
21 I have not written to you because you lack knowledge of the truth, but because you have it, and because no lie comes from the truth.
22 Who is the liar, if it is not the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, who denies the Father and the Son.
23 Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father, but whoever confesses the Son has the Father as well.
*************************** KORAN:
O People of the Scripture do not commit excess in your religion or say about Allāh except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allāh and His word which He directed to Mary and a soul [created at a command] from Him. So believe in Allāh and His messengers. And do not say, “Three”; desist – it is better for you. Indeed, Allāh is but one God. Exalted is He above having a son. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. And sufficient is Allāh as Disposer of affairs (Quran 4 171)
somehistory says
St,
I have long thought that the “wild beast” of Revelation 13 is islam.
Those verses in Ezekiel have never been fulfilled before. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, and then by the Romans. Neither destruction fits the prophecy in Ezekiel…where he names the ones attacking, but the attack fails.
I’ve thought about what Revelation says about the “wild beast” and it’s “image.”
Consider chapter 13’s description of the “wild beast out of the sea.” Seven heads…representing the major governments down through time. (Daniel shows us man’s governments are represented by wild animals) The diadems show rulership/kingship.
And one of the heads had a serious wound…nearly killing it.
Did not islam suffer that blow in the 1920’s?
And now, here islam is again taking over in nation after nation.
And the “image” of the wild beast…..mozlums promote a fake “image” with their claims of ‘peace, tolerance, etc.’ like bo did and others have done.
And it’s to the point that Freedom of Speech is being taken away if we say what they don’t want to hear….if we refuse to bow down…and they want to kill us for blasphemy…(they use knives a lot, don’t they?)
Ezekiel names Persia (we all know that’s Iran) and other nations around the area coming against Israel.
I believe it all fits together.
St Croix says
We are on the same page!
The head wound, and the “coming back to life” it does fit! Can’t think of anything else that fits. When the Lord kept calling me back and I finally responded for good–as I was by then in a desperate state–it was just before ISIS came on the scene. I was aghast at ISIS but didn’t understand it. Then started searching and found this site and a few others.
After that, praying and listening, I kept having the thought “Revelation” as in the book of. I said, Lord, I’ve read it, in the church I was in as a youth, but I see what they were teaching was not correct and I don’t know what is. Please help me understand it.”
There’s more to the story, but God did lead me to sources and eventually it all started making sense, with Daniel, Ezekiel, the minor prophets, Matthew 24, and so on. And the Book of Revelation. Also, I finally started to see the Bible as being about the nation of Israel, and then gentiles, as I am, becoming “grafted in” (I mean it does state this plainly after all, Paul said it!). I had heard that Israel is grafted into the church. This is backwards from what the Bible says.
“All Israel will be saved” and God therefore has unfinished business with Israel, the Jews/Israelites, those who have become Jews literally, as well as those in Christ who are also “Jews” figuratively through the grafting.
The Kingdom of God involves the restoration of Israel, and Jesus on the throne in Jerusalem. All the Bible reveals this redemption plan. I believe all of it, and live accordingly. This is my hope, and the hope of the world. As all of this unfolds before our eyes, can it be that far off? We don’t know the hour or the day, but maybe we’ll know the month or the week as it approaches. I know a number of events must happen first. But it’s astonishing how fast things can happen.
It also makes perfect sense that things are getting so weird, and people are so “het up” about Palestine, Israel, Jews–a sane person must ask why. Why in the world should it matter SO much? More than all the other conflicts and peoples? There has to be another unworldly dimension, an adversary with minions, who hates the Jews, and the King of the Jews who will return and cut them off, and put things right!
somehistory says
I was listening to a Bible sermon once a long time ago, and the man was speaking about how we see prophecy, but cannot understand it before it begins to be fulfilled.
He gave an illustration of driving down the road, we see a building in the distance. Only one side of it, we can’t tell what it is. the closer we get, the more we can see and it begins to take definite shape. As we are passing in front, we see the front, what we have already seen and now, the other side…we can then identify the structure.
He said that is the way prophecy is…we see part of the fulfillment, get closer in time to the rest of it, and as it is reaching the ultimate, we are no longer in doubt.
Some years ago, it was told to me that the UN is the “image of the beast.” Now, mozlums are controlling that organization, so the claim may turn out to be true. It certainly is presenting a lie about islam, wanting the rest of us to agree and it is totally against Israel.
The “false prophet” who “performs signs” to mislead mankind has “two horns,” appears to be lamblike, but ‘speaks like a dragon.’
Some say this is the UK/US which is basically leading the world in praise of the “wild beast.”
I think we are still driving down the highway, but will see a lot more before we can absolutely say what each is.
As for the “day and hour,” I remember Noah was given a week….7 days to know before the flood; the Israelites in Egypt were told the night before.
When Babylon was overthrown by the Medes and Persians, they were instructed to go into their homes and close the doors for safety.
I think we will have some clearer warning as to the ‘day and hour.’ God says ‘He won’t do anything without informing His servants, the prophets.’
And I’m glad you made your way back.
Statler says
Well put, sir!
Eva says
Which ‘ceasefire’ deal are you talking about?
Would it be the deal that hezbollah ignored from day one?
I hate to have to say it, it shouldn’t NEED to be said ywt again, but in the moslem world, there’s no deal they won’t break, no treaty they won’t ignore, no law they won’t shatter as and when it suits them.
They can be baying for each others blood one moment and ganging up together to destroy their ‘enemy’ the next. I’m sure other moslem terrorist organisations will be found to step into the breach; so to speak.
These creatures cannot be trusted in any situation or any circumstance.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
If they had any brains, the jihadists – at least the shi’a ones – would have learned the law of unintended consequences from this. They thought they were sitting pretty on a shi’a crescent, but given that Russia was in a war w/ Ukraine, and that Iran was in no position to defeat Israel (unless they were stupid enough to believe in their propaganda), they should have avoided supporting Hamas, and let Israel focus all its attention on Gaza. Instead, they opened a second front, got wiped out, then Israel got neutralized, and w/ all of Syria’s props either diverted or crippled, the HTS jihadists saw their chances – and grabbed it