The mastermind behind Hamas’ attack on Israel was not the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary government. Those clerics’ cerebrums are congealed in the 7th century gleaning their raison d’etre from the Koran. This diabolical Trojan Horse operation plan took far more historical acumen and agitation-propaganda (Agi-Prop) experience than any Arab leader in the Middle East possesses. And that points directly to Russia.
The Russians supported Nasser of Egypt and all the Arab countries in an attempt to abort the newly nascent nation of Israel in 1947 with massive amounts of tanks, aircraft, intelligence and political support on the world stage. They lost their shirts (literally, the Arabs couldn’t read Russian to turn the tanks’ heaters off in the middle of the Negev desert!).
In true Marxist-Leninist form, once suffering military defeat (Mao’s Phase III) the Russians automatically revert to Phase II – guerrilla warfare. But they use Agitation Operations (Agi-Prop) continually from Phase I through and post- Phase III (conventional warfare) to achieve and secure victory. It was Lenin’s “favorite scalpel” and remains so with every Russian administration.
As a result, during the ‘50s and ‘60s the Soviet Union flooded the Middle East with over 50,000 KGB trained, Agi-Prop Political advisors. They were sent there to inculcate the propaganda theme combining the Arabs innate hatred of their Jewish cousins with a hatred of the United States as “The Great Satan.” It was their greatest Agi-Prop success. The indoctrination of the Left and the intellectual elite in the U.S. was a distant second. In both cases, according to Lt. General Ion Pacepa (Disinformation, 2013), once the seed of agitation through false information was planted in the minds of the “Useful Idiots”, the communist agents could withdraw and their fingerprints would be untraceable as the lies grew in fertile, naïve minds.
Hamas’ Trojan Horse war on Israel has Russian fingerprints all over it – all plausibly deniable. The Russian’s even enjoy the largess of the United States paying for the entire regional conflict. This is what Khrushchev meant when he banged his shoe on the table at the United Nations and said “We will bury you!”
The tactical genius behind Hamas’ attack dates back to the Homeric Trojan War occurring around late 1100 to early 1200 B.C. The war lasted ten years because the Greeks could not figure out a way to penetrate the walls of Troy. Apocryphal sources state that in frustration, the Greeks built a large, wooden horse apparently left at the gates of Troy in respect to their fortitude after seeming to withdraw from the battlefield. The Trojans, weary of the long siege, were more than willing to believe the deception and brought the vehicle into their bosom. It proved their destruction.
According to a retired, Israeli military officer (and comments from survivors of the attack), the Israelis were lulled into the same sense of false security intentionally orchestrated by Hamas advisors (Iranian or Russian) – to the point of self-limiting the possession of personal weapons and celebrating a “Peace Rave” a quarter mile from their enemy’s perimeter. “Things were so peaceful!” “We were so happy!” “We gave them work permits!”
Echoes of “Peace in our time!”
As in previous disastrous beliefs in a permanent peace with Evil, Hamas exploited the highest of mankind’s traits – Hope. The Holocaust was carried out with great expediency because the Jews -particularly their influential Chief Rabbi– accepted the Nazis word at face value. They were being “relocated to work camps due to the necessity of the war”. They were greeted at Auschwitz with assurances they would receive showers and clean clothes. They chose to believe this Lie right up until the Zylon B gas began spraying from the shower nozzles. Totalitarian regimes understand this vulnerability in human nature much more than democratic societies. The Nazis used it extensively in WW II (see: London Calling North Pole by H.J. Giskes, 1953) and the Russians continue exploiting it.
According to Pacepa (page 13), in the mid-1930s, half a century before Gorbachev’s glasnost – the official Soviet encyclopedia defined glasnost as a spin on news released to the public meaning “the quality of being made available for public discussion or manipulation.” Western media, duped or intentionally, defined the word as “peace” or “openness.”
“Let the gullible [Western] fools believe you want to perfume your communism with a dab of Western democracy and they will clothe you in gold.” – Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1983. The Russians have developed surrogate insurgency to a fine art.
The opposite of Hope is Hopelessness. This was the tactic often used by dictators since Greek and Roman times. Convince your enemy that “resistance is futile.” Hamas – not known for their mental agility- , with a whisper in their ear from Moscow and using psychological Judo, reversed their inability to convince the Jews of the hopelessness of defeating the Palestinian people, into a false sense there could be peace between the two. The Israelis swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. It was assisted by Fifth Columnist “peaceniks” and fellow travelers within the Israeli government and population.
In order to assure the critical element of surprise in such an operation, counterintelligence had to ferret out potential operational security leaks. This they appeared to have done successfully. This involved not only limiting access to the concept of operations to those with a “need to know” but also identifying those with a Need to Know who had questionable relationships with the Israelis. Those were either locked out of the scheme, murdered, or coerced into providing false information to the Israeli intelligence agents. This apparently succeeded.
Terrorists’ goal in every operation is not the taking of terrain or regime change. It is to conduct a play on the world theater. This play contains shocking violence for several purposes: to project power; to gain media attention (ergo the cell phone videos), and to manipulate the media for perceived legitimacy. The greater the emotional shock the greater the desired effect.
The Desired End State is not the annihilation of the Jews or “pushing them into the sea.” The goal is to create a persona of victimhood in the Court of World Opinion. This morphs into political and financial support – which the U.S. government for several decades has been more than willing to provide. It’s the victimhood that provides job security for the terrorist leadership.
Under these criteria, Hamas’ Trojan War is already a complete success.
The problem won’t be solved by exterminating Hamas. It will only be solved with regime change in Iran. This was an opportunity missed several times by the Obama and Biden administrations during Iranian democracy protests.
If Reagan knew anything it was how to support regime change. Ask the Polish people
