Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Tells ‘Zionists’ to ‘Return’ to Europe and US

by Hugh Fitzgerald

The Quds Force commander, Brigadier General Esmail Qaani, like the rest of the Iranian leadership, continues to insist that a great victory was won by Hamas in its latest conflict with Israel. Never mind the destruction of Hamas’ weapons warehouses, its command-and-control centers, its intelligence offices, its weapons development facilities. Forget the deaths of several hundred Hamas fighters and 25 of its senior commanders. Pass over in silence the devastating destruction of much of the tunnel network that cost Hamas an estimated one billion dollars to build. Because, in Ismail Qaani’s version of reality, the Jews have lost heavily, a loss which prefigures a future colossal defeat, he has words of advice for the “Zionists”: Qaani thinks they should “go back” to where they came from, in Europe and the United States. “Israelis Should ‘Go Back’ to Europe and America, Says Iran’s Quds Force Chief,” i24 News, May 30, 2021:

Following the latest escalation between Israel and Iran-backed Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip, Iran’s terrorist Quds Force commander said on Saturday that Palestinians were ready to wrest control of all Israeli territory, urging “all Zionists,” referring to Israelis, to “go back” and “rebuild lives” in Europe and the United States.

Brigadier General Esmail Qaani — who was put in charge of the foreign operations arm of the elite Revolutionary Guards, formerly led by Qassem Soleimani, who was executed in a US airstrike in Baghdad in January last year — made the comments during a ceremony in Tehran.

“We advise all Zionists, who have sold their properties in Europe and America and other places and come to this land, which will become more valuable, go back and buy your houses and rebuild your lives,” he said.

Does Esmail Qaani think that the hundreds of thousands of Jews who, after World War II, arrived in Israel from the Displaced Person camps in Europe as impoverished refugees, many of them survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, have properties that they “sold” (they were in no condition to sell anything) and now they need only “go back” and “buy [their] houses”?

Does Esmail Qaani think that Jews, who have lived continuously in the Land of Israel for 3000 years, should “go back” from the ancestral homeland they have rebuilt at such great effort, to Europe, where antisemitism is again on the rise? Jews are not moving to Europe, but instead, are making aliyah from Europe to Israel; they have understandably been made anxious by the attacks on Jews by the Muslims who have been so heedlessly allowed to settle, by the millions, in Europe.

Esmail Qaani apparently does not realize that more than 50% of Israeli Jews come not from Europe or the United States, but from the Arab countries and Iran, places that their families left because of the intolerable conditions of living as dhimmis, subject to a host of political, economic, and social disabilities. And can Qaani be unaware of the pogroms that swept the Arab countries during and after the 1948 war, leading 900,000 Jews to flee, with at least 700,000 of them going to Israel? Would Qaani advise those Israeli Jews to now “return” to such places as Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Morocco? How does he think they would fare?

Tensions remain high in the region despite a ceasefire reached last week between Israel and Gazan terrorists that ended 11 days of fighting.

Tensions will “remain high” because Hamas has already announced, a few days after the ceasefire went into effect, that it will continue the “armed resistance” to the “Zionists,” that the latest fighting is only the latest chapter in a tale that will end only when the “resistance” leads to the final, inevitable triumph of Muslims over the Zionists – that is, to the destruction of the Jewish state.

This war proved that the champion [sic] Palestine, God willing, should be thinking about administering the whole of Palestine and the Zionist regime must be thinking about leaving the region,” Qaani added.

But it was Israel, all sane people recognize, that defeated, swiftly and overwhelmingly, the Hamas “resistance.” Operation Guardian of the Walls proved that in exploiting AI (artificial intelligence), the IDF has pulled far ahead of anything Hamas could have imagined, much less been able to deal with. A report on this technological triumph is here: “Israel’s operation against Hamas was the world’s first AI war,” by Anna Aronheim, Jerusalem Post, May 27, 2021

For the first time, artificial intelligence was a key component and power multiplier in fighting the enemy,” an IDF Intelligence Corps senior officer said. “This is a first-of-its-kind campaign for the IDF. We implemented new methods of operation and used technological developments that were a force multiplier for the entire IDF.”

In 11 days of fighting in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military carried out intensive strikes against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad targets. It targeted key infrastructure and personnel belonging to the two groups, the IDF said.

While the military relied on what was already available on the civilian market and adapted it for military purposes – in the years prior to the fighting – the IDF established an advanced AI technological platform that centralized all data on terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip onto one system that enabled the analysis and extraction of the intelligence.

Soldiers in Unit 8200, an Intelligence Corps elite unit, pioneered algorithms and code that led to several new programs called “Alchemist,” “Gospel” and “Depth of Wisdom,” which were developed and used during the fighting.

Collecting data using signal intelligence (SIGINT), visual intelligence (VISINT), human intelligence (HUMINT), geographical intelligence (GEOINT) and more, the IDF has mountains of raw data that must be combed through to find the key pieces necessary to carry out a strike.

“Gospel” used AI to generate recommendations for troops in the research division of Military Intelligence, which used them to produce quality targets and then passed them on to the IAF to strike.

This will come as a shock to IRGC Brigadier General Ismail Qaani, but Israel – far from collapsing — won this latest conflict with ease, and Hamas was rescued from total destruction only by Biden’s pressure on Israel to accept a ceasefire. No Israelis need to flee and “return” to Europe and the United States, as Qaani suggests. The IDF goes from strength to strength. This fourth round was Israel’s greatest triumph yet over Hamas. In just 11 days of fighting, Israel destroyed at least one-third of Hamas’ estimated 14,000 rockets, most of its drones and rocket launchers, and 62 miles of the tunnel network that had cost Hamas such enormous sums to build. Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense again proved its worth, intercepting 90% of the rockets fired into Israel. While several hundred Hamas fighters, and 25 senior commanders of Hamas and PIJ, were killed, only one Israeli soldier died in Operation Guardian of the Walls.

Nor is Israel collapsing economically. Its economy – and especially the high tech sector – is booming. Israel has more companies listed on NASDAQ than any foreign country save China. Israelis have more American patents than any foreigners save for the Japanese. Every week brings fresh news of an Israeli IPO that is a unicorn – meaning the company is valued at more than $1 billion. All the biggest American tech companies – Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Google have large R & D operations in Israel. Every other day we read the announcement of some Israeli advance, in medicines, medical equipment, and therapies, in solar energy, long-life batteries, and electric vehicles, in water recycling and production, in computer hardware and software, in cybersecurity and cyberwarfare, in laser anti-missile(“Iron Beam”) technology, and in so many other areas.

Meanwhile, Iran has lost its multi-year investment, both in money and weapons, in Hamas. It’s far less than it gives to Hezbollah, but over the past few years, Iran has provided Hamas with several hundred million dollars. The Iranian economy continues to crater, since the American sanctions have not yet been lifted, as Teheran assumed would happen within a month or two of Biden becoming president; there are still major differences to be ironed out, including Iran’s insistence that all sanctions be lifted before Iran makes a move to rejoin the 2015 JCPOA. If we are lucky, the “return to the deal” will take a few months more, meaning a few months more of economic misery for Iran.

Politically, Iran has isolated itself in the region. Syria, which is financially in a catastrophic state, needing an estimated $375 billion merely to repair the damage from the civil war.is Iran’s only ally. Tehran’s attempt to extend Shi’a power by using its proxies and allies, including the Houthis in Yemen, the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia in Iraq, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, is viewed with alarm in the Gulf Arab states, especially in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and in Egypt. By contrast, these same Gulf Arab states have observed with satisfaction Israel’s ability to slow down Iran’s nuclear program, setting it back by years. The Stuxnet computer worm that in 2010 caused more than 1000 centrifuges to speed up so fast they destroyed themselves, the assassinations by Mossad of six of Iran’s top nuclear scientists between 2010 and 2012, Mossad’s locating in 2018, in the middle of Teheran, Iran’s entire nuclear archive, which was then spirited back to Israel, the two attacks on the new advanced centrifuge plant at Natanz the second of which, in 2021, led to more than 5,800 centrifuges being destroyed, the assassination just last year of Iran’s most important nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and a long series of “mysterious explosions” at Iranian oil refineries, petrochemical plants, power plants, ammunition dumps, and similar targets, that have been attributed to Mossad – all this activity has made a deep impression on the Gulf Arabs, who are grateful for Israel’s acts of derring-do against their common enemy, Iran.

The Israelis are not going to go “back” to Europe or the United States, despite the warnings of that IRGC commander, Esmail Qaani. After nearly two thousand years, Israel’s Jews have rebuilt their ancient commonwealth in their ancestral homeland. They are not about to give that up. And more than half of Jewish Israelis – as Esmail Qaani apparently does not know — come from, or descend from, Jews who lived in the Arab states and Iran. They can’t go “back” to those countries from which they were forced to flee, and where nothing awaits them, in the unlikely event that they were allowed back in, except the dismal status of being “dhimmis,” subject to a host of political, economic, and social disabilities.

First published in Jihad Watch.

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2 Responses

  1. don’t know why, but reading this made me think of another NER post from today, the “ouch” by Reg Green citing a British general who achieved “one glorious defeat after another”…

  2. Jews should “go back” to Europe, but Muslims are privileged to migrate wherever they please. Indeed, Muslim migration is deemed a form of jihad.

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