When confronted with things like the 9/11 conspiracy theories frequently floated in Palestinian media, State Department officials are apt to respond with condescending remarks like “that’s just how Palestinians talk,” writes Stephen Flatow. The same attitude is on display in a particularly bizarre and incendiary email, mainly proposing U.S. encouragement of anti-Israel incitement, that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received from Thomas Pickering, a retired senior State Department official who was serving as her quasi-official adviser:

[Pickering] proposed that the U.S. should persuade NGOs to stir up Palestinian demonstrations against Israel, in order to pressure the Israelis to make more concessions. . . .

The racism part comes in with Pickering’s explanation as to why he prefers that the protesters be women. If Palestinian men take part, he explained, they might turn violent, . . . which would spoil Pickering’s whole plan of garnering world sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

Why was he so sure that Palestinian men would use violence? “On the Palestinian side, the male culture is to use force,” he wrote. . . .

Imagine if an Israeli official or an American Jewish leader asserted that Palestinian culture is inherently violent. Surely he would be denounced as a racist, ostracized from polite society, and forced to apologize publicly.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.