On November 27, 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the scientist who had for years overseen the Islamic Republic’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons, was assassinated while being driven through downtown Tehran. Based on interviews with unnamed sources, Jake Wallis Simons confirms what has long been assumed: that the Mossad carried out the assassination. Simons also sheds light on much that has so far been unknown, including the method by which it was done:

Neither [Fakhrizadeh’s] wife nor any of his [twelve-person] security team were harmed in the attack, which was carried out using a hyper-accurate automated weapon in order to protect civilians from collateral damage. The bespoke weapon, operated remotely by agents on the ground as they observed the target, was so heavy because it included a bomb that destroyed the evidence after the killing.

The Mossad made up its mind to eliminate Fakhrizadeh after examining the nuclear archive that it had spirited out of Iran in 2018:

“[The archive] contained original documents ordering the concealment of the nuclear program, many of them in Fakhrizadeh’s handwriting,” a source said. “Analysts realized they were looking at his ink, his fingerprints, his pressure on the paper as he wrote. He was the one who was behind the deception. [He] was the father of everything we found in the archive. All was under his command, from the science and the secret sites to the personnel and know-how. He had led an operation to hide it from the world. From that point, it was just a matter of time.”

Besides finding out some of the Hollywood style derring-do behind the operation, Simons also learned about its benefits. He quotes a source who told him:

Tehran has assessed that it will take six years to find a replacement for Fakhrizadeh. Israeli analysis has now put the breakout time (the period it would take Iran to finalize a nuclear bomb) at two years. Before Fakhrizadeh departed, it was about three months.

Prime Minister Varadkar’s meretricious messaging concerning the freeing of a kidnapped child is only one example of the Irish government’s perverse reaction to Hamas’s assault on Israel. Varadkar has accused the IDF of pursuing “something approaching revenge” in Gaza, and compared the Israeli war effort to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His parliament, meanwhile, came close to expelling the Israeli ambassador. Terry Glavin writes:

In a recent interview, . . . the retired Irish diplomat Niall Holohan put it this way: “We feel we have been victimized over the centuries. It’s part of our psyche—underneath it all we side with the underdog.” But there’s something else in the Irish psyche that’s impolite to mention in the comfy Dublin pubs and bistros. . . . Not a few of Ireland’s gallant and celebrated champions of the underdog, its heroes of Irish freedom, were vulgar anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators.

And in recent years, Irish Jews are commonly baited, harassed, and badgered every time there is some eruption in Israel involving Palestinian “resistance.”

The republican pamphleteer Arthur Griffith approved [of anti-Jewish agitation in Limerick in 1904], calling Jews “usurers and parasites.” Griffiths was one of the founders of Sinn Féin, in 1905, and he served as Sinn Féin’s president in 1911.

There was always a deep division in the Irish nationalist movement between Irish republicans who felt an affinity with the Jews owing to a shared history of dispossession and exile, and Catholic extremists who ranted and raved about Jews. Those Catholic shouters are still abroad, apparently unaware that for half a century, Catholic doctrine has established that anti-Semitism is a mortal sin.