Five years ago today, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a group of far-right fanatics chanting “Jews will not replace us” faced off against a group of counter-protestors chanting “Black lives matter.” The irony that the latter slogan has been adopted by a movement that believes that Jews—uniquely among all the world’s peoples—have no right to sovereignty in their native land was of course lost on those present. As for the first slogan, it did not indicate that the participants in the “Unite the Right” rally were worried that their place in society would be taken by Jews, but instead that Jews would nefariously “replace” white Americans with Hispanics and other non-white immigrants. In race-focused America, this particular combination of anti-Semitism and racism is often misunderstood. James Loeffler, drawing on evidence presented at the civil trial of some of the leaders of the Charlottesville march, adds some clarity:

The Charlottesville defendants were charged with civil conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence against the victims. Their defense strategy consisted of a repeated insistence that they were the true victims, the actual minority pursuing historical justice. They had come to town only to defend a Confederate statue, exercise their First Amendment rights, and confront the totalitarian Left. Any resulting violence was self-defense. The rise of non-white America, through mass migration, Democratic voting machinations, and Communist plots, genuinely imperiled their future.

Given this color-based binary, white Jews might seem irrelevant as a threat. Yet precisely because of their pseudo-whiteness, in supremacists’ telling, Jews constitute racial imposters, who have taken over American society. The proper transformation of American society would restore the demographic and political hierarchy and remove the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Barring that, though, violence was inevitable.

So, why did the Charlottesville marauders skip the town’s synagogue (the community was no less traumatized) to focus on pitched street fighting with Black Lives Matter and Antifa activists? The answer lies in the second dimension of replacement theory. Our enemy, said defendant, Michael Hill of the League of the South, is the “Jew-directed Communist horde” that threatens to destroy the white race.

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.