Partygoers at the Supernova Psy-Trance Festival who filmed the events that unfolded on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: Yes Studios

In a world of international anarchy, law-based counter-terrorism is never just about strategy, tactics, or doctrine. Whatever an insurgency’s specific features, this critical arena of national security planning should remain intellect-based and logic-centered.

For Israel in the Islamic Middle East, this means an ongoing awareness of enemy concepts of death. It signifies, among other things, that Israel’s counter-terrorism planners ought continuously to bear in mind the primacy of an historically under-examined form of geopolitical power.

This neglected form of power, abstract but incomparable, is “power over death” — meaning, in what manner should have jihadi promises of immortality been affected by the Assad regime collapse in Syriaand the still-unresolved Gaza War?

“An immortal person,” says Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “is a contradiction in terms.” Accordingly, any promise of immortality to jihadi terrorists will be densely problematic. It will, however, still resonate among those many insurgents who routinely prefer mystery to reason.

Assuming that others use decision-making rationality often make sense in explaining world politics, but there remain enough significant exceptions to temper any mundane generalities.

If Israel’s national decision-makers were to survey the prevailing configuration of global jihadi terrorist organizations (Sunni and Shiite) from a suitably- augmented analytic standpoint, the nexus between “martyrdom operations” and “life-everlasting” could become more conspicuous and understandable.

At that point, Israel’s national security planners could begin to place themselves in a better position to deter murderous hostage-takers and suicide-bombers, in microcosm (i.e., as individual human terrorists) and in macrocosm (i.e., as law-violating organizations or states that support the terrorist microcosm).

Those jihadi insurgents who seek to justify gratuitously violent attacks on Israelis in the name of “martyrdom” are acting contrary to codified and customary international law.

All insurgents, even those who passionately claim “just cause,” must still satisfy longstanding jurisprudential limits on permissible targets and levels of violence. Moreover, as a binding matter of law, such limits can never be tempered by any actively contending claims of religious faith. Under law, Palestinian claims of insurgency “by any means necessary” remain nothing more than an empty witticism.

Under established rules, even the allegedly “sacred” rights of insurgency always exclude any deliberate targeting of civilians or any intentional use of force to inflict unnecessary suffering. When Hamas terrorists kidnapped and beheaded Israeli infants on October 7, 2023, they were acting not on behalf of sovereignty or self-determination, but rather to cultivate the grotesque pleasures of a lascivious barbarism.

Law and strategy are interrelated. At the same time, they remain analytically distinct. The legal “bottom line” is unambiguous: Violence becomes terrorism whenever “political” insurgents murder or maim noncombatants, whether with guns, knives, bombs or automobiles. Always irrelevant to assessments of “just means” (jus in bello) is whether the expressed cause of terror-violence is just or unjust (jus ad bellum). Under the universal “law of nations,” unjust means used to fight for allegedly just ends are still law-breaking ipso facto.

Sometimes, Israel’s martyrdom-seeking jihadi foes advance the supposedly legal argument of tu quoque. This argument stipulates that because “the other side” is guilty of similar, equivalent or even greater criminality, “our side” is innocent of any wrongdoing.

Jurisprudentially, any such argument is disingenuous and incorrect, especially after landmark legal judgments by the Nuremberg (Germany) and Far East (Japan) ad hoc tribunals. Historically, tu quoque is always an immutably discredited posture.

For conventional armies and insurgent forces, the right to use military force can never supplant “peremptory” rules of humanitarian international law. Nonetheless, without a scintilla of law-based evidence, supporters of jihadi terror-violence against Israeli noncombatants continuously insist that “ends justify means.”

Leaving aside the ordinary ethical standards by which any such argument should be dismissed on its face, ends can never justify means in the law of armed conflict. Indeed, there can be no authoritative argument against this civilizing affirmation.

Witless banalities of politics ought never be taken as valid expectations of international law. In such law, whether codified or customary, one person’s terrorist can never be another’s “freedom-fighter.”

It’s really not complicated. Whenever an insurgent group resorts to unjust means, its actions constitute terrorism. Even if adversarial claims of a hostile controlling power could be plausible or acceptable (e.g., relentless Palestinian claims concerning an Israeli “occupation”), corollary claims of entitlement to “any means necessary” remain false.

Recalling Hague Convention No. IV: “The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.”

What about Israeli attacks on Gaza targets? Though Israel’s bombardments of Gaza are spawned multiple Palestinian casualties, the legal responsibility for these harms lay entirely with Hamas “perfidy” or “human shields.” While Palestinian casualties were always unwanted, inadvertent and unintentional, Israeli civilian deaths and injuries were always the result of jihadi criminal intent or “mens rea.”

International law does not provide an intuitive or subjective set of standards.  This law has determinable form and content. Therefore, it can never be casually invented or reinvented by terror groups to justify selective adversarial interests. This is especially the case when inhumane terror-violence intentionally targets a designated victim state’s most fragile and vulnerable civilians. Murdering captive infants is never defensible. Never.

National liberation” movements that fail to meet the test of just means can never be protected as lawful or legitimate in themselves. Even if relevant law were to accept the questionable argument that jihadi terror groups had fulfilled all valid criteria of “national liberation,” these groups would still fail to satisfy equally significant jurisprudential standards of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity.

These standards were specifically applied to insurgent or sub-state organizations by the common Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and (additionally) by the two 1977 Protocols to these Conventions.

There is more. Standards of “humanity” remain binding upon all combatants by virtue of the broader norms of customary and conventional international law, including Article 1 of the Preamble to the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907. This rule, commonly called the “Martens Clause,” makes “all persons” responsible for the “laws of humanity” and for associated “dictates of public conscience.” There can be no exceptions to this universal responsibility.

Under international law, terrorist crimes mandate universal cooperation in both apprehension and punishment. As punishers of “grave breaches” under international law, all states are expected to search out and prosecute or extradite individual terrorists. This is emphatically true for the United States, which incorporates international law as the “supreme law of the land” at Article 6 of the Constitution.

For the foreseeable future, jihadi “martyrs” could present an incrementally existential threat to Israel. If these criminals should ever get their hands on usable fissile materials, however, this threat could become more immediately existential. This does not mean that terrorists would necessarily require a “chain-reaction” nuclear explosive, but only the essential ingredients for an advanced radiation dispersal device.

In a worst case scenario, jihadi use of radiation dispersal weapons against Israel could spur Iran into protracted and enlarged military conflict with Israel. At that unpredictable point, Israel’s policy considerations of adversarial “last things” could become all-important.

In essence, for Israel, a jihadist enemy that links terror-violence to faith-based hopes of immortality could pose an incomparable threat. To suitably deter this fearsome peril, Israel’s national security planners should more expressly examine all strategic, geographic, and legal dimensions of the problem. For these science-based planners, jihadi searches for “power over death” ought immediately to become a subject of highest policy urgency.

Prof. Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018). 

The post Why Palestinian Terrorism Is Never Legal or Justified: A Fact-Based Retort first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Gilad Shalit salutes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after prisoner exchange deal in Oct. 2011. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The following is the tragic history of how Israel has released terrorist murderer Aladdin Al-Bazian in three different hostage exchange deals:

1. 1981 – Arrested

Aladdin Al-Bazian “was imprisoned for terrorist acts.” [Ma’ariv, May 6, 1986]

2. 1985 – Released

Al-Bazian was “released in the prisoner exchange deal with Ahmed Jibril’s organization.” [Ma’ariv, May 6, 1986]

3. 1986 – Arrested

Al-Bazian was apprehended “for the murder of Zehava Ben-Ovadia as well as for sniper attacks” [Ma’ariv May 6, 1986] and “sentenced to life in prison.” [Ma’ariv, November 5, 1986]

4. 2011 – Released

Al-Bazian was released as part of the Gilad Shalit exchange deal. [Jerusalem Post, October 19, 2011]

5. 2014 – Arrested

Al-Bazian was arrested and re-sentenced to life in prison. [Ynet, July 16, 2014]

6. 2025 – Released

Al-Bazian was released a third time in the latest hostage extortion deal. To prevent him from returning to terrorism this time, Israel expelled him to Egypt.

Note also that Israel has released many other murderers in the recent Hamas extortion deal. Most of them returned to their homes in Judea and Samaria or Gaza.

Israeli security has reported that 82% of terrorists released in the past have returned to terrorism. Israel plans to enforce tighter security measures to prevent further tragedies — but it remains to be seen how effective that will or can be.

Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is PMW’s Founder and Director. A version of this article originally appeared at PMW.

The post Israel Releases Same Terrorist Murderer for *Third* Time in Latest Hostage Deal first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Funeral ceremony for former Hezbollah leaders Hassan Nasrallah and Hashem Safieddine, outskirts of Beirut, Feb. 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

There are attention-seekers, and then there’s Jackson Hinkle — a man who has built a career on peddling Hamas propaganda, and whatever conspiracy theory happens to be trending on social media.

Now, he’s taken his online extremism into the real world with a trip to Lebanon, where he attended the funeral of eliminated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, seizing the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the Iranian regime’s most senior terror proxies.

This isn’t just another performative social media stunt. Hinkle, who has been banned twice from Meta platforms thanks to HonestReporting’s efforts to push for enforcement of their own community guidelines, isn’t just firing off tweets about his adoration for Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida — he’s an American citizen physically engaging with US-designated terrorist organizations.

Before paying his respects to Nasrallah, he traveled across the region, referring to Hezbollah and Hamas operatives as his “brothers.” And because no terror pilgrimage would be complete without souvenirs, Hinkle was spotted purchasing Hezbollah merchandise, proudly sporting the group’s signature yellow scarf.

Aside from highlighting the sheer depth of Hinkle’s ignorance (bear in mind, this is a man who had never mentioned Palestinians before October 7, 2023, and recently claimed Jordan shares a border with Gaza), his actions could also be illegal.

Under US Federal law, providing material support to designated terrorist organizations isn’t protected under the First Amendment. If Hinkle’s little terror tourism adventure involved financial transactions, coordination, or any form of logistical aid, he might find himself in legal jeopardy.

Material support specifically includes services and expert advice. Given Hinkle’s clear expertise at marketing and social media, is he providing Hezbollah with free publicity?

From Online Clown to Hezbollah Cheerleader

Hinkle’s latest stunt is just the latest evolution in his career of online grifting. Before October 7, he was best known for parroting Russian disinformation. His contradictory political outlook is perhaps best demonstrated in his self-description as an “American Conservative Marxist-Leninist” — a phrase that should have been the first clue that he’s less of a serious political commentator and more of a clueless provocateur.

Then, on the morning of Hamas’ October 7 massacre in Israel, something changed. Hinkle, sensing an opportunity, went all in on pro-Hamas propaganda. His reward? A staggering rise in followers, jumping from 417,000 to over 2.3 million in just a couple of months.

Yet, despite his track record of falsehoods, social media platforms have been slow to act. Elon Musk promised demonetization for accounts spreading misinformation, and while some of Hinkle’s most blatant lies have been fact-checked via X’s Community Notes, the damage has already been done. Hinkle has turned hate and disinformation into a lucrative business, and now he’s taken that act offline.

Terror Tourism or Something More? The John Walker Lindh Parallels

Hinkle’s embrace of Hezbollah might seem like an isolated case of a grifter playing revolutionary, but history tells us where this dark path can lead. Consider the story of John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban” who was radicalized by extremist ideology abroad.

It’s unlikely that Hinkle — who prefers to pair his keffiyeh with a suit rather than battlefield fatigues — will follow the same trajectory as Lindh. But the case of Lindh does, however, serve as an example of how the US government has previously used its laws to intervene. Lindh was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in prison for aiding the Taliban and was released in 2019 after serving 17 years.

But Israeli legal scholar Professor Avi Bell told HonestReporting that there would need to be strong evidence to show Hinkle had provided “material support” to proscribed terror organizations during his time in Lebanon.

Hinkle’s so-called terrorist “brothers” are not just a threat to Israel; they have been responsible for attacks on American and European soil as well. From Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks to ISIS-inspired vehicle rammings like the New Orleans truck attack, extremist violence has spanned continents.

As tensions in the Middle East escalate, it is crucial to assess whether current legal frameworks are sufficient to address individuals who amplify and legitimize Islamic extremism under the guise of “anti-imperialist” activism.

Lindh’s case set a precedent for how US law applies when American citizens engage with foreign terror groups. The question now is whether authorities will recognize the risks posed by similar individuals before their influence leads to greater consequences.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post This US Social Media Influencer Went to Lebanon to Praise Hezbollah; Will He Faces US Consequences? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.