Legal Commentary

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: I'd no more stand between Israel and its enemies then I'd stand between an out-of-control eighteen-wheeler and a brick wall.

Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah mastermind behind the kidnapping of Westerners in Beirut and many big terror attacks around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, was killed late last night in a car bomb explosion in Damascus.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which occurred in the Syrian capital?s smart Kfar Soussa district, although Hezbollah blamed Israeli agents.

Israel denies involvement. Uh-huh.

His death is a huge blow to the Iranian-backed militant group, given Mughniyeh?s years of experience and organisational skills.

He was commander of Hezbollah?s military wing, which he helped to build up into the formidable machine that fought the Israeli Army to a standstill in the war of summer 2006.

This is also the coward who "masterminded" the 1983 suicide bombings of the Marine barracks and French paratrooper barracks in Lebanon, the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut six months earlier, and the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airplane, during which the "insurgents" murdered a passenger who happened to have the misfortune of being a Navy Seal, then dumped his body on the airport tarmac.  He was an expert in shedding other people's blood, especially that coursing through the veins of the sleeping and the unarmed. You know, a real "man's man." Or, what passes for one in the Bizarro World of jihadism.

Right on cue, Hezbollah declared him a martyr to Allah. March 14, the anti-Hezbollah, anti-Syrian parliamentary coalition in Lebanon, had a different take on the story.

Walid Jumblatt, an outspoken March 14 leader, told The Times that Mughniyeh?s death was ?good news?, and hinted that the Hezbollah commander may have been betrayed by his Syrian allies.

There's nothing they like better in the Middle East than a good conspiracy story, or maybe fifteen conspiracy stories. It won't be long before somebody weaves a Danish cartoonist into the mix and "The Arab Street" goes wild again.

The Times, however, notes a strikingly similar incident from just a few years past.

However, Israel?s assassins have penetrated Damascus before. In September 2004, a senior commander of the Palestinian Hamas movement was killed in a similar car bomb explosion.

I'm shocked! SHOCKED, I tell ya'!!

The Israelis are people of the Old Testament, not the New. They don't feel compelled to turn the other cheek.

Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee?
and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?
I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.
Pslam: 139:21-22

Not that this killing will ever end, you understand. Their opponents are believers in a "god" whose nature transcends rationality, so as far as irrational hatred and violence are concerned, the sky's the limit, and then some.

Hezbollah is likely eventually to stage some form of retaliation to Mughniyeh?s death.

In March 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was blown up, killing 29 people, in an operation said to have been planned by Mughniyeh. The bombing was claimed by Islamic Jihad in retaliation for Israel?s assassination a month earlier of the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Abbas Mussawi.

?Hezbollah are wise people and they will not react hastily. They will study and reflect before they do anything,? said Ibrahim Mussawi, the Editor of Hezbollah?s Al-Intiqad newspaper.

Then launch rockets into a kibbutz, send a suicide bomber into a restaurant, or spray a school bus with AK-47 fire and RPGs. Or some similar "heroic" act, more worthy of rabid dogs than men.

"Wise" people, indeed.

Does anyone really think that Israel will allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon that it can deliver to Israeli soil? Seriously?

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to pose a nagging prospect of an event that's right around the next bend on the road to the end of history and the last man while you've got your nose buried in the entertainment section of today's newspaper where the latest travails of Lindsey Lohan are the prime story, or in the front page, for that matter, where you're parsing the nuances of what a beeeeatch that Hillary is and/or what an Elmer Gantry-like fraud I-Heart-Huckabee might be.

And so it goes.